“I—I am not what you think, Rye,” she declared.
“Indeed?” He measured her with a penetrating glance and whirled her around once before he said more. “In what way, may I ask?”
He half expected her to blurt out about some childish love affair gone astray on the other side of the Atlantic, but what she said amazed him.
“I am not really suited to plantation life,” she told him earnestly. “A planters wife needs to be able to do all manner of things. She needs to—to conserve fruit and salt fish and unravel stockings to gain thread to weave new fabrics. Unless of course she is wealthy. And I am not. I will have no dowry—my mother is extravagant and my father is always in debt. It is true he has received an inheritance but he will spend all of that and more on the new house he is building. I do not care for isolation—I am not at all what you think me to be.”
He considered her in amusement. Did the little wench imagine he was pursuing her for her dowry? Or that he needed a plantation manager in skirts? Was she trying to warn him then?
“I had thought you would tell me you were an inveterate gambler,” he said in a bantering tone. “Indeed that you had diced away the family fortune!”
She colored. “I am trying to say,” she told him desperately, “that the very clothes on my back are borrowed. Every gown in which you have seen me belongs to Reba, who wished me to”—she could not say “to attract you,” which would have been the truth, so she finished lamely, “to appear well before her friends in Essex.”
Since it was already obvious to Rye that Reba had no friends in Essex, the amusement on his face deepened. “You are telling me,” he asked more thoughtfully, “that you are not in favor with your family and therefore they sent you away to school unsuitably clothed?”
“Oh, no!” Instantly she rose to the defense of her parents. “They gave me enough gold to buy a whole new wardrobe but I”—she blushed again—“I gave it all to my sister, who wished to run away to the Marriage Trees with a man my parents did not approve of.”
“And did they reach these Marriage Trees?” he asked, fascinated.
“No, somehow they bungled it,” she admitted.
“Possibly because you were not there to show them how to put on disguises or shinny over roofs,” he grinned.
At least she had diverted him from talk of marriage! They quarreled amiably as they danced, over the merits of her “disguise” in London, and so relieved was she to be off the subject of marriage that she found herself laughing and lighthearted—even though she had but a few minutes before been wishing herself away!
She thought she might escape him for the dance was about to end and other young bucks would crowd up, clamoring to dance with her. Rye apparently thought that might happen too because he was suddenly whirling her across the floor.
“If I take a wife,” he told her, chuckling, “it will not be to unravel my stockings! And I can salt my own fish if the need arises!”
“I think you do not understand how important a woman is in plantation life,” she began unhappily.
“I think you do not understand how important a woman could be in my life,” he said, smiling.
In her perturbation Carolina had not noticed where he was heading. Abruptly she found herself danced into a small antechamber off the great hall, a tiny room that was hardly more than a curtained alcove whose one huge window was framed in ancient velvet draperies that Nan Tarbell had not yet bothered to replace. The tiny room was dim by contrast with the hundreds of candles twinkling down from the chandeliers in the great hall, and hushed by the heavy old rose hangings that seemed to reflect the white moonlight sparkling on the snow and ice from outside rather than the golden candlelight of the interior. She felt herself drawn toward the wide velvet cushioned windowseat and knew that although music and laughter floated in from the great hall, in this curtained alcove they were effectively alone.
Rye smiled down at her and let one hand slip almost negligently to her waist to draw her pliant body toward him. With the other hand he cradled her head and her pale blonde curls cascaded over his fingers.
She felt her heart begin to beat very fast.
“Carolina,” he said softly. “I have something to say to you.”
Her heartbeat was by now not only fast but wildly uneven. Oh, God, she thought, Rye is going to declare himself! And then I will have to tell him that I have been but leading him on, that I am already promised, that I can never— No! her inner self almost shouted. I have waited long enough—too long. I will not let him declare himself, I will tell him the truth now!
“Rye,” she burst out. “I have something to say to you too. I”—She broke off as the music stopped and a dancing couple came to rest just on the other side of the draperies that curtained off their alcove and stood there laughing and talking. She could not tell Rye what she had to say where other people could hear! “I have lost too many hairpins as I danced,” she substituted rapidly for what she had been about to say. “I must go upstairs and pin my hair up else it will fall down about my shoulders!”
With a fluttering gesture toward her fashionable coiffure she broke away from him, ignoring his murmured, “That would be none so bad a sight!” and darted back into the great hall. She skirted the dancers, for the music had begun again, and made her way upstairs. For all that there were ladies swishing their ballgowns up and down the hall, her own room at least was unoccupied and she made her way there and sat for some minutes before her dressing table with her head in her hands.
It had come to her with force that it was a very shabby role she was playing. And when she hurt Rye, she was going to hurt herself.
The door opened and she jumped up. “Oh—it’s you, Reba!” She stopped abruptly at her friend’s expression. Reba looked wild. She looked as if she might kill someone.
Reba came to a violent halt in the middle of the floor. She ignored the haggard look on Carolina’s face. “I have just learnt that the Marquess of Saltenham has departed for the Continent again for a ‘change of scene’—and all without a single word to me!” She lunged forward and snatched up a book from a nearby small table and sent it hurtling at the wall with such force that it struck with the sound of a small explosion. “Oh, I could kill him!” she cried through her clenched teeth.
“They’ll hear you downstairs!” gasped Carolina, looking at the fallen leather-bound volume.
“Devil I care!” wailed Reba. “Oh, it is too treacherous of him—and after I waited!” She was almost sobbing now. “He promised to marry me, Carol!”
Carolina strongly doubted that the actual words had ever been said, but Reba plainly had been seduced and abandoned. Her own anguished heart went out to her friend. “Then you must dance and laugh and be very lively indeed,” she told Reba with decision. “For there are those who may know about your affair—even though unknown to you—and they will gain no satisfaction if they think you are not hurt by it.”
“Not hurt by it?” cried Reba passionately. “I had planned to become a marchioness! How could I not be hurt by it?”
But it is only your head that is affected—never your heart, thought Carolina, watching her friend helplessly. You are sorry to have lost the title, but I do not hear you wail about the man!
“You are right!” cried Reba in a sudden about-face. “I will not let anyone think I feel deceived or upset!” She seized a piece of Spanish paper and dabbed her flushed cheeks even redder. “There! We will go down the stairs laughing, Carol, and we will linger upon the landing so that everyone may see us and view how unconcerned I am by anything Robin has done!”
Carolina felt herself propelled down the hall, while Reba went off into meaningless peals of laughter when they passed several ladies who had come upstairs to freshen up.
Concentrating on each other as if they were actors in a play and the dancers below their audience, the two girls tripped lightly down the stairs and paused upon the empty landing. Behind and above them stretched the elegant old tapestries that “kep
t out the draft” and by so doing hid the upper hall from view. The long tapestries did not quite come together in their downward sweep and Carolina had come to rest beside one of the long vertical slits where one tapestry almost, but not quite, met its neighbor.
“You are not the only one with problems,” she told Reba bleakly. “Oh, Reba, I cannot face what I have done!”
And up above, behind the tapestries, those words carried to ears for which they were not intended. Rye Evistock, who had strolled upstairs to view the great hall from above—and partly to escape the attentions of an overeager matron avid to marry him off to one of her daughters, had seen the girls come laughing down the hall. He had stepped into the shadows, not wishing to seem to be pursuing them down the stairs, and so had heard Carolina’s words as they floated up to him where he stood behind the tapestries.
“Well, I hope you will not tell Rye that you led him on only so that I would not be forced to marry him,” said Reba unpleasantly. “For if Mamma hears, she will kill me!”
“But Rye is on the point of asking me to marry him!” Carolina cried wildly. Her voice quivered with pain because in truth she did not want to relinquish him— and that was what hurt most. “How will he feel when he learns that I never intended to marry him? That I have been betrothed to Thomas all along?”
Chapter 19
Rye Evistock’s long frame stiffened and the blood surged so violently to his head that he scarcely heard Reba’s petulant, “Come, Carol, we have stood here long enough. To talk longer will make us seem to be perhaps worried about something, and I for one wish to appear completely unruffled this night!”
Carolina’s answer, if any, was lost in a sudden discordant blare of music from the drunken musicians, and the guests below began again to dance.
But Rye Evistock, who had been fingering in his pocket a gold ring set with an amethyst that had been his mother’s, and which he had intended to offer Carolina as a. betrothal ring, was as impervious to the sudden blast of music as he was to the back-slapping greeting of two tipsy gentlemen who brushed by him on their way back downstairs.
This plain and stunning proof from her own lips that Carolina did not care for him, that she belonged to another man—indeed was betrothed to the fellow, that she had tolerated his advances only to accommodate a friend, had hit Rye squarely between the eyes, staggering him. He had long prided himself that he was a man who met all circumstances with equanimity, that he would rise above any problem, any loss. But now he felt as if the world had been cut away suddenly from beneath his feet.
For long moments he stood stock-still and stared blankly at the tapestry from behind which had come this enormously enlightening conversation.
Playing him for a fool, was she? That lying wench with "her big clear luminous eyes! Well, she’d play him for a fool no more! Rye’s knuckles clenched white and he yearned to send them crashing into yonder wall.
When he rejoined the ladies he had got control of himself. The sardonic mask he usually wore had slid down once again over his dark face and he viewed the world with shuttered eyes. For a moment he wondered if he detected a shade of regret in the troubled gaze Carolina turned up to him as he led her out upon the dance floor—a dash of pity perhaps? No, she was without pity!
But it was Twelfth Night and he had one more gift to give her.
In truth Carolina’s conflicting emotions which had driven her almost to frenzy upstairs had by now melted into numbness. She was struck dumb by her unhappiness and by her very real sense of guilt that she should have done this thing. And she shrank from telling Rye. To see him stiffen, to read the hurt in his eyes—no, she could not bear it.
And besides—when he knew the truth at last, he would go away and she would never see him again.
As he led her out onto the floor, she thought she detected a subtle change in his manner toward her but she was so miserable she could not be sure she was not imagining it.
They danced silently, their feet moving expertly— and she could not bring herself to look at him.
“There’s snow on your boots,” she said in surprise.
“I stepped outside while you were upstairs.”
She nodded, her curiosity dulled by grief.
“This room is too crowded,” he said restlessly. “Come outside, I have something for you.”
She nodded and he led her out a side door she had not even known was there. She had forgotten how well he knew this house. The cold met her as she went out that door, it struck the bare skin of her neck and bosom—warm from the dancing—like a blow, but she was too numb to care. It had stopped snowing. Ice and soft snow glittered from the branches.
Her thin slippers mushed down into the snow. At any other time she would have refused to go farther, but she felt so bad about the shabby role she had played toward this man that she would have let him lead her anywhere.
She accompanied him into the frozen garden where the tree branches glistened and the distant music from the house was hushed. Above them in the clear air a cold moon looked down and cold stars glimmered. It was better this way, she thought, to hear the cold truth beneath the cold stars alone—not in an antechamber of a crowded ballroom where at any moment lovers might break in, or some half-tipsy friend might appear who would promptly slap Rye on the back and expect him to joke and be merry.
She had been shivering along beside Rye in her pale green velvet gown, for he had given her no chance to go upstairs and collect her cloak. He had led her past snow-covered boxwood, past mounds of white that come spring would be roses, and into the entrance to the snow-covered maze. She was holding up her skirts but now as the clipped green walls of the boxwood maze rose up about them, she began to protest.
“I’ll ruin my slippers, Rye—and they’re Reba’s. You should have let me stop to put on my pattens.”
“No need for pattens—’tis privacy I have in mind.”
Privacy? But what could be more private than this place where they stood? Carolina began to feel alarmed here in this cold lost world where the music from the house seemed endlessly far away. She looked up, saw him staring down at her like a stranger—and her gaze fell away.
“On down this path.” He stepped behind her. “It’s too narrow to go two abreast.” With a hand beneath her elbow he was guiding her along the maze, ruthlessly propelling her toward the center.
Ah, there it was at last, the round open place in the center of the maze with its snow-covered sun dial.
Here was where it would happen, she told herself fatalistically. Here was where she would break his heart.
He was silent now, staring down at her. She wished he would speak. She did not lift her eyes above his broad shoulders. Nervously she brushed away the snow from the sun dial and its pale shadow in the white moonlight gave them the time.
“Moon time, . . .” she said in a soft lost voice. And then, looking up with a sigh, “The moon has shining hours too.”
“When not obscured by snow,” he said, feeling almost physical pain at sight of the glorious halo the white moonlight made of her hair.
She looked down again for her eyes were blurred by unshed tears. She was thinking, This is the last time I will ever walk out with him—the very last time!
Oh, it was unthinkable! She would not, could not lose him!
Her heart was bursting. She opened her mouth to tell him that she was betrothed to Thomas, but her throat was dry and the words would not come. No, she would wait instead to hear what he had to say. And then, when he asked her to marry him, she would close her eyes and follow her heart!
But she knew that she would burst into tears if at this point he were to go down on one knee in the snow and gravely ask for her hand in marriage.
He did no such thing.
“I am sure you thought me a blackguard that night at the Star and Garter,” he said grimly.
She gave him a bewildered look. He had brought her outside on this freezing night to talk about that?
“For not breaking th
e dice and thus restoring to you your winnings,” he continued sardonically.
Indeed she had!
“You admit then that the dice were crooked?” She was amazed, for this was the first time they had discussed it. Indeed it was a subject she had been careful to avoid!
“Oh, yes, I knew it all along, but by the time I reached you, Twist had had time to secrete the crooked dice in his clothing. So we would have found only honest dice and nothing would have been gained.”
She had not thought of that. It cast a new light on things.
“And so you stayed to—”
“To trap him,” he finished for her grimly. “Twist had won a great sum of money from my brother, who cannot control his thirst for gambling. I had come down to London to find Twist and wrest the entire sum back from him.”
“And did you do it?” She was awed.
“Aye, I did. And yours as well. Hold out your hands.” He held up a small leathern purse, untied it, and gravely poured the contents into her cupped hands. “I had meant to return this to you in the upstairs dining room at the Star and Garter,” he said sternly. “But when I unlocked the door, intending to take you home, I found you gone. I spent most of the night searching for you, fearing you would come to some harm upon the London streets.”
Although they did not know it, from an upstairs window they were being observed. As she hurried simpering toward Lord Hollistead, Nan Tarbell had strayed too near the dancers—and forgotten to lift her train (after all, Nan had come to wearing trains late in life; she had worn only plain kirtles and practical aprons when she was Reba’s age) and a tottering old gentleman had stepped upon it. He had been full of apologies for the long tear in the fabric, but that had not mended the situation. Nan, cornering one of the maidservants, had gone upstairs to have her train mended. A restless woman, she had refused to take the dress off but instead had stood by the window staring down into the wintry garden, wondering what it would be like next summer. Would it be filled with strolling guests as the house was filled with dancing guests tonight?
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