Point of Honour (Sarah Tolerance)

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “I believe,” Miss Tolerance said slowly, “that you are beginning to enjoy yourself, sir.”

  “I lead a sedate life, Miss Tolerance, and this sort of adventuring is novel to me. Climbing trees and jumping out of windows? Learning rustic skills like whittling? And fresh air is beneficial to the health, is it not? But I think,” he added, “that we must find someplace secure to sleep tonight. I worry for my protector; she looks tired.”

  “She is tired, sir,” Miss Tolerance allowed, and put the parcels back in her saddlebag. Versellion’s solicitousness was at once welcome and distasteful to her; she did not like to expose any weakness, even fatigue, but the fact was that she had not slept the night through in several days, and she knew the strain was telling upon her. “Shall we ride west, then?”

  They scattered the wood shavings and the crumbs from their meal and mounted their horses, riding at a fair pace, seeking a shelter which would combine the virtues of solitude and solidity. An hour or so before sunset they found their haven, a small cottage that had been abandoned and was now, apparently, used to store hay. The cottage was dry, despite the rains of the last week, with a tiny hearth at the back, framed in stone. The windows were cut high in the walls, meant to admit daylight, not permit observation, and the door was the only way in. Miss Tolerance pronounced herself satisfied, and gathered tinder for a fire.

  With the cottage ordered for occupation, Versellion took up the lexicon and the Italian letter and sat down by the door to catch the last daylight. Miss Tolerance sat on the opposite side of the door and produced from her wallet the stub of a pencil; as the earl dictated, she wrote down words on the margins of the newspaper, not trying to make sense of what they meant when strung together. An hour later Miss Tolerance blinked hard. Between fatigue and fading light, the words she wrote were blurring before her.

  “My eyes hurt,” she said irritably. “And to tell truth, I cannot make heads or tails of what this means. Could it be writ in code?” She yawned hugely and handed the paper over to Versellion.

  The earl examined the paper while Miss Tolerance looked out at the twilit fields. For some time she let the noises and smells of the evening wash over her and thought of very little. If she stayed like this, she would shortly fall asleep.

  “It is no use,” Versellion said at last. He held the newspaper before him and was turning it to read the transcriptions and notes which she had made. “Even if I could find every word in the dictionary, I can’t be certain we’d have the meaning of the thing. I must have help.” He sounded thoroughly discouraged.

  Miss Tolerance rose from her place, found her saddlebag, and produced the brandy.

  “I judged we might need this for the medicinal raising of spirits, my lord.”

  Versellion put the paper down. “A very good notion.” He took a long draught and made a face. “And very bad brandy.” He took another draught and bowed to Miss Tolerance: “To my protector!”

  Miss Tolerance acknowledged the toast with an incline of her head and took the bottle herself. “To our puzzle,” she said. “Perhaps it is time to light the fire.”

  As she set to the task, she asked the earl where he thought he might find help in translating the letter. The earl did not answer. He was bent over the newspaper, poring over it by the last bit of light. When Miss Tolerance repeated her question, he waved one hand at her as if to gain quiet for concentration.

  “What were the names we found in the letter?” he asked at last.

  The fire was lit. Miss Tolerance took up the letter and held it up. “Miracoli. DiPassi. Hawley. Grudden, Hanschen, Cole, Ippolito …”

  “Spell Hawley,” Versellion demanded. She did so, and the earl made a noise of triumph. “I believe, then, that Mr. Hawley might be—or know-nostra collega di Oxford. See there.” He poked at a paragraph of type.

  Suddenly fully awake, Miss Tolerance took the newspaper and read the item. A small group of scholars at Oxford had been censured for correspondence with Catholic scholars in Italy and Germany, and investigation into possible charges of treason were being discussed.

  “There’s nothing new in this, sir. I read a similar notice last week. The war has the whole nation looking under covers for spies.”

  “But look at the names, Miss Tolerance.” Versellion leaned close to point out the one name that had caught his attention. “Charles Hawley, lecturer of B——College, Oxford. He stands to lose his post if he cannot defend himself.”

  Miss Tolerance shook her head. “I am plainly too tired to understand what this means to us. Even were this letter part of that correspondence which has come under investigation-what on earth does this have to do with your family? How came such a letter to be in a fan kept by an old Cheapside abbess? God, I cannot think!”

  Versellion drew back, contrite. “You should sleep. In the morning we will both reason better.” He made to assist her up, but Miss Tolerance waved him away and retreated to a corner of the cottage where the straw was thick. She pulled off her boots, lay down with her coat to cover her, and shouldered her way into the straw until she was comfortable. She murmured good night to her companion and within moments was asleep.

  She woke, suddenly, in the middle of the night. She could not tell what had wakened her, and lay still for a time, listening in the darkness. At last she rose up, bootless, and went to the door. The fields and trees that lay beyond were only shadows silvered by the moon. Under one tree their horses drowsed silently. Miss Tolerance looked one way, the other, saw nothing moving, and slumped against the doorframe.

  Versellion spoke out of the darkness behind her. “En garde, even in your sleep? Your fencing master taught you well.”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir, he did.”

  Versellion emerged from the shadows of the cottage and joined her, looking out over the fields. He leaned in a posture mirroring hers against the far side of the door. “Surely fencing was an odd sort of pastime for a schoolgirl. Ought you not to have been making samplers and learning to play the pianoforte?”

  “I did those things, too. But I badly wanted for active occupation. I was permitted to ride—sedately, with a groom at my side. I was permitted to walk—sedately, with my governess. I could stitch, and read sermons to my grandmother, and write letters, and practice upon the pianoforte.”

  “It sounds dreary.”

  Miss Tolerance laughed. “It was dreary. When I first saw Connell demonstrating a pasado, I was seized with such a … I hardly know what to call it. Longing, I suppose. To move that way, to have that freedom and that power. I took to the lessons at once.”

  “And the preceptor soon after?” Versellion asked dryly.

  “It was not a difficult step to go from loving the exercise to loving the preceptor, no. But Connell was hardly a hero from a romance; he was portly and rather shy, except when he had a sword in his hand. It was certainly not his intent to seduce me.”

  “Then what was his intent?”

  “To serve out his six months teaching my brother, then to find another position, and so on and on until he had the money to open a small salle in London. Our elopement ruined him, in a sense, as well as me.”

  “If it was not his intent, how did you come to—”

  “Elope? Have you ever fenced with a person of the opposite sex, my lord? The focus and the exertion can be … stimulating.”

  Versellion appeared to consider the idea. “And so you eloped.”

  “Not at first, no. But later … we were not left much choice in the matter,” Miss Tolerance said. “When we were discovered, my father went into a frenzy of high Gothic rage, threatened to turn me out on the highway in my shift! He challenged Connell—and a duel between them would have led inevitably to my father’s death and Connell’s exile. So we ran away.”

  Versellion had been studying the moonlight. Now he turned his gaze back to Miss Tolerance. “But if your father was prone to—what did you call it? high Gothic rage?—how came you to be studying fencing? Surely your he—”

  M
iss Tolerance sighed. “It was done in secret. My brother detested fencing, so we worked out a trade: I would take his lessons and he would do my mathematics.”

  “My God, you were young.” Versellion appeared to muse over this for a time. “Where did you go?”

  “We feared pursuit if we went to Scotland. We went to the continent.”

  “The hazard of that—in what year?”

  “Ninety-nine. sir. We went over in the trail of the English forces to the lowlands, and stayed behind when General Brune chased them out. The French forces were everywhere, trailing havoc in their wake—and we took advantage of the chaos and hid ourselves in it. I traveled as Connell’s nephew, we taught fence, and finally opened a salle in Amsterdam.”

  “His nephew?”

  “I wanted to fence, sir, and neither of us wanted the salle to have the reputation of a brothel.”

  “And the man never married you?”

  Miss Tolerance shook her head.

  “He had a wife?” Miss Tolerance thought she heard disapproval in the earl’s tone.

  “Oh, far worse than that, sir,” she drawled. “Connell was Catholic, and we could not agree how to marry. I was very young, and disliked the idea of a civil wedding—and I fear I was determined that he should love me enough to marry as I wished. By the time I had stopped refining upon it, we had been together for so long the ceremony seemed unnecessary, even dangerous—how could I change from a boy to a wife overnight? Perhaps my father was right and I am like my aunt, with no discernible morality.”

  “Your father,” Versellion said crisply, “was an ass.”

  “Well, yes. But that does not mean he was wrong. I made my bed very thoroughly, and now …” She stirred up the crushed grass at her feet. “Now I am lying upon it. And very dusty it is, too.”

  The earl smiled. For a few minutes the only sound to be heard was the breeze riffling the grasses.

  “If your father could not see the honor in you, he was an ass,” Versellion said at last. He took a step toward Miss Tolerance. In the silvered light, his face was ghostly; he examined her closely, and she was aware of his unghostly height and warmth.

  “Not everyone reckons as you do, sir,” Miss Tolerance said. She looked up at his face, reading what was there to be seen. “My lord, this has been an extraordinary day; I beg you will not confuse the excitement of our situation with any other kind of—”

  Versellion took her hand and studied it, tracing the veins under his thumb. “Miss Tolerance, I assure you I am well able to distinguish the excitement of the day from any other sort. My admiration for you did not begin this morning—or last night.”

  Her heart beat so strongly that Miss Tolerance was sure the strokes must be audible to Versellion; he must be able to feel them in the hand he held, and only moonlight hid the flush that warmed her cheeks. She drew her hand from Versellion’s grasp with some reluctance. “My lord, this is not wise. Your assailants—”

  “Are miles away. Look.” He gestured toward the moonlit fields. “Not a cutthroat in sight. Miss Tolerance, if your feelings are not in sympathy with mine, I will say nothing more than to beg your pardon for my impertinence. But I thought you were not wholly insensible—”

  Miss Tolerance shook her head. “Not insensible, sir, no.” Feelings she had believed lost, or buried across the Channel in a pauper’s grave in Amsterdam, wakened. She shivered.

  “Come back inside. The moonlight makes shadows and ghosts; you will catch chill. Please—I beg your pardon, but I have forgot, what is your Christian name?” His voice was almost a whisper.

  “Sarah, sir.” She said it firmly, not certain what she would do.

  “Sarah. Come back inside with me, Sarah.”

  He held out his hand but did not touch her. The space between them was filled with heat, the lack of contact more persuasive than an embrace.

  With the feeling that she was jumping from a very high place into a pool of darkness so inky she could not predict if she would swim or drown, Miss Tolerance took the hand he offered and followed Versellion back into the cottage.

  Eleven

  Miss Tolerance awakened to find herself in an embrace of the sort which had been foreign to her since the death of Charles Connell, and lay for some time cherishing the sensation. They were face-to-face; Versellion’s arm lay light across her hip, his face pillowed upon her hair (which, she was shortly to discover, pinned her to their rustic bed), and the warmth of his body communicated itself to her own. Her arm stretched under her head like a pillow, then arched around Versellion’s head, with the fingers lightly brushing his dark hair. Straw prickled beneath her hip, and a single shaft of bright morning light danced across the blanket which covered their closely joined bodies. The mingled smells of straw, dust, and Versellion’s skin caught her with such force that her eyes closed of their own accord.

  “Sarah?” Versellion murmured. She let her eyes open and found the earl looking at her. “Good morning.” He moved his face closer and brushed a kiss upon her eyebrow.

  Miss Tolerance ran her fingertips up the arm that lay across her hip, over his shoulder, and spread them through his hair before she moved to kiss his lips. “Good morning,” she said at last. Their faces were now very close together, their eyes darting from mouth to chin to eyes and back to mouth again, as if each of them were committing the other to memory.

  “Ought we to rise?” Versellion asked. He made no move to do so.

  Miss Tolerance shook her head slightly. “Wait a moment. When we rise, we go back to Miss Tolerance and the Earl of Versellion. I become your protector again, and you my client. Let us just … tarry … for a moment.” Her hand loosed itself from his hair and moved down across his back.

  Versellion slid his hand around the swell of her hip and drew her toward him. “By all means,” he murmured. “Let us tarry.”

  The sun was high when they started for Oxford. Versellion had carried the argument; even with the lexicon, he did not think they could reliably translate the Italian letter on their own, and Oxford was the nearest place outside of London where they were likely to find a disinterested scholar fluent in Italian. It was also, Miss Tolerance warned, a place where so notable a person as the Earl of Versellion might well be recognized.

  “Then we use my notoriety as a shield,” Versellion suggested. “In daylight, in a populous town where I am likely to be recognized, will it not be more difficult to attack us?”

  He had donned the rustic clothes Miss Tolerance had purchased for him in Reading, and sat now, with his back against the cottage wall, observing Miss Tolerance as she combed her fingers through the tangled mass of her dark hair and attempted to pick the hay straws from it. She was very aware of his gaze, but strove to adopt again the professional composure which had previously characterized their relationship.

  “That would work if we were amidst a crowd where everyone knew you, Versellion—say, on the floor of Parliament, or in an Almack’s cotillion. But in Oxford, all it requires is one person who recognizes you amidst a great crowd of people who do not, telling a man who is hunting you, and we’d have all your pursuers fall upon us in a quiet alleyway.”

  “You must see I cannot spend my life in hiding—particularly not now, when the political situation is so unresolved. Why cannot we take up one of these searchers and ask him who has sent him to find me? I dislike running. It smacks of cowardice.”

  Miss Tolerance finished braiding her hair and wound it upon her head again.

  “Common sense. Connell taught me to keep my feelings in check when I fought—and never to attack an opponent of whom I knew nothing, unless I had no alternative. If I had accosted one of our pursuers in Reading yesterday, what do you imagine would have been the result? He might have had a friend—or two friends or five-and-twenty—in the next street, ready to come to his aid and kill me. I might have got some little information from him and then, scrupling to kill him where he stood, let him go … so that he could follow me here to you. The minute we tip our han
d to the opposition, let whomever set the hounds upon your trail know where you are, your peril increases tenfold. Where’s the sense in that?”

  She took up her saddlebag, packed the Italian lexicon in it, and turned to survey the area for any other trace of their tenancy. Versellion stood and approached her, smiling.

  “What do I need to fear with my protector near me?” His tone made an endearment of the title.

  Having satisfied herself that they had left nothing behind, Miss Tolerance sidestepped the earl’s approach. “Your protector can only do so much, sir. I cannot catch a bullet, for one thing. No, I see the logic of Oxford, Versellion. I just hope we can go as quietly as possible, at least until I can hire assistance.”

  The earl bowed. “I will be guided by you in all things.” But he stepped directly into her path and drew her into a light embrace. “Don’t scold me, Sarah. I only wished to kiss you good morning.”

  Miss Tolerance permitted the embrace, but with an air which said quite clearly that the kiss was meant to seal all further endearments away until a later time.

  They rode without much conversation; the journey was not a long one. By early afternoon they had arrived on the outskirts of town and found rooms in an inn in the shadow of St. Clement’s Church, across the Magdalen Bridge. At Miss Tolerance’s insistence, Versellion stayed at the inn while she went out into the city to find an Italian scholar. As she had never been in Oxford before, she expected that this would be a task which consumed her for several hours: one could not, after all, stand on street corners crying out for a scholar as if one were hawking strawberries or cockles. Versellion, who had spent a year at Oxford without emerging with anything so undignified as a degree, told her to inquire first at the coffeehouse on Queen Street and, if she had no joy there, at the Bear, in Alfred Street. She left him ordering a vast dinner, his manner very much at odds with the broken-down coat he wore.

  As the university was nearing the end of Trinity term, the streets teemed with young men, most gowned and with the heavy, anxious look of students facing examination. Miss Tolerance began to wish she had kept her good coat and breeches—a common laborer such as she looked had less chance of disappearing in a crowd like this. There was no point in repining; better to suit her words—and accent—to the clothes she wore. The host of the Queen Street coffeehouse, however, displayed no democratic sympathies; he was plainly prejudiced against Miss Tolerance by her plebeian look.