Betina Krahn (21 page)

“No,” she declared, but not as loudly as he was used to hearing her speak. “Stay, your lordship, and keep me company awhile.”

He turned and found her facing him, wearing a garish purple satin with tattered sprigs of silk violets drooping here and there. In her frizzled silver hair was a grand Spanish comb made of carved tortoiseshell inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and she wore ropes of tawdry glass beads.

“Better yet,” she said in her papery voice, tottering closer to him and thrusting the handle of the feather duster into his palm. “Come and help me.”

“Help you?” He scowled at the feather duster, then at the room full of figurines.

Taking hold of his sleeve with a thin, blue-veined hand, she pulled him toward a graceful set of porcelain miniatures. “You can start there.” She pointed to a group on a sideboard nearby. “I’ve already done these over here.”

When she stared expectantly at him, he tucked his chin and looked uncomfortably around him. This would take the better part of the day to finish, he grumbled to himself with a trace of annoyance. But the trust he glimpsed in the old woman’s expression tempered his response. He heaved a disgusted breath, picked up a figurine of a milkmaid and her cows, and began to dust it.

“Why don’t you just sell them?” he said aloud after a few minutes. As he watched her pick up a figurine of a waltzing couple and clasp it to her breast, he thought better of that and amended it. “Or at least a part of them?”

“Sell them? What for?”

“For money, of course,” he said, stepping back a pace.

She laughed. “And what would an old girl like me do with money, eh?” Looking down at the porcelain couple
she held in her hand, caught forever in blissful youth and festivity, she sighed. “I have all I need here.” After a moment she looked up with an otherworldly glow in her face. “And I do so like to pet them. They make me think of the old days, you know. Each is like a frozen memory.

“This one makes me think of Vienna, where we waltzed until the sun came up, Fox Royal and me.” Her faded brown eyes focused on some other time and place. “I wore my most scandalous red gown—actresses always wear indecent red dresses—it’s traditional. The archduke wanted me to waltz fast and loose with him, but I declined. When he insisted, Fox called him out. There was such a scandal.

“And this one.” She picked up another, the figure of a goosegirl and a country swain adoring her over a split-rail fence. “We played a pastorale together in Geneva. Fox wooed and won me in verse and song, seven nights a week and twice more on Sundays.” She caught Remington’s eye with what on a younger person would have been called a lascivious grin. On her it seemed oddly gnomelike and endearing.

“I always said yes to that man, both onstage and off. But then, very few people—male or female, high or low, rich or poor—ever said no to Fox Royal. He was a man of a thousand persuasions.” Her eyes fluttered closed and she just stood there for a moment.

The sliding sensation in his middle had something to do with defenses, he knew. But he couldn’t stop it; she seemed so small and frail. When she swayed, he didn’t understand that she was falling at first. He barely had time to catch both her and her figurine before they crashed to the floor.

Setting the statuette aside, he gathered her up gently in his arms. She weighed next to nothing and felt dry and reedy, like a crumpled bird, against him. Calling her name
urgently, he looked about for a place to lay her down. He spotted an overstuffed leather sofa along the side wall beneath the windows and carried her there.

“Don’t put me down just yet.” She threaded her arms around his neck and refused to let go. “I am so cold. Just hold me.”

For a brief moment he wondered if he should go for help. But she patted his shoulder and looked up at him, seeming more lucid than he expected.

“It’s just one of my spells.” She managed a weak smile. “You know, it’s been a long time since a handsome young gallant held me in his arms.”

Something in that time-weathered countenance and those faded brown eyes that had seen so much of life tugged at him. It was the same full-chest sort of feeling he got when dealing with Uncle Paddington’s less rational moments—a sense that he was responsible, a feeling that something timeless and precious had been entrusted to him.

With effort he managed to lower himself to a seat on the sofa, still holding her. She sighed and settled against him wearing that faint, angelic smile. Neither spoke for a few moments; then she lifted her head from his shoulder to look up at him.

“Toni says you don’t like us very much.”

“She does, does she?” he said defensively.

“Women, I mean. You don’t like women. Says you don’t like marriage much, either.” She looked him over. “What happened? Some skirt give you the jilt?”

“You certainly get points for bluntness, madam,” he said rigidly.

“Cleo,” she insisted. “I’m too old to put a fancy skirt of manners on my yens and curiosities. I speak my mind. And right now I want to know what it is about us you don’t
like.” She frowned. “Aren’t of the ‘Greek’ persuasion, are you?”

It took him a moment to react to what she’d said. “I … am not.” She had caught him totally off guard, and in reaction he slipped easily into phrases he had written and spoken numerous times:

“I have nothing against women in general, just against women who expect to be married and kept and cosseted by men. I suppose it’s marriage I object to most. All that nonsense about home and family and love … it’s a house of cards, an illusion. Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, hideously one-sided.” His voice thickened. “To make us go into it more willingly, society dresses it up in respectable or romantic terms. But all their talk of love and happiness is nothing more than a cynical deception at worst, and at best, a socially useful myth.”

He felt her moving against his chest and looked down to find her grinning and wagging her head. “Don’t believe in love, eh? Poor boy.” She patted his chest gently, and he glanced away, roundly annoyed by the way she seemed to be patronizing him.

“That’s the greatest fairy tale of all,” he said with a growl. “That
love
business.”

She reached up and stroked his cheek, comforting him. After a moment she laid her head against his chest again and sighed.

“You know, my boy, I’m an actress, bred to the drama, the paint, the applause. I know a great deal about illusions … I’ve lived my whole life making believe.” Her voice lowered as she descended once again into the halls of memory. “With all that, my love with Fox Royal was the only
real
thing I ever had.”

Remington felt something in his chest begin to sink, leaving a hollow space.

She nestled closer to him. “I can tell you’ve never been
in love, my boy, and I’m sorry for that. It’s the only thing that makes life really worth living … two hearts beating as one. My Fox had a hundred ways to say it. But it all came down to that: just two hearts beating as one. When I lost my Fox, half of my heart died, too.”

Something seemed to be stuck in his throat; he couldn’t speak. But it was just as well, for he had no response to make. In a few short statements she had penetrated his finely honed defenses and made him admit for the first time that it was possible. Perhaps on rare occasions, for a special and ordained few, there was such a thing as lifelong and soul-binding love, unions of man and woman that transcended the bondage of matrimony to a higher plane. Love. It was exactly what Uncle Paddington carried on about. Perhaps belief in it was something people settled into as they aged.

Her eyes closed and shortly he felt her grip on his neck loosen. From the rhythm of her breathing, he could tell she had fallen asleep. He drew a deep breath, and for the first time felt the years creeping up his spine.

Antonia had stood in the doorway, hidden by the partially closed door, watching the exchange between Remington and Cleo. Cleo’s compensatingly loud voice had carried in the quiet house, and Antonia had arrived just in time to hear the last part of their conversation. Now she stood, transfixed by the sight of him holding old Cleo against him as she slept. She felt a sliding sensation in her middle as he shifted and freed one hand, then gently tucked wisps of white hair back into Cleo’s bedraggled lace cap. Swallowing hard, she stepped out from behind the door and into his vision.

He reddened at the sight of her, and she could see his shoulders straightening as he scrambled for an explanation of his compromising position.

“She … ummm … fainted, and I caught her,” he declared in a defensive whisper. “Then when I made to lay her down, she wouldn’t let go of me … demanded I hold her a while.”

“She did, did she?” Antonia said softly, gliding forward. She could read his embarrassment, could feel it as if it were her own. It was boyish and sincere, disarming in the extreme.

“You don’t believe me,” he charged.

“Oh, I believe you,” she said with a laugh that was dangerously warm, even in her own ears. “Cleo always has had an eye for a handsome man, and she’s perfectly shameless about taking advantage of an opportunity with one.” Halting beside the sofa, she bent and pressed the back of her hand against the old lady’s pale, downy cheek. She seemed warm enough, and Antonia straightened, searching his unexpected and utterly appealing chagrin.

“What I have trouble believing is that you honored her request.” She couldn’t help the bit of wonder that crept into her voice as she trained her eyes on his elegantly clad chest. “There must be a heart in there, after all.”

Their eyes met, and in the stillness of the library, seconds, minutes, or whole eons might have passed; she had no way of telling. The ache in her chest spread downward through her, weakening her knees. His expression was turbulent, but through that she glimpsed a calmer center, a hidden softer aspect to his keen-edged character. It was all she could do to keep from reaching out to try to take hold of that inner man.

A distant noise, the closing of a door, set reality rustling around them. His eyes darkened and lowered to Cleo, and the moment was past.

“Would you be willing to carry her upstairs and lay her on her bed?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice from betraying the turmoil inside her.

He nodded and slid to the edge of the sofa. Shifting the old lady in his arms, he thrust to his feet and carried her toward the door. Antonia led the way to Cleo’s room and they deposited her gently on her bed. For a moment they stood side by side, looking at her.

“She’s not well,” Antonia said quietly. “Of late she spends more and more time with her memories and less time with us.” She glanced up and found a surprising bit of understanding in his expression. “We’re worried about her.”

He nodded, and from his concerned expression she had the strangest feeling that he really did know what she meant. She turned for the door, and he kept pace with her. When she closed the door behind them, he was so close she could feel his warmth, could catch his dusky, sandal-wood scent. Her heartbeat quickened. Against her better judgment she looked up. His eyes were again that warm-chocolate color.

“Thank you for being so kind to her.”

The air seemed to sweeten and thicken around them.

He was so close, she thought … with a whole world of warmth unexplored inside him.

She was so tempting, he thought … with those clear, bright eyes that seemed to shine their beguiling feminine light into his rawest and most tender emotions.

He was trembling, and the thought that she would see it was all that kept him from reaching for her there and then. After a moment she lowered her lashes and turned away.

He watched her walking down the hall toward the stairs and felt as if she had just unlocked the door of his heart and left it standing wide open. He turned in the opposite direction.

Minutes later he found himself breathing hard, standing
in the linen room on the third floor. He ripped off his coat and seized a rag and a sooty lamp globe—anything to take his mind off the disturbing sense of connection he had just felt with Antonia Paxton, and off the rebellion occurring in his passion-starved loins.

That night, after Remington left, the ladies gathered in the main drawing room, as they usually did of an evening. Most knitted or worked on stitchery, though some wrote letters or played cards while they listened to Victoria play the pianoforte.