Love's Reward

by Jean R. Ewing

  Joanna longed to believe it. She longed for the desire to be left alone. But this man, who had swept into her life like a demon, could not be exorcised from it. Could not? She did not want him gone. She did not want him to leave her alone. She wanted his children.

  She stepped closer, lifting her chin, offering herself.

  Fitzroy gently touched her face, as if he might unwittingly lean forward to press his burning mouth onto hers.

  A sharp crack shattered the air.

  Birds flew up from the trees in a thunder of wing beats.

  Fitzroy lunged at Joanna to fling her down. She hit hard onto the damp ground, the smell of bruised grass and dead leaves flooding her nostrils.

  He landed on top of her, pressing her into the earth, while he cursed under his breath.

  “Damnation! Damnation!”

  The air was crushed from her lungs. He was heavy, and ruthlessly covering her body with his own.

  Joanna wanted to turn her head, but wet grass was stuck to her cheek.

  “What?” she tried to say.

  “Lie still,” he whispered. “Someone is shooting at us.”

  Chapter 11

  A second ball thudded into a tree above their heads.

  Silence. Thick. Impenetrable.

  Fitzroy quietly rolled away.

  As Joanna took a deep breath she heard the faint click of something sliding, hard and metallic. Afraid even to turn her head, she lay pinned on the ground, a small stick pressed uncomfortably into her hip.

  The undergrowth rustled, the leaves shaken by something living.

  Joanna heard it lunging past, then circling and coming back. She pressed her lids shut as the rustling came closer and stopped, only to be replaced by a loud panting. A large drop of saliva landed on her cheek.

  Swallowing her fear, she looked up. A bright yellow face with a pair of honest brown eyes grinned back. A dog, tongue lolling, sniffed at her chin. She smelt the scent of its breath and wrinkled her nose.

  Someone whistled. The dog looked around and barked.

  “It’s all right,” Fitzroy said.

  Joanna sat up, rubbing grass and dead leaves from her hair.

  “Are you quite mad?” she asked.

  Fitzroy was sitting with his back against a tree trunk, staring up at the canopy of leaves overhead. Sunlight caught the strong line of his chin and throat. He held a naked blade in his right hand and he was gazing up at it. Sunlight glanced from the bright steel, running along it like fire.

  So his cane hid a sword. Richard had one just like it. Joanna supposed most of the Peninsular officers did.

  As she watched, Fitzroy thrust the blade back into its case, gave the handle a twist, and stood, once again a gentleman with an ordinary walking stick.

  Joanna scrambled to her feet unaided. “Mad, lunatic, insane, fit for Bedlam!”

  Heavy footsteps crashed through the trees, a bush shivered, and a man in leather gaiters appeared before them like the great goat god, Pan: a Pan with a bluff, shiny, weather-beaten face and black whiskers, wearing a felt hat.

  He carried a double-barreled shooting piece over one shoulder.

  “Good Lord!” he said.

  The dog trotted over to him and sat down by the gaiters, gulping the pink tongue back into its mouth.

  “Your dog, sir, has not found your bird,” Fitzroy said casually. “Perhaps because you didn’t hit it.”

  “Good Lord!” the rustic said again. “I was shooting at pigeons, sir.”

  “Perhaps you could aim a little higher next time? Then you might bag your supper, instead of causing alarm to innocent ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Well, I’m blessed!”

  Fitzroy lifted his cane and pointed to a scar in the bark of a nearby tree.

  “Hardly blessed. The trace of your ball, sir.” He moved the cane higher to indicate the treetops. “The pigeons were up there.”

  “Well, I’m blessed!” the man said again.

  “An excellent dog, sir, but a villainous aim.”

  “I’d like,” Pan replied, turning very red and panting now like his dog, “I’d like to see you do better, sir.”

  “With pleasure.”

  Fitzroy took the gun from the man and primed and reloaded each barrel in turn, ramming home the balls that Pan gave him from a pouch at his waist. It was done with a rapid, deadly precision.

  “Don’t,” Joanna said.

  She didn’t trust him. He looked wild. Beneath that careless, sarcastic humor, she could sense a great swell of anger, like the sea.

  Fitzroy raised a brow and winked at her, before turning back to the rustic with the dog.

  “Pigeon pie?” He lifted the gun. “Or shall we take the mistletoe from that oak over there?”

  He fired one barrel. The dog raced away, reappearing in moments with a small oak branch in its mouth. A clutch of mistletoe was growing at one end.

  Pan rubbed a large hand over the back of his neck.

  “Bless me, sir! You are a fair shot. Very fair, indeed. You could bring down a bird very clean, I dare say.”

  “Do you mean that?” Fitzroy swung the open mouths of the gun toward the fellow. “Can you trust your own judgment? Pray, stand still, sir, lest my hand shake.”

  The dog dropped the branch and barked.

  Joanna screamed as Fitzroy fired point blank at the man. Pan had no time to move. He stood frozen, whiskers stark against his suddenly white face.

  The smoke cleared away. A round hole punctured the felt hat near the crown.

  “For heaven’s sake!” Joanna rushed up to the man. He had taken off his hat and put one stubby finger through the hole. “I’m so very sorry, sir. Indeed, my husband will pay you compensation for your alarm.”

  Pan of the black whiskers shook his head slowly.

  “Well, I’ll be! The very devil of a shot, indeed! No need for blunt, ma’am. No need at all.” He looked up at Fitzroy, color flooding back into his face. “Fair’s fair, right enough, sir. I’m sorry if the lady had a fright—for I surely did.”

  Setting his felt cap firmly back on his black hair, the man snapped his fingers at the dog. With a quick salute, he turned and stomped off through the trees.

  The animal looked back once over its shoulder at Joanna and Fitzroy, before bounding away after its master.

  Fitzroy dropped to his heels against the nearest tree and began, quite helplessly, to laugh.

  “This is madness!” Joanna stared down at him. “You do always carry your own storm with you, don’t you?”

  “No doubt I do, but our friend with the dog could have killed you.”

  “By accident! But you very nearly murdered him deliberately.”

  Fitzroy glanced up at her, shading his eyes against the light.

  “Do you think so? Then which is worse? A murder resulting from bungling and incompetence, or a lesson deliberately given? He was in no danger from my shot, I assure you. Indeed, had he ducked, I’d have missed his felt hat altogether.”

  “And who on earth are you to teach him a lesson?”

  “An officer he recognized from more difficult days, of course. He was a sergeant and a damned incompetent one, though he never served directly under me.”

  “You knew him?” She felt incredulous.

  Fitzroy grinned up at her. His hands hung relaxed, a wrist supported by each knee, the back of his hands strong and square above the curving fingers.

  “He’d have been mortified to admit it, so I saw no need to let him know that I remembered him. But bearing a weapon and shooting at pigeons in a public wood carries a certain responsibility. Anyway, I have a particular fondness for pigeons.”

  “You keep them at the bottom of the garden.”

  “Yes, Quentin told me you had found him there. But not only do I abhor the idea of a pigeon being shot down from the sky, it is generally considered unsporting to scatter balls into innocent passersby.”

  “But it’s much worse to hurt someone intentionally.” Now that the da
nger was over, Joanna felt a little shaky. “That man meant us no harm at all.”

  He stood, caught up his sword cane, and scraped the tip along the furrow in the bark. It was very close to where she had been standing.

  “Though you would have been just as dead. But why should we debate it? You’ve never harmed a living soul, whether by accident or design. Let’s go back, shall we? At least, wherever my sister spends time, sanity reigns.”

  Joanna turned away, only to be arrested by something new in his voice. She could almost have described it as tenderness.

  “Wait. You have leaves in your hair.”

  She stood, eyes closed, groping for some understanding, some calm, while his gentle fingers picked out leaves and twigs, the knuckles occasionally brushing her sensitive nape.

  How could he be so impossible, but then turn her legs into willow saplings with a touch?

  * * *

  There was no sanity to be found with Lady Mary in her nurse’s old parlor.

  “Look, Fitzroy!” she said as they came in. “Kittens! May I take one with me?”

  Lady Mary’s lap was full of kittens. More tiny balls of fluff crawled and clung to her skirts and shoulders.

  Fitzroy plucked a mewling puff of orange from his sister’s collar and gave it to Joanna.

  “What’s this?” he asked with a wicked grin. “How can such a creature be both so innocent and a young hunter? In that flat and appealing little head, a kitten carries everything it will ever need to know to be a terror to mice.”

  Joanna caught the kitten. It opened a tiny pink mouth armed with teeth like needles and cried.

  Fitzroy gave her another one.

  She sat down.

  He placed a third on her shoulder.

  “Let them be,” she said sternly. “Let them be innocent while they may! For unless they’re taught by their mother, they’ll never catch mice. Instead, they’ll just become fat old toms sleeping by the fireside. Not everything is determined, Fitzroy.”

  He gave her a grin that touched something deep in her heart.

  “Well, thank God for that!”

  * * *

  They drove back to London with Lady Mary’s kitten safely ensconced in a basket.

  Yet after delivering the ladies to their respective homes, Fitzroy called for his gray to be saddled and left again.

  Joanna did not want to admit to herself how much she longed for her husband to show her the attention he showered on his sister. She only knew that she could never be indifferent to him.

  She waited until past midnight before she went to bed.

  Fitzroy did not come home. How was she to finish a portrait of him if he didn’t sit for her? And what was she to do with her strange new feelings for him?

  When he reappeared the next morning it was as if their day in the country had never taken place, or if by taking a day away from town he was now driven twice as hard to make up for it.

  He apologized stiffly for missing their appointment in her studio and assured her it wouldn’t happen again, but he seemed distracted, almost demonic.

  She couldn’t understand him.

  Yet almost every day after that, he joined her and Lady Mary, often still dusty from the road, or with the drawn, attenuated look of a man who had gone an entire night without sleep.

  He seemed to shrug it off, shedding the fatigue like a coat.

  Joanna slipped aside to make sketches of him, while he laughed and teased with his sister and they played with the kitten. He brought Lady Mary little gifts: meaningless, charming things, like feathers, or shells, or an unexpected, whimsical surprise—a chocolate confection in the shape of a heart, or a speckled bird’s egg.

  Joanna watched them together with an odd hunger while she let her fingers fly over the paper, catching the tilt of an eyebrow, the cut of his jaw.

  Then, back at her studio, she would study the drawings she had made of him and wonder who he really was. For the image of the man now flowing from her fingertips onto the paper was of a Fitzroy Monteith Mountfitchet who didn’t exist: a man full of love and gaiety and quick wit.

  The vision of it filled her imagination.

  From the sketches Joanna blocked out a final version on canvas. It showed him half-turned toward the viewer, his head tilted back a little, with his shirt open at the collar and the hair tumbled over his forehead. A smile lurked at the corners of his eyes, as if he were about to wink at the world.

  It was what she had dreamed of and longed for. She was succeeding only too well in her desire to give Lady Mary a portrait of her brother that she could treasure. This was going to be superb.

  So when Fitzroy stalked into her studio at the end of each day—drawn, sharp, dark with fatigue—she could use him as a direct model for his throat, hair, and clothes, refining the colors and shapes of his skin and features.

  Meanwhile, she was painting his expression from memory, leaving the grim reality behind.

  She soon felt obsessed with this portrait. For while it was entirely her creation, it felt like a great truth—truer in its way than the first dark drawings she had destroyed.

  Joanna worked in silence. She asked him nothing more about his life, or where he went every day. She did not offer to touch him again, to rub his neck or offer any kindness, though he would pull off his cravat himself and toss it aside with obvious relief.

  Yet sometimes she would look up from the canvas to find him watching her with an intense craving: the look of a man dying of thirst, gazing at a desert mirage. She couldn’t understand it, for he would instantly veil his expression with indifference.

  Their marriage took on the pattern that he had promised.

  You won’t get my attention or my interest. I shan’t be available to you, or supportive of you. I shall always be preoccupied with other concerns that I will not share with you. Is that what you want?

  So how on earth could she tell him that it was not what she wanted any longer? That it moved and disturbed her to see him so filled with anguish? That she lay in her bed every night filled with covetousness that only Lady Mary knew glimpses of the magical man she was creating on her canvas?

  For while she resented and despised the husband who had humbled her at Lady Reed’s ball, and was infuriated by the cavalier who had shot a hole in a rustic’s felt hat, she was falling in love with a painting.

  * * *

  For Lady Kettering’s dance, Joanna wore one of her new dresses. She stood for several minutes and stared at her reflection in her mirror.

  The dark hair and the eyes that seemed to her too intense for beauty were unchanged, but she was not the same girl who had run away from Miss Able’s Academy only a few weeks before. There were little shadows of stress at the corners of her mouth, and a new watchfulness veiled her expression.

  It was as if something of her husband’s mood was rubbing off on her.

  Words from Cock Robin tumbled into her thoughts. ‘Who’ll bear the pall?’ ‘We,’ said the Wren, ‘both the cock and the hen, we’ll bear the pall?’

  She walked down the stairs alone to wait for the carriage. Once again her mother would escort her. No doubt Fitzroy would arrive there separately, as before. Joanna knew quite clearly what to expect.

  He will bed Lady Kettering next Friday. It is all arranged.

  She had entered this marriage thinking she wanted his indifference. How could she have guessed that it would hurt so very much?

  A large grandfather clock stood in the hallway. It reminded her of the timepiece at Miss Able’s. It had stood like a sentinel at the entrance of the school, keeping strict time, the drill major of her hours and days, the martinet clock hands and the great brass weight in the walnut case.

  Joanna closed her eyes and remembered it, remembered why she had run away—and remembered Fitzroy driving her there through the dark, in case there was a threat to her little sister, Milly.

  Now, as he had promised, her days were her own to order as she pleased. She had a studio, and she was doing g
ood work. She had no excuse at all to be miserable.

  The knocker rattled. Ah, her mother, at last!

  Joanna stepped forward to see the footman gazing down at a small brown-haired woman in a black dress and cloak.

  “Please, is Lord Tarrant in?” the woman asked.

  “Now what would the likes of you be doing at the front door?” the footman replied. “The tradesman’s entrance is round the back.”

  “No, I have personal business with Lord Tarrant,” the woman insisted with quiet dignity. “My name is Mrs. Morris. I am sister to Ned Flanders—as was his groom in the Peninsula. He would want to see me.”

  “His lordship is not in.”

  The footman began to close the door, but Joanna stepped forward. “Wait!”

  They both looked at her in surprise.

  “I am Lady Tarrant, Mrs. Morris,” Joanna said. “May I help you, instead? Please come in.”

  Joanna led the brown-haired woman into a private room and ordered some tea.

  They made an odd contrast: Joanna dressed for a ball, Mrs. Morris in her plain black dress and stout country boots.

  “My brother died recently.” Mrs. Morris was dry-eyed, composed, but Joanna saw clearly how it hurt to say aloud. “I was going through his things and came across this.” She held out a small parcel. “He said to me once that, if anything happened to him, I was to bring it to Lord Tarrant.”

  Joanna took the parcel and turned it over in her hands.

  “Then I’ll make sure that he gets it. Is there anything else I can do for you, Mrs. Morris?”

  The small woman stood up and smiled. “No, thank you, my lady. Lord Tarrant has been more than kind. He settled a very generous sum on Ned’s family after he was killed. It’s been quite a help at our farm, and to my sister in town—that’s where I’ll be staying tonight.”

  “Your brother was killed? I’m so very sorry.”

  Tight lines appeared on Mrs. Morris’s forehead. “He got in a brawl and was stabbed. Heaven only knows why! Ned was never much of a drinking man, for all his years as a soldier. But there you are. Wondering won’t bring him back. Good evening, your ladyship.”