But the fury was mostly because no one would have enjoyed these more than Lyon, and he wasn’t here to bloody enjoy them.
Fury was always the safest emotion when it came to Lyon.
She moved on to the next print.
The next must be the Garden of Eden, because in the center was a lush tree with an apple and a snake in it, and Adam and Eve, both clad in modesty-protecting fig leaves, were flanking Lyon below it. Oddly, he was wearing a full set of clothes, as if he’d just stepped out of White’s, and his hands were saucily planted on his hips. They were all beaming at each other, even the snake, as if they were celebrating a birthday.
In the center of the next panel a great bulbous black kettle was perched atop a roaring fire, which was rendered in satanic swoops of orange. Lyon was sitting in the kettle, his arms strapped to his sides with vines, and, quite understandably, his mouth was open in a little “O” of distress. What was clearly meant to be a cannibal was sprinkling salt on his head. Another cannibal sat nearby holding a knife and fork, which struck her as incongruous, because surely cannibals ate with their hands?
“And now he looks rather uncomfortable,” she murmured.
Which, ironically, perfectly described all the appalled, silent men behind her.
Ian cleared his throat. “Olivia, we—”
She abruptly held up a quelling hand without turning around.
The next panel featured Lyon standing on the deck of a ship, and he was shading his eyes with a hand, leaning forward, both shirt and the sails of the ship billowing in what appeared to be gale force winds. It was an ironic echo of the Le Chat print. And it was the only scenario of any of them Olivia could imagine being true.
One panel remained. She drew in a surreptitious bracing breath, exhaled softly, and moved on to it.
It featured a lone figure of a woman.
Dread suffused her, but curiosity compelled her. She leaned forward gingerly, as if the print were a wild boar she’d shot but was unsure she’d actually killed.
She was relieved to discover the woman was really rather pretty. Her hair poured in a dramatic black river down her back and she was wearing a fine blue dress, as if the artist had somehow known it was Olivia’s best color. Her bosom, unsurprisingly, given the artist’s predilections, greatly taxed the dress’s bodice.
Something lacy appeared to be trailing from her head to the ground.
“Oh, am I wearing a . . .”
She was about to say “veil.”
And then she realized it was cobwebs.
“Mother of God,” Landsdowne muttered viciously. “These are abominations. I insist that we leave.”
“Oh, they’re just cartoons,” she said almost gently, her voice still rather drifty. Like someone lying in state of grace on her deathbed, beyond caring about earthly things.
The rapt attention four well-dressed visitors were aiming at the prints drew the notice of Ackermann’s clerk. He bustled cheerily over.
“Aren’t they charming?” he said brightly. “‘The Legend of Lyon Redmond’ is an illustrated ballad about a famous young heir who disappeared after a woman broke his heart, and now she’s moldering away. I imagine every home in London will have one soon at the rate they’re selling. The artist is the eminently gifted Thomas Rowlandson.” He pointed at the signature at the bottom.
All four of them turned blackly incredulous gazes on him.
“His eyes are wrong,” Olivia said finally, faintly, absurdly. “They ought to be blue.”
IT WAS BLISSFULLY quiet in Twining’s tearoom. Just the soul-soothing music of teacups clinking against saucers, the chink chink of spoons dissolving sugar cubes and stirring in cream, the soft gurgle of brew poured from pots. No flash ballads drifting in from the street through the windows. No decorative prints on the walls making a mockery of her history.
She hoped Landsdowne hadn’t noticed the irony of the reclining lion that had always presided over Twining’s entrance.
“So,” Olivia finally said brightly. “Colin and Ian were right. I didn’t want to go into Ackermann’s.”
He snorted a soft, humorless laugh.
The two of them were subdued and dazed. As though they’d barely escaped a trauma with their lives.
Colin and Ian had departed to leave Olivia and Landsdowne to recover from Ackermann’s.
“I’m sorry about today,” she added. “I suppose London is forever in need of a spectacle. I never anticipated anything quite like this, however.”
He smiled faintly at her. “What do you suppose will be next? An operetta?”
She hadn’t considered the possibility of an operetta.
“Oh God,” she said faintly.
“I suppose you could consider it a tribute. If you were homely, you’d likely be less of an industry.”
She quirked her mouth.
Another little silence ensued.
“Olivia, you’ve been rotating your cup like a roulette wheel. Drink your tea. You need color in your cheeks.”
She had, in fact, been fidgeting, and she stopped. The tea in her cup eventually sloshed to a stop, too.
A little silence fell.
“Are you certain you aren’t bothered, my dear?” Landsdowne tried.
“Oh, I’m bowed, but unbroken.” She managed this with an insouciant sweep of her hand. She felt anything but insouciant, but then she’d been pretending not to feel things for so long it had become second nature.
“It’s just . . . when you read that man’s . . . shall we say, opus . . . outside of Madame Marceau’s, you went a shade or two paler than you already are. And I thought I might need to produce smelling salts in Ackermann’s. It was . . . quite concerning.”
She hadn’t known she’d changed colors.
But speaking of pale things, Landsdowne’s knuckles were white on his teacup.
She looked into his face, which was unremarkable if one sought the customary significators of beauty in it—aquiline noses and Byronic curls and the like. But it was compelling in its strength and confidence, and she liked it very much. His gaze was direct and intelligent, his shoulders imposing. One knew instantly he could be trusted with important things. He genuinely cared for her. One knew he would likely never press her for more than she was willing to say or do. He would never test her.
She wondered if this quality was why he, of all the suitors over the years, had won. Because she could go on as she was, sharing only a part of herself with him, and he would never know it.
Lyon had done nothing but test her.
“John.” She laid a hand gently on his arm.
His face softened immediately and his grip on his teacup eased.
It seemed unfair to be able to transform him with just a touch and a single word. He admired her so much; he asked so little from her. She likely didn’t deserve him, but “deserve” was quite the subjective word. It made her doubly resolved to be a perfect wife.
Wife. She was going to be a wife.
She leaned back and squared her shoulders, much like Mrs. Sneath did when she was preparing to do something dutiful. “I feel we should discuss ‘The Legend of Lyon Redmond.’”
Saying those two words aloud to him as though they were as mundane as “fork” or “biscuit” was one of the bravest things she’d yet done in her life.
“You refer to the flash ballad? Or to the man himself?”
He said it lightly enough. But there was nothing casual about the way he was studying her face.
He was a very astute man.
She managed a faint smile. “Given the events of the day, I shouldn’t blame you if you were curious about the origins of the so-called legend. Shall I put your mind at ease?”
“It would be churlish to object to having my mind put at ease.”
This was how they spoke to each other: with dry humor and gentle irony. They shared a pleasure in each other’s intelligence and view of the world. It was easy and pleasant and safe, and she liked it, because she suspected he would never require more of he
r than that.
“I confess there was indeed an attraction when I was a bit younger—the legend, if you will, has its foundation in a certain truth—but it did not last long. I cannot tell you why he disappeared or where he is. Whatever took place then no longer has any bearing on the person I am now or wish to be in the future.”
Attraction. The word was so pallid it felt like heresy. A scarce few months after she’d locked eyes with Lyon in a ballroom, she’d been lying alongside him in a clearing deep in the woods near Pennyroyal Green, her arms latched around his neck, kissing him as though the two of them had just invented kissing. The pleasure had been narcotic. They only wanted more and more and more.
If her abigail harbored any suspicions about the grass strains on her dress that day, she hadn’t said a word.
As for the rest of what she’d just said, Olivia hadn’t the faintest idea whether it was indeed true. It didn’t matter. Lyon was gone, and Landsdowne was here. She’d said what he’d needed to hear.
“Funny, isn’t it, how the ‘legend’—I’ll use that word—persists.” Landsdowne said this idly. “One would have thought the bloods had given up the betting books and forgotten his name altogether by now. Instead, it seems to be sprouting heads, like a Hydra. And I wish I could protect you from it.”
“I know, and you’re a dear”—there, she’d said the word, too!—“to care so much, and I’m so terribly sorry to concern you. The Everseas have always been a gift to the gossipmongers of London and to the bloods at White’s who’ve had such a wonderful time filling the betting books with nonsense. So many things rhyme with Eversea, you see. And I’ve been rather a sport for so long, like cricket or pugilism, I suppose this is their last opportunity to profit from it. Though your future may be filled with flash ballads about my relatives, as I hardly think my family will breed a sedate generation. Do you mind terribly?”
He smiled faintly. “One day someone will supplant the stories, I suppose. When we’re in our dotage. What stories we’ll tell our grandchildren.”
He said these things so easily now. To make grandchildren they would need to make children, and to make children they would need to make love, and to make love she would need to lie naked beneath Landsdowne’s naked body, and—
“I’m glad you think so,” she said hurriedly. “Although a dose of ‘dull’ might be restful upon occasion.”
“It’s funny about youthful experiences . . . so often the things that happen to us in our youth shape us into our permanent selves. When we’re still young and malleable.”
“Surely you’re not suggesting you’re old and calcified?”
He laughed. “I think you’ll discover I’m rather limber.”
Her eyes flared in surprise, and she looked down into her tea. Heat rushed into her cheeks.
Landsdowne naked. Landsdowne reaching for her. Landsdowne next to her in bed for the rest of her life. Did he moan and make noises and . . .
She tensed and pushed it out of her mind. But she must spend more time imagining all of this. Surely the notion was not distasteful. He was tall and manly, he possessed all of his teeth, he smelled wonderful. Surely more time spent dwelling upon it would help her to prepare for that inevitability. Surely it should be something she welcomed . . . one day.
She looked up to find his dark eyes on her intently.
He wasn’t smiling.
But she sensed he was imagining precisely the same thing.
Landsdowne wanted her, in every sense of the word.
Perhaps he thought the blushes meant she was modest, and would need to be gently tutored in matters of romance.
If only he knew.
“In the spirit of mutual disclosure, I feel I should ask whether you left a trail of broken hearts behind you on your way to matrimony. You’ve managed to remain out of the broadsheets, if so, something my family seems unable to achieve.”
His eyebrows shot up. He tonged sugar into his tea and swished it about long enough for her to realize he was about to confess something.
He took a fortifying sip.
And then he leaned back and sighed.
“Very well. There is a . . . Well, I’ve known Lady Emily Howell since we were very young. A lovely girl, very kind, and I admire her a good deal. Our families believed we would one day enter into an agreement. I suppose I believed it, too. And then . . . I met you.”
There was a hint of rueful, careful ardor around the word “you.”
As if it had been destiny. As if anyone could understand he’d had no choice at all in the matter.
She often thought Landsdowne had viewed her as a challenge. He was wealthy, a bit older, owned property all over England, was known to be fair and yet ruthless in business.
His determination to pursue the allegedly unobtainable Olivia Eversea and her new willingness to capitulate had likely coincided. Their courtship had hardly been the stuff of legends, but many a marriage began on less fortuitous footing.
She smiled but said nothing.
“Lady Emily has been all that is gracious and congratulatory, as a friend would be. Though I expect she is in fact disappointed. I can honestly tell you that I did not court her, and I do not believe anyone assumed we had a formal understanding. And yet.”
“And yet,” Olivia repeated softly.
“I do greatly regret any pain I may have caused her.”
Olivia pictured Lady Emily and her no doubt well-bred disappointment. There would be no hysterics. No foolscap covered in Landsdowne’s name, burned at midnight.
When the word that Lyon Redmond had disappeared finally penetrated Pennyroyal Green, and then the whole of London society—it took some time, the way it takes time for damp to make a weak roof cave in—Olivia had stopped eating. It was as if whatever made her human, gave her appetites and needs, had been excised. She had no more need for nourishment than a wickless candle needs a flame. She felt just that pointless.
She hadn’t even fully realized she’d stopped eating until her mother began to panic.
And at some point she had begun again, because here she was.
Yet food had never tasted quite the same since.
Lyon had abandoned her.
And Landsdowne was here.
“You’re very kind,” she said impulsively to Landsdowne. For he was. Good and solid and kind and perhaps most importantly, here.
He quirked his mouth self-deprecatingly.
They each took fortifying sips of tea.
“I have a friend who trains and races horses,” he said, after a long pause. “It is his passion. He fell off a spirited one and broke his arm badly, and the doctor told him he could set it one of two positions. If he set it the usual way, the way that afforded him the most freedom of movement, he wouldn’t be able hold reins effectively ever again. He chose to have his arm set in the second option—in such a way that he could grip the reins.”
“So you say we are broken into the shape of our wounds. Or in the shape of the thing that means the most to us, and so we are suited to one thing only.”
He smiled at her swiftly. Landsdowne genuinely appreciated her intelligence.
She didn’t smile. A chill was slowly spreading in her gut.
“Do you perhaps speak from experience?” she challenged lightly. Suddenly nervous.
He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t think so. I just thought it was anecdote worth sharing. That it perhaps merited a philosophical discussion.”
“I’m not certain I’m equal to a philosophical discussion at the moment, when I must tell Madame Marceau before next week which trim to use on the hem—the silver or the cream? Or beading? Perhaps Parliament would be thoughtful enough to put it to a vote. Though I’m certain your metaphor doesn’t apply to me.”
He was quiet, and this time it was he who turned his teacup a few times.
“You haven’t yet wed, and you’ve had countless options.”
A fortnight after she’d filled a sheet of foolscap with Lyon’s name she’d filled another o
ne: Olivia Redmond Olivia Redmond Olivia Redmond. Over and over and over. She hadn’t known what else to do with the geyser of emotion she could share with no one but Lyon. It was too new, too potent, and far, far too big to contain or understand.
She’d thrown that sheet of foolscap into the fire, too.
Because as far as her family and his were concerned, it amounted to heresy.
“I haven’t wed because I’ve only lately met you,” she told Landsdowne.
It was such a perfect thing to say that he decided to believe it.
He reached for her hand and gripped it. And his was so solid and warm and real and fine, and nothing in her lurched in joy or in any other emotion, and she thought, surely this sort of safety was better, and madness was for the very young.
Chapter 4
About five years earlier, at the Sussex Christmas Eve Assembly . . .
“NO, NO, MILES, IT’S like this.”
Jonathan Redmond slouched against the wall of the milling ballroom, shoved his hands in his pockets, narrowed his eyes, and aimed a look down the bridge of his nose at a young woman who was at least five years his senior.
The woman intercepted Jonathan’s gaze, frowned faintly, puzzled but indulgent, gave her fan an irritated little twitch, and turned away. Coltish Jonathan, of course, was all but invisible to her at his age.
His brother Miles stifled a laugh. “You look like you just took a cricket ball to the head. It’s more like this.”
He tipped his head back, slitted his eyes, clenched his jaw, and aimed a gaze at the same woman.
And while Miles Redmond, the second oldest, had many splendid qualities, he wore spectacles and hadn’t yet quite grown into his nose, and this time the woman remained oblivious.
“You’ve succeeded only in looking constipated.” Jonathan was indignant. “And what woman will succumb to that?”
“How do you know that isn’t Lyon’s secret?” Miles retorted.
They both laughed.
Lyon Redmond rolled his eyes. His brothers were taking the piss out of him, which he normally rather enjoyed. Taking the piss out of each other was one of the myriad pleasures of having brothers. Affection, if displayed, was usually conveyed via insults and wrestling, which they all found satisfactory and sufficient.
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 4