“How can you giggle when I am close to suffocating in this crowd?” Kitty looked back, a petulant child now. The exhilarating effects of the champagne were long gone, leaving a headache in their wake.
“Kitty, look around you. Do you not see the possibilities here for our success as pickpockets?”
“You are depraved, Tilla!” Town bronze had added to the country girl’s vocabulary, if not her savoir faire.
Quintilla’s musings were again with Amos. He would break the rules once too often, and get caught. She had been caught, tonight. Almost. Her hand circled her throat. That was as close to danger as she cared to come—ever.
Would the experience with Uxbridge narrow the boundaries of her world? A world without Warrick? She sighed. She did not want to look twice before leaping.
Their carriage appeared in front of Carlton House. A major problem to solve, thought Quintilla as she mounted the step. How to purge Warrick’s presence from her every waking moment—in a world that somehow seemed meaner?
17
The London season’s tumultuous high tide had receded, stranding Quintilla at the pianoforte this early afternoon, alone in the Guthries’ rose drawing room. Her gown of ruffled lilac organza blended with the room’s shadows while she concentrated on mastering difficult arpeggios that refused to be translated from page to keyboard. Through the open French doors could be heard a more musically adept bird madly warbling its praise of the fragrance of roses in the formal garden.
Upstairs, Lady Guthrie heard the pianoforte music and winced over a particularly error-laden rendition. She was conferring with her maid about the packing requirements for a last-minute decision to accompany Quintilla to Berkeley on the morrow. A short visit in the happily informal Davenant home should restore her ladyship’s equanimity, frazzled after the last hectic month. Strategy sessions were in order, and in the campaign for a widower, there was a need to negotiate from strength.
Rundle, answering the front door, could not hide his distaste for the discordant musical notes. He inadvertently flinched when he admitted Lord Eysley.
“Good afternoon, Rundle. No need to ask if Miss Davenant is at home. I will just follow the music to find her.”
The melody, now slowly, painstakingly played, accompanied Warrick across the hall. As he silently opened, then closed behind him the double doors to the drawing room, there was a crash of pianoforte keys—surely not ordered by the composer—followed by deathly silence. Even the warbler in the garden ceased its trills. Warrick leaned back against the door.
“My sentiments exactly,” he said, and through narrowed eyes saw the radiance envelop Quintilla as she regarded him in surprised wonder. If he had any doubts about her feelings for him, they were dispelled, and he knew the missing word from her last sentence at the Dacre ball. She loved him.
“It is a difficult measure,” Quintilla explained, defiantly apologetic. One does not, after all, pound pianoforte keys.
“So I heard.”
Quintilla remained seated, finding it impossible to stand in his presence. Warrick! Why was he not in Devon? How fine he looked, how ... delectable, walking towards her in top boots below his skintight buckskins. A coat of cinnamon brown matched his eyes, whose challenging gleam could ignite her if she did not take care.
“Have you thought of taking up embroidery?” Warrick sat beside her on the bench. “More restful to the ears, and it might give you something to talk about with Blumpton.”
“No. I discovered recipes interest him.” Quintilla flashed an impish grin, which she could not sustain. Warrick was too close. Her eyes returned to the keyboard where her hands roamed lightly over the keys, producing vague melodies.
“So, is there a future for you, with Blumpton’s recipes?”
“No.” She continued to focus attention on her rambling hands. What was the matter with her! His nearness so disconcerted, shyness conquered years ago now left her frozen. Only her hands still moved.
“Nor any future with guests from the Dacre Long Gallery?”
Again she glanced at him, and shook her head.
“After all those dances, performed so perfectly—chasse and waltz—and every country dance known to man!”
Warrick bent his head, and his voice was perilously close to her ear. Quintilla stopped playing the pianoforte to look carefully at her partner on the small bench. His eyes gleamed even more dangerously.
“Waiting for the grand passion, Quintilla?”
Quickly she began to play their sea chantey.
Warrick sang, “What shall we do with a lovelorn suitor?”
Quintilla’s fingers could not even play the right notes for this easy piece.
“What shall we do with a lovelorn suitor?” Warrick paused to kiss her cheek, then continued. “What shall we do with a lovelorn suitor, early in the morning?” Again his lips pressed against her cheek, nearer her mouth this time.
Quintilla stopped, her hands resting on the keyboard. How was she to maintain her composure when he kissed her? A kiss of friendship, surely? She would not love and be hurt by rejection, she vowed. Even with Warrick.
“Did you go to Devon?” Quintilla tried to lessen her overwhelming excitement by returning the relationship to a more mundane foundation. She must be resolute.
“No. I went to Gloucestershire, to Berkeley.” At Quintilla’s openmouthed astonishment, Warrick hastily explained. “I visited your parents, for permission to address you.” Warrick took her trembling hands from where they lay on the pianoforte keys and held them between his firm palms. “I confessed to your father and mother how very slow I was in recognising the great esteem I have for you, and they very kindly forgave my ... lack of perspicacity when I told them of the pleasure I find in your company, how irrevocably I love you, and want you to marry me.” The passion in his words, pouring from his heart, told of his need for her.
“You want me?” With a cry of pain, Quintilla fell into his arms, burying her head between his chin and his shoulder. She could feel his heart beat with hers.
“I want you.” His husky voice vibrant with the emotion of their intimacy, he rubbed his cheek against her sweet-smelling hair.
“And you do not care about my leg?” Quintilla’s anguished words, muffled against the smooth texture of his coat, carried a lifetime of enduring with grace the mishap of her birth, and its consequences.
Warrick immediately answered her. “Oh, I care very much for your legs. I care very much for your ears, too, especially this one.” He kissed that organ of hearing closest to him.
With his two hands, Warrick moved her face away from its haven on his shoulder to where he could see directly into her blue eyes, filled with long-standing doubt. His fingers spread on her tear-stained cheeks. “I care for your eyes.” His lips touched each closed lid, tasting the tears she could not contain.
“I care for your pert nose,” he kissed the tip, “and your honey lips.” He pulled his lips back and forth across hers. “I did not confess to your parents, Quintilla, how much I desire you.”
Kisses whisper-soft brushed each corner of her mouth, her tremulous lower lip, her chin, her throat. Quintilla’s emotions tangled with the power of his presence, the gentle impact of each kiss melting her resistance. One last desperately honourable time, she struggled against his sheltering arms, against her rising ecstasy. “What about the Eysley tradition?”
With his forefinger, Warrick wiped away a last tear from her cheek, and swept back from her face the tendrils of hair threatening to obscure the shining glow of belief now lighting her eyes. “What Eysley tradition?” he asked, bemused.
“Eysley barons marry only the most beautiful women,” Quintilla instructed.
Warrick laughed, knowing he must not express how little it mattered. In truth, a concoction of Edwina’s, and her gossiping clique. “Darling girl, I think I am most faithfully observing the tradition. More than any other Eysley baron—ever. Now, have I missed hearing your acceptance of my proposal?”
&nbs
p; “Oh, Warrick. I do love you, and I would be so honoured ... and joyously happy to marry you and be your wife”—He started to fold her arms in his arms. Quintilla’s hand on his chest stayed the embrace. “But—.”
“But what? Where is my Quintilla of the daring spirit, who ignores the rest of society to do just what she wants to do?”
“Sometimes, society can persuade the ... different to adopt feelings of inadequacy.” Quintilla wanted him to understand her hesitancy.
“And have they finally persuaded you?” Warrick carefully perused her face, earnest, reflecting her struggle. “With all your courage? Have they finally persuaded you?”
“Never!” The word came fiercely. The strength from Warrick’s hands on her shoulders flowed to reinforce the certainty surging within her. He wanted to share with her, through the years, the battles as well as the beauties of life.
“Good! Because I need your spirit, your zest for life, with me always, Quintilla.” His arms encircled her.
Such a satisfactory place to be—in his arms. She squirmed against him, longing to become one with him, feeling the energy in him. Her finger traced the line of his jaw. “I wanted, I want, always, the most ... best ... for you.”
He laughed at her stumbling words. “I have the most best, if you love me.”
“I love you, Warrick.”
His lips introduced her to the rapture of the grand passion. Out in the garden, the bird resumed its exuberant ode to beauty.
AFTERWORD
The Vaccination Act finally passed July 23, 1840, four months after the death of Lord Boringdon. Dr. Jenner had died in 1823. As of 1986, it has been more than a decade since a case of smallpox was recorded anywhere in the world.
The poem which Dr. Jenner recites in Chapter Six was actually written by him (with alteration of only a few words to fit this novel). The correct version may be read on page 186 of Paul Saunders’s biography of the Berkeley physician.
With the exception of Dr. Edward Jenner, everyone in the novel who put in an appearance at Number Seven, Sloane Crescent is fictitious, as are Warrick’s relatives and employees, as well as Lord Uxbridge, Winifred Ambleton, and the Cravenhursts, Shorehams and Dacres. All other figures are people who lived at the time, functioning as described.
Barker, F. and P. Jackson. London, 2,000 Years of a City and Its People. London: Cassell, 1974.
Borer, M.I.C. Mayfair, The Years of Grandeur. London: Allen, 1975.
Dolan, E. F., Jr. Jenner and the Miracle of Vaccine. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1960.
King, Ronald. The World of Kew. London: Macmillan, 1979.
Priestly, J. B. The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency, 1811-20. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
Rowse, A. L. The Tower of London in the History of England. New York: Putnam’s, 1972.
Saunders, P. Edward Jenner, The Cheltenham Yean, 1795-1823. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982.
THE AUTHOR
MARTHA LOU THOMAS has recently retired from a career as librarian. She says her mention of William Harvey’s discovery of blood circulation in a medical bibliography is the closest she has previously come to writing about matters of the heart. She has adapted children’s stories for a long-running radio program and written a prize-winning videocassette program on searching computer bases. Waltz with a Stranger is her first published novel. She lives in Corona del Mar, California.
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