“And are your memories of the place sweet, my dear Sherry?” his companion inquired. “I daresay you charmed many young ladies in this room, you sly devil.”
“A great many.”
“But never one in particular?” the woman demanded, her tone coy.
Diana stared at the nearest candle flame as it stretched tall, undisturbed by the slightest draft while she held her breath.
“No one in particular,” he said. “You know me, the more the merrier.”
Their voices moved away, merging with the general commotion, and Diana finally exhaled with such a hard sigh that the bold candle flame nearby was nearly extinguished. Still partially wedged behind her beam, she slowly turned, scanning the crowd for a sight of his sun-kissed head and that ridiculously well-carved physique.
A stout gentleman moved aside, taking a cluster of women with him, and Diana found the owner of the name—and the laugh—that had plucked her attention out of the weary void. For the first time in more than three years, there he was, his fine, foolishly arrogant profile smudged by candlelight.
He was back. Of course he was, she thought scornfully. He’d returned after all that time, just when she looked her very worst and had a pimple the size of a holly berry on her chin. When else might he possibly return but at that very moment? She would have laughed out loud at her own misfortune, if she’d had no fear of being heard and looked at.
Yes, there he stood. It was him, and no denying it.
Captain Nathaniel Sherringham, “Sherry” to his closest friends.
The most frustrating, infuriating man she’d ever known. A man who dared accuse her of having vinegar in her veins and a heart like an icehouse.
The irreverent, imprudent gambler who once in utter madness—and very probably in his cups—had proposed marriage to her.
The man who had once called her beautiful, but to whom she was now apparently “no one in particular.”
Two
He sipped his punch, his gaze traveling swiftly over the dancers. No faces he recognized tonight. Had they all moved on in his absence? Three and a half years was a long time to be gone, he supposed, but he had not expected this hollow sense of sadness and loss in his gut. As he’d said to his companion, the town hall assembly room hadn’t changed at all. Only the people had.
Nathaniel knew he should have written to his sister, Rebecca, and let her know he was traveling into the county. Had she come there to meet him, at least there would have been one face he recognized, even if she did immediately start nagging him about being gone so long and never sending a letter to let her know where he was. Letters were not his forte, and she ought to know that.
He watched a young girl in a yellow dress as she skipped beside her partner in a country jig, laughing and pink-cheeked, glowing with the spirit of youth. Made him smile.
“Don’t you want to dance?” the woman at his side demanded.
“No. It’s too late, Caroline. This is the last dance of the evening.”
His companion looked around in disappointment because they’d arrived when the ball was almost over.
“Oh, I suppose it’s just as well,” she exclaimed with a weary droop of her shoulders. “I am feeling sick and my head is spinning. This dreadful crowd has a very peculiar, unpleasant odor…” She covered her nose with her small fingers, wincing.
“That is the scent of the country, Caroline.”
“But indoors too?”
“Inevitably someone brings the outdoors indoors. On their shoe.”
She shuddered and clutched his arm.
Darkly amused by her performance, which seemed to suggest she’d been raised in a palace rather than three small rooms above a shop in Cheapside where her father was a glove maker, he reminded his companion, “Well, you wanted to experience a dance among the rustics, as you call them.”
Nathaniel’s fingers drummed slowly against his punch cup, recalling this tune and a time, long ago, when he’d danced to it. Turning his attention back to the dancers, he gazed beyond the faces of the people there and saw those that used to be present. Ghosts of his past.
* * *
A graceful hand in a white silk glove, its touch so light, like a fledgling bird uncertain about its perch.
A coolly knowing glance from shining green eyes beneath black, curling lashes.
Ebony hair, so startling against translucent, ivory skin.
“My mama says you’re a good-for-naught scapegrace, so you needn’t try to flirt with me. I’m only dancing with you because your sister is my friend and she asked me to. Please don’t try to impress me. It will only embarrass us both.”
Well, that told him where he stood from the start.
“Oh, I do love to be danced with as a favor to Rebecca,” he had replied with teasing hauteur as he rose from his bow. “Nothing fluffs my vanity and pride more than to know my little sister must bribe and cajole her new friends into standing up with me, Miss Makepiece.”
She’d eyed him warily, but with just a touch of curiosity and bemusement. “Your vanity requires fluffing? It seems every bit as plumped up already as a proud songbird’s chest feathers.”
Immediately he had noticed two very alluring things about her. No, not her bubbies—although they would come to his notice too, in time. Nathaniel had been drawn first to the young lady’s very dark and shapely eyebrows. Like the stalks of two restless exclamation marks that had fallen over onto their sides, they emphasized everything she said, made every word seem important and challenging, even when it came in such a calm voice. Not just calm, he reconsidered, but emotionless. The eyebrows gave away what her voice would not.
Her steady, poised hand laid over his own forced Nathaniel to slow down, to look where he was going for once. Diana Makepiece moved with elegant, ladylike steps and didn’t erupt into giggles like many girls her age with whom he danced. She even danced this rather wild country jig with grace. She made everyone around them look like concussed drunkards with two left feet. Especially him.
Other people had watched her with quiet admiration, for her looks were very refined and unusual, exotic for the Buckinghamshire countryside. He’d heard it speculated—in hushed tones—that her father was possibly of foreign blood, although whether that blood was Greek, Italian, Spanish, Cornish, or Irish no one could confirm.
Much to Nathaniel’s frustration, his practiced, teasing wit was not enough to win a smile from her lips. But when he stubbed his toe, she smirked and her brows twitched. His infamous charm couldn’t raise the slightest blush, yet her slender shoulders shook with the effort of remaining somber when he was prodded in the eye by the tall feather in another lady’s hair. Thus he discovered a strange way to amuse the ice maiden. Good thing he was naturally clumsy. And hardheaded.
* * *
“What are you smiling at, Sherry?” His companion nudged his arm again in a habit that was becoming as annoying as the presence of a persistent fly buzzing around the dregs of his punch.
“Was I?” Nathaniel didn’t want to share those memories with Caroline, so he put his smile away and shuttered the little scene that had played through his mind’s window.
His green-eyed girl must be Mrs. Shaw by now. Don’t think of her. He had promised himself he would not, yet barely a quarter of an hour in that room had brought her back to him.
How different she was from the woman on his arm tonight, he thought, glancing down at Caroline. How had he become burdened with this spoiled, loud creature? She liked to say they were two wounded souls together, and they did rather limp along. “We’re two of a kind,” she often remarked.
He hoped not. It had given him a jolt to hear that she considered her personality and habits to be the same as his.
Caroline was a divorcée, cast off by her husband, Admiral Sayles, after a scandalous affair with an exiled French aristocrat. She scrabbled along from one rel
uctant host to the next, getting money where she could. Now she’d turned to Nathaniel for assistance, and having known her in his younger years, he felt he should come to her aid. He had never been able to deny a woman in distress. Unfortunately, his gallant spirit had a habit of earning him more trouble than praise. In this case that was certainly true, for since he’d offered her a helping hand, she had not shown any desire to release it, instead holding on with a fierce grip.
“Since my dear cousin Eleanor was lost to typhus only weeks before her wedding, I’m quite certain her mother will welcome my company to cheer her spirits,” Caroline had said. “My aunt is always inviting me to visit her in Bath.”
“Yes, but does she expect you to accept the invite? A surprise visit is often more imposition than anything else.”
Caroline’s only concern, however, was for herself. “A change of scenery and air will certainly be of benefit to me. My health suffers. I have been betrayed and abandoned, left to manage as best I can. Why would my own aunt turn me away?”
Since no one else would help her, Nathaniel had assumed the task of delivering Caroline safely to the one remaining relative who might take her in, but on the way he had business to tend. They were obliged to stop here overnight, and Caroline, hearing by chance about the assembly room dance, would not cease her moaning until he agreed to take her. In truth, he had felt some curiosity to see the place again. One of his old hunting grounds.
“At least let’s get some more punch, Sherry,” she exclaimed. “I’m parched. It’s too hot in here. I fear I might faint. I am very dizzy.”
He offered to find her a chair, but she preferred her place standing at the edge of the dance floor. “Goodness no, why would I sit with those old ladies and chaperones? No one can see my dress if I sit down.”
“But I thought you were not feeling well.”
“I do suffer a steadily increasing weakness and the most awful pains through all my joints,” she insisted, suddenly remembering that fact. “Not that anyone ever cares.” With this said, however, she declared herself capable of remaining upright at least until he returned with her replenished cup. As long as he was not gone too long.
Nathaniel left her tapping her feet at the side of the room while he returned to the table of refreshments by the door.
As he waited to refill Caroline’s punch cup, he felt a sudden stroke of air that seemed, somehow, in that stifling ballroom, to have found its way under his tall collar. He glanced up.
A woman had just walked over to a nearby window and opened it. With her back to Nathaniel, she shooed a small bird out into the fresh, spring night air, and then she stood there a moment, probably taking a few cooling breaths herself. She had dark hair, a slender neck devoid of jewelry, and a plain gown with a high collar. He thought for one dreadful moment that she might be Diana’s mother, that old termagant Mrs. Rosalind Makepiece. The memories were certainly haunting him tonight.
The woman in the dull-colored, unflattering dress still had her back to him as she walked away into the mob, struggling against the flow. Now he knew it couldn’t be Mrs. Makepiece, or that cluster of young girls would have parted as quickly as the sea for Moses. Nobody ever got in that woman’s way.
Except Nathaniel, of course. He had never stood aside for her.
“I do not like you, sir,” Mrs. Makepiece had said to him once. “My daughter is destined for greater things.”
Well, at least she was direct, but since he didn’t particularly care whether she liked him or not, her comment didn’t prevent his appreciation of Diana. When Nathaniel found a woman he fancied, he pursued her energetically and without disguising his intentions, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. He seized life by the seed bags, to put it bluntly, and saw no cause to limit his own happiness to please others.
Ah, he thought suddenly, perhaps Caroline Sayles was more right than he cared for her to be when she pointed out their similarities.
His sister used to laugh at him. “I’ve never seen you work so hard, Nate! You put more determination and dedication into chasing Diana than you put into anything.”
He knew his sister thought it was merely a teasing game of sorts, a challenge to his vanity. Nathaniel had thought the same. In the beginning.
The first sign of something different being afoot came when old habits and the familiar parade of petticoats and pretty faces no longer made him content. But Nathaniel could not reconcile himself to the idea of giving up all other women for the sake of one. He believed in “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” his favorite poem—the only one he’d ever memorized—being “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”
And Diana certainly never encouraged his attentions.
But when he heard news of her engagement to another man, Nathaniel was cast utterly adrift. Sinking deeper and deeper into a violent depression, he’d come up with a list of three possible plans over several jugs of ale at the local tavern.
One. Kill W. Shaw.
Two. Kidnap D. Makepiece (until she concedes her mistake).
Three. Kill W. Shaw.
He was never a very great schemer.
In the end, having sobered up only slightly, he proposed marriage to her instead. It was ill-planned, badly timed, and desperate. He had no experience with humility.
Not that she considered any of this to be a mitigating circumstance.
In his mind now, he heard Diana’s voice as clearly as it had been when she berated him on the last day he saw her. Even then she had spoken coldly, condescendingly, using emphasis without raising her voice.
“Nathaniel Sherringham, you’re a boy! You don’t know what you want from life. You greet every day as if it’s your first and yet your last. You have no direction, no discipline, and no appreciation for the consequences of your actions. As my mama says, everything for you is about the pleasure of the moment, and your fancies are too fleeting.
“How can you look after a wife when you cannot look after yourself? This ridiculous proposal is nothing more than another impulsive, addlebrained idea upon which you would merrily wager—like betting on an outside chance in a horse race just because you feel sorry for the beast or like the color of his tail. Well, I, sir, do not gamble.”
A sharp pain stabbed deeply through his chest as he thought again of those green eyes shimmering with light and shade. The gently arched brows seeming bemused, pitying him for that maladroit proposal.
Then had come the severing cut to his pride when she left him waiting on that old stone bridge until he could no longer imagine she might come. Apparently even laying open his heart to her in that foolish note, fired by sling through her window, had not thawed her feelings for him.
Still watching the slow, awkward progress of the bird rescuer across the hall, he saw her stumble. Whether she was pushed accidentally by the surging crowd, or whether it was the fault of her own unsteady footing, he couldn’t be sure. Seeing that she was quite unnoticed by anyone else, Nathaniel put down his empty cups and moved swiftly toward her.
A large gentleman had unknowingly caught the hem of her gown under his chair leg, and as he talked and laughed loudly with his drunken companions, the woman’s distress was ignored by all. Nathaniel thought he must be the only one who could hear her agitated, “Excuse me.”
He moved forward quickly, demanding that folk stand aside. The woman swiveled around, her hands tugging on her skirt. Apparently she’d decided to sacrifice the gown rather than try further polite methods to get her captor’s attention.
Nathaniel arrived behind the loud group, ready to help. “Madam, can I—?”
She looked up, startled and annoyed.
And he gazed down into a pair of simmering spring-green eyes. The light in them was livid, tart, frustrated. But upon seeing him, it changed immediately to astonishment and alarm, then something akin to fear, before it flickered and died away, like a candle flame caught in a
draft.
Now those eyes were dull, empty.
He could not speak. He could barely take a breath.
Was it only three years and six months since he last saw her?
“Diana.” The name burst out of him, just when he thought his tongue was frozen by her icy regard. “Diana?”
She was so changed, frail and faded.
“Captain Sherringham,” she replied, her voice tired, her head bowed as she looked down at her trapped skirt again. “You’re back.”
The weary resignation in her voice irritated him. He might as well be a returning infestation of greenfly, he thought angrily. Now she would not even look up, intent on hiding her face.
He recovered enough to reply with his customary jocular teasing. “Yes, I am returned, but don’t worry. I shan’t blot the horizon long with my presence.”
“That will be a pity for some ladies, I’m sure. You’ll still find some addled enough and at liberty to seek a rake’s company.”
“Good. I do love a woman with a taste for merry thrills.”
“And thrillingly merry bad taste.”
She wrestled with her skirt, but since she didn’t have the physical strength to secure her escape, her actions became more frantic and even less effective. The large fellow now noticed her struggle and tried to move his chair, but only succeeded in dragging the leg further along her skirt and rending a larger hole in the hem.
Where was her husband? Nathaniel wondered. Why did William Shaw leave his wife unattended?
Nathaniel folded his arms. “I came over to make this gentleman move off your gown, yet I hear not a word of thanks.”
“Fortunately, Captain, I haven’t been waiting around for you to save me,” she muttered.
“I didn’t imagine you had. It would have been foolish to do so, since you gave me my marching orders once before.”
How To Rescue A Rake (Book Club Belles Society 3) Page 2