And he would never truly know peace until he’d discharged that debt.
He wondered if Olivia Eversea, who had remained in Sussex while Redmond had taken to the seas, would recognize the man Lyon had become.
Was love something you helplessly fell into, like quicksand? Was love for another person something you could learn, like Latin? Or was love for one particular person something you were born with, or, like a fever, lay dormant, until that one person for you happened along and released it?
He didn’t know, and he suspected Olivia didn’t, either. Not knowing absolved neither of them of making the choices life forced them into making, so that life could move, as was its nature, ever forward.
“IF YOU WOULD hold this please while I see to my hair.” Lady Prideux thrust a shawl at Elise without looking at her or waiting for a response. It was not a question.
This made it easier to study Lady Prideux up close. Her nose was a perfect incline ending in an insouciant tilt above a pale blossom of a mouth. She had a slight and quite fetching overbite. Her skin was Sevres fine.
She was absolutely stunning.
For an evil person.
And then Alexandra looked up sharply, as if she’d felt the heat of Elise’s gaze.
She froze.
Ah, so she recognizes me, after all.
To the credit of her conscience at least, Lady Prideux went a little pink.
“Oh, it’s you, Mrs. . . . Fountain.”
“Yes. We meet again, Lady Prideux.” Elise curtsied.
“My apologies. I didn’t recognize you out of context. This is quite a different position for you, isn’t it?”
There was a hint of cold glee in her tone.
“I suppose it is.”
“I didn’t know you were working for Phil—that is, Lord Lavay. I call him Philippe, of course.”
“Of course,” Elise said smoothly. Her back teeth clamped down. The word felt wrong, wrong, wrong when Lady Prideux said it. The word belonged to Elise.
“I’m so glad to see you landed on your feet,” Alexandra enthused insincerely. Confident, apparently, that Elise was now invisible because she was a servant.
Lady Prideux settled in at the vanity and turned her head this way and that, either admiring herself for the five hundred thousandth time, or seeking any imperfections that might have sprung up between her trip from her home to Alder House.
Elise studied her, too, imagining with relish where she would first jab Lady Prideux with a pin, if she was so inclined.
Lady Prideux whirled, and Elise schooled her face to stillness.
“I trust there are no hard feelings over what transpired about my sister,” Lady Prideux said with a gushing and wholly manufactured warmth. “It is just that our family is so very particular about the moral education of our girls, and Colette is so very, very sensitive. I’m sure you understand why I did what I did. Given that you’re a . . . mother.” She purred all of this.
Colette was in fact a beautiful, stupid, and mean little girl, and Elise normally gave the benefit of the doubt to her students at least a dozen times before drawing any such conclusion about any of them. There might be hope for her. She refused to believe there wasn’t, but with a sister like this one, Elise despaired of this.
But this wasn’t why Lady Prideux had gone to such cold and calculated lengths to ensure that Elise was removed from her position. As she had told Lavay when he’d probed, Elise had indeed spoken out of turn, in the heat of caring about a student, and had apparently gravely insulted Lady Prideux. Who, not content with being merely beautiful, wanted also to be thought intelligent.
“Let us put it all behind us, shall we?” Lady Prideux didn’t wait for Elise to agree to that. “I expect to become engaged very soon,” she confided on a girlish whisper. “Perhaps even tonight. I should like to look my best.” She gave a self-conscious little laugh. “What do you think?”
“Your coiffure is beautiful, Lady Prideux.”
“It took four maids and half an evening to achieve it,” Alexandra said with some satisfaction. “And still it seems to be coming loose.” She fussed with one of the diamond-tipped pins. “If you would assist?”
She said this imperiously. And likely just for the pleasure of giving Elise an order.
With shaking hands, Elise took the proffered pin and slid it back where it belonged, though she sincerely thought it belonged jabbed somewhere into Lady Prideux’s soft skin. Her stomach turned, imaging Philippe touching this woman’s hair, which presumably he would do if he married her.
“Well, I’m off to dance with Philippe,” Alexandra said. She studied Elise, as if to make certain she was still more beautiful. Elise had noticed that women like Lady Prideux often did this, assessing where their beauty fell in comparison to other women’s beauty.
Apparently satisfied, Alexandra turned to leave.
Elise stopped her. “Oh, Lady Prideux—I fear your hair is still sliding a bit in the back.”
Alexandra halted.
“Oh, dear. Would you please, Mrs. Fountain?”
She presented her slender back to Elise.
Elise slid a pin from its place, carefully detached one of the fine braids from its latticed position, pulled it gently, surreptitiously upward, and pinned it very, very carefully so that it thrust vertically up from the center of Alexandra’s head.
“There. Now you look perfect,” Elise said warmly.
Perfectly like a unicorn.
“Thank you, Mrs. Fountain,” Lady Prideux said, as if there had never been any doubt. Then she sailed back into the ballroom.
“I FIND I should like a breath of fresh air. I don’t suppose you can call your gathering a crush, Philippe, but I find I am breathless anyway. Perhaps you can escort me to an open window, or . . . the garden?”
Philippe gave a start when he saw her.
A narrow braid rose up from the middle of her head, not unlike a cobra preparing to strike. Then again, the caprices of fashion often eluded him, and she was, after all, fresh from Paris.
“Certainement,” he agreed warmly. His eyes warily on the rearing cobra braid, he extended his arm.
He led her toward the crowd to the French doors that opened out on the garden.
“Aarrgh! It’s looking at me!” a young man said, pointing at Alexandra’s vertical braid. “It has an antenna and it’s looking at me!”
“Don’t mind him—he’s drunk,” his friend said. But he eyed Alexandra uneasily.
“Splendid,” Philippe said smoothly. “I’m glad you’re enjoying the evening.”
“What was he talking about, Philippe?”
“Probably an hallucination of some sort.”
Heads turned and eyes widened as they proceeded through the room, but Alexandra took all of it as flattery.
AFTER LADY PRIDEUX departed, Elise fled the cloakroom—leaving an excited Mary and Kitty in charge of it—and scrambled up the stairs to peer in at Jack.
She exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and paused to watch him. Jack’s even breathing was the best song in the world. She lingered for a stolen moment, basking in the perfection of him and in a pure cleansing blast of love.
She moved to her own chamber, dragging her hand across the back of her friend and beautiful gift, the brown chair, then paused to look out the window.
A pair of shadows was strolling in the garden below.
Carefully, slowly, she raised her window a few inches.
The voices became audible. Not the actual words; just the low rumble and lilt of conversation.
She heard laughter.
A woman’s laughter.
She saw the tip of a lit cheroot move in the dark, like a firefly. A man was gesturing broadly about something.
Being French.
The night was cool
and clear and stars hung like tiny icicles, an echo of the chandeliers inside.
She felt as isolated from those aristocrats in the garden as one of those stars, suspended millions of miles away from them, up in the quarters of a housekeeper. Powerless to do anything but watch.
So she watched them, almost as a form of penance.
She had no doubt that was Lady Prideux. Elise wondered if the moonlight made her vertical braid cast a shadow at her feet as they walked.
How many times had Philippe done this throughout his life—how many parties and balls had he attended, how many women had he held in his arms, taken into his bed, walked with in gardens?
He might find happiness with the awful Lady Prideux, who was, after all, a member of his species. But Elise didn’t want to witness it. The very thought made it feel like the ground was opening up beneath her feet like a trapdoor into oblivion.
“Fallen woman.” The term made a sort of poetic sense. Once the fall started, it seemed it never stopped.
She closed her eyes and remembered the kiss, and how his eyes had been hot and bewitched and uncertain, and how he had tasted, and how he had trembled when he’d touched her, and how hurt and closed his face had gone when she’d pushed him away.
And as the sensations surged through her, hot and bright and as dangerous as the edge of a blade, she brought her fingers to her mouth, pressed her lips against them, and closed her eyes.
As if kissing him good-bye.
PHILIPPE AND ALEXANDRA trod along the moonlit path toward a bench between a pair of tired shrubbery.
A distant giggle told Philippe they weren’t the first couple to have this idea.
“Philippe, I haven’t yet asked—how are you enjoying Pennyroyal Green?”
“How do I like Pennyroyal Green . . . let us say it’s no wonder the Eversea family is known to be so wild. They’ve gone wild out of necessity, due to boredom.”
She laughed softly.
“Surely it’s not as awful as all of that. The pretty hills, the view of the sea, the picturesque buildings, the picturesque villagers . . . the picturesque housekeepers.”
He shot her a sharp sidelong look.
“Certainement, the Redmonds and Everseas are easy to look at,” he said evenly.
“And cannot you go out and do manly things? Shoot creatures, and the like?”
“The weather hasn’t cooperated with those kinds of activities, unfortunately. Perhaps I am restless, now that I am feeling more myself. It will be a pleasure to be in my own home again, or to be on my own ship. I have never been comfortable in limbo.”
“I understand,” she soothed. “One does like to have one’s own things about, and men do not abide well when trapped in little country houses, like pets. And you’ve grown so accustomed to having dangerous men leap out at you.”
“The squirrels do a fair amount of leaping. Other than that, my reflexes remain unchallenged.”
“And the options for servants are so limited here in the country that service is wanting, and how do you say, avoir le mal du pays. One feels more at home in the hands of servants who were trained, who come from a lineage of servants, like my dear butler Francois. I do think a talent for serving your betters is inbred, don’t you? Instead, you must settle for that common woman running your current household.”
He paused then.
“That . . . common woman?” he repeated mildly.
The words echoed with a peculiar dissonance. Never in a million years would he ascribe “common” to Elise.
The back of his neck prickled a warning.
“Yes. Though she seems competent enough in her present role.” Alexandra waved a gloved arm about to indicate the general success of the festivities. “You look well fed, and the house hasn’t yet burned down. I suppose it is all one can hope for from the staff one can find here in the country.”
“Forgive me, but your tone of insinuation puzzles me. Do you have a prior acquaintance with my housekeeper?”
She tilted her head to study him there in the cloud-filtered moonlight, then made a little moue and gave him a sympathetic little tap with her fan.
“Ah, forgive me, Philippe. It hadn’t occurred to me that you hadn’t heard. I thought perhaps you had simply settled for the lesser of all the evils presented to you when hiring a housekeeper. But then, one wouldn’t expect you to indulge in local, provincial gossip. A very few people do know and have been all that is discreet about it, so it should not reflect upon you or your character. I assumed when you hired that woman you knew why she was removed from her position at the school and had made your decision accordingly.”
“Her name is Mrs. Fountain.”
He said it almost silkily.
If Alexandra called her “that woman” again, he was afraid he’d do something rash.
Only the Earl of Ardmay would have been able to tell just how utterly furious Philippe was now.
And Elise, perhaps.
“Of course it is. Mrs. . . . Fountain.” Alexandra gave an unpleasant little laugh.
Philippe’s patience expired. “It is unlike you, Alexa, to be coy. Mrs. Fountain’s character was represented to me as unassailable by the Redmond family, which was sufficient for me to hire her, and I have thus far found no fault in her ability to run the house. She has in fact made me quite . . .” There was, in fact, no single word that encompassed just exactly what she’d done to and for him. “. . . comfortable.”
What a ridiculously inadequate word. Nearly a lie. He almost laughed. He’d felt a good many things in Elise’s presence, but comfortable, lately, wasn’t one of them.
“It is clear she cannot be faulted for the way she has managed your establishment,” Alexandra allowed magnanimously. “And she’s doubtless certainly more than qualified to be a housekeeper, of all things. She was raised gently enough and was apparently hired to teach young ladies a number of subjects at Miss Marietta Endicott’s esteemed academy. It’s just that her character doesn’t belong in an academy for young ladies. Below stairs is just the place, among those of like temperaments. I just don’t believe women who possess, shall we say . . .” She lowered her voice discreetly, though they were entirely alone. “. . . low impulses . . . ought to be teaching young girls, especially those troublesome enough to be admitted to the academy. Though I maintain the girls are merely high spirited, not, as popularly assumed, recalcitrant.”
He knew Alexandra’s youngest sister had been admitted to the academy.
“Low impulses?” he repeated, incredulously.
“Yes.”
Alexandra was serious.
Suddenly he thought of Elise’s laughter, the rise and fall of it, so like music, so like a reward that he thought he would do nearly anything to earn it. The songs that careened off melody but were impressively well rhymed.
The apple tarts.
The look on her face when she watched her son—a look that tightened his throat.
The little sound she’d made in her throat when he’d kissed her.
The soft, God, the soft, generous yield of her lips.
His impulses seemed to originate from a place lower on his body.
Hers seemed to emanate from some inner grace. Some innate warmth.
A variety of emotions, now stretched him on some sort of internal rack, each fighting for supremacy.
The one that prevailed was a very nonspecific, cold fury.
Listening to Alexandra, he suddenly understood the rabble’s low impulse to divest aristocrats of their heads.
“I’m sure you’ll understand when I ask you to expound, given that she is an employee of my home,” he said smoothly.
“Oh, I’m certain she’s harmless enough, and her ability to perform her current duties seems unquestionable, but her past . . . well, I fear it’s rather . . . unsavory.”
She
whispered that last word.
He was tempted to do something shockingly violent, like reach out with both hands and vigorously muss Alexandra’s hair. He could imagine the shrieking.
“Rest assured, my dear Alexandra, that I am impossible to shock. Providing your delicate sensibilities can withstand revisiting the occasion upon which you learned about Mrs. Fountain’s . . . low impulses . . . would you be so kind as to elaborate?”
She blinked at his tone, which, granted, was rather more militant than usual. Then she drew in a long breath, clearly enjoying the notion that her sensibilities were delicate, and lowered her voice and spoke in a rapid hush.
“His name was Mr. Edward Blaylock. He was the son of a solicitor, training to be a solicitor in London, and he came to see his young sister settled in the school. I’m told he was quite handsome—he was the talk of the teachers. But his attention settled upon Mrs. Fountain. They walked out together, he came to call evenings . . . well, let us just say that apparently the courtship wasn’t a secret. And then one day he was gone. And nine months later her son was born, though it was somehow kept very sub-rosa, you see, and very few people knew, and she continued on in her position there. And . . . well, as you know, her name isn’t Mrs. Blaylock. For a reason.”
The sensation seemed to leave his limbs. He recognized it as quite similar to that infinitesimal moment between the time the sword goes in and the time the pain starts.
Suddenly the beautiful starry sky seemed terrifyingly infinite and impersonal.
What must it have looked like to Elise when she’d learned she was pregnant?
Jack’s father is gone, she’d said.
Jack’s “quite handsome” father was gone.
“Philippe?”
Apparently he hadn’t said anything for quite some time.
“From whom did you learn this, Alexandra?”
His voice was even and steady, but he heard it as if from a distance. He still felt peculiarly empty, waiting for the right emotion to pour in. He wasn’t certain how he felt.
There was an interesting pause.
“One of the servants at the school shared the information.”
It Started with a Scandal Page 20