The gentleman agreed, still frowning. They walked in silence for a few minutes, each of them looking from face to face in the hopes of spotting them.
“I do hope you aren’t worried,” the Black Knight said.
“Worried?” Marianne answered. She smiled up at him innocently. She couldn’t imagine what might worry her.
“You know,” he said. “A gentleman disappearing with your friend.”
She hadn’t considered this, but still she didn’t feel especially anxious. Marianne only shrugged and said, “Well, he is your friend. Do I have cause to be anxious?”
“No,” he answered quickly. “Not in the slightest. Julius is a mischievous fellow, yes, but he would never do a lady any harm. He is a good man.”
“Then consider me assured,” she answered, with a skip in her step. Nothing could ruin this night. She didn’t think she’d ever been left truly alone with a handsome man. Even though nothing would come of it, it was exciting to her.
“You are very trusting,” he remarked, frowning harder now.
Again, she shrugged. “I have no reason to mistrust you or your friend.”
He didn’t seem to understand this notion.
“Oh, do you hear that? The music is starting!” She exclaimed. Marianne was delighted by the sound. She so rarely got to dance and when she did her sister was always lurking beside her, looking to ruin it.
Marianne could understand that, of course. Her sister was a sensitive soul really, and it hurt her to see Marianne dancing with handsome gentleman while she herself did her utmost to attract one. Failing time and time again on account of her pickiness or their understanding of her character.
She did not help herself by lurking around Marianne with a bitter face, as she often did.
If it helped her sister find happiness, Marianne was happy to give up a few dances. But not tonight.
“Will you dance with me?” She asked, quite suddenly. Again, this seemed to surprise him. He blinked down at her and looked around as if his friend might save him. “Only if you’d like to,” she added, a little more shyly.
“Please do not think I am hesitant,” he answered. “Only surprised.”
She tilted her head like a confused puppy. “Confused that I’d like to dance with you?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure how to do so correctly. Instead, he simply shook his head as though realizing he was being quite foolish and nodded. “Of course I’d like to dance with you.”
“Wonderful!”
They walked together to an open area where the townsfolk were already beginning to dance. The dances were different to the ones she participated in at the balls, but no varied that she couldn’t manage.
She looked around at the townsfolk, who were less regimented in their movements. Though they followed a routine, they looked less like soldiers and more like happy children. Without rules. They just danced because it brought their hearts’ joy. And when their hearts told them to throw in an extra step or flourish, they did so shamelessly.
At first, the Dark Knight was a little stiff in his steps. But she didn’t mind. She took him by the hands in a brazen move and danced like she’d never danced before.
“I am sorry,” he said, over the sound of music. “I do not often dance,” he admitted.
“Neither do I,” she said, with a grin, and picked up her gown’s skirts so that her legs had more freedom to move.
He was watching her dance and she was sure he must have thought her a fool. She would never have danced like this at a ball. But it was fun to be ridiculous. Silliness was a part of her character that she always had to hide. But not here. Her silliness was infectious here and she saw a few of the townsfolk mimicking her moves with broad smiles.
In time, the Black Knight loosened up. His limbs and his face loosened and he moved like a wave – with surprising grace. The more they danced, the more pink their faces became. They spun in circles, arm in arm, they linked hands and leaned back, he twirled her back and forth.
They danced through five full songs, before at last they could barely breathe. They were panting and clapping for the musicians and even the Black Knight whooped his approval.
She expelled a quick breath and grinned at him. “I think I need to sit down a moment,” she admitted. “Somewhere quiet perhaps.”
“Of course,” he said, and led her away from the dance floor to a quiet area just beyond the fair, where the grass was thicker and a small grove of trees appeared.
There, she sank down onto a fallen tree and kicked off her shoes. She wriggled her toes in the grass and said, “I love doing this.” She smiled down at her feet. “Feeling the grass. I don’t often allow myself to just… feel the grass.” She laughed as she said it. “Do I sound mad?”
The Black Knight came to sit beside her. “No,” he said, as he took off his shoes. “Not in the least bit mad.”
They sat in silence for a long while, looking up at the moon, watching the lights flicker and dance in the fair. After several minutes, he pulled a satchel from his belt. “Here,” he said. “But be careful. It’s strong stuff.”
Marianne took it from him and took a sip, then coughed. “Oh my, that is strong.”
He smiled. Such a smile that it made her pause and just look at him. His masked face was bathed in moonlight. She could see the strong cut of his jaw. The youthfulness in his eyes. She took another swig of the wine, without taking her eyes off his face. She didn’t cough this time.
She caught him stealing a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye and looked down quickly. “You’re staring at me,” he remarked.
If they’d been a gentleman and a lady at a ball, she would have deflected that remark. Then again, if they’d been a gentleman and a lady at a ball, she doubted he would have said it at all. She wondered who he was and where he was from but was too afraid of him asking her the same questions to give voice to her curiosity.
They were not at a ball, she reminded herself. So she would answer how she truly wanted to. For once. Making the most of this experience, as she’d promised herself she would.
“You are handsome,” was all she said, with a soft smile.
Chapter 6
Lord Alexander Anthony Redmond, Marquess of Riversdale
She’d called him handsome. And he hadn’t been able to maintain eye contact with her after that. He was so glad of the mask, which disguised much of the pinkness in his cheeks. He hadn’t been called handsome very often.
As a child he’d spent most of his days inside, alone, because he’d come down with a sickness that had left him bedridden for months and housebound for several years. It had kept him from doing all the things his father had expected of him. Riding. Hunting. Marksmanship.
Instead, he’d read a great deal. Cultivated his mind as much as he could. But that hadn’t satisfied his father. He’d been able to learn fencing and riding at Oxford and had become rather good at them, but his father’s disappointment seemed entirely ingrained. It often felt irreversible.
His strength had walked hand in hand with his looks. As a weak, sickly child he’d looked malnourished and small. Once he was recovered, he’d worked his body hard to have the broad figure he had today, but he’d never recovered his confidence entirely. He may look big and strong, but he still felt small and feeble from time to time.
Perhaps that was one of the reasons he had no interest in love. Because he didn’t expect women to have much interest in him and because pleasing his father consumed him entirely.
And yet here he was, being called handsome by a woman with no cause to do so. He tried to work out her ulterior motive and found none. She didn’t know who he was. He couldn’t explain away her flattery as he did with every other woman who had seemed to show an interest in him in the past.
She just… thought him handsome.
Alexander had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Thank you,” he said, ever so quietly.
He had to wonder who this girl
was. This girl who danced with such freedom in her limbs. Who smiled like no one was watching. He’d never met a woman like her, which made him think that she must certainly be just a simple maid of the town. Perhaps a farmer’s daughter. Whoever she was, whatever her background, she had him entirely entranced.
When they’d danced together, she’d made his heart beat so hard that he’d thought it might catapult itself through his rib cage. And then she’d know the effect she had on him. An effect that seemed never ending, and only grew by the moment.
She was watching his face, with a curious expression.
His neck began to feel hot.
“Do you think me beautiful?” She asked. Such a candid thing to ask. If he’d been drinking, he would have choked.
He gawped at her, too surprised to try and hide it. When he tried to speak, it came out like a stutter. “I… er… I…”
She smiled at him and touched his hand. “You don’t have to say it,” she assured him. “I only wondered. I have never asked a man that before.”
“But you must know that you’re beautiful.”
She smiled over at him gratefully. “We women can know nothing until a man validates it for us. Or at least that’s what my mother tells me.”
It was a rather clever thing to say. She almost sounded educated. “I do not think that should be so,” Alexander said, with a frown. “It is a sad world we live in if that is the truth.”
“A sad world indeed,” she answered.
After a moment, he looked at her face. The moon and stars made her skin shine almost silver. “If it is true and my word on this matter means anything… then you should know that you are beautiful.” He swallowed. “Very beautiful.”
Her hand was still on his against the bark of the tree trunk they sat on. She gave it a grateful squeeze. “I thank you for saying that. I hope you have not said it to spare my feelings.”
“It is the truth,” he said, with more force. “God’s own truth.”
They caught themselves staring at each other. With her hand over his. There was so much intensity in her gaze. An intensity that he felt in his belly and his gut.
“Will you be here tomorrow?” She asked, without shyness or coyness. “I would like to see you again.”
Alexander nodded before he could give his intentions any real thought. “Of course,” he said. How could he say no?
* * *
“Where the devil have you been?” Julius seemed to emerge from nowhere. Alexander and the Fairy Queen had just parted ways and he’d been walking through the fair in a daze, looking for Julius. Half-looking. Half-dreaming. He felt like a boy again, playing at fantasy. A fantasy with queens, knights and fairies.
“I might ask you the same thing. You disappeared.”
“For but a moment!” Julius seemed agitated, while Alexander looked drunk. A complete reverse of their usual behaviors.
“Well, where did you go?” Alexander asked. His eyelids were heavy, which made Julius frown.
“How much have you drunk? It is not like you to drink more than a sip or two.”
“Do not evade the question,” he answered, with a smile.
Julius didn’t answer for a moment, but scrutinized Alexander’s smiling face. At length, he conceded. “Well, that fine lady I went to speak to was tricky to say the least. And her character was not so fine!”
“You mean she resisted your advances.”
Julius clenched his hands in front of him as if he wanted to throttle someone. “Doggedly.”
“And you are not accustomed to that.”
“Not in the least! So I pursued her when she made to walk away.”
“Julius! The behavior of a cad!”
“I was only resolved, Alexander!”
“What happened when you followed her?”
Julius grimaced, but there was also a twinkle in his eye. Alexander knew his friend well. So he knew how much he enjoyed a challenge. Though the lady’s resistance frustrated him, it also excited him. “She hid from me.”
“Pardon?”
“Just as I said. I spent more than an hour ducking between stalls like a damned child playing at hide and seek.”
This made Alexander laugh, heartily.
“I am glad you find it so amusing.”
“And did you have any luck?”
“I would catch a glimpse of her from time to time, but she was ever so agile. I think she must have been hiding in the stalls, you know. It was like hunting a wood nymph. After an hour, I started to wonder if she even existed at all.”
“She existed. I saw her with you,” Alexander assured him playfully, and smacked him on the back.
“I must find her.”
“She’ll be here tomorrow,” he replied, thoughtlessly. His steps felt so light.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because her friend will be here tomorrow.”
Julius grabbed Alexander’s arm, forcing him to stop walking. “Is that why you are walking like a drunkard? Has some lady besotted you, Alexander, after all these years the women of the world have spent trying?”
Alexander laughed again and shook off his hold. “That is an overstatement. On both counts. I made a friend.”
“A fair friend?”
“I suppose she was quite fair,” he said, with a twitch of amusement at the corner of his mouth. More than fair. She was astounding. “Though she was masked, so it was hard to tell.” Not in the least bit hard to tell, but he didn’t want Julius to think him smitten.
“As was her friend. I have this theory that masked women must be disguising true beauty.”
“That sounds entirely counterproductive. Is it not ugliness that women wish to hide?”
Julius gave him a droll look. “Do you think her ugly beneath that mask?”
“No,” Alexander answered, perhaps too suddenly. “Not in the least.”
“Exactly my point. Neither is her friend, I am certain of it. So there must be some correlation between beauty and masks. After all, we are quite beautiful men, are we not?”
Alexander rolled his eyes and shook his head. But he was glad of his friend’s ridiculousness, for once. It kept him from having to return to reality. A reality he would postpone for as long as he could.
“I think I need a drink,” Julius said. “Pass me the wine.”
Alexander did so. They took several swigs on the way home, and fell asleep in the drawing room in a drunken daze. The sleep was deep, but the Fairy Queen was there amongst the dregs of tiredness.
Bewitching him.
* * *
Lady Marianne Purcell, Daughter of Baron Westlake
“Psst.”
Marianne stopped walking. She looked about her, but no one was looking at her. She started moving again, but the noise came again.
“Psst.”
This time, she stopped and spun in a circle. “Hello?” She whispered into the darkness. The stalls were closing for the night and the lights were fading as each one shut up so that the owners could go home.
“Down here.”
Marianne looked down. Beneath one of the flaps of the stalls, she could see something she recognized. The hem of Becky’s dress. “Becky?”
Becky lifted the flap and stuck her head out. She looked around, quickly. “Are you alone, my Lady?”
“Quite alone. Would you come out and tell me what is going on?”
Becky scrambled out, blushing fiercely beneath her mask, brushing the loose blades of grass from her dress. “Are you alright my dear?”
She curtsied, as was appropriate, but Marianne waved her hand at her dismissively. “Oh, none of that. Tell me what’s the matter.”
“Nothing anymore, my Lady. Only a gentleman has been chasing me all evening!”
Marianne paused, blinked, then laughed so loud that a passing child jumped out of their skin. She covered her mouth with her hand to dull the laughter. “The very same gentleman who approached you earlier?”
“You saw?”
>
“I did. I thought you could benefit from the experience.”
Becky gawped at her. “How so? I have been running for dear life all night. Hiding in the most dire places.”
Again, Marianne laughed. She twined her fingers with Becky, as if she were only a dear friend and not a servant. That’s how it felt to her. Their friendship surpassed rank. “I am sure he didn’t mean to hurt you. He only wanted to woo you. And perhaps you should have let him.”
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