by Laura London
Behind her came a soft metallic click as the dining-room door opened. Lynden turned to see who had entered and found herself confronting the cool gray stare of the flesh-and-blood Melbrooke. She gazed back at him numbly; so real had been her fantasy that she was sure anyone of Melbrooke’s perception would have seen it as well. Lynden stammered a greeting, blushed furiously, and turned away from him toward the tapestry. To her relief, she found that Venus had again assumed her conventional, classical garb and Adonis had returned to lean languidly against the olive tree.
I meant to appear sophisticated, thought Lynden ruefully. A fine beginning. She raised her hand to her cheek and found it still burning. She heard Melbrooke come beside her.
“Did I startle you? I’m sorry,” he said. “I was looking for you, you know. I have something I wanted to give you.”
Lynden turned to look suspiciously into the gray eyes. “What?”
He smiled at her, curiosity in his expression. “Nothing so alarming, Lynden. I’m afraid that sometimes my presence seems to exercise a rather unhappy effect on you. May I have your hand?”
Lynden held out her hand, saying nervously, “If you like. Though I’ve already bestowed my hand on you at the church so what you want with it now is more than I…” She stared down at her index finger as Melbrooke slid a delicately sparkling ring on it, then carried her small hand to his lips and placed a light kiss on the fingertips. Lynden withdrew her hand with some haste and examined the ring where a flawless, deep-red ruby blazed like a comet amid the brilliant, starlike fire of a dozen diamonds.
“Is it for me?” whispered Lynden.
“Well, yes,” admitted Melbrooke. “However, don’t let that deter you from telling me if you don’t like it, because than I’ll get you something else.”
Lynden’s eyes became as wide and challenging as the stone on her finger. “If I don’t like it…? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen! But I don’t understand! Why have you given it to me?”
Melbrooke sighed. “For some reason, Lynden, you persist in investing my actions with a sublety of motive that I cannot recall ever having possessed. Please try not to look so shocked. There is nothing improper in a husband’s giving his wife an engagement ring, though, I admit, it is more generally done before the wedding.”
“Oh! An engagement ring?” So, it was only a conventional gesture. Lynden deftly managed to swallow her disappointment that it had not meant something more without really admitting to herself that she had wanted it to mean something more. But if he wanted to play the thoughtful husband, then she would show him that she could play the dutiful wife with the same emotionless ease. She smiled at him in a way that she hoped approximated her Aunt Eleanor’s brittle artificiality. “That was very kind of you, My Lord. Indeed, I don’t know why you should bother, but since you have, why, I thank you.”
“Very gracious,” he noted, looking a good deal more amused than Lynden would have liked. He went to the small, highly polished dining table and drew out a chair for her. “Is your sister coming down for dinner tonight? Why don’t we sit, then, while we’re waiting for her. I could ring for wine, if you like. No? Very well.” He sat opposite her, the diffuse yellow candlelight lending a luminous, internal sheen to his wheat-colored locks. “How was your morning? Mrs. Coniston told me at breakfast that she was going to show you around Fern Court. You must have been heartily bored.”
“Not at all,” said Lynden, resting her crossed arms on the table and leaning forward. “Especially I liked your stables and the barns. Do you know we counted over twenty-five kittens in the lofts? And I met your chef as well. French, and very emotional. Oh, and I oversaw the linen closets,” said Lynden, thinking to herself that “overlooked” might have been a better word.
“So. Is all in order?”
“Order!” exclaimed Lynden. “Lord, it shared the order of the cosmos, from the alpha of the hand towels to the omega of the bed sheets. One can’t help but be impressed, though I wonder, Lord Melbrooke. Are you really rich? No, what I mean is, are you really, really rich? Are you rich rich?”
“Lady Melbrooke,” he answered smiling. “Vulgar as it may sound, I am really really rich rich.”
“I am very glad to know that,” confided Lynden. “Not that I care for riches, because I don’t. I might as well warn you that my political sympathies are almost Republican, you know, but your house is most extravagantly run, and I thought that in case you weren’t really rich rich, I ought to go on record as pointing it out to you.” She sat back in her chair with the air of one who has nobly acquitted her duty.
“Is it?” said Melbrooke in a shocked tone, though his lip twitched suspiciously.
“It is,” said Lynden firmly. “Though it looks as though you may be laughing at me again. Why, this chandelier for example.” She pointed at the glittering piece above the table. “Rock crystal, I believe? Nobody owns rock crystal these days, except for kings and emperors.”
“I didn’t buy it,” he said apologetically. “I inherited it from my grandmother.”
“As though that makes it any better,” said Lynden severely. “And even if we did give you credit for that, what of the twenty candles for family dining? Ten would have been sufficient, generous even. And you needn’t think that you can cozen me into believing they aren’t made of myrtle wax. At Downpatrick Hall tallow is burned everywhere except the salon and the guest rooms, of course.”
Lord Melbrooke was about to deny the slightest desire to cozen Lynden into believing any falsehoods when Lorraine entered, looking very pretty in her best puce dinner dress. He greeted her and asked her politely if she, too, disliked his chandelier.
“Your chandelier?” she said, dazed. “This one? Dislike it? Oh, no! I should never presume—no, indeed. What has made you think that I might?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “But Lynden did say that she thought we were burning too many candles in it.”
“Lynnie! That was too bad of you,” said Lorraine reproachfully. “There must needs be a lot of light. How could the diners enjoy these beautiful tapestries or this graceful epergne?” She indicated the large silver serving piece set at the table’s center.
“The tapestries look very well if one cares for that kind of thing, I suppose,” replied Lynden. “But this epergne? Why, one ought rather to dim the lights on its behalf. Observe the side facing me. Look at this small figure! The top half of his body is a human boy’s but the bottom half is like a goat’s, which I must say casts a particularly unfavorable light upon the character of his mama.”
“Even so,” said Lorraine firmly, “you ought not to be discussing such a thing at the supper table. ’Tis monstrous improper.”
“Well, I might point out,” said Lynden, “that you are inconsistent. How can it be perfectly proper for the figure to be there and be monstrously improper for one to talk about its being there? I might point it out, but I won’t. Instead I will very civilly change the subject.” She turned to smile very civilly at her husband. “My Lord, Lorraine was quite, quite taken with your study this morning when Mrs. Coniston showed it to us, and was not even put off by the messy pile of papers on your desk. I don’t know if I’ve told you before, but Lorraine is very partial to your poems. In fact, she quotes you all day whenever she has exhausted her store of quotes from Wordsworth and Spenser.”
Lorraine shook her head modestly, disclaiming. “But I am a great admirer of yours, Lord Melbrooke. Is your work in progress to be epic poetry?”
He leaned back in his chair, sipping his wine, his eyes shining. “It’s possible, though I entertain some rather well-founded fears that it may only turn out to be a very long poem. But I am flattered that you quote me in company with Spenser and Wordsworth.”
Lorraine was staring at Lynden’s hand where it lay cupping the stem of the wine glass. “Lynnie, what have you got on your hand?”
“You don’t have to say it as if I had a worm sitting on me. Lord Melbrooke gave it to me,” said Lynden, as casual
ly as she was able.
“He did?” said Lorraine, almost forgetting his presence in her excitement. She took Lynden’s hand and examined the ruby. “One can only echo the lines of William Dunbar: ‘Hail, redolent ruby, rich and radious! / Hail, Mother of God!’ ”
“Nothing like that,” said Lynden, dismayed to find herself blushing. “It’s an engagement ring, is it not, Lord Melbrooke?”
He studied her enigmatically. “Yes,” returned Melbrooke. “And now that our engagement has been officially announced, perhaps you will be able to bring yourself to call me Justin.”
“Fiddle!” said Lynden, and the footman brought in the first course.
Chapter Seven
Eleven o’clock the next morning found the barn kittens harrying the local rat population, the scullery maid polishing the dining room’s epergne, and the twins in the music salon where Lorraine sat before the grand piano trying to master the first movement of Beethoven’s Concerto no. 3 in C-minor. Lynden sat at a large desk trying to compose a letter to her mother. For more than twenty minutes she had been frowning over a page inscribed with the words “Dear Mama,” but now she stood and joined her sister on the piano bench, pointing to a line on the sheet music before them.
“What does this mean?”
Lorraine stopped playing to look. “That? Where it says ‘allegro con brio’? That means fast with vigor. I seem to have plenty of brio but I’m afraid I’m not allegro enough yet. Wait, was that a knock on the door? Come in! Oh, Mrs. Coniston, hello!”
“Good morning, ladies,” said Mrs. Coniston briskly. “Lord Melbrooke wishes you to come to the drawing room. There is company that His Lordship would like you to meet.”
“Why, Mrs. Coniston, there’s a note of… of something in your voice,” said Lynden. “Who is the company? Don’t you like them?”
Mrs. Coniston shook her head in unconvincing reproach. “Really, my dear, you are much too quick in your judgments. It’s not my place to judge His Lordship’s associations!”
“Ah! You don’t like them!” cried Lynden triumphantly. “I knew it! Are they some of Lord Melbrooke’s shocking rakish friends?”
“They are that, in all faith, My Lady, but it would hardly be fitting for me to say so. You ought to meet them and make your own mind up and that’s all I’ve to offer!”
Lynden put her hands on Mrs. Coniston’s shoulders and at once surprised and charmed that lady by giving her a quick hug and whispering, “Thanks for the warning. You’re a dear, you know.”
Thus, when the twins entered the drawing room, it was not the surprise it might have been to see Lynden’s husband sitting on the settee next to a spectacular blonde who could only have been yesterday’s lady of the crimson riding habit. She was tall, generously endowed where nature had treated Lynden with economy, and the natural blonde hair framing her handsome features had caused countless of her acquaintances mistakenly to seek a similar triumph with the dye bottle. Today she was dressed, not by accident, unless Lynden missed her guess, in a clinging gown of lemon amber that looked exceptionally well against the gold drawing-room walls, imparting the distinct impression that the lady had some special sense of belonging there. She smiled graciously at the twins when they entered, as though she were the hostess putting at ease a pair of not terribly important guests.
Before this moment Lynden had been unaware of even the most minute feelings of ownership connected with Fern Court, its lovely rooms, or its beautiful furnishings. It had been a place owned by Melbrooke and only remotely and accidentally connected with her, and yet, now, Lynden found within her a strong and unsettling desire to drag this usurper in lemon amber from her settee, order a carriage, and bundle the blonde beauty back to her castle.
Lord Melbrooke was at his most reserved and least communicative. He gave Lynden a smile that would have frozen water at twenty paces, and introduced her first to the woman beside him, who, it came as no surprise to Lynden, was called Lady Silvia, and then to the gentleman, her half brother, Lord Crant. Lynden had been too intent on Lady Silvia to notice him, but as he bowed over her hand, she realized that, while Lady Silvia was the more well-favored of the siblings, Lord Crant had much the more interesting aspect. His hair was darker than his half sister’s, in fact, almost black; and his face was more sharply set, all angles and plains, with a wide, clever mouth. But none of that mattered, really, when you looked at his eyes, which were the oddest and most arresting Lynden had ever seen. Extraordinarily, as though by some whimsical act of God, each of his eyes was a different color; the right one was the deep sky blue of his half sister’s eyes and the left was brown. It rather took Lynden aback for a moment—but only for a moment, because the expression in his eyes began to make a greater impression on her than did their unusual color. Crant was smiling—not a friendly, benign smile, but a mocking one, with edges of cruelty.
“But, Justin, she’s devastating!” he murmured, with precisely enough irony to rob his words of sincerity without making them an insult. “Small wonder you were tempted at last into matrimony. She’s a Venus.”
“Indeed,” drawled Lady Silvia, coming forward to take the hand that Lynden had jerked from Lord Crant’s grasp. “A vestal virgin.”
There was enough truth in that to hurt. Lynden colored and wondered how much Lady Silvia knew. Surely Melbrooke wouldn’t have told her that their marriage had not been consummated? Lord, if that had been a guess, it had certainly been shrewd!
“Justin shows taste in this as in all things,” suggested Crant suavely, directing a sneering smile at his half sister. He returned his gaze to Lynden, made a cursory examination of her slender figure, and said, “Justin tells us you come from Yorkshire,” in the same tone as he might have said “Justin tells us you have less brain than a peahen.”
“I do come from Yorkshire,” said Lynden angrily, and then defended herself as best she could by adding, in a manner that would have driven her ailing Mama into strong hysterics, “and I’ve never seen anyone before with two different-colored eyes.”
Lynden heard her sister gasp at the calculated rudeness of her statement and Lord Melbrooke, at Lynden’s side, acquired a sudden and intense interest in plucking a microscopic speck from his elegant coat sleeve, a look of stern concentration on his attractive features.
Meanwhile Lord Crant was rapidly revising his initial impression that Melbrooke’s new bride was a shy, banal schoolgirl. Good God, had this infant actually some wit? If she had not, would Melbrooke have married her, no matter what the inducement? Melbrooke was, of course, no fool.
Crant favored Lynden with his ungentle malicious smile. “A trait that passes through my family. But, no, you wouldn’t have seen it, because, my dear, Crants never travel in Yorkshire.”
“That,” replied Lynden tartly, “is the Crants’ loss.”
“So I am beginning to believe,” said Crant.
Two o’clock that same afternoon found the barn kittens catnapping in the lofts, their stomachs full; the scullery maid sitting before a warm kitchen fire gossiping with the chambermaids; and the twins, muffled in scarves and winter bonnets, stomping along the valley road to Grasmere Lake. Of course, there are some that might take issue with the charge that Lorraine’s graceful strides could be called stomps, but there could be no other description for Lynden’s gait.
“And did you see her face,” that young lady was saying, “when she leaned over Melbrooke and positively mewed in that high, sugary voice, ‘So, Justin, dearest, you stole your little bride from the schoolroom! How very romantic!’ ”
Lorraine grinned in reminiscence. “I did see her face then, but that look was nothing compared with the look she gave you when you said, ‘The schoolroom romantic, Lady Silvia? How could you think so? Only because it’s been so many years since you were in one.’ It was not fair of you, either; you know she can’t be a day over twenty-five.”
“That I can believe. There was the faintest suspicion of a blemish starting on her chin, though she had tried to cover it
over with masking powder.”
“There’s nothing wrong in that, Lynnie. You’ve done the same yourself!”
“Used to, but I haven’t had a blemish in years—or at least since Christmas last when Aunt Sophronia sent us that box of aniseed comfits,” said Lynden judiciously. “Thing is, I don’t mind that she uses masking powder on her blemishes.”
“One almost invisible blemish,” corrected Lorraine, who had a penchant for accuracy.
“Oh, very well, I don’t mind her using powder on her one blemish. I don’t even mind her having blemishes… in fact, I wish she had more of them! It’s that brother of hers, Lord Crant. I hate the way he stares at me, as though he were trying to guess whether I’d tried to improve my figure by stuffing goose feathers into my bodice. And that’s one thing at least that I’ve never done! Especially after last spring when Allison Fitzcrystal took a spill as we rode in her father’s meadow and the feathers flew out like thistledown!” Lynden kicked an unoffending stone from her path. “That was lesson enough for me! What did you think of Lord Crant?”
“Of his manner? That he was intelligent, self-confident, and so… so very hard. So sardonic! How I admired you for having the nerve to match wits with him, Lyn, but you must be cautious. I feel that he might have been much more cruel had Melbrooke not been by.”
“Melbrooke! How can you say so? He stood there and did nothing, absolutely nothing, to defend me! If I hadn’t stuck up for myself, those Crants would have torn me to pieces!”
Lorraine thoughtfully tidied a wisp of hair that had escaped from under her fur-lined bonnet. “I think—well, I was watching Lord Melbrooke this morning, Lynden, and I thing that he was more aware of everything that was going on than you know. It might well be that if you hadn’t been able to defend yourself, he would have protected you.” She saw that Lynden looked frankly skeptical. “I suppose it’s a moot point. But Lynden, there was something else I noticed about Lord Crant. There was something—Lynden, did he remind you of anyone?”