Elisabeth Fairchild (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine

Patience was sure Pip must say something on the way home. She waited patiently through his perfectly unobjectionable chitchat recounting how lovely had been their visit, how well Lady Wilmington looked, how timely that they should visit in the same instant Richard should have come to call, how wonderful the garden party Melanie was planning sounded.

“You do mean to be there?” he asked.

“Yes. I would not miss such a gathering.”

“Melanie mentioned there is to be an announcement.”

“Yes. She is soon to be ousted by her cousin, is she not?” Patience sighed. She did not want to talk about the garden party. She did not want to discuss Lady Wilmington’s proposed announcement—although she did wonder if Richard’s name might figure into it—wondered, too, why he had looked so baffled when she had turned down the offer to meet his mysterious friend. Did he simply hope to see her married to someone he knew and cared for, that they might more easily remain friends?

A logical conclusion, certainly a practical one, and yet it left her testy; she did not know why. But of course the real reason was because Pip would seem to address any topic but that which most interested her—his feelings for her, the feelings he had kept hidden from her for years, the feelings Melanie had informed her he was afraid to divulge.

“Who am I?” she asked him suddenly.

“Who are you?” he repeated the question, his features a picture of confusion. “What do you mean, who are you? Do you not recall? Are you feeling faint, m’dear?”

She sighed in her impatience. “No, I am not faint. And of course I recall, but I wish to know from your perspective who I am.”

“Oh, a game, is it? All right, then.” He sat back to regard her through narrowed eyes. “You are Patience Ballard. . . .”

“Am I?”

“Last time I checked.”

“Patience. Am I Patience?”

“Not at the moment. You seem very impatient with me, and it is not fair, as you have not informed me just what game it is we play.”

“What does Patience mean to you?”

“Patience? Why it means to wait, quietly, calmly, unruffled—precisely the opposite of the mannerisms and expression you are displaying right now. In fact, quite the opposite of the mannerisms you typically display. Why do you ask?”

“I am tired of being Patience.”

“But who then do you hope to be?” he asked, much confused.

“I am tired of waiting.” She stirred restlessly in her seat, ready to fling herself at him. “Of hoping. Of dreaming. I do not want to be Patience anymore.” She wondered if he would admit his feelings at last if she threw herself into his arms. “I should like to be impetuous, and daring, and noisy, as you are.” She gathered herself for a move, given the slightest sign.

“Me?” He flung up his hands, as if to ward her off. “But you are wrong, my dear friend. I am the soul of patience. Have been for years.”

“Are you?” She was surprised, hopeful, breathless, now ready to be patient a little longer.

“Without question, and so you shall see at Melanie’s garden party, for I mean it to be a night of revelation for myself as much as her.”

Patience quieted, puzzling over his words. Did he mean to declare his love for her at this garden party?

“All right.” She sat back to consider the dilemma of what she must wear to the garden party, for it promised to be an evening when all eyes might turn in her direction, and she had given away the better part of her clothing allowance to Richard’s foundlings.

“Do you know . . .” Pip paused.

Well, of course she didn’t. “What?”

“Richard said . . .” He stopped, gave her an odd look, and took note of the street where they were turning. With a frown he went on, “Richard said the strangest thing today.”

“Richard, strange? How unlike him.”

“Yes.” He seemed to be puzzling it still.

They came to a halt in front of her parents’ town house. “What did he say?”

Pip glanced at the back of the driver’s head. “Too much to go into here. Care to come play a game of battledore tomorrow?”

Battledore?
They had not played battledore since they were children, she and Pip. How like him to make her wait till tomorrow with whatever his mystery was.

She tried to sound disinterested as she stepped down, saying, “What time?”

“Early,” he said with the sort of smile that always managed to melt her heart. “While it is cool.” Then he winked at her. “But not so early there is still heavy dew on the grass.”

***

Patience arrived with her battledore racket at a quarter past ten. Pip, to her amazement, had already set up the net, an ancient thing that had stiffened with age and gone paunchy in the middle.

Patience had grown nervous about Pip’s unusual request. What could Richard have said? Why go to such lengths to tell her?

She allowed herself to suppose Pip wanted a moment alone with her, a very private moment to ask a most private question of her, nothing to do with Richard at all, and it made her hands sweat a bit on the racket handle as she knocked at the door. Her voice faltered in asking the butler for Pip.

Her knees even went a bit soft as she was led through the house to the back garden.

Pip made it all right again.

He met her with a sour expression, a battered shuttlecock in his hand. Sadly lopsided, it was missing three feathers.

“Only one I could find,” he apologized.

She laughed, relieved. He did not look as if he meant to ask her anything at all important. “Oh, dear. Silly thing will have no sense of direction whatsoever.” Like her mind, she thought, wandering off on stupid tangents.

“Well, I’m game if you are.” His grin stirred a flight of shuttlecocks in her stomach as he bounced the cork end of his wounded bird against his strings.

One could not call it a game. It was more rightly dubbed the shuttlecock chase. The featherless cock insisted on flying into the wooded copse bordering their playing area far more often than it should. No matter which way one hit the thing it whirled off in unexpected directions. Their pursuit of it was an exercise that had them both laughing and whooping from the start.

On their third foray into the wood to retrieve the “blasted thing,” as Pip kept referring to it, Patience asked, “What was it Richard said to you yesterday that you found so strange?”

“Here’s the tricky devil!” Pip bent to pick up the pitiful shuttlecock. He responded as if he had not heard her question as he gave it another thwack against catgut. “I thoroughly enjoyed our visit to see Melanie yesterday. Did you?”

“Of course.” She dodged in the direction she was sure the shuttlecock must go, and miscalculated entirely.

As she set off into the wood again, she asked, “Did it have something to do with Melanie?”

“Do you like her?” Pip asked as he followed, racquet batting at the grass and ferns into which the shuttlecock might have flown.

“I do. She has been very kind to me.”

“And you to her.”

He said it carefully, as if he had given the matter thought.

“Have I?”

“But of course. You were so good in listening to Wilmi as you did, all of his old stories.”

“They were new to me.”

“And in visiting her while she was in mourning.”

“Richard’s idea.”

“Here it is,” he called and bent to ferret their wayward cock out from under a juniper bush. And as he rose, he looked up at her, laughter in his eyes, and asked, “Was helping out with her teas at the foundling home Richard’s idea?”

“No. Mine. You tried to talk me out of it, as I recall.”

He held the shuttlecock out, as if he meant her to take it, but when she reached for it, he moved his hand as he had when they were children, teasing her, dangling it just out of reach. “I thought you too unspoiled.” He waggled his brows, eyes sparkling with a familiar teasing light. “Too unwise to the ways of the world to get involved.”

She reached for the shuttlecock again, and again he moved it just out of reach, so that she leaned in closer, reaching high, her rib cage brushing his, their arms bumping as she laughed, and grabbed at his hand.

And suddenly he turned his hand, so that hers met with his, and between their palms the mangled shuttlecock was pressed. When, in her surprise, she would have snatched it away, triumphant, he clasped his fingers to hers, that she might not.

Her eyes went wide.

“Perhaps I was wrong.” The light in his eyes, the throaty tone of his voice proved unexpectedly provocative, as he released his hold on both her fingers and the shuttlecock, in a way that led her to suppose he meant to flirt with her.

Her heart beat a little faster; her breath came short in asking, “And Lady Wilmington? Did you try to dissuade her as well?”

He laughed, and politely held back a branch that blocked their way. “No. Melanie is very wise to the ways of the world. It is one of the reasons I mean to marry her.”

“Marry her?” She did not for a moment take him seriously. “Do not tease me, Pip. You cannot marry her. Must not.”

He frowned. “Why so?”

“Because . . .” She twisted the shuttlecock between her fingers, eyeing with pursed lips feathers gone awry. “Because Richard is in love with her, and she with him, and I would not have you spoil that.”

“Richard?” He gave a great guffaw, and swung his racquet at a violet, decapitating it. “Whatever gave you such a preposterous idea?”

“Melanie.”

“What?” He looked momentarily stunned, indeed the arc of his racquet froze in midair, and then he laughed again, and swung the racquet again, scything through the grass. “She plays a game with you if she has said such a thing.”

“She was in earnest.”

He shook his head. “Impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

“Richard is in love with . . .” He smiled an impish smile, and twirled the racquet like a ballet dancer, just above a row of nodding daisies. “. . . someone else entirely.”

“You are wrong.”

He made an exasperated noise. “If anyone would know these two, it would be me. I cannot believe you suggest such a match. They are completely unsuited to one another.”

“I happen to agree, but love is not always wise, or sensible, or well matched.”

“This truly is preposterous!” His voice rose, impatient, a little doubtful. “If Richard were in love with her he would have said something to me yesterday, when he told me . . .”

“Yes, what did he tell you?”

When he did not at once reply, she drew breath sharply. “Did he admit that he has been having an affair with her?”

He ducked under the net. “Something equally preposterous.”

“I tell you he is in love with her, and if you are as good a friend as you claim, you will not break his heart in stealing her away from him.”

He turned at that, and looked at her incredulously through the net, his gaze so intense she took a step backward. Jaw set, anger flashing in his eyes, he whirled the racquet twice in his hand, as if he wanted very much to strike down her remark before he spat out, “Are you sure it is I who would be thief?”

She did not know how to respond to such a question, and with an exasperated sigh he banged the palm of his hand against the catgut of his racket. “C’mon. Let’s play.”

“What did Richard say?” she called out rather irritably as she managed to get the shuttlecock airborne, its flight a corkscrewing nightmare of misdirection.

He bashed the spiraling cock with undue energy. “I will tell you if you promise to tell me if what he said is true.”

She frowned as she scampered back from the net, and missed the direction of the shuttlecock completely. “All right. I promise.”

“Bloody hell!”

“How unlike Richard. He is not given to blasphemy.”

He ducked under the net again. “No. It is the damnable shuttlecock. Flown into the woods again. Did you not see it sail past?”

“Sorry. I was certain it would go hither, instead of yon. Which way?”

He parted the trees for her. “Into that ocean of ferns.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Yes. Confound the thing. Onto your hands and knees.”

“I shall get dirt on my gown.”

He pulled her down beside him, shoulders bumping, hips bumping, his manner playful and teasing, an unusual light in his eyes. “You never used to fuss.”

She elbowed him with a trace of irritation. “I used to have more of a dress allowance.”

He threw back his head to laugh, and caught at the hem of her skirt as she passed, giving it a tug as she bent to look among the fronds of ferns.

“Now, please tell me what it was Richard said that was so important you would ask me here to play battledore with a vexingly featherless cock.”

He laughed, waggled his brows at her, and jumped up from where he knelt. “Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.” She waggled her eyebrows back at him, the muscles of his thighs catching her attention as she bent again in search.

He caught the drift of her attention, winking at her with such a devilish gleam in his eyes she blinked in dismay. Never, since he had spoken to her at Vauxhall Gardens as the mysterious woman in red, had Pip turned the full power of his charms upon her. And his smile, the rakish gleam in his eyes could be dizzying indeed.

Blushing, she rose at once to her feet, saying, “Why, there it is. Not in the ferns at all.”

He turned, looked in the direction she pointed, and laughed. “Up a tree, is it?”

“And too high to reach,” she warned him.

“Do you mean to make me climb?”

“You never used to fuss,” she mocked him, giving his hip a bump as he walked beside her. She could tease, too. Indeed, she could be quite coy when she wanted to. “I think I can get at it.” She threw a coquettish glance over her shoulder. “If you will be so good as to give me a boost.”

“A boost, is it, my little hoyden?” He laughed again, his every glance and gesture as changeable as the leaf-filtered light that dappled his cheek. “Still hoist your skirts to climb trees now and again, do you?”

Her thoughts went all muddled to have him smile at her as he did, shadows deepening the blue of his eyes, sunlight winking golden in his hair.

“Whenever the opportunity presents itself,” she said with a nervous laugh.