Gypsy Heiress (14 page)

“It’s hardly likely,” I said, headache and embarrassment adding an unintended edge to my voice. “Our tribal justice decrees that promiscuous women should have their nostrils slit.”

I saw right away that I had horrified Mr. Absalm, for he blanched and swallowed loudly and said that he begged my pardon. It occurred to me that I had just received the predicted indecent proposal and, to my shame, I realized that John Lennox was standing only a few paces away and that he must have heard everything. I looked at him, blushing, only to find that he was regarding me with voluptuous approval and, as our gazes met, he lifted his hands and made a gesture to me of mute applause. As for Peregrine Absalm, for the rest of the evening he treated me with a respect that bordered upon awe.

Dinner went off very well, “considering,” as Ellen would say. Lady Gwen had impressed upon me the importance of dividing one’s attention equally between the partner on the right and the partner on the left. This was easy enough to do, because on my right was an elderly baronet who needed little encouragement to talk about the disastrous drop in the prices for farm produce since the end of the war, and on my left was the rotund and red-faced parson who announced straightaway that while he was sure I would know much that interested him about the ways of the gypsy, we would have to discuss it at some later date, for it was death on his digestion to talk during dinner.

Mrs. Perscough deplored the modern trend toward allowing one’s guests to speak across the table on formal occasions, as it allowed uncongenial people access to their various foes, rendering null and void a hostess’s careful efforts to separate the incompatible, and inevitably making the meal a less than peaceful occasion. To discourage this practice, she had placed huge silver bowls at frequent intervals down the table and had the gardener fill them with arrangements of tall white hothouse lilies surrounded by an impenetrable array of green foliage. Ellen, seated toward the end of the table, I could only see if both of us happened to crane our necks at the same instant; Lady Gwen caught us at it and frowned me down.

My cousin, Isabella, and her husband had arrived late, delayed by a strained spavin on one of their coach horses, and they were seated when they came in halfway through dinner, though not before Isabella had made a great show of being happy to see me, followed by a more restrained greeting from Vincent. I smiled back at them with as much animation as my throbbing head would allow, feeling relieved that whether at Vincent’s advice, or at Lady Gwen’s, Isabella had not carried her ill feeling toward me into the public eye.

Isabella and Brockhaven were seated side by side. Through the foliage I could see them talking to each other in a steady, intent way I found painful to watch, no matter how much I chided myself for it. They had been lovers once, and she still cared for him. And she was so pretty, like a vision. For all Brockhaven’s apparent hostility, was any man ever proof against a beauty like Isabella’s?

I kept my smile in place and continued to mind my manners, but my headache continued to grow, and with it my loneliness and my sense of being an outsider.

After the meal the gorgios segregate by sex, with the ladies retiring to another chamber to “leave the gentlemen to their port,” which is a practice that occurs only by accident at Edgehill. Lord Brockhaven leaves the table immediately after dinner to shut himself in his study with piles of estate business, and Robert rides off to gambling or cockfighting with his cronies.

Gypsies do the same, my grandmother had told me. The men sit together, looking very pleased with themselves, as though they have cleverly and by stealth shed their petticoat government so they can swear and smoke and argue about business, politics, and horses. The women form a group of their own, looking equally pleased with themselves so they can discuss the men; who has put on weight and who has lost it, how best to cure your husband of snoring, and the clever thing their youngest child said when he had seen his father cut himself during shaving.

As I walked to the white drawing room with the other ladies, the throbbing in my temples was so intense that when Ellen asked me how I had liked dinner, she had to repeat her remark three times before I could make sense of it. I apologized and told her about my headache, and soon I was surrounded by ladies speaking in solicitous whispers of headache powders and warm compresses and having our carriage brought round to convey Gwen and Ellen and me back to Edgehill. I demurred quickly, and raised my eyes to Mrs. Perscough, and in a voice that I distantly recognized as pleading, asked if I might lie down alone for a few minutes in the dark. No, thank you so much, I didn’t need Lady Gwen or Ellen to come with me.

I hardly recall being led to a guest chamber, being tucked under a soft blanket, or Mrs. Perscough’s whispered message that she would return to see how I did in one hour, and that I should ring the call bell and send a servant for her at once, if I should need something before then.

My eyes closed in blessed relief, my mind faded restlessly into sleep, and I dreamed that I was a Saxon princess held captive by Danish pirates. Lord Brockhaven fluctuated with bewildering speed between the identity of a Saxon hero who was come to rescue me, and the leader of the pirates.

It was more than an hour later when I woke up, so said the small bracket clock that sat beside a single lit candle on the mantelpiece. A note propped beside it from Lady Gwen said that she had come with Mrs. Perscough on the hour and when they had found me sleeping, decided it would be better not to disturb me. The note ended by saying that I should ring for her to come to me as soon as I woke up, and that she knew how sensitive I was, and I mustn’t allow myself to feel awkward about lying down—
everyone
understands a headache—and she loved me.

I smiled mistily at the note, tucked it into my reticule, made what reparations I could to my hair, and determined to find my own way back to the white drawing room.

The corridor was dark and quiet, with small, glass-globed tapers that burned many yards apart, shedding pale, flickering light in silver haloes along the blue walls. I passed door after anonymous door, stopping at intervals to listen in vain for the sounds of conversation. The corridor reached an abrupt end, so I had to retrace my steps, which built in me a feeling of failure that began to nibble away at the well-being that Lady Gwendolyn’s note had given me. At length I found a well-lit staircase hung with a chandelier, and remembered I had climbed it on Mrs. Perscough’s arm. Almost running down it in my relief, and not looking anywhere except the steps ahead of me, I reached the bottom and barreled full speed into the tall figure of a man.

“What’s this?” he said, above my head. “Why, Liza! Hello, little Liza.”

“Vincent!” I gasped, then corrected myself hastily, “I mean Mr.—Mr.…” Elves had fuddled my tongue, for I couldn’t remember his last name.

“Randolph,” he supplied, with some amusement. “But I liked hearing Vincent better from your lips. Please continue with that. I hope you’re feeling better now. Mrs. Perscough told us that you had a headache. We were very concerned about you.”

I wondered who he meant by we, and why he was so kind to me when his wife hated me so, and why he always looked at me in that particular, discreetly analyzing way. My words were as disjointed as my thoughts, as I said, “Oh, no! There was no cause! I had the merest trace of a… that is, I’m ashamed to have been such a baby about—” I broke off, realizing that I was doing exactly what Lady Gwen had cautioned me not to do in her note.

He put up his hand, as if in one gesture to reassure and show me that he understood.

“I don’t think you’re a baby,” he said, his gray eyes searching my face from under heavy, long-lashed lids. “What would have put such a thing into your mind?”

My thoughts flashed back to Lord Brockhaven and what he had said to me in the front hall at Edgehill this evening. I found myself beginning to blush.

“Nothing. I babble sometimes.”

“Nonsense!” he retorted, with a cool, direct grin that reminded me in a small way of Brockhaven’s. “You handle yourself magnificently. I can’t imagine a more self-possessed young woman, or one with greater courage. Surely, you must realize that the sweetness of your charm holds center stage, whatever company you find yourself in and whatever situation—and I have seen you in the most difficult.”

I stared at him blankly, and he laughed.

“And modest in the bargain,” he said. “Never mind. How has it been, settling in at Edgehill? Gwen is quite a lady, isn’t she? She must be a great support for you.”

“Yes, she is, and Ellen also. I don’t know how I could have gone on without them.”

“Nor do I,” he said, a little too dryly. “I’ve wanted to come to see you but…” There was an odd, almost wistful quality to his voice that I found disturbing, and as though he sensed my unease, he lifted his long graceful arms and rested his hands over the bare curve of my shoulder, his thumbs brushing gently the flesh that covered my collarbone. “You’ve noticed, haven’t you, that Alex and I don’t get along.”

“Yes,” I said through a tightening throat.

“That makes it a trifle difficult for us to become friends. And that’s all I’ve wanted, Liza, from the first moment I spoke to you. I don’t mean you any harm. How could I? Do you believe that?”

There was a silence that I somehow found frightening, and I nodded, because he seemed to expect it and because it had never occurred to me to think that he might want to harm me. I heard a door open behind him, but his shoulder blocked my view and by the time he turned to look, the door had closed again.

As he turned back, he gave me the smile of a sympathetic advocate. “So. A pledge to our mutual trust. Your hand on it?”

I lifted my hand right away, hoping it would make him take his from my shoulders, but he only raised one hand and curled it around my fingers, bringing it to his lips.

“Here’s to friendship,” he said in a low tone. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. “I’ll tell you what! Why don’t we talk to Gwen, and ask if we can’t get you over to visit us at Chad next week? I was looking through the old schoolroom in the west wing yesterday, and do you know that I found a copybook that belonged to your father? He must have been around seven or eight years old when he made it, and it’s full of diagrams for mechanical banks and spinning jennies, and poems like an ‘Ode to the Land Under a Tree Stump.’ We have a miniature toy coach and four that belonged to him too, and a pull-duck from when he was an infant. I know he would have wanted you to have them. If we can arrange a visit, then I can show you his old rooms, and where he played, and give you his toys. Would you like that?”

“Oh, yes! So much! How kind of you to think of it. Several times I’ve thought of how I’d like to see Chad, because it was my father’s home, but I haven’t wanted to impose.”

There was a sharp crack as the door behind Vincent was pushed open with some force, and Brockhaven strode into the corridor. Vincent removed his hands from me, though not before Brockhaven had seen.

“Touch her again,” said Brockhaven in a soft invitation, “and I’ll flay open your hide with a horse whip.”

Clamping a bruising iron grip on my upper arm, he pulled me with him into the drawing room. I barely noticed the cheerful groups of chatting guests that surrounded us as I stared in mute amazement at Brockhaven.

“Enjoy your latest conquest, my dearest love?” he said in a quiet tone that felt as though I was being flayed with the same horse whip with which he’d threatened Vincent.

“What do you mean?” I said, fighting for control over my voice. “What have I done to make you so angry? I met Vincent in the hallway. What would you want me to do? Walk by him, ignoring him when he spoke to me?”

“Of course not,” he said in a suddenly indifferent tone that reminded me that Lord Brockhaven was much better at playing this game than I. “Would I expect you to say no to a man? And stand still to let him run his hands over your body, so we can be certain you won’t hurt his feelings? The next time Vincent makes love to you, don’t do a damn thing to discourage him, so I can have the pleasure of killing him afterward.”

“Makes
love
—?” I repeated in a voice that sounded pathetically like a squawk to my own ears. “Kill him? How dare you say that? How dare
you
say that?” My heart began to race, and I could feel the color flame into my cheeks. Shame that I had not had the confidence to take Vincent’s hands off my shoulders did nothing to lessen my discomfort, and the vaguely guilty feeling that there was a small measure of justice in Brockhaven’s accusations made me angrier and more defensive than ever. “There was nothing indecent in the way Vincent treated me! In fact, he was kind, and respectful, which are two things that—”

“… I am not.” He finished my sentence with a sardonically raised eyebrow. “Spare me your comparisons, valid as they may be. It’s so delightfully opportune for the male sex that you’re so easy to seduce.”

Blood surged through my heart in scalding bursts. “To which seduction do you refer—Vincent’s or yours?”

I knew immediately from the coldly suppressed fury on his face that I had said too much, but for once I was too hurt to care. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” I said with a heavy-handed flippancy. “We’re not supposed to talk about that, are we, my lord?”

His fingers tightened on my arm until I was half-afraid that I might whimper. “My sweet little girl,” he said in a calm, hard voice, “that’s one rein that you had better not pull. Do I have to explain to you why?”

“No,” I gasped, wishing I was of a loftier frame of mind than to be curious about what he would have said. Brockhaven released my arm, and I might have collapsed with relief if I had not been mesmerized by bright blue flames that burned deep in his eyes. After a moment, the fire seemed to bank and fold into itself, and he said, “Don’t stay alone with Vincent, Liza. Never.”

It was more than a minute before I could answer him, so harsh was my battle to keep tears from invading my voice. “In the name of heaven, what’s made you so angry? I
know
that in your world it’s acceptable for me to be acquainted with your cousin. Lady Gwen told me so. How can you tell me I cannot? Why would you want to?”