Valentine v-4

by Jane Feather

"Out, you horrible little girl!" Swallowing her grin, Theo swept Rosie toward the door, relieving her mother of further embarrassment.

  "But when…"

  "The day after tomorrow," Sylvester said to Rosie's anxious inquiry as she was borne inexorably from the room.

  "We must be on time… I wouldn't want to miss the grand procession," Rosie declared as Theo thrust her into the corridor.

  "We won't miss anything," Theo assured, and closed the door firmly.

  Rosie's diversion had broken the intensity of the circle by the fire. Sylvester moved away to pay his respects to the patronesses, exchanging a few words with the young men hovering around Emily and Clarissa. His mortification burned deep, but he was bland and polite, doing what was required. He felt Theo's pensive eyes on his back and guessed at the swirling cauldron of questions she was just waiting to fire at him. Questions he couldn't bring himself to answer.

  But in this respect he'd misjudged her. When they'd left Lady Belmont's salon and were once again in the relative privacy of his curricle, Theo made a few casual observations on the company and said not a word about what had happened. But her silence merely masked the rumbling turmoil of her thoughts.

  Why had people reacted to Sylvester like that? What could he have done? It must be something that people considered shameful, but she couldn't force him to tell her if he chose not to. And he obviously chose not to. There was a chilly touch-me-not quality to his present silence, much stronger than the distance there'd been between them since they'd arrived in London.

  She couldn't believe he'd done something dishonorable. Of course he'd tricked her into marrying him. But if she absolved her grandfather of dishonor in the business, then she had no choice but to absolve her husband. In one light they'd both sacrificed her for the estate, but in another light she could hardly be sacrificed for something she wanted more than anything herself.

  No, the worst she knew of her husband was that he was arrogant and controlling and reserved to a fault. And those weren't good enough reasons for Society's ostracism.

  The carriage turned onto Curzon Street, and Sylvester broke into her absorption, his voice politely neutral.

  "You'll forgive me if I leave you to go in alone. I have some business to attend to with Hoare's bank." He drew rein outside the house.

  "Of course," Theo said, springing down without waiting for his assistance. "I'll see you at dinner, I expect."

  "Certainly. And we should discuss how we're to arrange this excursion to Astley's. Will Emily and Clarissa wish to accompany us?"

  "Oh, yes, and Edward," Theo agreed. "It'll be a family party." She paused, her hand on the curricle door, her velvet eyes grave. "We tend to stick together."

  He nodded. "So I gather." Raising a hand in farewell, he gave his horses the office to start.

  Theo was in the drawing room, dressed for dinner, when Sylvester returned.

  "I'm late, I'm sorry," he said as he came into the room. "I'll pour myself a sherry and then I'll go and change."

  Theo was sitting on a chaise longue, her legs curled beneath her in a position that ignored the constraints of her delicate evening gown of pale-blue silk.

  She put down her book and smiled at him. "Why bother to change? It's only us."

  "I'd hate to show discourtesy to my wife," he said lightly, turning away to pick up the sherry decanter.

  Theo could hear the strain beneath the light tone, she could see the tension in his broad back as he filled his glass. Slowly, she uncurled herself and stood up.

  "I don't believe your wife would consider it such," she said, coming over to him. She slipped her arms around his waist, resting her cheek between his shoulder blades. "In fact, your wife doesn't give a damn what you wear when you're with her. The less the better, really."

  Sylvester put down his glass and reached behind him with both arms to encircle her body as she leaned against his back. He could feel her intensity, the currents flowing from her spirit to his. She was trying to reassure him about a great deal more than his wardrobe.

  Such fierce and unquestioning loyalty was as astonishing as it was moving. He drew her around in front of him, and she put her arms around his waist again, looking up at him with a little questioning smile that belied the gravity in her eyes.

  Abruptly, hunger for the warmth and comfort she was offering swept through him. He crushed her against him, his mouth finding hers with rough need. She came up on her toes, pressing herself into his body, her lips parting beneath the onslaught of his kiss.

  Foster opened the door in his customary discreet fashion to announce dinner and as discreetly closed it again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The girl in the center of the ring wore a scarlet blouse with billowing sleeves and a ruffled neck, leather britches, and Cossack boots. The gaily caparisoned horse beneath her caracoled, seeming to be prancing on the very tips of his iron-shod hooves, and the girl's balance didn't falter as she pirouetted on the bare back. Then she jumped, flipped in the air, and landed again on the horse, her two feet firmly planted.

  Emily squeaked and seized Edward's hand. Clarissa gazed round-eyed, and Rosie leaned forward, her hands on her knees, as if she couldn't get close enough to see. Theo shook her head in admiration.

  "How wonderful to do that," she said enviously. "What an amazingly exciting life it must be."

  "To be a performer in Astley's amphitheater?" Sylvester asked, raising his eyebrows. "My dear girl, you can't see from here how shabby those costumes are. Just imagine living in a freezing caravan, with no privacy, racketing around from place to place half the year."

  "Sheer bliss," Theo declared, her eyes on the ring, where a troupe of jugglers were performing with fire sticks.

  "Oh, he's going to swallow it!" Clarissa exclaimed, turning pale as one of the performers tipped back his head and the blazing stick inched into his mouth.

  "How does he do that?" Rosie demanded. "It must be a cheat."

  "Oh, you have no magic in your soul," Clarissa told her, her hands gripped tightly in her lap.

  "I only want to understand," her little sister protested in her customary refrain.

  Sylvester leaned back slightly, his eyes resting on his wife's profile as she gazed raptly at the ring, where six horses now circled, their white plumes waving in the air. Each carried a standing rider, all dressed alike, but it was clear that three were male and three female. They began an elaborate dance, a kind of quadrille involving both horses and riders, the latter exchanging horses as if they were exchanging partners.

  "Why bliss?" he asked softly.

  Without taking her eyes off the ring, Theo said, "It's exciting. It's doing something… something risky that you must do perfectly if you're not to hurt yourself. It's a real life… not this… this…" She stopped, but Sylvester knew what she'd been about to say. London bored her, and she despised the inane social round, although she struggled to hide her tedium from her mother and sisters, who seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  His gaze shifted from his wife's countenance to Edward Fairfax. Emily still clutched his hand. Edward had taken lodgings in Albermarle Street, although he spent all his time in Brook Street and went to his lodgings only to lay his head on his pillow. Sylvester was still uncertain whether he knew anything about Vimiera, but if he did, he clearly wasn't saying. And he hadn't hesitated to join the Belmont women in their support of Stoneridge.

  He closed his eyes as his temples tightened. Theo had still said nothing openly about his humiliation of the other afternoon, and today her sisters and Edward were behaving just as always. Perhaps it was the distraction of the performance.

  But perhaps, he thought, it was another way in which they were showing him their support. A kind of blind loyalty simply because he was now one of them. They were the most extraordinary family. But dear God, if only he could prove that their loyalty wasn't misplaced.

  The familiar frustration washed through him. If he could just remember, or find someone who remembered, what ha
d happened before the bayonet had slashed across his head. There had to be an explanation for that surrender. An explanation other than abject cowardice. He'd searched the records at Horseguards, forcing himself to meet the eye of men who passed him in the corridors, but the transcript of the court-martial yielded nothing that he didn't already know. It was time to start asking some questions.

  Again Neil Gerard's face popped into his vision. Gerard had not yet put in an appearance in town, but it was very early in the Season. When he turned up, Sylvester would tackle him. If he cut him socially, then he would track him down in his lodgings. Somehow he would force the man to talk about Vimiera. Maybe now, now that Sylvester was distanced from the agony of his imprisonment and the immediacy of his shame, he might latch on to some infinitesimal fact or impression that would unlock his memory.

  Unless he already knew the truth. Unless he knew everything there was to know: He'd yielded the colors, surrendered, condemned his own men. Perhaps the truth had been too terrible to remember.

  Theo took her eyes from the ring for a minute and glanced at her husband. A shiver ran through her as she saw his expression. His eyes were blank, his face drawn, that muscle twitching in his cheek. What was it?

  She glanced at her sisters, intent on the scene in the ring. With the natural delicacy of Elinor Belmont's children, no one had mentioned the other afternoon. If Theo didn't bring it up, then they wouldn't. They would have discussed it among themselves and with Elinor, but it would go no further than that unless they were given permission.

  But for some reason she couldn't bring herself to speculate about some obscure dishonor in Sylvester's past, not even with her sisters or her mother, from whom she rarely held secrets. Just as something had held her back from revealing the true conditions of the old earl's will. Her motives for keeping quiet about it confused her, but for whatever reason, she kept silent.

  "I wish I could ride," she declared with sudden fierceness, and was instantly rewarded as Sylvester's eyes focused and he came back to the world of Astley's amphitheater.

  "But you do," Clarissa pointed out. "You rode only this morning in Hyde Park."

  "You call that riding?" her sister retorted scornfully. "A decorous trot along the tan under the eyes of every old cat in town?"

  Sylvester raised his eyebrows and caught Edward's eye. The younger man gave him a sympathetic smile.

  "Look at that man swallowing a sword now!" Rosie cried. "That has to be a cheat. It must fold up or something as he pushes it down."

  "A magician's nightmare audience," Sylvester murmured.

  Theo's deep chuckle answered him.

  "She has an inquiring mind."

  "So I've noticed."

  The grand finale brought the performance to a rousing close. Sylvester could see that the unsophisticated treat had been a success. Emily and Clarissa had been delighted, Rosie fascinated if less than credulous, and Theo diverted for a few hours.

  "Supper," he announced cheerfully, placing Theo's cloak over her shoulders. Her hair was braided around her head, and the slim white column of her bared neck was irresistible. He forgot where they were for a minute and bent and kissed her nape.

  Startled, she looked over her shoulder, her eyes glowing with sensual response to the caress. He kissed the corner of her mouth and the tip of her nose.

  "Where are we going for supper?" Rosie asked, clearly unimpressed by this delay in the proceedings and quite unaware that her sisters and Edward were tactfully looking in the opposite direction.

  "I thought you might enjoy the Pantheon, Rosie," Sylvester said easily.

  "Will they have scalloped oysters and ices?" the child inquired, removing her glasses to wipe the lenses on her skirt. "I most particularly enjoy scalloped oysters and pink ices."

  "Then you shall have them," Sylvester assured her. "Let's get out of this crush."

  He shepherded his small flock ahead of him through the rowdy departing audience, a crowd of townspeople, raucous costermongers, fleet-footed urchins. Astley's was an entertainment that appealed to anyone who could afford the penny entrance fee in the pits.

  There was an autumnal nip to the evening air as they emerged into a crowd as noisy and shrill as the one inside. Fruit and flower sellers called their wares, competing with the bellows of pie sellers, and the jangle of an organ grinder with his scrawny monkey dancing frantically.

  "I'm just going to look at that monkey." Rosie dived into the crowd in the direction of the organ grinder.

  "Rosie!" Theo plunged after her, but Sylvester was quicker.

  He grabbed the child's pelisse and hauled her back.

  "This is not Lulworth," he said. "You do not run off like that on your own, do you hear, Rosie?"

  "I merely wished to see what kind of monkey it was," she said with an injured air. "There are many different kinds of monkeys, you should know, Stoneridge. I have a book about them, and I wanted to identify it."

  "It's a little black monkey," Edward said. "Now, come along. Emily's getting cold." He took Rosie's hand and marched off with her, Emily and Clarissa arm in arm beside him, toward the corner where the chaise and Sylvester's curricle waited with coachman, groom, and tiger.

  Sylvester and Theo followed, pushing their way through the crowd that seemed suddenly to grow thicker. It wasn't so much that, Theo realized suddenly, as that they were being pressed on either side by three men in the leather aprons of workmen. Three very large men. She glanced up at Sylvester and saw that he was now behind her; the men had somehow separated them just as they drew ahead of the crowd.

  She saw the realization of danger flash in his eyes the minute she understood it herself.

  "Theo, go to the carriage," he ordered, his voice low and intense as he stepped sideways, his eyes assessing the three men. They wore caps low on their foreheads. A hobnailed boot swung, kicking him on the shin, and his breath whistled through his teeth. He was surrounded now, no room for maneuver, the indifferent crowd behind them as they left the immediate vicinity of the amphitheater.

  Sylvester was unarmed. A man on a family outing in the company of women and children didn't carry weapons. His driving whip was with the curricle. One of the men raised his arm, a heavy oak cudgel in his fist, and Sylvester wanted to scream as the memory of the bayonet slicing down at his unprotected head filled him with a momentarily paralyzing terror. He flung up his arms to protect his head at the same moment that Theo kicked the cudgel wielder in the kidneys.

  The man bellowed, spinning toward her, giving Sylvester breathing space. Theo kicked again, her leg a perfectly straight weapon, her aim wickedly accurate, slamming into his groin. He doubled over with a scream.

  The other two were on Sylvester now, and a knife glinted. He drove his fist upward under the jaw of one of his assailants, a massive bear of a man who simply shook his head and prepared to renew the attack. As he did so, Theo went for him, two fingers jabbing for the eyes. Blinded, he fell back with a panicked cry and her leg flashed upward, her heel driving against his heart just below his ribs.

  "Bastards," she said, dusting off her hands. "That was exciting, wasn't it?"

  Sylvester had dealt as efficiently with the third assailant, who lay gasping in a fetal curl on the ground, the knife at some distance from his body. The earl, momentarily at a loss for words, turned to his wife. She was breathing rapidly; her eyes shone, her cheeks were flushed, her hair wisped from its braided coronet, and she looked perfectly ready to take on another half a dozen footpads.

  Her hat lay on the ground and he picked it up, dusting it off against his thigh, handing it to her silently. She stuck it on her head and grinned at him.

  "That'll teach them."

  "Yes," he said, "I'm sure it will. Where the hell did you learn to fight like that?"

  "Edward taught me. You knew I could do it."

  "I knew you could wrestle," he said slowly. "I did not know you knew how to fight like a damned street Arab."

  "I'm sorry if it vexes you," she said, a s
hade tartly. "But it seems to me you should be grateful. Those footpads meant business. If you ask me, they were after more than your purse and your watch."

  "What on earth -" Edward's horrified tones came from behind her as he took in the scene. "We wondered where you were."

  "Oh, just dealing with a minor matter," Sylvester said.

  "Footpads," Theo said with another grin at Edward's expression. "You should have seen me, Edward. I remembered all those kicks you taught me, and that business with the fingers." She gestured to prove her point.

  "Dear God," Edward muttered, glancing uneasily at the earl.

  "I only showed her the technique, sir. I didn't train her in it or anything."

  "My wife is clearly an apt pupil," Sylvester said with a sharp exhalation. "And the devil of it is that if she weren't, I'd probably be lying there with my throat cut – which rather inhibits my legitimate outrage."

  "So I should hope," Theo declared indignantly. "What shall we do with them?"

  "Leave them," Sylvester said, turning away. "Are the girls all right, Fairfax?"

  "Yes, they're in the chaise," Edward replied. His expression was strained, his voice low. "I was so busy seeing them safely installed, I didn't see what was happening. Not that it would have made any difference. A cripple isn't good for anything but seeing to the comfort of women."

  "Don't be a damned fool," Sylvester said roughly, but he touched his arm in a fleeting gesture of understanding. "Come along, let's get out of here." He indicated they should go ahead of him and then turned back to his assailants. One of them was struggling to his knees.

  Sylvester planted a foot in his chest and sent him sprawling. "You will inform whoever employed you that he will discover I don't take kindly to unprovoked attacks. That is a most solemn promise." He lifted his foot again, and the man on the ground cowered, covering his head.

  "All right, guv, all right. We was only doin' what we'd been told."

  "By whom?" The gray eyes were like the arctic wastelands as he stared down at the man, his foot still menacingly raised.