by Edith Layton
It was a long while later that the horses slowed.
Elizabeth let out a long shaking breath to find herself still intact and at a standstill. The Earl jumped down in one long fluid movement, and then, tethering the horses to a tree, came round to offer Elizabeth his hand to descend. Seeing that he still held his walking stick, she attempted to descend without his help.
“You will break your leg if you distain my hand,” he told her through gritted teeth.
She took his hand and found to her surprise that his strength was such that he hardly needed to bear his own weight upon the stick when he received hers.
Once on blessed firm ground again, Elizabeth took a hurried look around her. They were indeed, she thought, in a place where they could have private conversation.
A pond lay before them, in a natural hollow of the land. Great willows grew to one side of it and a long meadow stretched on beyond it. Wildflowers grew in profusion among the boulders to one side, and there was a beaten path that encircled the whole. Oddly, though it seemed an untouched bucolic landscape, there were two wrought metal benches along the path, one on either side of the pond.
“This,” the Earl said as he walked toward the farther bench, “was a family conceit. Simon called it our ‘last outpost.’ For, you see, half the pond belongs to Lyonshall and the other to our near neighbor, Jason Thomas, Duke of Torquay. My brother was used to spend much time here as well, poor chap, since it was the nearest he could get to foreign travel, he often said. He and the Duke were great friends; they planned the place together. Although two more different sorts of fellows seldom inhabited the earth together,” he mused. “Jason was quite the rake,” the Earl said, continuing down the path, “but now he’s married and the most conventional paterfamilias one could imagine. It is always the same with those reformed fellows. And as he is momentarily expecting his third or fourth dependent, I cannot remember which, it is unlikely he will intrude upon us. We shall have the place to ourselves and you can unburden yourself entirely without fear of interruption.”
Having achieved the farther metal bench, the Earl sat, stretched out his long legs, and indicated that Elizabeth sit beside him.
“Now, then,” the Earl said with a cold smile, “begin.”
Elizabeth paused to marshal her thoughts and was about to speak when he went on, “What could it be? Is it that Anthony is not Anthony Courtney at all, but some impostor? Did the two of you do away with the infant Anthony Courtney years ago, like the little prince in the tower, in expectation of his future inheritance?”
She laughed at the absurdity, but before she could begin, he continued, “Or could it be that the true Anthony Courtney is even now the unhappy resident of Bedlam, or perhaps your Anthony himself is merely on parole from that august institution?”
Hearing her bubbling laughter ring out across the water, the Earl paused and then said carefully, “Or is it that you are not precisely his ‘cousin’ at all, but rather his wife or lover?”
The cold manner in which the last was said caused Elizabeth to gasp, cutting off her amused laughter in an instant.
“That is a monstrous thought!” she cried, half-rising in her agitation. “Even to say in jest!”
The Earl stayed her. “Sit down, Elizabeth, and grant me pardon,” he said wearily. “It was indeed monstrous. I have been told that before. Go on, then. For you see, your hesitation gives rise to the most bizarre ruminations.”
“Of course Anthony is who he says he is. And I am his cousin. I have raised him from infancy,” she said angrily.
She paused for a moment and then turned to face the Earl and looked him full in the eye. She was now both angry and insulted, so her words tumbled out, clear and sharp in the mild afternoon air.
“It is only that we have presented ourselves under false colors. You see,” she went on, drawing in a deep breath, “we are poor. Actually very poor. The clothes I stand in, the garments Anthony wears, all our finery was purchased from the proceeds of the sale of family bibelots. You might say that a Dresden shepherdess paid for this frock, Uncle’s chiming watch accounts for Anthony’s riding clothes, and a small horse painting by Stubbs for all my slippers and fans and buckles. Uncle lost his fortune years ago, and we, his two sisters, and Anthony and I, all live on what little remains. We are, in effect, that cliché, ‘poor relations.’ I did not have a season in London. Not because of my mother’s fragile health, but because the cost was so prohibitive, I could not. In fact,” Elizabeth said, pausing to note with a certain wrenching pride the startled look upon the Earl’s face, “my mother enjoys the stoutest constitution. It was only another excuse for our poverty. Just as my refusal to ride was. For I do like horses. Very much, in fact. But we never could stable one, and it is difficult to learn to ride the kitchen cat. Which,” she said in rising anger, “is the only livestock we can afford to keep. For he catches his own dinner each night.”
“And,” the Earl said with an oddly contorted expression, “that is more than I can say for my Scimitar. Quite right,” he said, and then, to her complete amazement, he began to roar with laughter.
“Oh, pardon me, Elizabeth,” he finally said, subsiding. “It is only that you looked so fierce. And that I had expected quite another sort of confession. But why in heaven’s name did you strip the family coffers for this imposture as wealthy young springs of fashion?”
“Because,” she said sorrowfully, “Uncle thought that you were an elderly gentleman of conservative leanings. He felt quite strongly that you would distain a poor relation, and choose a wealthy one as heir instead. He said that was the way of the world.”
“Perhaps,” the Earl mused, looking at Elizabeth with a softened expression, “that is true, after all. But not, as you must know, in my case. Then this is the whole of the secret matter you wished to confide to me?”
Elizabeth looked into his eyes and saw such a tender expression there that she had at once to lower her gaze.
“No,” she whispered. “Not quite all.”
As she was looking out toward the placid waters of the pond, she did not see his expression alter. Nor see the way he closed his eyes slowly, as if in pain. What now? he thought, for they always begin with the least and then pile up truth upon truth till the whole is indeed monstrous. As he waited for her to begin, he could hear very faintly the echoes of another soft voice saying, “No. It was not the first time. Yes, there were others. Many others.” He seemed to hear Elizabeth’s voice from just as far away. And then he sat up sharply, as the sense of her words finally registered upon his reverie.
“What?” he almost shouted.
“I work,” Elizabeth repeated sadly.
“You work?” he asked in honest perplexity.
“Yes,” she said. “I am a shopgirl. Only,” she added with more spirit, for she was proud of her advancement in the world, even in the face of the fact that a man such as the Earl might be shocked by it, “I am rather more than that. I design bonnets as well,” she said, lifting her chin and staring at him defiantly, “and I do that very well. Miss Scott says I have a natural talent for it. So though I do sell hats, I also have a hand in creating them. And they are very good ones. Although,” she added with painstaking honesty, “I do not fashion the forms. We get those from London. But I do the trimmings. And I select the color schemes and nettings and….”
The Earl stared at her as though she had said “I murder” rather than “I work,” and Elizabeth, with sinking spirits, was about to rise and go back to the standing carriage, when he said incredulously, “That is the whole of it?”
“Yes,” she said defiantly. “And I would have told you long before this, but I could not get Anthony alone to get his consent. So I sought him out the other night in his rooms and he agreed we make a clean breast of it. And if you now think us too far beneath you to consider as equals, we shall quite understand. We shall understand your attitude, at least. But we do not consider ourselves to be inferior in any fashion, except perhaps,” she said with ab
andon, burning her bridges behind her, “socially.”
“Elizabeth,” the Earl said, placing one long-fingered hand aside her flushed cheek and gazing into her sunlit topaz eyes, “you are wrong. For it is I who am your inferior, I think. I entertained the most nonsensical notions about your state when you told me you had a ‘thing’ to be honest about. I wrenched you from Simon’s garden because I thought what you were about to say was so…yes, monstrous, that it would profane that peaceful place for me forever. I apologize for that. But if you think I distain your condition or your courage, or your enterprise in working, then you are as wrong as I was in my estimation of you. Forgive me, Elizabeth. I have little faith in your sex, but I had no right to visit that deficiency upon you.”
Elizabeth stared raptly into his eyes, and would have forgiven him anything, including murder most vile, but only said shyly, “I cannot forgive a sin that was not committed. For you only thought the worst of me. And if we were to condemn thoughts of others, we should never have a soul to talk with.”
“To talk with,” the Earl repeated softly, as though mesmerized by the changing sparkles of glinting light in her eyes. “Yes, that is the important thing, Elizabeth,” he said, watching her closely, noting the arch of her neck, the provocative lift of her breasts, and the way the dancing refracted light struck shimmer from her clean light hair. “I am glad that you have unburdened yourself to me. Secrets are damnable things. If you have one in your keeping, it tends to grow alarmingly, as though it fed upon your silence. And they litter, you know, like barn cats in the dark.”
She was gazing at him with a soft and quizzical expression and he wondered again at how many other secrets she had in her close keeping. She had said that she had told him all, and now here she sat, so relieved and so seemingly open and yielding to him. He could not ask her for another secret, but he distrusted her air of innocence. She had enchanted him, and had tempted him more than he wished to admit since he had grown to know her in the few short weeks of her stay at Lyonshall. He wanted to believe her, to toss all his hard-earned knowledge of the world away and believe her entirely. But he could not. He knew of only one other way to try to breach her innermost thoughts and discover her entirely.
The Earl tore his gaze from the smiling girl and stared out over the placid pond for a moment. Then he turned back to her with a peculiarly wrenched grin.
“Elizabeth,” he said into the silence that had been broken only by birdsong till his words were spoken, “do you know why an affirmed rake like my neighbor, the Duke, agreed so readily to construct this little oasis of civilization in partnership with my scholarly brother?”
Though her thoughts said clearly “of course not,” Elizabeth found she was only capable of nodding denial as she looked steadily at the lean countenance before her. The Earl had moved so close to her she could see the way his now green eyes studied each new tension upon her face and could feel his warm breath upon her cheek.
“The Duke had many house parties in his dissolute days,” he began quietly, “and though he was admittedly as wild a nobleman as one could encounter, still he was, after all, a gentleman born.”
The Earl’s eyes danced with laughter as he went on, “And he knew that no gentleman could ever force his attentions upon a female in his own house who was harbored there as his guest. It just is not the thing, you know. So two benches were placed here at the boundary of Lyonshall and the Duke’s lands. One sits upon our grounds and the other, the one we now adorn, lies on Torquay’s lands. The center of the pond, you see, is the boundary line. Thus, the Duke could quite properly walk a lady around the water and court her there as ardently as he pleased. And no one could say that he was going beyond the bounds of propriety, for after all, she was not upon his own lands.
“Elizabeth,” he said caressingly, “we are not, strictly speaking, at Lyonshall now. And you are not, just as strictly speaking, at my mercy as my guest. I never thought to use the Duke’s own device, but I should like to now. May I?” he asked softly.
Again Elizabeth was without speech. Although not quite sure of his meaning, but as though mesmerized by his gentle voice and face, she gave him a small affirmative nod.
She felt his lips, warm and soft, lightly touch upon her own. And a moment later, found herself in his arms, and discovered herself overjoyed to be there. When he at last raised his head, and she at last could open her eyes to look at him, she found he was gazing at her with a searching expression. He looked into her wide and dazzled eyes, and with a low utterance, drew her to himself again. This time his mouth was as warm and searching as his gaze had been, and he deepened their embrace. She felt herself responding to him and answering his unspoken question fully and freely even though she had never experienced such a total encompassing of her senses before. His hands moved her as they searched intimately upon her, and still she stayed lost in his arms.
At last it was he who ended the embrace. He drew back and studied her again. She was too shaken by emotion, her eyes too blurred with unshed tears at her sudden thought, to see his expression clearly. For if she had, she would have seen that it was not loverlike in the least, but rather a look of chillingly cold appraisal. For he was waiting to hear her response to him. He had felt her body’s response, but it was not enough. He awaited her spoken words. Would she say, he wondered, “Oh, no, we must not!” with shy confusion, as Kitty had? Or, “How lovely,” as all his light ladies did? She could not know that either answer, from either pole, would have damned her forever in his heart.
But she gave the one answer that no female ever had. As he watched, two huge tears gathered in her eyes. And to his growing consternation, they slowly overfilled and flowed down her cheeks, only to be followed by yet more until she was honestly weeping. Until she was weeping openly and tragically in the bright sunlight.
9
It was a scene that would have thrilled any pastoral painter. But it would have had to be done with a pastelist’s palette in order to do it true justice. For the day was a soft one, dappled with sunlight and splashed with color. The pond lay still and blue, the willows were fragile hues of tender green and yellow, the flowers were the blue of columbine and iris and the varied tints of heartsease and primrose. The two human figures complemented their surroundings. The young woman was all in sprigged green muslin, her hair a shining light brown. The gentleman was an accent piece, in russet and brown, even to his thick hair. They sat as if posed upon an ornate wrought metal bench. But the scene would have appealed perhaps to only a select few artists, those that favored somewhat maudlin, dramatic postures. For the lovely young woman was covering her eyes and weeping as though her heart was broken and the tall elegant gentleman was bent toward her as if in supplication.
“No, Elizabeth, you must not,” the Earl said as he withdrew a clean white square of linen from his pocket and pressed it upon the weeping girl, while saying in real confusion, “Have done. Really. I haven’t compromised you, you know. It was only a kiss. I thought you wanted it as much as I. Truly, Elizabeth, you must not weep so.”
Were they actually so provincial in Tuxford? the Earl wondered with alarm. They did not live in such gothic times that a kiss meant a lady’s honor, or at least not in the circles he traveled in, and it was not as though he had forced her to it. She was of age, and had come willingly to this deserted spot with a gentleman, both alone and unchaperoned. Or was it, a small thought intruded, a ploy to wring a declaration from him? Was that what she was angling for with all this sobbing? But taking another look at her as she sat frantically dabbing at her eyes and taking deep breaths to control herself, he doubted she was actress enough to give such a spontaneous performance.
“Come, Elizabeth,” he said gently, taking another tack. “Would you feel better if we had Anthony call me out when we return?”
“Oh, it is not that,” she wailed, a new freshet of tears springing forth.
“No one has as yet written a sonnet to my lovemaking,” he tried again, “but really, I have nev
er reduced a female to a puddle before. I am sorry,” he went on a little desperately, “that you disliked it so, but I promise, I vow, I will never do it again.”
“Oh, no”—Elizabeth turned a streaming face to his—“that is not it at all. I have never had such a kiss before. It was nothing you did to me,” she snuffled, trying to restrain herself. “It was rather what you must have felt. I am so sorry, Morgan,” she went on, in her extremity using his Christian name.
“What I felt?” the Earl echoed in amazement.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said disjointedly, “and knowing what I do, it was cruel of me.”
“What in fiend’s name do you know?” The Earl raised his voice in consternation.
“You know,” Elizabeth whispered into the handkerchief. Her companion watched in fascination as even the tips of her ears blushed red.
“I’m a little thick today,” he said slowly. “Pray refresh my memory. Come, Elizabeth, it is not at all the thing to carry on like Niobe, and then tell me that I know why, when I haven’t a clue.”
“What Anthony told me,” she said, now foundering in embarrassment, “about your wound.” Seeing his blank look, she added, “Your other wound, why you called us all to Lyonshall. Your reason for having to select an heir,” she continued, noting the disbelieving look upon his face. “About…” She sniffed, hiding her eyes behind the handkerchief and saying with as much daring as she was capable of on such a sensitive topic, “About your…incapacity.”
Peeking out and seeing a look of startled comprehension beginning on his face, she went on hurriedly, “And it was unfair of me to permit embraces, perhaps even to encourage them, knowing that it could bring you only pain. Or regret.”