A Reckless Desire

by Isabella Bradford

  “Let us take the lessons out-of-doors,” he said abruptly. “A brisk walk through the garden will do us both a world of good.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she murmured. She was well aware of how much her eyes betrayed her emotions, and she bowed her head to hide them from him now as they stepped through the door and into the garden.

  The morning was perfect for June, with brilliant blue skies overhead and a soft breeze in the air. Spot bounded ahead, equally glad to be outside, and clumsily flushed several indignant birds from the hedges. In weighty silence, they walked around the perimeter of the rose garden twice before at last he spoke.

  “We shall be traveling to Newbury this afternoon,” he said. They were walking side by side, with him purposefully keeping his hands clasped behind him to keep them from the temptation she represented. “You and I shall have business there.”

  She glanced at him sharply. “Business, my lord?”

  “Yes.” What with all the overcoming, he’d nearly forgotten the surprise he’d planned for her for this day. “It’s high time that Mrs. Willow had some clothes more befitting her station. Mrs. Currie is an accomplished mantua-maker whom even my stepmother has employed on occasion. She will be expecting us.”

  She stopped walking, her expression wary. “A mantua-maker is to make new clothes for me, my lord?”

  He stopped, too. “Yes, she is,” he said. “Consider it a small celebration in honor of your achievement this morning.”

  “That is most kind of you, my lord,” she said slowly, “but I do not believe I should go.”

  “Why shouldn’t you go?” he asked, surprised and disappointed that she wasn’t as pleased as he’d expected. “What woman doesn’t enjoy such a shop? I will, of course, take care of the reckoning. You will not be accountable for whatever fripperies you choose, if that is your concern.”

  “It is, my lord, but not how you think,” she said darkly, folding her arms over her chest. “It’s one thing for me to be here at the Lodge as your guest, but another altogether if I were to accept costly clothes made by a mantua-maker that you have paid for. I’d be no better than every other doxie you’ve had here, wouldn’t I?”

  “No, you would not,” he said testily. He knew her well enough to understand that when she folded her arms like that, she meant it as a kind of self-protection, a way of reassuring herself when she was upset. Usually he found the gesture poignant, and it reminded him of how difficult her life had been until now.

  But today his obstreperous male brain could only focus on how those folded arms were pressing her breasts upward, in a fashion that he couldn’t avoid noticing.

  He cleared his throat again, as if that would help. “I should hope that you would realize by now that there has never been the veritable parade of doxies through the Lodge—or through my bed—that you believe. Not even your cousin came here.”

  She frowned, unconvinced. “Forgive me, my lord, but the way Mrs. Barber and Sally treat me says I’m not the first woman to have been brought here.”

  “There have been one or two,” he admitted. “Most recently there was a most unfortunate mistake with a young woman who behaved more like a ninny than a doxie. Most likely that’s what Mrs. Barber recalls. But that does not constitute the raging flock of doxies that you imply.”

  She didn’t say anything, which was far worse than if she’d raged at him the way Magdalena would have. Why the devil didn’t she realize that she was as far removed from that ninny of an apprentice as the moon was from the sun? Behaving honorably in the face of constant temptation to do otherwise had not been easy, and he would have appreciated a bit of acknowledgment for it, especially this morning. Her suspicion had stung his pride, and he was sorry, very sorry that she still didn’t trust him despite his best, manful efforts.

  “I am purchasing clothes for Mrs. Willow as part of the wager,” he continued, “and not because I expect you—or her—to behave in a doxie-like fashion. Why must you think otherwise?”

  She ignored his question. “No obligations at all?” she asked warily. “I know you paid my cousin’s mantua-maker’s bills for a time, and the lace-maker’s, and the stay-maker’s, and even her plume-maker’s, and I know what you received in return.”

  He kicked his boot at the graveled path in frustration, and Spot skittered ahead, ready to chase the flying small rocks.

  “What I expect to receive in return for buying you clothes, and stays, and laces, and even plumes, if you desire them, is the sum of the winning wager, payable by Everett,” he said with excruciating patience. “I consider the purchases part and parcel of creating the actress known as Mrs. Willow. She requires the proper costuming for her role. You can’t very well present yourself to a stage manager dressed as you are.”

  He had wanted to sound patient; instead he realized he was sounding merely disgruntled and a little petulant, neither of which were agreeable qualities, and he kicked the gravel again.

  He heard her sigh beside him, doubtless at how pathetically unmanly he was being.

  “Forgive me, my lord,” she said at last, her voice small and contrite. “You are right, and I am wrong. If you had merely wished to seduce me, then you would have done it by now. You would have done it just now, in the parlor. You could have ravished me then and there, yet you didn’t. If that was all you wanted from me, you wouldn’t have bothered with correcting my vowels.”

  “That is true,” he said quickly, wishing with both his heart and his cock that she hadn’t mentioned ravishing. “I gave you my word, and I will not break it. We shall put aside that last little, ah, transgression, and continue to abide by our agreement.”

  “Yes, my lord, your word, and our agreement,” she said, and sighed again. “You truly are a gentleman. Please forgive me for doubting you.”

  He grunted. He didn’t like her apologizing to him any more than she liked it when he did it, and it didn’t help that while she wasn’t doubting him, he was noticing how the breeze was teasing at the kerchief tucked into her bodice and over those maddening breasts, threatening to pull it free.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” he said gruffly. “Now come, let us walk through the gardens.”

  He stalked off ahead of her, determined to leave this conversation behind. She followed, but brought the conversation with her.

  “Thank you, my lord, for understanding,” she said, a little breathless from keeping pace with him. “You’ve always been so kind to me, and so generous, even when I didn’t deserve it. It’s only because this wager has been so…so difficult. I don’t wish to be quarrelsome, especially not to you, but santo cielo, these weeks have been a trial to me. A regular trial.”

  “I can imagine.” They’d been a trial for him as well, though likely not in the same way she was intending. “I have not always been an easy tutor to you. But you have been so apt a pupil, and have made such spectacular progress in your studies, that surely you must believe the trials have been worth their trouble.”

  She nodded, leaving him to decide whether she agreed, or was simply being distracted by the flowers. Either was possible, especially once they entered the rose garden.

  She gasped with wonder as soon as he opened the gate. “Oh, my lord!” she exclaimed. “Look at the roses! Look at them!”

  Nodding obediently, Rivers tried to do as she asked. The first red roses were already in bloom, and the air was heady with their scent. He’d always taken them for granted. The precisely tended bushes, each in their perfectly squared beds, had been designed to make a pretty show for guests taking breakfast in the back parlor, and he’d always found their beauty a bit too lush, a bit too predictable, to be genuine.

  Lucia, however, had no such reservations. She stopped directly in the middle of the raked gravel path and flung out her arms as if to embrace the entire garden. She tipped back her head so the sun washed over her face beneath the curving brim of her flat straw hat, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply.

  “Such a beautiful smell, my lord,” she
exclaimed without opening her eyes. “I know poets write of lying in a bed of roses, but I should rather have this, to be surrounded by this smell, without any of the prickly thorns.”

  “It’s not just any old poet who wrote that,” he said. “It was Christopher Marlowe.”

  With her eyes closed, he could unabashedly study her face. She’d blossomed like a flower herself here in the country, with enough to eat and no more of the unappreciated physical toil for others that destroyed the soul. The circles beneath her eyes were gone and the sickly pallor replaced by a charmingly plump rosiness. No one would overlook her now, not when she looked like this.

  “Christopher Marlowe, my lord?” she asked without opening her eyes. “Should I know of him? Has he written plays, too, or only poems?”

  “A few,” he said. Hamlet was enough for her to consider at present without tossing Marlowe into the mix as well. “His plays are not the fashion now.”

  She opened her eyes and lowered her chin. “Then why speak of him at all, my lord?”

  “Because he wrote quite splendid verse,” Rivers said, reciting for her.

  And I will make thee beds of roses

  And a thousand fragrant posies,

  A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,

  Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

  Lucia smiled, her joy in the words and images lighting her face as surely as the sun had, and sending a little lurch to his chest.

  “Oh, my lord, that is splendid,” she declared. “Is there more to it?”

  Of course there was more. There was an entire poem. But he’d be damned, doubly damned, if he recited all of The Passionate Shepherd to her now. Come live with me and be my love indeed. What kind of infernal mischief in his brain had made him think, after all that had happened earlier, standing in the middle of a rose garden and quoting Marlowe to her would be a wise idea.

  “There is more, but it’s mostly about sheep,” he said quickly, hoping to distract her. “Come, there’s another garden here you haven’t seen. This way, through this gate.”

  “Oh,” she said, clearly disappointed, even as she followed him. “But will you answer me one question about Mr. Marlowe’s poem, my lord?”

  “Mr. Mar-loh,” he corrected almost without thinking. “Mar-loh.”

  She sighed with dutiful frustration. “Will you answer me one question about Mr. Mar-loh’s poem, my lord?”

  “If I can,” he said, albeit reluctantly. The last thing he wished to do was discuss all the swoony, erotic overtones of the poem.

  “It’s the kirtle, my lord,” she said. “What exactly might that be?”

  He wanted to laugh with relief. “It’s only a gown of some sort,” he said. “An old-fashioned garment, much enhanced by the flowers. Here’s the other garden I wish you to see.”

  He held the old oak door open for her to step inside, and she laughed as Spot ungallantly pushed ahead of her. He was glad that she’d laughed, and glad, too, that he’d decided to lead her here.

  Later he’d think back to this decision, and wonder why and how he’d made it, and consider all that had occurred because of it.

  But not yet. Now all he did was follow her inside the garden, and let the heavy oak door fall shut after them.

  This garden was small and square, with unruly beds filled with every color of wildflower and herbs mixed in for fragrance’s sake, and as far from the neatly groomed garden of French roses as could be. The walls enclosing this garden were the same gray stone as the Lodge itself, but rough-hewn and haphazard, and settled into place by time. Twisting, gnarled crabapple trees grew in each corner, their boughs bright with new green leaves and filled with the chirps of the songbirds who’d wisely chosen this haven in which to build their nests. In the center of the garden stood a small bronze sundial, and sitting beneath it on a stone was a flat pan of water for birds to bathe in. No matter whether Rivers was here or in London, his orders were that that pan be filled freshly each day, as it had been for all his life and more.

  “No roses here, I fear,” he said, wanting to defend this humble garden, and hoping she wouldn’t find it lacking by comparison. “But I much prefer the exuberance of these wildflowers.”

  “I do, too, my lord,” she said, sunlight filtering through the straw brim of her hat to dapple her face with tiny freckles of brightness. “I’m more a wildflower than a rose myself.”

  “That was what my mother said, too.” The long stems and spreading leaves brushed against the hems of her skirts, reaching out to her as he himself longed to do. “She loved the roses too, of course, but this garden was hers. She’d little interest in the hunting, and this was her private retreat while Father rode off with their friends and guests. Father kept this garden in her honor, and I do the same now that the Lodge is mine.”

  She tipped her head to one side. “Your mother is dead?”

  “She is,” he said, the sorrow in his voice more for what he’d never had rather than for what he’d remembered and lost. “So long ago that my father has had time to grieve her and remarry, to a lovely, gracious lady who is a joy to have in our family. But she will never replace my mother. She can’t. I was so young when she died that I have only the vaguest of memories of her.”

  “I am sorry, my lord,” she said softly, reaching out to touch the tall daisies nodding on their stems beside her. “It’s much the same with me. I can only just recall my mother’s face, but it’s the other things—her laughter, her gentleness, the way she brushed my hair and sang silly songs to me in French—that’s what I remember most. That’s why I wear her necklace, too, to help with my remembering.”

  He watched how she touched the little cameo pendant that rested in the hollow of her throat, a pendant she always wore and that, before now, he’d dismissed in his head as some little bit of poor rubbish. Now he understood how the humble necklace must be more valuable to her than any diamonds, because of who had worn it before.

  He understood, and her words rang true to him as well. He’d always tried to remember his mother as the beautiful lady in the portrait in Father’s library, dressed in jewels and ermine and red velvet for Court, and not the frighteningly fragile woman, wasted by her final illness, that he’d been forced to kiss on her deathbed.

  He looked up at the trees, striving to clear away that last melancholy thought.

  “I fear that most of the memories I have of my own mother are based upon what others have told me rather than what I recall for myself,” he said carefully. “She was especially close to my brother Geoffrey.”

  “Yet you were her son, too, my lord,” she said. The breeze was toying with the ribbons on her hat, blowing them up into her face, and impatiently she brushed them away. “You are her son.”

  “Of course,” he said, agreeing to the obvious. He envied those ribbons, dancing across the curve of her cheek.

  “That is why you’ve kept this garden as she left it, my lord,” she said, a statement rather than a question. “Even if you can’t remember her, you can still be with her in a way when you’re here.”

  He frowned, taken aback by the notion that the Duchess of Breconridge would be laid to rest beneath an informal garden of wildflowers.

  “My mother isn’t buried here,” he said brusquely. “She’s with the rest of my ancestors, in our family’s crypt in St. Andrew’s.”

  “But if she loved this place and these flowers so much, my lord, then part of her is still here,” she reasoned. She bent and plucked a deep purple pansy, one of the last of the spring, and traced her fingertips across the velvety black-and-purple petals. “ ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember. And there is pansies; that’s for—’ ”

  “For thought.” He smiled with relief, glad she’d turned their conversation back to Hamlet and away from his family. “Knowing the actual flowers in that scene will add richness to your interpretation. They won’t have real ones in any playhouse, of course—they’ll doubtless be some sort of imitation trumpery—but if yo
u can recall the flowers here, you’ll be able to convince your audience that the false ones are every bit as real.”

  “That’s my last scene in the play, my lord,” she said softly, twirling the flower’s stem gently in her fingers. “If audiences do not believe in my Ophelia by then, and if they cannot feel for her plight and be ready to weep for her, then it will not matter a whit whether my flowers are real or false.”

  “But they will care for you, Lucia, I am sure of it,” he said. He was sure of it because he cared about her—though he hadn’t realized until this moment exactly how much. “In a way it’s a shame that your death is offstage, and only related to the audience. Of course not even the most clever of stage wizards could contrive a drowning death on the stage, but even if there were some way you could be seen on the farthest branch of the willow, over the deep currents, so that the audience could share the trepidation of Ophelia’s danger.”

  “No, my lord,” she said firmly. “To do that would be to meddle too much with Master Shakespeare’s play. You’ve said yourself his words are sacred.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said hurriedly, chagrined that she’d recall that, and chagrined, too, because she was right to remind him. “It’s a shame that it cannot be done. But you must admit how poignant such a scene would be, and how affecting to every sensibility.”

  “I will be carried out on my bier,” she said. “That will be sorrowful, or it shall be if I can manage to lie still as death.”

  “I trust you will,” he said. “The crowds on the benches like nothing better than to shed a tear for a doomed lady, not a restless corpse. As I have explained before, my studies have discovered that every expert in theatrics declares that it’s the task of the entire playhouse, from the lowest stage-sweeper to the highest actor, to indulge the crowd’s pleasure.”