Elisabeth Fairchild (10 page)

Felicity pushed away from the haven of her Deering’s arms, shifting sides of the coach, so that she curled up in his embrace, asking endearingly, “Sing another verse, papa. I am sorry to have interrupted.”

He met approval in Miss Deering’s eyes as he sang several verses, cuddling his daughter. Mrs. Olive felt emboldened enough to join in on the chorus. When the song was done she suggested another, and soon the carriage swelled with their combined voices.

Felicity fell asleep, head nestled in the hollow of her father’s shoulder, the rocking motion of the carriage, and the good cheer of song lulling all of them, Mrs. Olive’s eyes closing, Miss Deering’s lashes fluttering now and again no matter how much she tried to hold them high.

Val did not want to fall into jouncing, cramped uncomfortable dozing himself, and so he shifted his arm beneath the borrowed lap blanket, that the weight of Felicity’s head might not send it to sleep, and asked his daughter’s dark-eyed governess, “Are you cold?”

She sat directly opposite him. He had not missed the hunched position of her shoulders, the way she rubbed her hands together. He knew she was cold, and asked out of courtesy--out of a need to know how forthcoming she would be with him.

She started to shake her head.

He eyed her through lowered lids. “Do not say no when you mean yes, my Deering.”

Her lashes fluttered down again, in surprise, not weariness.  My Deering! She was not his. What possessed him to say such a thing?

“I do apologize,” he said abruptly.

At the same time she blurted, “I am a little chilled.”

A moment’s silence passed while they eyed one another, and then he made it worse by suggesting, “You are welcome to warm yourself with my overcoat.”

Her eyes flew wide, focusing on the coat flung across his knees to drip.

“It is not so wet as it was. And quite warm.”

“Have you not need of it, yourself, my lord? Your--” she hesitated, gaze falling, “limbs--I mean--your clothing is wet.”

“I appreciate your noticing,” he said in jest, provoking another startled look from long-lashed dark eyes. “But I will survive. Take it. Please, I beg of you.”

I’ve no idea, really, how to speak to a governess. Too many years on the battlefield, too many women of ill-repute who professed themselves amused no matter what I said or how.

“Unless, of course, you wish to share the warmth.”

She eyed the overcoat with alarm. Indeed he made the suggestion in jest, knowing she must refuse so unorthodox an arrangement. It amused him to test the depths of her prudery.

“I could not, my lord.”

Of course, she could not.

“It is large enough to drape both our knees. An unusual suggestion, I know, but sensible. Must I wake the child to retrieve your lap blanket?”

“No.”

“Shall I prod Mrs. Olive to share hers?”

She turned to consider Mrs. Olive, whose head had fallen back upon the seat. Her mouth gaped on a whistling intake of sleepy breathing.

He smiled, and she, seeing the smile, must smile as well.

Her gaze fell. “No, my lord. I would not bring discomfort to anyone. It is why I said nothing.”

“Oh, but your body cries out.” She was too easy to provoke. The alarmed look returned. “You shiver,” he clarified. “Come, do not be silly. I cannot sit watching a woman suffer when there is so easy a solution.”

He meant to hand her the coat, to cease his teasing, but she stopped him in reaching for the coat sleeve, grasp halting, tentative, fear in her eyes.

“It will not molest you,” he said impatiently.

Her gaze flew up to meet his, shocked. A terror he could not mock looked out at him from the deep dark wells of her eyes.
Damn Palmer. What did the bloody twit do to her?

“No, my lord,” she agreed. Any young female who valued her employment must agree.

“That is what you were thinking, was it not?”

She blinked, shook her head.

“Do not say no when you mean yes, my Deering,” he said brusquely, tone mocking, ego bruised by her willingness to think the worst of him when she did not know him.

Her chin fell. Her gaze. Her lips pursed. She let go her hold on the overcoat.

“You ought not call me that.”

True. I ought not. Funny how it persists in slipping out of my mouth that way.
“Quite improper I am sure,” he said. “Now tell me about Palmer.”

That earned him a direct look. She shivered again.

Is it cold, or Palmer that troubles you, my Deering?

“Had his way with you, did he?”

So intently she regarded him, as if with sharpest gaze she might discern all that lay in his heart, the core of his intentions.

“No he did not!” she protested with quiet heat.

Oho! Methinks the lady doth protest too vehemently
. He arched an eyebrow, unused to so delving a gaze, so ardent a denial--intrigued by it. “No? Tried to have his way, then?”

She nodded.

“You managed to stop him?” he drawled. “The bandage on his dragon’s wing?”

She nodded.

“Hit him, did you?”

“Bit him,” she murmured, her regard no less focused, no less wary.

He smiled, pleased to see she looked tempted to match that expression. So, Palmer tried to palm her, did he? He thought of Penny, of the way she had once looked at him--love in her eyes--trust. It added fuel to the fire of his temper.

“No more than he deserved!”

Felicity stirred, her head turning against his shoulder, a mewling noise issuing from her throat, as her fingers curled against his lapel.

“She suffers nightmares,” he said.

“I know,” Miss Deering said quietly.

Of course she knows. How many times has she been awakened by my daughter’s cries?

“She told you why?” he asked brusquely.

“No, my lord. Only cried out for her papa.”

“And for Penny?” he said knowing all too well the sound of those cries.

“Yes.”

“She raised her.”

“So she said.”

He settled his daughter more comfortably against his shoulder, settled his own temper, with a flick of the wrist rearranged his coat, flung the tail-end of the garment across the skittish little governess’s lap.

She grabbed at the weighty, lined fabric, smoothing it across her knees, not refusing, as he had thought she might.

He eyed the hills and valleys their limbs made beneath the heavy fabric, warmed by the sight, by her acceptance of his warmth. And then he looked away, watching the rain drenched countryside rumble by, wondering what life might have been like had it been Penny Foster’s knees opportunity warmed. He imagined what it might have been like to be married, to have the little one just born his own rather than Cupid’s.

“She married my best friend,” he said.

She watched him from the far side of the coach.

Dear Miss Deering. Not Penny. It will never be Penny. He gave his head a shake.

“Yes, my lord.”

She tried to sit still, to sit straight, despite the pitch and yaw of the coach, his coat tugged between them, connecting them, one side still damp from the rain, the lining warm with his body’s heat. She was uncomfortable with that connection. Her whole body spoke of that discomfort.

“You probably know the whole of it,” he said bitterly.

“Whole of what, my lord? Your life? Your daughter’s? I hardly think so.”

“My shame?”

She blinked, confused.

He glanced at Felicity, at Mrs. Olive, to be sure both slept. “Come. Come, Miss Deering. You know my daughter’s circumstances, her history?”
That I left a poor girl pregnant? That I credited the wrong woman with the child’s birth? She knows, I can see it in her eyes.

Miss Deering kept her voice very low, her gaze sliding often to the child as she spoke, her concern that they might be overheard equal to his own. “I know that she was illegitimately conceived.”

So harsh those words, even when whispered.

“That her mother died in childbirth.”

Eve. Poor Eve.

“That you were unaware of her existence until your return from France, and that she was well cared for by a young woman named Penny Foster.”

He exhaled heavily. “And thus you know the whole of it, as I said.”

“No, my lord.”

“No?”

“I also know that you took her in when many a gentleman of your position and status might have denied her very existence. I know that you see to it she is well-educated, and that you would seem very fond of her, indeed that you may have risked your own life, and reputation in providing for her.”

He said nothing. There seemed nothing to say, only a moment of unspoken communication as she looked him in the eyes, gaze steady.

“She fears me.”

“She has yet to learn to know you.”

The coach lurched through a rut in the road, throwing their knees together, no avoiding it, and she did try to avoid it, her legs, her body held stiffly away from his beneath the swaying lap blanket of his coat. Sleeves trailed about his thighs. The furred collar rested soft as a lap dog beneath his hands, and he found himself not at all averse to bumping knees with this dark-eyed governess who saw far more than he had expected.

“I beg your pardon,” she gasped.

Their eyes met, her dark, fearful, cat-ready-to-scamper gaze sliding away.

“You’ve no reason to beg me for anything,” he said.

She made no reply.

“No reason to fear.”

He could see her reflection in the window, the pale peak of her forehead, the dark wells of her eyes, watching him, judging. She had judged him in absentia for many months. For as long as Felicity has been in her care.

He laughed, a dry humorless noise that fogged the window, eliminating for the moment that pensive reflection. “No need to bite,” he promised. “No fire left in this old dragon.”

He was happy to see hint of a smile touch her lips. In his belly, embers stirred, an unexpected heat.

That he attempted to put her fears to rest surprised Elaine.

That he noticed her concerns was queer enough, but that he discerned the source of her uneasiness startled her. His attempt to calm her seemed nothing short of a source of wonder, in its own way, an additional concern. Accustomed to fading into the background, the focus of none but her pupil’s attentions, Lord Wharton proved unwilling to allow her to so fade--just as Palmer proved unwilling. It worried her.
I must not allow him to catch me unaware--alone--vulnerable. I will not allow it. Never again.

And so, while she feigned sleep, she could not allow herself to doze on the way to Chester, through the rain, not while he was in the coach, not while his coat graced both their knees, his legs swaying against her gown with the rocking of the coach no matter where she tried to direct her own limbs. The roads were not so well paved here as they had been in Leeds.

He did not doze, neither did he choose to talk. His prerogative. Not her place to start a conversation. Not that she would, with no idea what to say to him.

He simply turned his head to the window and watched the countryside slip by, and now and then glanced down at the child with softened features, and rearranged the arm that cradled her.

Once he looked Elaine’s way, a quick glance that passed over her in the manner to which she had grown accustomed--as if she were not really there. She took some comfort in that, and at the same time felt a pang of regret, for when he talked to her, when he asked her about Palmer, he had looked at her as if he truly saw her, as if her answers mattered. His interest made blood race, and fear rise. She had felt very alive in that moment, very aware.

But now his head turned away, fair curls dry--angelic curls--and he no angel--no saint in this Valentine. His piercing, blue-eyed gaze remained fixed on the landscape, and she faded into her familiar oblivion, watching him, weary of the rocking. She came to life again, in a knifeblade-sharp awareness only when the coach rocked more violently than usual, and once again their knees banged, or his boot tops brushed the fabric of her skirt.

What thoughts provoke this deep breath? One might almost call it a sigh. The heat of it momentarily fogs the view.
He seemed, in the very sound of that exhalation, in the unrelenting concentration of his gaze, unhappy.

She did not know what to make of him.

What she did know was that he knew she both feared and respected him, and that the combination of emotion, like the uncontrollable banging of their limbs, rattled her from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes.

T
he coach stood waiting for his lordship outside one of the galleried, wattle-and-daub, mullion-windowed shops that made up the heart of Chester’s commerce. Lord Wharton and Felicity were buying tea.

Mrs. Olive sat knitting, while Elaine made every effort to take interest in a book. Words swam on the page. The sentences made no sense. Her gaze kept drifting to the doorway.
Whose coach will I sit in next week, or the week after that? And when I am Mrs. Olive’s age, in whose coach will I then sit?

With a sigh she turned the page she had read at least four times over. Marking her place, she patted the comforting bulge of paperwork in her pocket. Lord Wharton’s unexpected gift. She need not fear too much her future with such a letter to recommend her.

Across from her, the clicking knitting needles stopped. “That gentleman in the rain, at the school.”

Did she mean Palmer?

“A former employer?” The old lady tugged at one of the balls of yarn nestled in a basket at their feet.

“Yes.”

“Wanted you back, did he?” The needles resumed their work. In and out, in and out, dark gray yarn weaving itself into light.

“Yes, he wanted me.”

“And yet you did not go with him.” She tugged at the truth as gently as the wool. “Was he cruel? Did he beat you, my dear?” In and out, in and out, she would knit the truth together, the light and dark of Elaine’s past.

“He did not beat me.”

“Was he then a drinker with bad temper?” Click, click, click. She came to the end of her skein.