Lovely Lying Lips

by Valerie Sherwood

  Heads turned interestedly to watch them, as they glided like swans across the floor.

  Abruptly Captain Warburton became aware of that attention.

  “The music has stopped,” he said with a flashing grin.

  Margaret looked about her with a pounding heart. They were all watching—all the elite of the countryside. Just as they had so often stood back to watch Margaret Archer dance. She gave the crowd a graceful curtsy and took the arm the gallant captain offered.

  And then as they strolled away from the center of the floor the music started up again and once more he swept her into the rhythm of the dance.

  To Margaret it was a kind of heaven, newly gained, but one that—like other earthly treasures—could not last. But she would play out these minutes one by one, drawing them into a skein of memory to knit and purl on lonely nights when the wind sang its lonely song across the moors.

  How she yearned to say, Oh, Tony, I have come back.... And watch his strong face light up with wonder and with joy.

  For now she no longer had any doubt that he still loved her. At least, he loved the woman she once had been ... and was no longer!

  That last thought came crashing in upon her senses even as those senses reeled beneath the pressure of his masculinity, the deep physical attraction he had always had for her, the longing for his arms that had been with her so long. She remembered moonlit nights when she had lain beneath him sighing, she remembered the sound of straw crunching beneath their lithe straining bodies as they held lovers’ rendezvous in some barn, she remembered the scratching sound of silver and gold embroidery threads in fancy coverlets in one of the hastily found and as swiftly latched guest bedrooms in other people’s houses where they had slipped away from the merriment for a brief and lovely rapture of their own. She remembered so much—and it must all end. Before tonight’s unmasking.

  With her hands clasped tightly together, her fingers twisting spasmodically in her delicate gloves, Constance watched the little tableau from the sidelines. Her teeth had nearly bitten into her soft lower lip and she was straining forward, willing everything to be all right.

  She gave a guilty start as she realized that someone was asking her to dance. She never knew later who it was that led her out, so rapt was she in keeping her head turned to contemplate the tall distinguished man in black and gold and the tall graceful lady in bronze silk and copper lace who swayed with him to the music as if she were part of him.

  Margaret was looking up into her lover’s face now boldly, realizing with confidence that the lace-edged black velvet mask she wore hid all her scars from view, that all of her that Tony could see was beautiful. For her throat and bosom were flawless and unmarked and they flashed snowy white as she whirled confidently in the measures of the dance, her shadowed emerald eyes glorious and glowing.

  There was no handsomer couple on the floor than the tall captain and the lady in bronze silks that nobody knew.

  Nobody except Constance. And Clifford Archer, if he were here.

  Constance’s dancing partner brought her back to the place where she had been standing and someone interposed himself between them and breathed into her ear, “Margaret looks well tonight. I had not hoped to see her looking so fine.”

  Constance stiffened. She whirled in consternation and found herself looking into a face that—despite its skimpy mask—somehow reminded her of Margaret’s. Except that it was broader and less symmetrical and behind the mask those eyes flashed blue instead of green and the luxuriant hair that crowned it was gold instead of flaming red.

  “I was watching for you and I saw you come in together,” he murmured. “Margaret had written to me what you both would be wearing.”

  This gentleman in amber satin had to be Clifford Archer. Her uncle. So much older than Margaret, who seemed a teenager herself as she was whirled about the floor by the dashing Captain Warburton.

  Constance cast a swift look around. Her partner had departed and they were standing for the moment a little apart from the others. “Yes, she does,” she said quietly. “But I am afraid for her all the same.”

  “So am I,” agreed the amber gentleman with a sigh. And then, hastily, “We will find an opportunity to talk later—perhaps in the solar upstairs. It would seem someone wants to meet you.”

  Constance was abruptly aware of a tall young man who had approached as they were talking and was now standing before her. He was dressed dramatically in a scarlet-lined short cloak—miserably hot for this warm summer night but it gave his black suit with its red revers a certain dash. She was taken aback, for even with a mask obscuring his features she could see that he looked strikingly like a younger version of Captain Warburton.

  “Ned,” said her uncle, cheerfully recognizing Ned despite his red satin mask, “you shall be the first to meet my ward, Mistress Constance Dacey. Constance, this startlingly garbed fellow is Ned Warburton.”

  It took Constance by surprise to be introduced to Tony Warburton’s brother as Clifford Archer’s ward. She cast a sudden grateful look at her uncle, who was claiming her as best he could—and then drew slightly away from Ned Warburton. For she felt toward him an instant aversion—he looked too much like his brother. Just as she had felt an instant and violent aversion to Captain Warburton, no matter how striking a figure he cut out there on the floor! He had brought Margaret sorrow and now, if things went wrong, he could bring her death!

  “Mistress Constance.” Gallantly, Ned bent over her hand, then turned to include Clifford Archer in his next remark. “This night is full of surprises,” he declared humorously. “First Tony, who has not danced two consecutive dances with any woman since his wife died, seems unwilling to leave the floor—faith he dances with his newfound lady even after the music has stopped!” He nodded toward his brother and Margaret, still moving in perfect unison across the floor. “And now you astonish me, sir, by producing a ward from a hat as it were. Tell me. Lady of Mystery, where has the Squire been hiding you?”

  Constance forced to her face a quick mechanical smile. “I have been tucked away in boarding school in London ever since my parents died,” she told Ned glibly. “Indeed, this is my first ball and I am afraid my dancing is sadly at fault.” Perhaps that would discourage this younger version of the dangerous gentleman so masterfully sweeping Margaret across the dance floor!

  But Ned was not to be discouraged so easily.

  “Faith, I cannot think it,” he declared gaily. “Come out upon the floor with me and we will gauge the mettle of your dancing!”

  “I may step upon your feet,” Constance warned him in a cool distant voice.

  “You may stamp upon my boots and welcome, if only you will keep smiling at me like that,” Ned assured her and confidently whirled her out upon the floor where her swirling lavender silk skirts almost brushed Margaret’s bronze ones. Then they were swept apart by the other dancers.

  But in that brief close look, Constance had thought, I have never seen Margaret look so happy. Dear God, don’t let anything spoil this night for her. It is all she has—perhaps it is all she will ever have of her brave Captain Warburton—who rushed into marriage with another woman a short two months after she left the scene!

  Constance’s anger at the Captain rubbed off on Ned. She kept her face averted from him, refusing to meet his gaze as they danced. Instead her violet eyes followed the progress of Margaret and her sometime lover as they whirled about the floor.

  That anger made her response insolent when Ned with a faint chuckle said, “I see you are eyeing my older brother, Tony, but I feel I must warn you that he is seldom home. Let Tony get wind of a war somewhere and he’s off like a shot!” (For Captain Warburton had chosen to keep from his younger brother all knowledge of his secret intelligence activities on the Continent—lest reckless Ned try to emulate him and get himself killed!)

  The violet eyes that turned toward Ned lacked their usual deep velvet radiance. They had instead a hard amethyst gleam. “You say you have a brother?” she
asked with a faint hauteur. “And which one might he be, in this gathering?”

  Ned was a little taken aback. “Why, he’s the tall fellow in black and gold dancing with the beautiful red-haired lady.”

  “Really?” said Constance in a bored voice, not deigning now to cast so much as a glance at Tony Warburton. “I had not noticed him. But then I do not care for black garments—even those trimmed in red or bright colors. So somber.” Her gaze passed distastefully over his own scarlet revers to frown at his costume, which was mainly black.

  Ned flushed. He cast a quick glance over the dark sheen of her hair to ponder the resplendent colors that most of the young gentlemen at the ball were sporting—shades of gold and green and orange and puce and blue. He made an instant resolve to visit his tailor on the morrow and order himself a suit that would be of a color more pleasing to the Squire’s fastidious ward. Green, perhaps. For he had never been more taken with a girl in his life and her bland disregard puzzled him. It was as though all her being was concentrated elsewhere.

  As indeed it was. Fear prickled through her veins—fear for Margaret. And she would have been doubly terrified could she have heard what the lean Captain was saying to Margaret now.

  “I find it hard to wait for the unmasking.” Tony smiled down at his lustrous lady in her whirling bronze silks. “Even though ’tis only minutes away.”

  Only minutes away, thought Margaret dreamily, and in the distance a great bell seemed to toll. But it was still far away and somehow every moment now seemed forever....

  The Captain leaned closer. “ ’Tis all I can do to hold back from snatching the mask from your face here and now, so curious am I to learn who you are. You cannot be who I think you are, for heaven is not that kind to mortals. And yet—” He was smiling down at her now most tenderly. “Whoever you are, you fill these arms as no one has for years.”

  Tears glimmered in the brilliant emerald eyes that looked back at him. Well spoke, Tony, she thought proudly. For we were true lovers once... we loved as no others have loved before or since our time. And somehow even through my mask you seem to know me. That distant warning bell seemed muted now and hushed. Her treacherous heart was responding to him, beat by beat. That heartbeat thundered in her ears, deafeningly, and her fast-drawn breathing threatened to suffocate her.

  Captain Warburton was having the same difficulty. He felt as if an old forgotten song was thrumming once again in his ears and he was seeing for the first time wild young Margaret Archer come bursting into the drawing room at Axeleigh. A vision of her flame-red hair haunted him—and it was this hair. And those emerald eyes he could but glimpse through the narrow slits in the enveloping mask that hid the whole top part of her face, those eyes even in this deceptive candlelight were Margaret’s well-remembered color. And that generous winsome smile, the perfect white teeth, the soft mouth glimpsed through the gathered black lace that edged her black velvet mask—that was Margaret’s smile. The firm but delicate jawline, the white column of her proud throat with the little pulsing area in a hollow just above her snowy bosom, her entire magnificent figure—even the way she fit into his arms, the way she moved with him—was Margaret to the life.

  Was it possible that through time and space, defying death, Margaret had somehow come back to him?

  He must know!

  Of a sudden he whirled her through the dancers and out of the great candlelit hall, into the dimness of the screened area that led from the great hall to the kitchen, the buttery, the servants’ dining hall.

  Margaret knew what he was going to do, but she had no will to resist. Too long had she waited for this moment.

  Tenderly his mouth closed down on hers and she kissed him—through the lace of her mask. All of her heart was in that kiss, all of her vanished dreams. Her body yearned toward him in a sweet irrevocable sway. He could feel the tremulous response in her, the wild sweet madness that sent the blood racing through her veins.

  And Tony Warburton felt as if a distant cannon had boomed. For the touch of those lips was Margaret’s. Unforgettable. The tingling passion that he felt in this woman, so wild and sweet, so well remembered, was Margaret’s.

  So rapt were they in the thunderous response of their own bodies that neither of them heard the thunder of hooves outside.

  “Who are you?” he demanded hoarsely.

  And just as she had known he would, in all her terrible fatalistic daydreams, he snatched at her mask, tearing the lace as he ripped it away from her features.

  Chapter 20

  But even while Captain Warburton, in that dim screened corridor, was in the very act of snatching off Margaret’s mask, behind them in the candlelit great hall a dramatic sequence of events that capped anything a Huntlands’ Midsummer Masque had ever seen was taking place.

  Constance, being whirled about the floor by Ned Warburton, was suddenly anxiously aware that Margaret and her tall captain had disappeared. Even as she quaked with that realization, there came from outside, pounding down the drive, the thunder of hooves, hoarse cries and a couple of wild shots, one of which came through the open casements of the hall’s enormous bay window and cut the rope that held the vast chandelier above the dancers.

  The music came to a shrieking halt as the astonished musicians peered down in fright from their little gallery above. Women screamed and the crowd scattered as the heavy iron mass of the great central chandelier suspended above them crashed to the polished floor, sending fifty lighted candles flying. And from outside came simultaneously another shot and a hoarse prolonged cry that ended in a rending moan.

  Someone had been hit.

  Around Constance now men were running toward the front door from whence the shots had come—with Tom Thornton at their head. Boots were stamping in a desperate effort to stamp out the candle flames before they ignited fragile chemise ruffles or dainty silken skirts. Frightened servants had poured in from the rear and were scurrying about with snuffers, collecting the fallen candles. At least two satin-clad ladies had fainted and were being borne away. Beside her Ned Warburton gave a low curse and would have put her from him but that she would not let him, her fingers closed convulsively over his arm.

  For in the midst of that wild scene, Constance was aware of only one thing:

  Tony Warburton was back. Constance saw him spring into the room with his right hand on his sword hilt, his long strides carrying him straight for the front door and whatever trouble awaited outside.

  In horror Constance swayed against Ned. For in Tony Warburton’s left hand, as if forgotten, he carried a lady’s lace-trimmed black velvet mask—Margaret’s!

  And Margaret herself was nowhere in sight.

  A kind of blackness came over Constance. She felt she might be sick or that she might faint. As she fought to overcome it, Ned leaned over her in concern.

  “Are you ill?” he asked anxiously, for megrims and migraines and fainting fits were common in a day when women wore tightly laced corsets ribbed with bone or steel.

  “No,” gasped Constance, her world reeling. “I need air.” She clutched at his cloak to steady herself.

  Nothing she could have said could have pleased Ned more, for it was her light weight sagging against him that was preventing him from doing the one thing he longed to do—to make his way to the door and find out what was happening outside.

  “This excitement has been too much for you,” he told her masterfully as with an arm supporting her body he made swiftly for the door. “Howls and shots and chandeliers falling! Damned disgrace, that’s what it is!”

  He was still blustering as they reached the comparative coolness of the air outside.

  There against the statuesque backdrop of the moon-washed old trees, a strange pageant was being played out.

  Muttering masked guests in their finery clustered in little groups staring down at a fallen man whose black hat had come off and whose gaudy green cloak failed to cover the gaping hole in his chest. Beside him danced a nervous horse, and someone had grasped t
he reins to keep the horse from running off. And behind him were ranged a troop of the King’s men, in uniform.

  As Constance and Ned came through the door, the leader of that troop, a rather dashing major, was finishing what must have been a dramatic challenge:

  “—And will anyone tell me why this man should choose to leave the road and dash in here under pursuit?”

  The masks may have concealed perfectly innocent faces, but confronted by the King’s men, ranged about, nobody cared to answer that question.

  “Then perhaps,” he taunted, “someone among ye would care to claim the body?”

  Nobody cared to claim the body either.

  The major laughed and gave them all a scathing look that condemned them as rebels. “Cart this carrion away,” he commanded, nudging the fallen man with the toe of a shiny boot. “Since no one cares to claim the body.”

  But the Squire of Axeleigh, rushing through the oaken door—a little late for he had been occupied with stamping out the flames from a screaming lady’s skirts that had been set alight by the candles of the fallen chandelier—was ready enough to do so.

  “Hold there!” he cried truculently. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

  The major brightened. “Do you know this man?” he drawled.

  “Certainly,” snapped the Squire. “He’s Nick Netherbury and he’s one of my tenants.”

  The major thrust out his jaw. “Netherbury he may be to you, but he’s Jack Drubbs to us and he’s been spreading rebellion here in the West Country.”

  The Squire, who had torn off his mask as he came through the door, regarded the major with a look of pure amazement. “Impossible,” he said flatly.

  The major was nettled. “We had word he was out to collect some money for Monmouth and we set a trap for him. When we ordered him to halt he fled before us—and turned in here." He cast a significant look around him at the company.

  Tom Thornton, who had been looking puzzled, now shouldered his way forward. “That man is indeed Nick Netherbury,” he corroborated the Squire quietly. “None of us knows about any Drubbs.”