“A prophet, are you, Mr. Redmond?”
He smiled again, and his smile made her breath catch in her throat. “Merely very observant.”
They were silent again for a time.
“Speaking of investing, Miss Eversea, I think I’ll go to Tingle’s Bookshop tomorrow at about two o’clock to see if he’s got in any books about Spain. Tingle keeps them near the history section, which, as you may know, is the remotest, dustiest part of the store. In the very back. I suppose it’s because many of his customers don’t often venture toward those shelves.”
She understood at once.
“Spain is sunny,” she said inanely.
“Yes,” he said shortly. She sensed he’d unnerved even himself.
They were quiet a moment, and then:
“I hate waltzes,” he finally said, so darkly she gave a start.
He noticed her widened eyes and smiled faintly, tautly. “It’s just that they are far, far too short.”
She was suddenly too shy to answer.
The music ended.
But her heart was still waltzing.
He bowed, and she curtsied.
He led her off to the edge of the ballroom, returning her to her friends, as if restoring a figurine he’d stolen to its proper shelf.
Chapter 5
The next day . . .
AT TWENTY MINUTES TO two o clock, Lyon all but flew from his bedroom.
He halted in his doorway, yanked open his desk, and snatched a sheet of foolscap he kept under the rosewood box, the one with the false bottom, a delightful puzzle of a box. He scrawled two short sentences, sprinkled it with sand, willed it to dry immediately, which it mostly did, and then folded it and shoved it into his coat pocket.
He paused in a mirror to ensure his cravat was straightened, which proved to be a mistake. Just as he had one hand on the banister—he liked to use it to launch himself a few stairs at a time—a voice stopped him like a wall.
“Lyon . . . a word, if you please?”
Lyon glanced over his shoulder and saw just his father’s hand and forearm. Both were thrust out the door of his study and making beckoning motions in the air.
Bloody hell. Summoned to the Throne Room, as he and his siblings liked to call it. He often had pleasant enough visits with his father, but an actual summons seldom boded anything good and was rarely comfortable, particularly for poor Jonathan, who could, rather amusingly, do no right, and not even for Lyon, who could generally do no wrong but was as conscious of the need for rightness as a horse is of its harness.
He inhaled deeply, exhaled gustily, resignedly pivoted, and strode into the room, aware he was usually a welcome presence and his father sometimes merely liked to beam proudly at him and discuss the latest work of the Mercury Club, which Lyon usually rather enjoyed.
But as he entered, his eyes avoided the clock.
It was his enemy right now, and perhaps time would slow if he pretended it did not exist.
“Good afternoon, Father,” he said cheerily.
“Have a seat.”
Damn. If sitting was required, then something serious was afoot.
Lyon did, pulling out a chair and arranging himself casually in it, crossing his legs and swinging one polished Hoby Hessian.
He could see the reflection of the clock in its toe. Its pendulum kept swinging traitorously.
“Did you enjoy your first ball in Sussex?”
“It’s definitely pleasant to be back. Very different from London. I should like to stay a bit longer and rusticate, if no one objects. I’ve missed the country a good deal, I realize.”
It was his way of preparing his father for the fact that he didn’t intend to leave Pennyroyal Green anytime soon.
“We always enjoy having you about, Lyon. Did anything else interesting happen last night?”
“Saw a few old friends.”
“Such as young Cambersmith?”
“Yes.”
All at once suspicion flared bright and hot and he was, in an instant, on guard.
“His father mentioned that you danced with Miss Olivia Eversea. Stole a waltz right out from under his nose.” His father sounded faintly amused.
Just the very words “Olivia Eversea” made the back of Lyon’s neck warm and tightened the bands of his stomach.
He would not look at the clock he would not he would not.
“Yes. I believe I did. Among other girls.” Whose names he could not remember even if someone had pointed a pistol at his head. “Isn’t it funny that Cambersmith would tattle?” He smiled faintly.
His father was silent. Never a good sign.
Lyon and his siblings had more than once jested about his father’s green eyes. They suspected he could see like a cat right through to any secrets hiding in what he no doubt (affectionately, one hoped) considered the black little hearts of his sons, as well as his one quite lively daughter. He’d always seemed to know who’d gotten jam on the banister, or who had accidentally shot the foot off the statue of Mercury in the garden, or who had stolen a cheroot from the humidor.
His father steepled his hands and tapped the tips of his fingers lightly together.
Which was peculiar, as his father was neither a fidgeter nor a procrastinator. He preferred to deliver orders and news the way a guillotine delivers a nice sharp chop. Swiftly and surgically.
“Did one of your brothers or friends dare you to dance with her, or . . .”
Lyon blinked, genuinely surprised. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re sorry for dancing with her?” His father sounded faintly relieved.
“Forgive me if I’m being obtuse, sir, but I don’t understand the question. Why would anyone dare me to dance with a young woman who doesn’t want for partners and would hardly be likely to refuse me? We are Redmonds, after all.” He said this half in jest.
It was the sort of jest his father typically enjoyed.
It rang flatly in the room.
Lyon dancing with an Eversea was aberrant, and they both knew it. Because Lyon was dutiful, and he had been raised with the notion that the Everseas and the Redmonds quite simply did not dance with one another, any more than cats and dogs enjoyed a good waltz.
“Why, then, did you dance with her?”
Lyon stared back. He saw only his own reflection in his father’s eyes.
He wickedly contemplated saying, Because she is my destiny just to see whether his father was too young for apoplexy.
He’d never even known he was capable of thinking such words. Let alone believing them.
And then all at once it wasn’t funny.
He decided to try cajoling. “Come. You’ve eyes in your head, Father. And you were young once. It was an impulse, I suppose.”
His father would likely disinherit him at once if he’d said, Because she reminded me of the first wildflower in spring. His father considered excessive use of metaphor a character flaw.
His father smiled, faintly and tautly, a smile in which his eyes did not participate. “I was, indeed, young. Once.”
It was as ironic a sentence as Lyon had ever heard.
Something about it stirred a faint memory, a suspicion he’d had for some time. Because he was, as he’d told Olivia Eversea, indeed observant, and he’d seen his father’s eyes linger ever so slightly on a particular woman more than once.
He cautiously echoed his father’s faint smile with one of his own. Over the years he’d learned to modulate his emotions, his expressions, his word choices, all in order to ensure his father remained indulgent and proud, because that’s what ensured a comfortable life in the Redmond household.
“And yet you’re not typically impulsive, Lyon.”
“No. I suppose I’m not.” He knew better than to expound.
Lyon was in fact demonstrably the opposite of impulsive. He hadn’t squandered his allowance in gaming hells, impregnated the servants, or appeared in the broadsheets for cavorting on Rotten Row with notorious aristocratic widows.
Though he had indulged in an aristocratic widow or two. Sometimes he thought God had created aristocratic widows for the sole purpose of indoctrinating handsome heirs into carnal pleasures. But he was both discreet and discerning.
From the moment he was born Lyon’s responsibility as future head of a dynasty had been impressed upon him, the way a signet ring grinds into hot wax.
He was coming to realize his learned carefulness was something of a useful skill.
He was also beginning to understand the grave cost to himself.
So he said nothing more.
But God help him, he darted a swift look at the clock.
His father usually missed nothing. But if he noticed that glance, he didn’t remark upon it.
“Lyon . . . you should know how proud I am of you. A man could not ask for a better son.”
He said this so warmly that despite himself, Lyon nearly flushed. His father’s pride and approval was as potent as his censure, and his three sons, despite themselves, had lived for it their entire lives. His brothers usually had to make do with whatever splashed off Lyon and landed on them. (Their sister, Violet, occupied her own category. Every one of them doted on her, his father included, and she was in danger of becoming hopelessly spoiled.)
“Thank you, sir.”
“Your future with the Mercury Club is brilliant. The world is your oyster. You have not only your family name to thank for this, but your focus and intelligence and discipline. There will, in fact, be an opportunity in a few weeks for you to accompany me to London to present your ideas for investment to the members of the club.”
Yesterday this would have been dizzying, gratifying news. It was everything he had always hoped for.
But oddly, now a trip to London sounded like a trip to purgatory. Heaven, as far as he was concerned, had a population of two.
“Thank you, Father. I should be honored.”
“You are poised now to make a magnificent marriage, as I did, one that will bring a wealth of blessings and stature to the Redmond family for decades to come. I know your suit will be welcome by one young lady in particular, and her family will welcome us to London, too.”
Lyon was wary now. The name of some girl would likely be produced any moment. A girl with a title and a fortune and a father with connections that Isaiah could charmingly exploit in the service of building the fortune.
In all likelihood, Lady Arabella.
Yesterday Lyon would have been curious to hear the name. He’d, in fact, had several names in mind not too long ago. Yesterday, Lady Arabella would have seemed a perfectly reasonable, indeed, desirable choice. It was a choice he understood, and he’d been raised with the knowledge that making a spectacular marriage, and conferring the associated kind of honor and influence upon his family for generations to come, was his duty.
He knew, definitively, that it no longer mattered what his father said.
Lyon now knew who and what he wanted.
And before yesterday, he hadn’t even known what it was to truly want.
“I always hoped to marry as well as you did, Father.”
Lyon thought he saw a flicker in his father’s eyebrow region. He could have sworn something about that sentence had touched Isaiah on the raw.
Isaiah finally merely nodded once. “Nothing makes me happier or more proud than knowing I can count on you to do the right thing, son, for your actions are a reflection of your fine character. I am absolutely certain you will never disappoint me or bring shame to our family, and this is such a comfort to me and your mother.”
It was as though he could will these things into existence by merely stating them.
Lyon had always been fascinated by the fact that Isaiah could persuade nearly anyone of anything. He’d watched his father subtly but relentlessly ply wit, charm, and strategy in meetings at the Mercury Club, over drinks at White’s, milling about with port and cigars after dinner parties. He studied people for weaknesses, strengths, fears, and proclivities, and he used them to his advantage the way conductor shapes a symphony. Lyon had witnessed one wealthy investor after another succumb to his father’s tactics, none the wiser. Thusly the Redmond fortune and influence grew and grew.
It was an extraordinary talent, his father’s intellectually driven intuition, and Lyon had always been secretly proud of it.
But now that Isaiah was employing the same tactics on him, it seemed faintly sinister.
Lyon’s skin itched. As if strings binding him were chafing.
It was not the first time he’d had these sorts of thoughts. Almost two bloody o’clock in the afternoon would not go down in his personal history as the hour of his epiphany.
But it had finally come completely into focus, and with it came an interesting sort of calm.
Lyon was a separate person from his father.
He did not like to be told what to do.
And, like his father, he intended to get what he wanted.
“Thank you, Father. Your opinion means the world to me.”
His father said nothing. He pressed his lips together thoughtfully.
The clock ticked inexorably on. It was now bloody hell two o’clock.
Lyon shifted slightly. The message he’d shoved in his pocket rustled.
He finally could no longer bear it. “Will that be all, Father?”
“I hope so,” his father said. And smiled faintly.
IT HADN’T BEEN difficult for Olivia to persuade Genevieve to accompany her into town to Tingle’s Bookshop the following afternoon. Genevieve loved Tingle’s Bookshop, and Tingle was fond of the Eversea girls. They were two of his best customers, after all, between Olivia and her pamphlets and love for a good horrid or adventure novel, and Genevieve and her predilection for florid romances and biographies of great artists and the occasional indulgence in a London broadsheet, which usually made both her and Olivia giggle.
But Olivia rose late, because visions of waltzes had kept her feverishly awake all night. And Genevieve dawdled at home, because she was attempting, and failing, once again to curl her hair, and Olivia thought her head might launch off her neck from impatience as the clock raced toward two.
It was a quarter past two by the time they arrived.
They burst in the door and both paused on the threshold to inhale at once the singular perfume of leather and paper and glue that characterized Tingle’s. It was a roomy shop, serving all of Sussex, and it was partly sunny, so that people could admire the gleaming of gold-embossed bindings and comfortably flip through a page or two of books that had already had their pages cut, and partly softly dark, to keep the fine covers from fading.
A few other people were in the store, two older gentlemen and a woman, and all were absorbed in the separate little worlds of their books.
Tingle looked up, beamed, and bowed as if they were princesses. “If it isn’t the Eversea girls! What wonderful timing. Miss Olivia, I’ve a new pamphlet for you.”
Mr. Tingle lived to serve his customers.
Olivia seized it delightedly. “Oh, wonderful, Mr. Tingle. So very kind of you to remember to get it in for me.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all, my dear. And Miss Genevieve, I’ve a shipment of books I know you’ll want to see,” he said, twinkling. “It’s in the back, however.” He beamed at them. “I’ll be just a moment.”
He ducked into the back of his shop, and they could hear him rustling about and whistling cheerily and tunelessly under his breath.
Olivia drifted, as casually as she could make it seem, over to the section of history books. Her blood was ringing in her ears, since her heart was circulating it rather enthusiastically.
“History books, Olivia? Wouldn’t you rather have a look at the horrid novels? I thought I saw The Orphan on the Rhine on the shelf. You want that one, remember!”
“Shoo,” Olivia muttered beneath her breath to Genevieve, who had attached herself to her hip.
“I beg your pardon?” Genevieve was startled.
“Er, my s
hoe. I believe there’s a pebble in it.”
“Oh. Well, perhaps you ought to take it off and—”
“Oh look! Mr. Tingle has returned with your books, Gen!”
“Ohhh, lovely!” Her younger sister whirled and all but skipped to the front of the store.
Olivia took a deep breath and rounded the corner of a shelf.
Mr. Redmond was standing there idly, his long form looking as at home there as he did in a ballroom, one leg casually bent, and he was studying the spines of the books as if he had all the time in the world to do precisely that.
A book was already tucked under his arm.
She stared at him.
He didn’t even turn. “Well. Good afternoon, Miss Eversea.”
His voice was scarcely above a murmur.
“Why, good afternoon, Mr. Redmond. Have you an interest in history?”
“As a matter of I’m positively fascinated by the events of the past. Specifically, the events of last night.”
“Last night . . . do you mean the first time you stole a waltz?”
He smiled. “I still refuse to feel chagrin.”
“You did indeed do me a charity, for Lord Cambersmith would have trod upon my foot. He always does.”
“You see? I am a veritable Robin Hood of the ballroom.”
“Didn’t Robin Hood give to the poor?”
“Oh, but I did. I gave to poor me, who had heretofore gone my entire life without dancing with you.”
She stifled a laugh at that.
He turned. “I have already made a purchase.” He gestured with the book beneath his arm. “I just wanted to make certain I didn’t leave the shop before I ascertained there was nothing else in the store I wanted.”
“Very thorough of you,” she said, her voice just barely above a hush. “I should hate for you to forgo something you want.”
He approved of that saucy little sentence with a slow smile she felt in her solar plexus.
“What’s that in your hand, Miss Eversea? Have you brought me a love letter?”
Olivia stifled shocked laughter. Then reflexively whipped the pamphlet behind her back.
“I’m terribly sorry, was that too bold?” He was all mock somber contrition.
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 6