A Fresh Perspective, A Regency Romance (13 page)

Was her love, desire and longing a curse, or a blessing?

“That is a question better directed at your father. I suppose, as someone once pointed out to me, it is a matter of perspective.” He was smiling when she looked back at him, well aware that he threw her own words back in her face.

Thoughtfully, she walked the circle of stones. A matter of perspective. The events of the last few days had shaken her resolve to subdue and forget forever her love for Reed. Was that, too, no more than a matter of perspective? Her feelings made no more sense than this gathering of stones, but there was something admirable in them, if only in their persistence.

As she passed each of the stones, she took advantage of their bulk to blot momentarily from her sight the image of Reed, only to marvel at the manner in which her heart quickened when he popped, quite predictably, into view again on the other side. She studied his face from every angle, the light changing. She commit to memory the tilt of his head, the line of his jaw, the curve of his cheek. She missed him now, before they were even separated. The color of his hair, the flashing brilliance of his smile, the little laugh lines that bordered his eyes and mouth--heavy as stones these things hung in her mind, heavy with her anguish in knowing he meant to leave tomorrow with her love never expressed.

He seemed changed. Or was it only the change in their surroundings and in the company they kept? Another stone to blot him from her sight, another fresh perspective, and still she came to the same conclusion. Her oldest and dearest friend, the man she had vowed to detach all thought and feeling from--she was more in love with him than ever.

Time would not change that, could not wear it away, any more than time and weather had worn away the stones. All her life, Megan had found comfort and answers in the Bible from which her Father spoke to his congregation every Sunday. She sought comfort now, among the many verses. As she moved from rock to rock, closer and closer to Reed, she leaned into the hard, sun-warmed surfaces and whispered a prayer from the Psalms. “Have mercy on me O Lord for I am in trouble: mine eye is consumed with grief. . . and my years with sighing.”

“Did you say something?” Reed asked.

She sighed and pressed her back hard against the largest rock. “Father would find the mystery of this place vastly interesting. He would want to know the true history of the stones.”

Reed paused in his painting, expression thoughtful. “True history. Just what do you suppose true history to be?”

“The chronicling of events. What else?”

“I think true history is a difficult thing to collect. I think we do not, any of us, know the true history of any person, place or thing.

The idea made her uneasy. “Not even when records are kept?”

“No, for the records are kept by an individual. Truth is therefore seen through that person’s perspective, just as a painter gives the scene before him his perspective.”

“Ah!”

“We have, therefore, one person’s interpretation of what true history was and between the lines of that interpretation are truth’s secrets.”

“Secrets?”

“Yes. Bits unseen and untold. The little mysteries of history. Only think if you had never heard my side of the story last night. You would have quite a different history of the event in your mind this morning.”

“I see what you are getting at.” Thoughtfully, she unscrewed the cap on the canteen. Splashing water and then pigment on a wide brush she blocked in the light and shadow of Castlerigg Stones without benefit of a starter sketch.

“Are there mysteries in your life of which I know nothing, Nutmeg?” He surprised her with the question.

She laughed, a sad little sound. “Of course there are.” She dipped into pigment again, roughing in the dark, weathered shapes of the standing stones.

It was his turn to be surprised. “Big things, Nutmeg? Important things?”

“I perceive them as such.”

A peregrine winged above them, slate blue with a black-barred underbelly, powerful and swift. With the flick of her wrist Megan added the bird to the pale wash of her sky.

“You intrigue me,” Reed admitted. “I thought you felt free to tell me anything. It pains me to think you guard yourself against me.

“Are there, then, no secrets you keep from me, Reed?”

He opened his mouth, closed it again and nodded. “One or two things, come to think of it.”

“Mystery can be a good thing, in moderation,” she said softly.

“You will not tell me your secrets?”

She eyed the scene before her. Words, thoughts and feelings pressed hard against the dam of her best intentions, threatening to spill over. How would Reed respond if she were to tell him the true history of her feelings for him? She had thought of little else of late. That secret history hung between them like an unpainted page. She shook her head. “I might, someday, given the right circumstances. And you? Will you tell me why you must rush away tomorrow? And why your forehead grows prematurely wrinkled over the figuring of figures?

“Someday,” he promised. “Someday, I will tell you everything.”

The day ended with their secrets still intact and though they had spent the last two days together, Megan felt a growing distance between them. A growing sense of secrets.

Two more had arrived while they were out; two wax-sealed letters delivered to the cottage. One came from Reed’s father, the other from Giovanni Giamarco.

Reed tore into both letters. Both made him frown. He did not tell her what news they brought.

She did not ask.

The financial news was not what Reed had hoped for. His father informed him there were no unlisted sources of income, no hidden assets, no hope of sliding out of their financial fiasco easily.

In addition, Lord Talcott could tell him nothing of Giovanni Giamarco he did not already know. Of the Frosts, however, he wrote, “Not the type of people you want to tangle with, my boy.” There followed a long and convoluted account of their latest doings according to the London gossipmongers.

The two were living on tick. They had tried to secure a match for Miss Frost with a peer in Cornwall, a foolish young man who had been caught with her in a most compromising position. The peer’s father, a respected member of the House, had threatened to cut off his son’s inheritance if any marriage took place. The Frosts had, it was rumored, been granted a lavish financial settlement, with which they had booked passage to Italy, where, it had been hoped, the young lady would snare an Italian, no more to trouble the young men of Great Britain.

On the heels of his father’s revealing missive, the ludicrous note from Giovanni was almost amusing.

“You have disgraced a young woman’s most precious possession,” it read. “Her honor. Declare the means by which we might settle this like gentlemen, as well as the time and place, at your earliest convenience.”

A duel over Laura Frost, a gazetted fortune hunter, was not something Reed cared to engage in if he could avoid it. A thought occurred to him. A thought of some brilliance given the circumstances. He retreated to the attic for paper and pen and sat himself down to scribble out his reply.

“I will meet you at noon, the day after tomorrow, on the very spot where you believe Miss Frost’s honor was compromised. Weapons to be determined on the spot.”

There. That ought to forestall Giovanni’s ire, and he would leave town tomorrow. They need never meet. He had far more important problems to deal with than a duel over untrue history.

Chapter Fourteen

I
t was hopeless! Numbers swam before Reed’s eyes in the flickering candlelight. He could feel a headache coming on. His pulse pounded too quickly in his temples. Finished tallying, the sums confirmed his worst fears. He tried to believe the numbers could not be right, that he had miscalculated, dreadfully miscalculated something.

A second tallying offered exactly the same results. His pulse jumped another notch. The sorry truth was, his father’s income disappeared far faster than it was produced! His parents were in fearful debt. How could his father write so condescendingly of the Frosts living on tick when he was floundering in the river himself?

Of an inheritance, Reed could find nothing to speak of. He was more likely to inherit massive debt than anything else. So contrary was this to his understanding of the natural order of things, so greatly did this threaten his perception of the future, it left him feeling tetherless, almost without body in his shock. Hard to grasp the idea, but his father’s estate had all but vanished, dwindled away by careless spending, foolhardy investments and high interests on unnecessary loans!

Gone, all of it gone! With it went the comfortable future he had too long taken for granted. How arrogant to have assumed that things would remain constant, unchanged and secure. How foolish!

He closed his eyes and leaned head into hands, this thinking too heavy for his neck alone to carry. He could not see past a financial problem this enormous. It boggled the mind. He had always taken money for granted.

“Reed?” Megan’s voice floated out of the darkness near the doorway. “Having trouble sleeping?”

She looked like a little girl, standing barefoot, nightrail billowing, hair long and loosely tumbled across the crochet shawl thrown around her shoulders.

“Trouble, yes,” he whispered, without going into detail. She looked young and innocent and untroubled. He did not want to burden her with his problem. “Bad dreams?” he hazarded.

“No, not really, just too many thoughts careening around in my head. Do you know what I mean?”

He almost laughed. He knew exactly what she meant. Numbers kept roaming around in his brainpan, and the panicked thoughts that went with them. “Yes, I do.”

She picked up a pair of boots that had been left to dry near the fireplace and sat down to slip her feet into them. As she bent, her nightshift strained against the curve of her buttocks. As she straightened, it strained against the curve of her breast.

“I had it in mind to take a turn in the garden,” she said. “I generally take a moonlit stroll in the garden at home when my thoughts will not be still. Care to join me? We are much less likely to wake Gussie and Tom if we talk.

It took him a moment to absorb the words. He forced himself to look away from the shadow of her nipple beneath the pale white fabric as she stood. “Sorry to disappoint, but it is raining.”

“Is it?” She opened the door to peer out into the night where a gentle, soundless rain was indeed drenching their surroundings. Quietly closing the door, she returned to the chair. “Has it been raining long?”

“An hour or two.” He could not look at her, could not risk his eyes straying in a manner most uncharacteristic of him. “I do have a suggestion, if it’s fresh air you are after.”

“Yes?” Her hair, like a shower of spilled spice, caught what little light the room possessed when she bent to slip the boots from her feet. Her neck, he thought, had never looked so fragile. He sketched the line of it in the open ledger. A line or two more, and her profile was captured amongst the sums.

“There is a queer little balcony on the south side of my room where we might sit and chat undisturbed.”

She turned to look at him, face flushed from bending, eyes shining with the rush light by which he had been working. “The spinning gallery! What a splendid idea.”

“Is that what it is called?” Quietly closing the ledger on both his drawing of her and his personal nightmare, he picked up the rush holder and lit their way to the stairs.

There was a difference, he thought, an uneasy difference, between leading Megan upstairs to his study in daylight and in leading her upstairs to the room where he slept in the dead of night. She felt it too. She would not have hesitated in the doorway else, her eyes wider than usual, dark with expanded pupils.

Rather than study the matter too intently, rather than look at her as she clutched her shawl tightly about her shoulders, he crossed to his bed. “Here, take these!” He tossed her the pillows and gathered up an armful of the bed coverings before he led the way out a narrow doorway on the far wall.

The spinning gallery was a long, narrow balcony of sorts tucked up under the overhang of the roof, too shy of headroom to stand upright in properly. One end of it currently sheltered a sweet smelling stack of the peat that was used in the fireplace downstairs. A high, wooden balustrade railing prevented either of them from pitching into the yard below. Hunch-backed, they arranged the bedding and pillows into a sort of sultan’s bower and settled themselves.

They were practically in each other’s laps when they sat and looked out over the dripping, glistening landscape. The smell of wet grass and damp peat was refreshing after the musty, candle-wax closeness of the cottage.

“Was this miserable little space really used for spinning?” he asked, more to break the silence than out of any real desire to know. It was a safe topic.

“Yes. I would think so. I think it must have been the perfect, out-of-the way spot to set up a spinning wheel.”

“All we need is Rumplestiltskin,” he said lightly.

She nodded, delighted. “To spin some gold.”

The idea appealed to him more than she could know. But it was a fairy tale solution to a problem all too real.

“The troll would want our first born,” he reminded her. “Perhaps it is best we do not find him here.”

She blushed deep rose and hugged her shawl tighter around her shoulders.

“What keeps you awake, Megan?”

She pursed her lips. The moonlight on her profile was worthy of recording by an artist of greater skill than he could lay claim to.

“I have been thinking of my own first born,” she surprised him in saying. “I have been thinking of London, of love and of marriage.”

These were not safe topics. He did not press for details.

She sighed. “What keeps you awake?”

Another unsafe topic, his impending doom. He made light of it. “I have been tallying numbers that do not want to add up.”

“Is your father’s bookkeeping in a state?”