A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (4 page)

“Because he’s a vicar? For heaven’s sake, Henny,” she said wearily, “he’s … just a man.” It was easier to use the word “just” to describe Adam Sylvaine when he wasn’t standing near enough for her to count the colors in his hair. “Beneath their clothes, under the skin, they’re all the same. It always becomes evident eventually. It matters not whether they look like angels or gargoyles.”

“I didna say he was saintly, or even good. I said he was better,” Henny maintained obstinately. With the maddening air of superiority she liked to adopt when she couldn’t support an argument.

In her weakened state, the word “better” for some reason cut Evie too close to the bone. She’d no hope of being better, it seemed. Life had seen to that, and it had taken on a momentum of its own long ago. Still, she hadn’t any regrets. Regrets implied she could have made other choices, and she wasn’t certain she could have. Certainly, she’d viewed her life as a triumph of planning until recent events had exploded it like a cue taken to racked billiard balls.

“It might behoove you, Henny, to remember that age doesn’t necessarily bequeath wisdom.”

“Ye only use words like ‘behoove’ when you know I’ve the right of it. And mind you, better means he isn’t for the likes of you, rag-mannered chit that ye are.”

“A rag-mannered chit who has tolerated your cheek for much too long.”

They bickered with comfortable familiarity all the way back to the carriage.

The driver and footman had just finished reharnessing the horses and scrambled upright when the two of them approached.

“Why did the vicar wrap the horse’s hoof?” she asked the footman.

“He said he should hate for us to ruin our livery, m’lady. He insisted upon it.”

“But … I’m not certain I understand. Why would anyone need to ruin anything?”

“As a precaution, m’lady, to protect it until he can be shod again, we needed to wrap his hoof. Shoe came off cleanly, like, so no damage done yet, and we’re fortunate he wasn’t lamed. Vicar knows his horses!” he said admirably. “If we take the drive slow, we should reach home without harming him. Vicar said he’d send the farrier out to us straightaway.”

It was the sort of report one’s servants didn’t usually trouble a countess with. But there was no man of the house, and her budget, settled upon her by Monty’s estate, could scarcely justify keeping the horses and carriage and the footmen as it was, and the health of something as valuable as a horse was of paramount concern. And she had no doubt that everyone below stairs knew it.

And livery was costly, too. Likely the vicar knew it. She imagined what the cost of a cravat meant to a vicar, and his kindness threw her own churlishness into stark relief.

“Thank you,” she said gently to the footman. “We shall take the drive home slowly, then, and come to know the lovely scenery of our new home a little better.”

“Very good, my lady.”

She’d made him smile, and this lightened her mood a little. It was such an easy thing for her to do, normally, to charm, to ease, to make things better, to take care of things, and she felt her failure with Reverend Sylvaine bleakly. She was an expert at identifying the thing that made a man feel most proud and the thing that made him feel most inadequate, and she would praise the one and bolster the other. Of course, once captivated, she could tweak his vulnerabilities and strengths the way a skilled driver used ribbons to steer horses, should the need arise.

“Now, Lord Asquith, he could by no stretch of the imagination be compared to a flower,” Evie concluded inside the carriage, continuing the argument with Henny, determined to win it.

“Lud, but isn’t that the truth of it,” Henny agreed, sighing and leaning back into the well-sprung seats. “The man stunk like a shop in Seven Dials. ’Twas an ointment ’e bought in the dead of night at McBride’s Apothecary and used for a masculine complaint.”

Evie was fascinated despite herself. She knew McBride’s well, in large part because McBride could be relied upon to pawn things, something actresses often needed to do. “How would you know a thing like that?”

“I ken a thing or two. I might ’ave been a tart in my day, too,” Henny said smugly. “Given arf a chance.”

Evie was too weary to object to the word “tart,” especially when it was said with genuine affection. Henny had known her in every incarnation. And Henny had surprising success with men. “Perhaps you ought to give it a try, Henny. Mayhap you can land an earl, too, and the two of us can retire in style.”

Her maid gave her thigh a delighted slap. “I may do that very thing.”

Evie looked out the window, out upon the soft hills unfolding endlessly, to the smoke spiraling up into the sky from cottage chimneys of houses filled with people who would in all likelihood be gossiping about her within days and would never welcome her, to the flat silver line of the sea in the distance, and knew a moment of disorientation: The view could have been her past or present or future.

For some reason she found herself craning her head in the direction Adam Sylvaine had disappeared. As if he, of all things, was the star she could navigate by.

Chapter 4

ADAM WAS SURPRISED to find himself at Lady Fennimore’s door. He paused and fished out his pocket watch; he was only ten minutes later than usual. He frowned, surprised, and stuffed it back into his coat. He could scarcely recall the walk at all, and he’d taken it once a week for nearly a year now. Time had suspended as two images overtook all other thought.

Lady Fennimore’s daughter greeted him at the door, as usual.

“How is she this morning, Jenny?”

Jenny gave a start. She took an infinitesimal step backward, eyes widened.

It was then he heard himself as she’d heard him: curt, preoccupied, irritated. Very unlike him. The sort of voice that might make anyone take a step back.

He added a smile to apologize for it. Jenny forgave him with a melting smile of her own and twined a finger in a stray curl that had escaped its pins.

“She’s about the same, Reverend, but she’s always so much better after she sees you. You can go straight up if you like. I’ve just put the kettle on, and I can hear it about to boil. I thought you might like some tea after your long walk.”

“You’re always so thoughtful, Jenny. Tea would be wonderful. And the walk is one of my favorites.”

Pleased pink moved into Jenny’s cheeks and throat and collarbone, and she touched a hand to a wayward tendril of fair hair and floated to the kitchen, buoyed by his smile and kind words and her own daydreams about the vicar, which involved her serving tea and rubbing his wide shoulders and propping one of her own needlework pillows beneath his head when he napped.

She was certain the “love thy neighbor” sermon had been directed to her.

He watched her go, her softness and simplicity and eagerness to please balm after his last little encounter. And as she disappeared into the kitchen, and Adam strode through the foyer, past the gilt-edged mirror nailed up over a small table struggling under the weight of roses stuffed into a Chinese urn. Lady Fennimore kept a hothouse, though it sometimes seemed as though the hothouse kept her, so profuse were the blooms and so prevalent the scent of them in her house.

Just as he was about to launch himself up the now-familiar flight of marble stairs, he froze.

Then turned, and as cautiously as if he were about to accost a burglar midcrime, returned to the mirror.

To discover his expression was dark and abstracted; his jaw was tense. His eyes were brilliant, with some fierce emotion, something perilously close to anger but not quite.

No wonder Jenny had taken a step back.

He’d best do away with that expression before the astute Lady Fennimore got a look at it and somehow worked out that a woman had caused it.

A thoroughly baffling, unpleasant woman.

Who had gone from sleeping in church to shrieking in what sounded very much like gutter Irish (which had perversely amused him) to prickly and difficult, to flinging flirtation at him—she’d quite alarmingly sparkled at him—like a soldier hurling boulders with a trebuchet.

Despite all of this, two impressions surfaced through all the others. And these were the ones that dogged him all the way to Lady Fennimore’s house.

How he’d first seen her: standing utterly still, two hot pink spots on her cheeks, hand flattened against her rib cage. Then squaring her shoulders, like a pugilist shaking off a blow.

Something Maggie Lanford had said hurt her.

And then there were the freckles.

He’d seen them as they stared each other down—a faint scattering, only slightly darker than dried tears, on each cheek. And something about them, and her green eyes, made him think of bird’s eggs, and summer days, and from there he’d found himself wondering what that smooth cheek might feel cradled in the palm of his hand. What might be like to drag his thumb softly over those pale spots which, if he knew women, were the bane of her existence, to soothe away whatever hurt had put the hot pink in her cheeks.

He’d never had a thought like that in his entire life. Let alone about a woman he disliked.

He inhaled deeply, exhaled, and turned his back on the mirror.

LADY FENNIMORE WAS propped in bed, engulfed by a night rail and topped by an enormous frilly cap from which her cobweb-fine gray hair escaped. She was layered over with great heaps of blankets. Her hands lay frail as lace gloves atop the counterpane. The sun had full run of the room and poured emphatically through the enormous windows, and Adam could see every one of the thousands of wrinkles that comprised her now-tissue-fine complexion.

“Ah, there you are at long last, Vicar. I don’t know what should keep you. Come and sit by me and savor my last moments on earth. Perhaps you ought to record my thoughts for posterity. I had a few new ones this morning though demmed if I can remember them now. God knows no one else says anything worth remembering these days. Though your predecessor had one or two moments of profundity. I’m awaiting yours.”

A combative glint lit her eyes.

“Doubtless if deathless prose ever occurs to me, I’ll owe it entirely to your inspiration, Lady Fennimore.”

He and Lady Fennimore rather enjoyed each other.

Now they did, at least. At first she was one of things that had helped knock the corners from him. One of the proverbial bats that flew out at him from the tunnel.

She smiled. And then she squinted at him. “Young man, you look distracted,” she accused.

“Enthralled by your company, that’s all.”

She snorted. “And I do believe you’re getting a wrinkle. About your left eye.”

This little observation was an example of why she terrified Mrs. Sneath’s battalion of women and why he was the one who visited most often.

“Your eyesight is remarkably good for a dying woman,” he said dryly.

“A pity isn’t it? I’d rather use up all of my faculties before I meet my Maker, and yet some of them work brilliantly yet. You oughtn’t think so much. Do more praying than thinking. You’ll wind up with fewer wrinkles. I was a thinker, and look at me now.”

“Perhaps I’ll pray that my Maker forbears giving me any more wrinkles, lest you point them out.”

She laughed again. It devolved into a cough, and she lay back with a sigh and closed her eyes briefly. He waited with her.

She sighed and opened her eyes.

“I’ve been giving things away, you see, in preparation for my next … oh, let’s call it my little journey, why don’t we. Reverend Sylvaine, will you be so kind as to open that box on the table there?”

She angled her chin toward a tiny, hinged wooden box on the table next to her bed.

He leaned forward to retrieve it and levered it open.

Inside was a tiny gold cross, a necklace. He lifted it up on one finger; the fine chain pooled in his other palm, cool and smooth.

“It was mine when I was a girl. It was given to me by my uncle, and he told me to wear it for good luck and protection, and I did for years until my neck grew too fat for it. Jenny wanted it, but she’ll inherit a good deal when I go, and I told her I wanted to give it to you. And you might be the only person she wouldn’t begrudge such a thing. It’s not valuable, mind you, but I’d like you to have it, Vicar. I expect you’ll encounter many a soul who might benefit from a little protection. Give it to someone who needs it.”

He went motionless. He didn’t trust himself to look up just yet. He was swamped by the full knowledge that his visits here would soon cease.

His day-to-day life was marked now by moments like these. Without warning, something a parishioner said or did would unaccountably move him. He knew these moments were both expanding and reshaping him, the way the sea shaped a continent. They made him better—better able to help, to understand, to see—but not always without a bit of pain.

He cleared his throat and looked up.

“Thank you, Lady Fennimore. I’ll cherish it. I wish I’d known you then.”

“Ah, Reverend. If you think I’m a delight now … Now, if you’ll close the door, I’ve something to confess. And I shouldn’t like my Jenny or anyone else to hear.”

Ah! So more surprises were in store. He stood and closed the door and returned to the chair.

“You may be surprised, young man, to know that I was a Diamond of the First Water in my day.”

“I don’t doubt it at all. Your eyes are magnificent.”

“Face like yours, flirting with an old woman like me.” She snorted. “Shameless, and you a man of God.”

“I’ll do penance for my moment of weakness, of a certainty.”

She laughed again, and he waited when the laugh became a cough that shook her, and she reached for her handkerchief again. She cleared her throat.

“A pity it is you’ll marry one of these village milksops, and have a dozen dull and pretty children.”

“Now, Lady Fennimore, consider that it’s possible that you do the young ladies of Pennyroyal Green a disservice.”

“That is, unless something goes awry. Like with that Redmond chit,” Lady Fennimore continued.

“She’s married to an earl, now, Miss Violet Redmond is.” There was no use debating which Redmond chit she referred to; everyone knew Violet had once threatened to throw herself down a well over an argument with a suitor and had needed to be pulled back by her elbows. “She’s a countess.”