by Mary Balogh
“Fifteen minutes,” she agreed, and swept by him and on up the stairs. She paused on the first landing and looked back. He was still standing in the dining room doorway, gazing lazily after her.
This, she thought, was not a good idea.
But its companion thought came unprompted: Why not?
* * *
• • •
It was a brisk and breezy September day, halfway between summer and autumn. The sky was predominantly blue, but white clouds scudded across it and made of the land below an ever-moving chessboard of sunshine and shade. Marcel could think of a dozen things—at the very least!—he would rather be doing than standing at the edge of a village green, waiting with a largish crowd of expectant villagers and their darting children and prancing dogs for the grand opening of a harvest fair. The ceremony was apparently to include some sort of recital by the church choir. They were gathering and lining up on the green, all clad in billowing gowns. However, he had chosen quite deliberately to be here and had no cause for complaint. He had even quite rashly deprived himself of the means of leaving here.
But, so far at least, the annoyance of it all was outweighed by the triumph of the fact that he had the former Countess of Riverdale at his side. Let no one ever say that life was without its little coincidences. Actually, a giant coincidence in this case. What were the odds . . . ?
She had put on weight in the past fourteen years. She would doubtless be horrified if she knew he had noticed, but really the extra pounds were evenly distributed over all the right places and made her even more attractive than she had been then. More womanly. Or perhaps it was merely that he was looking at her now through eyes and sensibilities that were fourteen years older than they had been then. What twenty-five-year-old male would look upon a fortyish woman with lust, after all? And it was certainly lust he was feeling for Miss Somebody Kingsley. Strangely—he was just now struck with the thought—he did not know her first name.
She was looking aloof and dignified, the very look that had so intrigued him then. For he had wondered if what he saw told the whole story, or if she was in fact a powder keg of passion that no one, least of all Riverdale, had ever ignited. He wondered the same thing now.
“What would you guess their average age to be?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the choir. “Sixty-five? Seventy?” Had no one here heard of choir boys?
“Their age is surely immaterial,” she said in just the cool, reproving tone he would expect of her.
“The quality of voice will matter, though,” he said. “I would wager upon plenty of warble and vibrato, with some off-key would-be soloist ruining the collective effect. That will be the one who has grown deaf and cannot hear the tuning fork or his fellow choristers.”
“That is very disrespectful of you,” she said with a frown. “People cannot help being elderly.”
“But they can help remaining part of a church choir long after they ought to retire with some grace,” he said.
“Perhaps it is a younger member who will prove to be tone deaf,” she said. “If anyone is. Good heavens, we have not even heard them yet. Perhaps they will be sublime.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed. “I will stand corrected if you prove to be right. I seriously doubt it, however.”
Her lips twitched and she almost smiled. A memory struck him then of trying—and failing—to make her smile all those years ago. He could not remember ever seeing her do so, in fact, and wondered if she ever did.
“Ah,” he said. “The moment is upon us.”
A man of great self-importance who did not introduce himself but doubtless held some position of authority in the church—though he was not the vicar—delivered a long and pompous and repetitive speech while people grabbed their children and tried to grab their dogs and keep them more or less still and quiet. He made a point of welcoming visitors to their humble festivities and professed himself and his fellow churchgoers honored indeed to have them. Every eye in the village, except perhaps those belonging to the babies and dogs, turned upon the only two obvious visitors. The church dignitary was followed by the vicar, fully vested, who offered a mercifully short prayer of thanksgiving for the harvest and the fine weather and the hard work and generosity of his flock. The choir sang about Christian soldiers and archangels on high and other holy things that had nothing whatsoever to do with either harvest or church roofs. But Marcel’s prediction proved undeniably correct. There were both warbles and vibrato, and one dominant male voice was off-key by a crucial half tone.
“You need not say it,” Miss Kingsley said after the vicar’s wife, with gracious smiles and nods for everyone, had declared the fete open. “I heard. And the singing was lovely. They were doing their best.”
“If ever I did something to please you,” he said, “and you told me afterward that I had done my best, I would crawl into the nearest deep hole and sulk for the next fourteen years or so, Miss Kingsley.”
The wind had whipped some color into her cheeks. Even so, he had a strong suspicion that she was blushing. She had thought he was making some risqué remark, then, had she? He had not been, as it happened, but he was perfectly willing to take credit for it. Her eyes were as blue as he remembered them. They had always been one of her finest features—a real blue, not one of the varying shades of gray that often pass for blue.
“I see a booth over there that is positively spilling over with jewels,” he said. “Allow me to escort you.” He offered his arm.
She looked at it before taking it, as though she suspected some sort of trap. He must have touched her before. Of course he had. He had danced with her on more than one occasion. But the touch of her hand on his arm now felt unfamiliar. Light. Neither leaning nor clinging. But it brought her shoulder close to his arm, and her dress brushed against his Hessian boots. It brought the faintly fragrant scent of her to his nostrils. Not too floral, not too spicy. Just right. Perfect for her.
He was glad he had sent André away.
“Absolutely,” she said. “The church congregation must be rescued from being rained upon. Besides, I am partial to sparkling jewels. Let us see if there are any diamonds among them. Large diamonds.”
The former Lady Riverdale being lighthearted? Actually joking? This was intriguing. He raised his eyebrows but made no comment.
There were diamonds and emeralds and rubies and sapphires. There were topazes and garnets. There were silver and gold. And there were pearls. All of them large and sparkling—even the pearls—and perfectly shaped. All of them unutterably vulgar and not even convincing fakes. He decked her out in some of the more ostentatious of them and paid three times what the two flustered ladies who ran the booth asked of him. She glittered and sparkled at ears, bosom, wrists, and fingers—and admired the effect and preened herself under the admiration of the two ladies and the small crowd that had gathered about at a respectful distance to watch. There was a smattering of admiring applause. She thanked him and told him she would have considered the sapphire bracelet too if only she had one more wrist.
“An ankle?” he suggested, looking down toward the hem of her dress.
“Ah, no,” she said. “One would not wish to look overdressed.”
She had set aside at least some of her legendary dignity, it seemed, in favor of something approaching gaiety, and he was enslaved. She did not immediately snatch off the jewelry as soon as they were out of sight of the booth and hide it away in the darkest depths of her reticule. Rather, she kept fingering it and admiring it.
They had their portraits sketched in charcoal by a bearded, wild-haired artist who made Marcel look like a cadaverous devil minus his pitchfork and Miss Kingsley like a moon-faced ghost with a pearl necklace. They bought two iced cakes after the baking had been judged and they had been awarded third prize. They were as hard as granite.
“But very pretty with their twirled icing, you must admit,” she said when he grimaced.
“I might,” he said, “if I did not feel as though every tooth in my head had just snapped in two.”
“But not by the icing,” she said.
“But not by the icing.”
“Well, then . . .”
They watched the wood-sawing contest, in which a group of brawny, sweating young men with shirtsleeves rolled well above the elbow showed off their muscles and their prowess for a gaggle of giggling village maidens—and for the two of them, the visitors, the outsiders. They examined—at least she did—the needlework stall after the judging had been completed, and she bought him a man’s coarse cotton handkerchief, across one corner of which a large L had been embroidered in the midst of curlicues and stemless, leafless blossoms. The handkerchief had not placed among the winners—one fact that impelled her to buy it, he suspected, the other being that the L could stand for Lamarr. She seemed not to know about his marquess’s title.
He bought her a crocheted drawstring bag in a hideous shade of pink—also not a winner—in which to keep all the jeweled finery now bedecking her person.
“I will treasure it all,” she assured him, and he wondered idly if she really would. He considered how long he would keep the handkerchief. He suspected that he would keep it, though he would never use it and thus display it to the shocked eyes of the ton.
They watched and listened to the fiddle contest. He refrained from tapping his foot or clapping his hands in time to the music, as most of the spectators did, but she did not so refrain, he noticed. She appeared to be genuinely enjoying herself. As, strangely enough, was he.
They watched a singing contest for little girls and one boy soprano, who had somehow escaped the dreadful fate of being a member of the church choir, before moving on to watch the archery contest and then to have their fortunes told. He was to expect long life and prosperity and happiness. No surprise there. Did fortune-tellers ever predict anything different? He did not know what she was to expect. She did not tell him.
They drank weak, tepid lemonade from a table run by a Sunday school class. It must be many years since he had drunk any sort of lemonade. It would be many more before he would indulge again.
She became more lighthearted as the afternoon wore on. But she did not flirt with him. And that surely had been part of the attraction when they were younger. Although he had wondered too about the possibility of hidden passions; maybe he had seen in her a potentially steadying influence as his life had careened more and more out of control—and even as he had flirted outrageously with her. And even as he had known she was married and therefore out of bounds for anything more than dalliance. It had not occurred to him at the time that just maybe he could have made a friend of her.
But he did not make friends with women. Or even with men for that matter. Friendship involved a certain degree of intimacy, an opening of self to another, and he chose not to share himself with anyone.
She was not married now. Ironically, she never had been.
And he wanted her. Still. And he wondered still.
They watched a dancing contest about the maypole that had been erected in the center of the green. Two teams had come from other villages to challenge the dancers from this village, and crowds gathered around to cheer on their favorites and to applaud appreciatively every intricate move in which the colorful ribbons twined themselves about the tall pole in seemingly hopeless entanglement while the dancers who held them were forced closer and closer to it and to one another—and then smoothly extricated themselves, weaving in and out as they circled to the spirited scraping of the fiddles until each dancer held an unencumbered ribbon and the maypole was bare.
“The maypole is like a symbol of life, is it not?” the former countess said at the end of one such dance, and he turned an inquiring gaze upon her. She was flushed and bright-eyed—not just from the wind, he guessed—almost as though she had been out there dancing herself.
“It is?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Around and around,” she said, “seemingly getting nowhere but becoming more and more entangled in troubles and cares, not all of them of one’s own making.”
“That is a gloomy assessment of life with which to entertain yourself on a festive afternoon, Lady Riverdale,” he said.
“But the maypole dances do not end in chaos,” she said. “And I am not the countess. The Countess of Riverdale is married to the present earl and is a friend of mine.”
“I will not be distracted with trivialities,” he said. “Complete your analogy.”
“Everything works out,” she said. “If one faithfully follows the pattern of the dance, it all works out.” She was frowning.
“But what would happen,” he asked her, “if just one of the dancers bobbed when all the others weaved? The whole pattern would be ruined, all the ribbons would be hopelessly tangled with one another, and all the dancers would be doomed to weave and wander in eternal befuddlement. I am afraid your analogy is a naively romantic one, Miss Kingsley. It is simplistic. It suggests that there is such a thing as happily-ever-after if one but lives a virtuous and dutiful life.”
“Very well,” she said. “It was a foolish and impulsive idea, and it has annoyed you. I am sorry.”
Had she annoyed him with her oh-so-simplistic suggestion that unwavering virtue was always rewarded? By God, she had. But how could anyone in her right mind believe even for an impulsive moment that life turned out right if one but followed the rules? Especially when such a belief depended upon the companion theory that everyone else in one’s orbit could be relied upon to do likewise. How could she of all people believe it?
“Annoyed?” he said. “Rather say charmed, Miss Kingsley. I am charmed by your naïve optimism.” He possessed himself of her hand and raised it to his lips. She was not wearing gloves, as she had not all afternoon. She was, however, wearing a ridiculously large diamond ring, which sparkled in the sunlight. “And dazzled,” he added.
She . . . smiled. And he really was. Dazzled, that was. Years fell away from her face even as lines appeared at the outer corners of her eyes.
“It is rather splendid, is it not?” she said, extending her hand and spreading her fingers. “The poor emerald on my other hand is dwarfed.” She raised that hand too and shook it to make the ruby bracelet jangle on her wrist. “Optimism? Do I believe in it?”
It was a rhetorical question, it seemed. She turned away rather abruptly before he could answer in order to listen to the lengthy adjudication of the maypole dancing. She kept her face turned away from him. He had offended her, perhaps, by calling her naïve.
What would he do tomorrow? Hire a horse? Buy a horse? André had had the presence of mind to have the largest of his bags taken into the inn, but that in itself posed a problem. Hire a gig, then? A curricle? A carriage? Were any such conveyances available in such a place? He doubted it. Would he find himself walking home, or at least to the nearest sizable town? But he would think of that tomorrow.
“Shall we make our way to the church hall and the feast?” he suggested. That was where everyone else seemed to be headed.
“I suppose there is little choice if we wish to eat,” she said.
“I most certainly do not choose to go hungry.” He offered his arm. “Do you?”
She gave him that look again, the one that suggested he had just said something risqué, though he had not done so intentionally.
“No,” she said, and took his arm.
Four
It seemed to Viola that she had stepped out of time. There had been the seemingly disastrous delay in a journey that should have been completed by nightfall; the almost incredible coincidence of finding Mr. Lamarr stranded—albeit deliberately—at the same small country inn as she; the fact that a village fair had been arranged for this exact day; his suggestion that they enjoy whatever it had to offer together; and the excellence of the weather for the time of year. It was all so st
range that it was hard to believe in the reality of it. So she did not. It was a time out of time, as though she had been given the chance to step off the world for a short while and had taken it.
Tomorrow everything would return to normal and so would she. She would resume both the journey and the life she had cast off for today. She would face the demons that had cracked her surface calm in Bath and sent her scurrying homeward, alone. She would face all that when tomorrow came.
In the meanwhile . . . Oh, she had enjoyed this afternoon as she could not remember enjoying any other. She had left her old self back at the inn and become someone new, someone she had never before allowed herself to be. She had been decked out in tasteless, garish jewelry, the very sight of which would normally make her cringe. Worse, she had allowed Mr. Lamarr to pay for it. She had bought him a gift too—a hideous handkerchief hideously embroidered. She had clapped her hands and tapped her foot in time to fiddle music and to the intricate maneuvers of the maypole dancing instead of observing with quiet, gracious dignity. She had shamelessly admired a few brawny, sweating young men as they sawed wood and showed off for the young women. She had had her fortune told and was apparently to expect long life and continued bliss with her handsome husband—she had not corrected the misconception. She had sat for her portrait even though she had seen some of the artist’s earlier efforts and knew he had no talent whatsoever. She knew artistic excellence. Joel, her son-in-law, was fast gaining fame as one of the country’s most talented portrait painters. She had continued to sit even when a crowd had gathered around to watch and comment.
They had certainly not gone unnoticed or unremarked upon, she and Mr. Lamarr. Far from it. She had felt very much on display all afternoon and had chosen to enjoy the attention and even to play up to it. She had flashed her cheap false jewels before anyone who looked at her with admiration and pointed out to a few people where they could purchase some for themselves.