by Edith Layton
She had lain awake in the night, and thought of little else in the day, and now she believed such letters existed. She had been vilified because of them, she had been coerced into leaving her homeland because of them, she had even been offered violence because of them. But as the coach traveled on into the heart of France, she found she was as anxious to continue this journey as she had been loathe to begin it.
She had never wanted to see Robin again after that wild October night, but she knew that she must see him, she must face him, and demand to know why he had invented such monstrous stories about her. Not for his uncle’s sake, although the fact that he treated her with such revulsion stung more now than when she had thought him simply deranged. She had to learn the truth for her own heart’s ease.
Julia gazed out the window at the rolling fields of France, and only closed her eyes to rest when the baron rode by and chanced to glance at her.
It was nearing twilight when the coach rolled down the long drive to Sir Sidney’s leased chateau. Julia might have shut her eyes for an instant to escape the baron’s notice, but when the stir Celeste made as she gathered up possessions came to her ears, she realized that she had drifted off into the first easy sleep she had experienced since setting foot upon foreign soil.
The chateau was huge, and all Julia could take in was the startled impression that she was to spend the night in a castle, before the coach stopped and the footman raced to assist her from the carriage. Before she had a chance to wonder at how she was supposed to go on, the baron appeared at her side and took her arm, and Celeste took her place obediently in their wake. They walked the many stone steps to the huge oaken door, which swung open to meet them as smoothly as though they were taking part in a well-rehearsed ceremony. It seemed that everything was going according to some prearranged formula, and that she all unknowingly fell into the scheme of things without so much as a ripple.
When the short, stout, balding gentleman appeared and clapped the baron on the shoulder, shouting a jolly, “Hallo, why it’s Stafford! Delightful to see you, m’boy,” and his stunning lady-wife cooed her greetings, Julia did not have to breathe a word. She was introduced to the pair before she could take in her breath at the sight of the size of the vast entry hall.
“Miss Foster,” the baron said calmly, “may I present Sir Sidney and his beautiful lady-wife?”
“Oh never so formal, Nicky,” the statuesque red-haired lady chided him, taking the baron’s arm and disengaging him from Julia.
“We don’t stand about on ceremony here, Miss Foster,” the portly older gentleman said merrily. “Now, come, how can I call you Miss Foster, when I insist you call me Ollie as all my friends do?”
“I fear,” the baron said at once, before Julia could begin to stammer out an answer, “that you will not be able to call her anything for a space, sir, for she has been suffering from a thunderous headache all day and I promised her some rest in a quiet bedroom immediately we arrived here.”
“Suffers from the headache, and demands her own bed? Just like my little Gilly.” Sir Sidney guffawed. “But I thought it was only the married ladies that protested so. Never say you’ve tied the knot, Nicholas old fellow?”
“Never say is quite correct,” the baron drawled, as Sir Sidney’s wife let out her indrawn breath in laughter, “but I should be pleased if Miss Foster could be shown to her room at once.” Even as the baron had done speaking, Celeste began to tug Julia toward the stairs, so she had only a fleeting glimpse of the crowd of well-dressed people who had come from the recesses of the great house to greet the baron and to try to catch a glimpse of the young woman he had brought with him. As she mounted the stair Jo follow a footman to her room, she had only the briefest view of the hack of the baron’s head as he lowered it to catch Lady Sidney’s whispers to him as she linked her jeweled arm in his and led him away.
Julia’s room was large and sumptuously furnished. Fat white and gold cupids cavorted across its vaulted ceiling and snuggled together on her bedposts. But as she had to remain in her room for the night, and for the next few days and nights as well, she came to be the most grateful for its cushioned windowseat. From there she could observe that the world continued to go on around her.
Sir Sidney came and went with a variety of lovely female guests, but Julia became accustomed to the sight of his flame-haired wife with the attentive figure of Nicholas Daventry in constant attendance upon her. She saw Lady Sidney and the baron ride out with the other guests in the early afternoon, she could observe them strolling through the rose gardens after luncheon, and in the night, she was able to crack the window open and hear their laughter above the music until almost dawn.
It seemed to Julia that her captor was well occupied upon this visit, but she only added that information onto her present store of resentment. She stayed in seclusion in compliance with his wishes. Her meals were brought to her room, along with various medicaments that their host thoughtfully provided for his unknown, ailing guest.
Celeste was very good company, but Julia was growing restive as another soft summer night came on and the music struck up once again. It was not that she wanted to dance, she told herself, it was just that she very much wanted to use her limbs. Even Celeste had been able to go for a walk in the afternoon, while she could only complete useless circuits of her room.
The evening was advanced and Julia was about to put on her nightshift, when a soft knock came upon her door. After Celeste had made certain that Julia had scrambled into bed with her coverlets up about her chin, she opened the door cautiously. The maidservant held whispered conversation and then, closing the door once again, came into the room with a wide grin upon her face.
“Ah, mademoiselle,” she said happily, “you have not been forgotten.”
“Don’t tell me,” Julia groaned. “This time they’ve sent up powdered newt or frog instead of hartshorn and warm milk for my headache. I think if I took all their remedies, I should never leave this place alive.”
“No, no. This is a much better cure for your poor head. For I told Makepiece, M’sieur le Baron’s valet, that if you lingered in your room any longer, you would in truth be ill. So he has spoken with the baron, and he brings you this message. There is a small garden he has discovered, very much in disuse, to the side of the house. You may go there tonight and breathe in some fresh air. Of course,” Celeste warned as Julia positively leaped from her bed as though it were red-hot, “if anyone comes along, you must clutch your head,” she pantomimed agony, “and return here at once.”
With her maidservant to lead the way, Julia stole out into the halls of Sir Sidney’s vast house and crept down the servant’s stairs. She drew her beige shawl around herself tightly and paused at every noise. Their dinner done, the other guests were at cards or dancing, but still she dared not risk discovery. Finally, they achieved a back door. Celeste pushed it open with the flourish of a woman presenting the royal gardens of Versailles, instead of a simple deserted knot garden.
It was only the size of the bedroom she had just left. As it had no ceilings, the omnipresent cherubs that the Sidneys seemed to adore had to make do with sporting atop a bird bath. That, and a few thoroughly chastened rosebushes and a marble bench completed the decor of the forgotten garden. It was close to the house, but privacy was assured as it was ringed around with a hedge of boxwood. The spare, empty garden was like paradise to Julia.
After Celeste had left, Julia sat down on the stone bench and breathed in the rose-scented air and stared up at the moon as though she had been a prisoner in the Bastille for twenty years, rather than penned in a plush guest bedroom for two days. She could hear the faint, far-off music of a waltz, she could feel a slight, light summer night breeze stir her hair, and she felt at once elated and depressed to be abroad on such a night. It was a night made for adventure, but she wanted none. It was a night made for memories, but she dared not recall hers. It was a night made for lovers, and that she could never be.
So she sat and rai
sed her face to the moon in much the same way that a pagan might make obeisance to the sun, as though she could draw warmth and sustenance from it, and she let the silvery light wash over her and tried to transcend the night. Then she scented something different on the night wind and heard a small sound too large for an animal to make, and she tensed.
“No need to be a Sarah Siddons, Miss Hastings,” the baron’s voice drawled, “for it is only your obedient servant. You can take your hand from your brow and drop that look of intense pain, unless the sight of me provokes it, of course. I only came by to see how you are faring.”
She turned and saw him in the shadows. He was splendid in his evening clothes, and the white of his shirt and his eyes gleamed against their dark background in the bright moonlight.
“When can we leave?” she asked simply.
“Yesterday, I thought,” he said, coming forward and standing before her. “Do you mind?” he asked, gesturing with a small cheroot that he held, its red tip a small glowing light in the darkness. “It’s a filthy habit I picked up in my travels. But snuff, for all it’s in fashion, makes me sneeze and I cannot see how the symptoms of illness can be a pleasure. Now this,” he said, laughing as he traced a small incandescent circle with its red embers, “only makes me cough and gasp, and so is, of course, much more pleasant.”
She could not see his face clearly, but he spoke so easily that she wondered if he were quite sober. As though he had overheard her thoughts in the stillness of the night, he said lightly, “I’ve had a little claret, a dab of port, a taste of champagne, and a sip of cognac, but I assure you, I’m the clearest-headed fellow in the company. And that perhaps is why I’ve come out here. There is nothing so depressing as being the only sober member of a jolly troupe. I’d like to be gone fully as much as I expect you would, Miss Hastings,” he said more seriously, “but my charming, convivial host has managed to elude me very nicely and I cannot go until I have had his ear in private. May I sit down?” he asked suddenly.
Julia nodded and must have murmured her assent, for he sat even as she moved away to make room for him, although there was already room and to spare for three persons on the bench beside her.
They sat quietly for a few moments and she could hear the orchestra beginning a sprightly country dance. “But Lord knows,” he said, as though he had been speaking all the while, “I should like to leave this place.”
“When can we go then?” Julia asked again.
“So soon as I can corner our clever host. He knows I have less than pleasant news for him, and like the king who slew the courier for bearing bad tidings, he confuses the messenger with the message.” Though Julia said nothing, he went on just as though she had asked that which was in her mind, “Our delightful Sir Sidney, you see, has been living here for years. He has entertained hundreds of our countrymen and has a reputation as a generous, immoral, but obliging host. The only problem is that we have discovered that he has been obliging to the enemy as well. Now as he has birth, and some powerful family connections, it’s been decided that the matter shall be resolved in an honorable, gentlemanly fashion. Oh no,” he said in mock horror, “no summary execution, no internment in Newgate for this Jolly Ollie. No, he is simply to be told, on the qui vivre, that his presence is not welcome in England again. Never again, as a matter of fact. And I am the lucky chap who is to tell him.”
There was nothing Julia could say. But she sensed that he needed someone to say something to him.
“How very difficult for you...” she began to say.
“How very nicely put,” he said sweetly.
“I only meant,” she said rapidly, “that it must be difficult for you to play at being a guest when you are, in effect, an enemy.”
“I know,” he said wearily, “I’m sorry. I should not have bitten your head off. It is just that it is a tiresome, unpleasant business. I am offered everything by my host, and more than that by my hostess, and all I want is to deliver my message and to be gone from here.”
There was silence between them until Julia finally ventured to say cautiously, “She is very lovely.”
“Then that was your bedroom window,” he laughed. “You should take care not to stir the curtains when you spy on us. I take it you mean that you have observed the good lady of the manor and myself at our play. Ah yes, the fair Gilly,” he sighed. “She has been in my constant company. I cannot ride, eat, dance, or walk without her beside me. I must peek under my bed each night like a frightened maiden to make sure she isn’t there as well.”
She wondered at his relationship with their beautiful redheaded hostess, but she did not dare to comment and chance his scorn. His mood was edgy, his temper uncertain, and she wondered again at just how much he had imbibed, however much he claimed he was the clearest-headed of the guests. They remained in the darkness without speaking, but Julia felt his gaze upon her, as though he willed her to conversation with him.
“Tell me,” the baron said pleasantly enough, casting away his cheroot so that it made a fiery arc into the darkness, “did you take all of the medicines that our good host provided you?”
“No,” Julia said in confusion. “You know I am not ill.”
“Ah, but you were a good guest,” he said, “for you didn’t send them back and insult him, did you? No,” he sighed, “the trick of being a good guest is to appear to enjoy everything that is offered, while discreetly refusing to use everything offered. But it is, as you say, difficult.”
His face glowed dimly white as he turned toward her, and Julia was both gratified and a little alarmed by the odd mood of fellowship that had come upon him and by the strange way that he could anticipate her thoughts as though she spoke them aloud. As he gazed at her, she could not tell if he meant to offer her friendship, violence, or even ardor. She still did not know him. So she edged away just the merest bit and asked, “Is there anything I can do? To make it easier for you, that is to say.” In her gray gown, her white face surmounted by golden white hair, she was as plainly visible to him in the depth of the dark as was the radiant moon in the black sky above them. And it seemed to him that she shimmered and wavered in a nimbus of silvery light even as that inconstant planet did. He did not think he had drunk so much until he had come out into the night air. Then he found her in the empty garden, young, innocent seeming, looking like some lost fairy creature, her sad and beautiful face uplifted, yearning to the moon. Even knowing what she was, in that instant she seemed the only familiar person in that household of cheats. Then they had spoken and he had discovered the odd communion between them, the eerie way in which she seemed to understand so completely each thing he said this night. He took in a deep, shuddering breath of cool night air and forced himself to remember precisely who and what she really was, despite the effects of wine and moonlight. He had to stoke up his anger, she had disarmed him so, and all he could achieve was sarcasm. He laughed and said, “Anything that you can do to make it easier for me? You wish to ease me then? How delightful. Do you offer yourself to me to save me from my hostess? What a lucky fellow I am. What a choice of beds the night brings to me. One exquisite female wants me for her husband’s sake, or for his fortune’s sake, it is the same thing to her, I think. And the other offers herself, for what, I wonder?”
“Why?” Julia cried as she sprang to her feet, goaded beyond her limit of endurance, “why do you offer me friendship with one hand and snatch it away with the other?”
“But,” he said, lowering his head and closing his eyes for a moment so that he could see things more clearly, “I never offered you anything. Or at least, I did not mean to do so.”
He raised his head to find that he had been addressing the ether. For she was gone.
8
Sir Sidney bustled into the study, smiling even as he hurried to meet his guest. “Don’t get up, don’t get up,” he insisted as the other gentleman rose to his feet, “for I’ll be joining you in a moment.”
Then the stout Sir Sidney, his movements such a parody
of stealth as to be amusing, made straight for the library shelves behind his desk. He extracted a set of heavy volumes, dark red leather tomes with ornate, incomprehensible titles in what might have been Greek picked out in gold leaf upon their spines. With a wink to his guest, Sir Sidney, as though with difficulty, carried the four volumes to his desk, puffing all the while at the exertion. With a negligent gesture of his podgy hand, he waved away the assistance offered.
“Heavy fellows, cost a fortune, but worth every guinea spent. My favorite works, the author’s a fellow named Bacchus, perhaps you know him?” Sir Sidney asked, as he laid the books down upon the desk. With a practiced flourish, he began to open the uppermost one. As he did so, the entire stack of books fell open neatly in the middle to reveal that the book covers were false and that what lay within them was not pages, but a cleverly designed box containing two decanters and a set of blown crystal glasses.
“Ha!” Sir Sidney said with satisfaction. “Now this, I think, is what a library is really for.” He poured a brimming glass of amber liquid for his guest and handed it to him.
“I never was a bookish fellow,” he commented as he took another glass for himself and settled back in his wide and comfortable chair behind the desk. “And here was this great library overflowing with books. And most of ’em in frog-talk at that, if they wasn’t in Latin, which I never got a handle on, no matter how my schoolmasters thrashed me. So when I chanced upon these fine volumes, why I snapped ’em up. Now I sit in here half the day and have the reputation of a studious fellow, don’t you know, and enjoy myself as well. And my dear sweet Gilly don’t know the half of it, neither.”
His guest very much doubted if his host’s dear sweet Gilly ever cared to know even a quarter of it, but since for some reason, Sir Sidney seemed bent upon presenting himself as a devoted husband with an adoring, if overbearing wife, he said nothing. He was not here to shatter his host’s illusions, if indeed he had any left. He was only here to deliver a message, and if Sir Sidney wished to play at some charade for his own pleasure, it made no matter to the eventual outcome of their discussion.