by Laura London
“I wasn’t poaching, sir!” I said. “There was—I saw a fox, a trapped fox as I was passing by the forest in my wagon, and I only sought to free it. I hadn’t thought at the time, but I realize now that I can prove what I’m saying.” I swung around and looked up at John Stewart. “Sir, if we could go back to that place where the trap was set, you would see shredded fox fur and signs of blood, and you would believe me when I say I couldn’t have been setting the trap, but that it had been there for some time.” I read a new uncertainty in the warden’s face, and looked desperately back to the young man. “I beg you, sir.”
The youth gave a subtle smile as though he found it amusing that a creature of such little importance should plead so hard for its life.
“Such passion,” he said. “Perhaps you could convince me.” He leaned over and cupped my cheek in his hand. “Would you try, my little nymph?”
Alarmed by his tone, I took a step back. He smiled again at my reticence as one might smile at the quaint antics of a squirrel, and looked at Stewart, saying, “Bring her to the house.”
Stewart looked distressed. “Master Robert, you know I cannot. You ought to know better than to ask.”
Master Robert returned look for look with a haughty stare, though his gray eyes twinkled. “Do you say ‘cannot’ to me, John? God, that would be a first.”
“There’s my reward for spoiling you,” Stewart said glumly. “Now you’re in your manhood, you upbraid me for it. I’m taking the gel to Chipping.”
“You won’t, John. You’ll bring her in the house as I asked,” Robert said matter-of-factly, with impenetrable self-confidence. “Don’t be a prude, man,” he said, softening the words with a persuasive smile.
It was clear that John Stewart was upset. “I’m a Christian man, Master Robert. You know that.”
The youth backed his horse several paces, with a gleam of unholy amusement in his eyes. “Why, certainly I know that. That’s why I’m not asking you to be brought to the house. See that in one-half hour she’s in my…”
“Reading room,” interrupted Stewart firmly.
“A dainty compromise, John,” spoke the young man over his shoulder as he cantered the horse toward the stable block, “and as good a place to begin as any.”
I won’t let them see me cry, I thought. I won’t. I must keep a clear head and find some way to escape. But when Stewart led me into the big house through the wide corridors of the kitchen complex, the possibility of escape seemed as hard to imagine as sharp peppers in May. I suffered the chafing of the rope on my wrists and followed my captor down the halls.
As I looked about at the hushed, beautiful surroundings, the very concepts of flight, terror, and escape seemed an intrusion from the outside world. Plush exotic carpets muted our footsteps and all further sound of our progress down the halls, which were hung with gorgeous, brightly colored tapestries. The ceilings were brilliantly frescoed. At points in the hallway were tables set with gold vases filled with arrangements of fresh flowers, the tables themselves carved and gilded by masterful hands. To buy a simple, rough-hewn table was ten shillings at the least. I could scarcely imagine anyone possessing the fortune to own even one of Edgehill’s tables. This was opulence far beyond what I would have thought possible in a dwelling; it seemed more luxury than would be available to kings or princes. An anxious tightness arose in my throat to match the binding constriction on my wrists.
The wide glass panel in the reading room overlooked the south lawn. The walls and plaster ceiling were blue, with ribbing picked out in white. Fine paintings adorned the walls, treasures of their kind by Van Dyke, Hopner, and Reynolds.
Without looking at me, Stewart summoned a footman, directed him to stand watch over me, and untied the rope from my wrists. Coiling it into a loose loop around his wrist, he stomped from the room without another word. The footman, a freckle-faced, fair-skinned lad of eighteen, looked embarrassed but determined to do his duty. He warned me not to try any of my gypsy tricks on him, not to put my greasy fingers on any of his lordship’s tables, and not to sit down. I was left with nothing to do but stare disconsolately out the window, rubbing my wrists to restore circulation, and watching a family of deer from the estate herd grazing under a clump of beech trees far down the lot. I noticed a fiery pain throbbing on my palm where the trap had cut me.
I thought sadly of my wagon with its clean varnished sides, and my horse, Yojo, in his brass-studded harness, still hitched to the wagon. He was thirsty by now, I was sure. He would roll his great shoulders uncomfortably under the leather collar, and turn his head to nicker at Kory, the stallion, that I had left tethered to the wagon’s back rack. I knew my two horses. They would lift their ears at each strange sound, and look for me, only to be disappointed. I stood as I was for a long time. The deer wandered out of sight into the beech trees. The footman shifted position uncomfortably, and shadow from the branches of a large oak tree touched the stone base of the house.
I was beginning to wonder if the young man called Master Robert had forgotten about me when I heard footsteps in the hall, and he entered the room. Dressed in clean buckskins and a crisp white shirt, he gestured his dismissal of the footman, who left with relief. Robert smiled at me, but before he could speak, I said, “Has your warden found the fox fur? Am I to be freed?”
I could see my long-term fortunes were of little concern to him; my sensitivities piqued no interest. But as much as my words were capable of surprising him, they did so. It simply had not occurred to him that I might still wish to leave.
“I doubt if Stewart’s gone to look at your fox trap. The prize bitch in the Squire’s hound pack has begun to whelp, and the Squire has sent for John to play midwife.” He walked leisurely over to me, and leaned against the window frame. He was very close, the gaze of the gray eyes caressing my face. “Please me, and I won’t let them hurt you.”
I wasn’t certain of his meaning, but found my suspicions too terrible to voice. “I am afraid, sir,” I managed, “that I would find you too hard to please.”
He grinned. “Why?”
“ ’Tis evident, sir. I’m so different from you.”
He captured one of my braids and threaded it slowly through his hand. “Vive la difference, my pet. Since Adam and Eve in the garden…”
I was beginning to feel sick and shaky. “That’s not what I meant, sir. I refer to the difference in our degrees.”
“King and pauper, admiral and Latin master—you’ll find, my dear, that we’re all the same underneath the sheets.”
It was impossible to insulate myself from his meaning. My knowledge of this aspect of the male character was limited to incomplete scraps culled from my reading and tart comments from my grandmother. The thought of increasing my knowledge at these callous young hands was as terrifying as John Stewart’s prison. My mind cast wildly for some way to deny him without causing him to deliver me up to the Chipping gaol.
More than once I had seen my grandmother exploit superstitions of the gorgios to protect herself. “If you let me go in peace, sir, I shall put a spell for good fortune on your name.”
“Do you do hocus-pocus, my pet? How charming. Why do you worry? I’ve already told you I’d let you go without harm.” He caught my remaining braid in his hand; his gray eyes were pitiless. “After I’m done with you.” He pulled my face to his by the braids; I tried to pull away, wincing in pain from the hard ache of my hair yanking at my scalp. He bent as though to kiss me. I gave a cry of fear, which startled him enough to slacken his grip, and I was able to tear myself loose and run for the door in an unthinking panic, tugging inefficiently at the brass doorknob. Without looking behind me to see if Master Robert were following me, I finally opened the door and tried to leave the room, only to collide with someone attempting to enter from the other side.
I felt the warm, steadying pressure of a hand on my shoulder as I gasped for lost breath and looked up through a mist of tears to see the man who had accidentally prevented my escape. He was tall,
a few years older than the man who had tried to kiss me, and there was a physical resemblance between them that could only have been familial. There was a hardness to his body, accentuated by a jacket and breeches that covered his slim hips without a crease. The breeches seemed to flow in a perfect line into the tops of highly polished boots of black leather. The face was strikingly handsome, lean, and aristocratic, and framed by dark, glowing hair that curled naturally in a manner that hairdressers have tried unsuccessfully through the ages to pleasingly emulate. His eyes were deep blue, and had in them the crystalline quality of an early spring sky.
I later learned that many young English maidens could have put a name to that dazzling face. But as my contact with the British aristocracy, or in fact with any aristocracy, had been nonexistent, no spark of recognition informed my mind as I stared at him. I hardly knew whether to class his arrival as an improvement in my situation or a decay. Those intimately familiar with the man would surely have advised that it must be the latter.
As I was eventually to know, it would have been too much to have said that the blue-eyed man’s reputation was a stench in the nostrils of every decent citizen. The man had his defenders. To those detractors who charged that he had not an amiable bone in his admittedly graceful body, there was the refutation of Lady Jersey, who claimed that he had once kept her company in a garden alcove for a period of no less than ten minutes and made conversation that, if it was not precisely amiable, was at least free from his customary, biting rudeness. Perhaps the record length of the contact was due to a heavy rain that prevented his leaving the shelter; perhaps a liberal dose of Lord Jersey’s brandy accounted for the relatively mellow tenor of his conversation. Say what you would, he was not as black as he was painted.
The largest block of his critics came from those gentlemen gifted with pretty wives and mistresses, for there seemed to be a lamentable tendency for such ladies to fall headlong in love with the man after receiving even the smallest trace of encouragement—a crooked smile from the shapely lips, or the most minor courtesy. Fathers were brutally torn. Should they present their daughters to him in the remote hope that it might be their daughter to win his heart and enormous fortune? Or should they hide their girls when the fellow was about out of the horrifying, but far more likely possibility that his erratic fancy should alight on the damsel with every object in view save marriage? No one had ever accused him of having an excessive regard for public opinion, and he had overstepped the limits of respectable oat-sowing times out of mind. Still, he was too rich, too well-born, and too highly placed to be shunned, and the only hostesses who proclaimed to their acquaintances that they would never have that man in the house were hostesses who were as sure as Sunday that he wouldn’t have come anyway.
All ignorance, I could see only the unmistakable mark of cynicism sketched on the otherwise pristine features, as though repeated disillusionment had tarnished his vision of the world. If he felt as much as a wheat grain of kindness toward me, it was not apparent in his face. He was staring at me as though I were an oily rag left by carelessness on the reading room floor. His hand dropped from my shoulder and rested on his long thighs as he spoke.
“It appears honest John Stewart was right.”
“Oh, dear,” said Robert, his gray eyes suddenly filled with laughter. “What did he say?”
“He said he was afraid he’d inadvertently assisted in a rape.”
It was a hard word for me to hear. I felt the sting of blood in my cheeks, and glanced quickly at the younger man. There was defiance in his face, though only a trace, as he stared affectionately back at the man in the doorway.
“Do you object, big brother?” he said.
The older man ran me up and down rapidly with a contemptuous look. “Our tastes always were different.” The look stopped on the cut in my hand; the man’s eyes clouded enigmatically, his frown deepened, one eyebrow was lifted. To Robert, he said, “Must you maim them first?” He caught my hand. I tried to jerk it away, but he held it fast. “Hold still,” he commanded sharply. I still struggled, and he caught my chin firmly in his other hand and looked into my eyes. “Hold still,” he repeated deliberately. I felt burned by his gaze, and took in a sharp breath, but held myself quietly while he uncurled my fingers to look at my wounded palm.
Robert, watching this tableau, spoke softly. “I hadn’t noticed that.”
For the first time his brother appeared to smile, a sparse curl at the edge of his lips. “I believe you. It’s in character.” Without looking up from the wound, he asked me, “On what did you cut yourself?”
I swallowed. “The trap. I had stopped to free a fox…”
“I’ve already heard your story,” he interrupted. “John Stewart left me a note. You weren’t catching a fox; you were letting it go. Very original. If the wound goes septic, you’ll probably lose your hand, you know.”
“I shan’t,” I contradicted, a good deal shaken. “My grandmother was a healer, and she taught me some of her skills. I shall put a poultice of mold on it, and after three days adder’s tongue boiled with olive oil.”
“Wonderful. Filthy it up with a lot of herbs. Until medical science has the time to figure out which folk cures are helpful and which are lethal, if you get an injury on my land, you’ll have it treated my way. Come over in the light.”
“The light?” I asked, confused by his words. I had imagined I was to be turned over at once to the distressing ministrations of a disapproving maidservant. “And… you did say—your land. Surely you cannot be Lord Brockhaven!”
“Why can’t I be Brockhaven?”
“I had thought,” I said, “that an earl would be a much older man.”
I heard a crack of laughter from Robert behind me.
“I had thought,” replied Brockhaven, “that a gypsy would speak wretched English. Why is your speech so pure?”
It embarrassed me that he had noticed, though I ought to have expected it. My use of Grandmother’s tongue, the Romany, was clear and perfect and yet somehow my father’s refined English had been the dominant influence on my speech. I dreamed in Romany, I thought in a mixture of English and Romany, but when I spoke aloud, my English sounded as though I’d been raised in a Sussex manor house instead of under the tin roof of a gypsy caravan. It was the only part of my father’s legacy that I regretted, for it irrevocably proclaimed my mixed blood.
“I was taught,” I said, and hoped he’d ask no more.
He didn’t pursue the matter, merely giving me a look saying clearly that mine was exactly the kind of stupid answer one could expect from a weak-witted rustic. After propelling me to the window, he examined my hand once more in the sunlight before picking up the lid of a flip-top bureau. Holding my hand over a built-in basin, he began to clean my wound with a stream of water from the matching china pitcher. In a lower drawer there were linen napkins, bleached to a blinding lily white. In a sharp gesture that would have brought palpitations to his housekeeper’s conscientious heart, he rent one of the immaculate creations in half and probed carefully at the torn flesh on my palm.
I had expected to suffer terribly from this procedure so I was amazed when the gentleness of his touch reduced my pain to a soft sting. I had almost begun to think that I had perhaps misjudged his harshness when he pulled a crystal decanter from a shelf in the bureau and, holding tightly to my wrist, poured a flood of brandy on the injured hand.
I gasped, paled, and swayed on my feet. Hard young arms caught me before I could fall, and Brockhaven lowered me to an upholstered chair with more efficiency than tenderness. Helpless, I drooped my head against the wing and closed my eyes. He fashioned a comfortable bandage from a folded napkin, laid it on my palm, and wrapped it snugly around my wrist. Summoning my strength, I forced myself to recover and, fighting the dizziness, rose to my feet with the help of the chair arm. I faced Lord Brockhaven.
“It had to be done, I know,” I said, in a strained voice. “Thank you.”
Whatever values Lord Brockhaven
possessed, sentimentality was not among them. “I would have done the same,” he said, “for an animal.” He turned to walk from the room, stopping when he reached the door to give his brother a smile’s shadow. “Even without a bloody palm, I find her none too appetizing. Doubtless, you’ll tell me that your tastes are different than mine, but if you want my advice, give her a bath first.”
As he reached for the door handle, I cried out, “No! Oh, please no! Have pity, my lord! Let me go!”
Brockhaven eyed me sardonically and then suddenly he paused, his gaze dropping to the gleaming gold chain that circled my neck. Though it was an unusual chain, with tiny crossbars set in each link, he might not have noticed it if his attention had not been drawn there by my habit of touching it nervously in anxious moments. His eyes sharpened as he looked at it, as though the chain had touched off a spark in his mind. To my surprise, he crossed the room in a swift stride and slid his finger behind the delicate goldwork where it lay at the base of my neck. He lifted it to expose the attached medallion, which had fallen behind the cloth of my bodice. There was a change in his expression that I could not identify. What emotions moved him, I didn’t know, but there was little doubt that he recognized the medallion. It had been a gift from my father; I knew it was valuable, and yet, it was hardly enough so to excite the interest of a man like the earl with his many fabulous possessions.
Robert had come to stand beside his brother.
“She stole it, of course,” said Robert tensely.
Afraid of being accused of yet another crime, I was quick to reply to the accusation. “I haven’t! It was my father’s!”
“Your father’s,” Brockhaven repeated thoughtfully. “Incredible.”
“Her father stole it,” suggested Rob, looking questioningly at Lord Brockhaven. “Alex, it can’t be.”
A grim smile crossed Brockhaven’s features. “That’s easily checked.” He turned back to me with a thoughtful, studying gaze and reached up to my face, the side of this thumb stroking my cheek. “What’s given the color to your skin, brat? Was it the sun…?” His searching fingers traveled down to my neck. “Or was it your parents?”