She was happy to be enfolded in a long, silent, and equally eloquent hug.
Pulling herself away finally, to share a smile with her sister, she continued, “Now let’s go over the list of what we were supposed to accomplish in the next few days, and figure out what tasks we can assign to Julia. If he and I do actually go.”
Which passed the evening quite entertainingly, until Mary found herself yawning and gaping over the voluminous list they’d compiled-for Julia liked to have her responsibilities made most explicit.
But even with every chore painstakingly noted, Jessica would insist upon lighting another set of candles, in wait for the carriage from Cauthorn.
“Well, it’s her first real dance party, and even if, as is more than likely, she’ll simply curl her lip and roll her eyes when I dare ask how it went…”
“Of course,” Mary replied, “but you won’t mind, will you, if I go on up to bed?”
Jessie shook her head, and the sisters kissed good night, the younger one rather in awe at how one could still love so ungrateful a wretch as a daughter, and a beautiful one at that, whom Kit may or may not have danced with this evening, not, of course, that it mattered one way or another.
The Dowager Lady Rowen was still asleep, Thomas told Kit, when he’d stopped at the dower house the next morning.
Well, it was still awfully early. Kit hadn’t waited to be shaved nor to eat breakfast. His head was still swirling with a night of dreams. Spicy, sugared ones, and some odd, confusing ones as well-the London delegate had even appeared in one of them.
But the impeccable Thomas looked a bit less composed than usual as well, his words still polite but a bit uncharacteristically short. Not only that: Kit could have sworn that the footman had quickly stuck a pamphlet into a pocket of his mulberry velvet coat.
Et tu, Thomas? Certainly you’re not also planning sedition.
One never knew. Still, he hated to feel himself suspicious of so loyal a servant. Thomas had retrieved a few items that Kit had left behind in Calais; his mother had given them to him yesterday when she’d arrived.
“Ah, well, tell her ladyship that I’m off to Wakefield for a few days, on magistrate’s business,” he replied. “Oh yes, and here,” he added, “this is for you, with all my thanks.” Whatever swill he might be poisoning his thoughts with, Thomas deserved a reward for finding what had been lost. “No, please, it’s the least I can do.”
He turned away and started down the path, stopping suddenly, to call back a final piece of information.
“Wait, Thomas. I didn’t word my message quite correctly. You can tell her, if you please, that Lady Christopher and I are off to Wakefield.”
Why not?
And, for that matter (for there she was, waiting by the oak tree), why not sweep her into his arms for a happy morning kiss? His dreams of her had been of a more exotic genre, but she looked so pretty and natural there in the clearing in her green dress, that it was randy pleasure enough just to peer into her sunlit face, just to draw her to him, curve his hand around her arse, and then to imagine…
Drawers? No, I don’t.
Of course not. Drawers would be an absurdity in a carriage, not to speak of an assault upon common sense. While without them… delightful to think how little it would take-just a few buttons of his pantaloon… with the moist green fields slipping by on either side of them outside the windows.
“I expect”-she was pressing her belly and thighs against his quite shamelessly-“that you want to go to Wakefield this morning.”
He laughed and buried his mouth in the curve of her throat.
But what was that crackling? Over there on the path, behind that stand of pines?
So absorbed had they been in each other, it took them a moment to absorb the fact that they’d been spied upon, the interloper running quickly and lightly away toward the east, where the low morning sunbeams glared through the trees, obscuring their vision.
“Not that it matters, I expect,” Mary said. “I’ve already told Jessie about our journey, and didn’t insist that she keep it a secret either.”
He laughed. “The only person I told was my mother.”
“She’s back?”
“With Gerry and Georgy. The delay was all their fault. The poor lady was hard-pressed to gather up the pair of irresponsible rapscallions…”
“Just listen to the very serious and solemn Lord Christopher…”
“Better keep your hands to yourself, my lady, if you expect him to do his serious and solemn best later today…”
“Why do I expect that he’ll manage quite splendidly no matter where I put my hands at this moment? But of course,” she added, “you’re right that I shouldn’t be pawing you as I am in this venue. We’ve gotten overconfident, when we’re really quite public here-well, our intruder of just a few moments ago proves that. I expect it was Lord Ayres, making his long-threatened poetic ramble through the forest…”
“You haven’t been flirting with that pomaded ninny…”
Her face changed; she stopped him short as a new thought struck her. “But if the dowager marchioness has returned home, that must mean that Thomas… Kit, you should have told me sooner. I must go… yes, come get me in an hour and a half. That will be perfect.”
For although she hadn’t always been the most patient of employers-nor by any means the easiest to keep neat and well-dressed or to clean up after-there were certain basic demands of human decency and loyalty to her sex.
She’d gotten a stitch in her side, walking so quickly and sometimes breaking into a run on the way back to Beechwood Knolls-on the same path that once she’d skimmed so lightly, not even noticing the first raindrops.
I must look a fright, she thought, waving hastily to the group just starting out for the Halseys’. Lord Ayres ignored her completely, his eyes trained upon a flirtatious Miss Fannie Grandin, looking very pretty and composed with her hands on the reins of the dogcart. Yes, it must have been the pomaded ninny who’d stumbled into the forest, perhaps to prepare himself for this morning’s conquest… Well, at least he’d had the tact to run away rather than show himself.
It didn’t matter. “Have a lovely, lovely time,” she called out to them, and to Fred, conferring with the groom about the horse who’d be pulling the curricle, and Elizabeth, hugging Jessica good-bye at the side of the carriage.
She threw open the door to the house. “Peggy,” she called, as she thundered up the stairs.
“Peggy, where are you?”
Panting on the landing now. But wait. This needs to be done with some tact.
Well, as best I can anyway.
The girl had just finished strapping the trunk shut. She looked up now from where she was kneeling beside it. Pale, anxious.
She knows he’s returned. And she hasn’t seen him yet.
“Peggy, I’ve been thinking. Well, you know, it’s rather selfish of me, going off so suddenly like this to Wakefield with… um, Lord Christopher, though in fact, he, well, we are rather obliged to… ah… but with all the preparations for the midsummer party, and leaving Mrs. Grandin alone here, and you know how imperious Mrs. MacNeill can be, not that she isn’t very dear and good in her own way…
“Well, in any case, Peggy, I’ve rather been thinking that perhaps I should leave you behind these few days, here, you know, at Beechwood Knolls, well, in the neighborhood, I mean… So as to… um, to be of assistance to my sisters…”
Mama would have done it with genuine tact and grace. But the slow, serious, anxious, but also resolute smile taking form on Peggy’s wan face was proof enough that Mary had succeeded well enough.
Her little trunk was packed; her portable writing desk sat on top of it, next to her folded dark red traveling cloak. A miscellany of necessaries-lavender water, her all-important drawstring bag, even her spectacles-were knotted up in a large India shawl.
She sat alone on a bench built round a large beech tree near the front door. To wait. For half an hour? Half a year? The bet
ter part of a decade? Or merely an instant. She couldn’t tell if time were rushing by or stopped forever. How odd, when her pocket watch was ticking so evenly and objectively. She tried to set her breath to it.
But at least she needn’t be alone. For here was Jessica, carrying a covered wicker basket.
“The inns between here and Wakefield won’t give you an edible luncheon, and so I thought… well, there’s a bottle of wine, another of cold springwater, some pretty good Stilton, sliced cold meat, bread, and-careful, they’re delicate-a few strawberries from the kitchen garden, wrapped in cheesecloth.”
Arthur Grandin had particularly loved the strawberries that grew at Beechwood Knolls. Mary took her sister’s hand, and together they listened for the jingle of traces, the crunch of wheels. The path from the main road was screened by dense hedges, ancient elms and beeches. They’d hear the Rowen coach before either she or Jessica caught actual sight of it making its stately way over the gravel.
Chapter Twenty-four
Their meeting in the forest-her very unladylike hands, not to speak of the guilty frisson of being spied upon-had inflamed his imagination again.
He grinned, quite forgetting that he was being shaved at the moment.
“Careful, my lord.” Good luck that his valet hadn’t been holding the razor a quarter inch nearer his cheek, or Kit would finally have something like the dueling scar he’d once coveted, when he was too young and stupid to know better.
“Sorry, Belcher. My fault entirely.”
Neat and decent at last, dressed and shaved for a day’s travel. A pity, he thought, to disturb the excellent knot in his cravat-or to crease his linen or possibly to tear a button from his waistcoat. A pity, and the sooner the better too.
He was still grinning while he helped himself to a quick breakfast and bade good-bye to the family group around the table.
But in the unwieldy, inevitable way of these things, his mood took a precipitous shift in direction during the minutes it took him to quit the house. And now that he stood poised to step up into the traveling coach, his thoughts were a muddle of obscure anxieties and simple annoyance.
Must they have that grinning idiot Frayne up there on the box? Alas, it seemed that they did. Kit had requested the other, politer coachman, but the man had gotten a cold.
Frayne would have to do.
“We shall be taking the north road to Wakefield,” Kit told him. Blandly, patiently. “But first we shall be stopping at Beechwood Knolls.”
A gleam stole into the coachman’s eye.
No need to speak a warning-just to look one was quite good enough; Kit had learned that much, at least, from the old Eighth Marquess of Rowen. Gratifying to watch the coachman shrink down into his multiple capes, shivering in the chill of Lord Christopher’s glance, even as his brow grew moist in the morning sunlight. Sometimes one needed to manage one’s coachman, rather as one’s coachman managed the horses.
And as one wished one could manage one’s dreams.
For the quaint yet oddly disturbing dream he’d had last night had come back to haunt him. He’d found himself in a large, crowded room-or was it a street?-surrounded by Britons of all sort. Somehow, he knew that there were seventy thousand men present, most of whom appeared to be bleeding. (There’s violence already-Lord Sidmouth had suddenly appeared, whispered this to him, and disappeared back into the crowd.) But even as they bled, it seemed that all seventy thousand men were pointing, whispering, and laughing at Lord Kit, while Mr. Oliver stood on a podium and delivered a Latin oration.
Absurd. Meaningless.
But if one must dream…
For he’d also had some very pleasant ones last night. Think of those. Ah yes, as he slid onto the padded and tufted blue velvet upholstery. Dreams and memories too of past carriage journeys, the more recherché positions one could assume, as they had assumed during some well-remembered rides. (Times during the first year of their marriage, when the Curzon Street furniture had become too tame for them.) The positions worked better, though, with the help of extra carriage robes and cushions, particularly for tired knees on the jolting floor of the coach.
Good, excellent-Belcher had already laid the cushions and neatly folded blankets on the backward-facing seat.
Yes, let’s go, tell Frayne I’m ready. The valet nodded. Kit leaned back; Belcher climbed up to take his seat next to Frayne. The carriage jolted slightly and started down the avenue.
But he still wasn’t quite at his ease. Because they hadn’t undertaken this journey merely for its erotic possibilities. The aim of this journey was a serious one.
To find out more about the dangers threatening his nation-from a man he’d sworn never to speak to again.
Still, Mary was right. He owed it to himself to speak to Morrice. Could the London radicals really call out such large numbers of men?
And if Morrice appeared to be lying, if he really was as vile and low a person as Kit had been trying to convince himself he was for the last nine years…
Well, nothing would be lost, would it?
Except, perhaps, a sneaking hidden hope he’d barely admitted to himself of a possible reconciliation. Ah, well, if such a thing were impossible, better to know now.
Just get all the information. Understand the situation. Easier that way to follow orders. No doubt in the end he’d do exactly as he’d been told. Wait until the moment arose, then call out the militia, suppress the rebellion, arrest the Williamses and the Mertons, the Turners and the Watsons and the Weightmans (no surprise how well he knew their names by now).
Difficult but necessary. Banal, ordinary, clear, and inescapable as the day. Duty wasn’t a problem.
It was honor that presented more of a challenge. Honor and its Janus face, betrayal.
He’d promised Mary that he’d confront the man who’d betrayed him.
They passed through the gates of the park at Rowen. The gamekeeper saluted him from the side of his lodge.
He’d promised her… Not in so many words-but wasn’t that the curse and the blessing of loving an intelligent woman? He knew, and she knew, and she also knew that he knew that she knew… Yes, all right, enough of that-each and both of them knew perfectly well what he’d promised her.
Which was to confront all the betrayers in the case. Including the betraying little wretch that had been his younger self.
… Cheating and lying, whoring and not touching me for weeks… ignoring Richard just as you’d been ignoring me…
Yes, quite possibly one could count some of that as a betrayal of those one loved. A betrayal of oneself too, not to speak of the friend he’d… oh, all right, he had loved his friend Richard, even if it wasn’t so easy to use the word about a boyhood companion.
Betrayals all round. How cruel their younger selves had been.
Perhaps, he thought, we owe a debt of honor to our poor, flawed, frightened and deluded younger selves, to become the people we should have been, if only we could have.
The carriage had entered the gates at Beechwood Knolls.
Stupid name, the old marquess had sometimes muttered, Beechwood bloody Knolls. Even if it were merely a brewer’s holiday villa, purchased a scant three generations ago, one ought give it a more venerable name.
Never mind (as Kit had been astonished to learn, when Mary had taken him to be introduced to her parents) that they liked it just as it was.
“Well, it’s not exactly a country house.” Mrs. Penley had had an enchanting smile, and an intimate, confiding way of taking the arm Kit offered, even while he’d felt her husband glowering at his back when they went in to dinner. “Even with the wings and ells we’ve added onto it, it’s really only a house in the country, you see.”
He’d been charmed, but not convinced.
What a humorless young dunce I was, Kit thought: serious, ponderous, proud, and yet absurdly impatient, and about all the wrong things. Though hardly alone in that-damn it, Mary hadn’t had the patience either to listen to him, nights he’d spent won
dering who his real father was and simultaneously fearing it above all things. Which anxieties, he supposed, hadn’t helped him stand up to the idiots at White’s.
The real wonder, it seemed to him now, was that they’d come as far as they had-that they’d be traveling together and stopping at an inn tonight, openly, as Lord and Lady Christopher. Still, given their past-and the unclarity of their present-he could only shudder at what the outcome of this journey might be.
The Rowen carriage had passed beyond the hedge. He could see the house in its entirety now-simple, rambling, inviting, and comforting as usual.
A comfort as well, her silhouette against the grayish bark of the giant tree as she rose to greet him. Looking far prettier (as the coach came nearer) than in last night’s dreams, or even than she had this morning.
Or was that how love worked itself out over time? Did familiarity have its own charms? Or was he simply growing old, staid, and avuncular as the young people at the assembly last night had made him feel?
Not old at all. And he’d prove it too.
Which led him nearly to tumble out of the carriage in his haste to grab her up, hand her in, get away and onto the road as soon as they could.
As though he could have cut short Mrs. Grandin’s polite inquiries as to his family’s comings and goings- because of course Elizabeth had reported Gerry and Georgy’s attendance at the assembly. And then one had to make all the happily optimistic responses (thank heaven he could speak them truly) to Mary’s sister’s well-meaning hopes for the present marquess’s health.
Neighborly. Civilized. And in Kit’s current state of confusion, nearly unbearable, until at long last her things were packed, she seated, their final good-byes made, he and she side by side, surrounded by all that padded and tufted velvet, Mary seeming every bit as befuddled as he.
Quite as though she hadn’t pawed so deliciously at him this morning, she now appeared shy and oddly formal. The few inches of space between their bodies might have been the Channel at Dover.
The Slightest Provocation Page 23