Kissed by Starlight

KISSED BY STARLIGHT

Cynthia Bailey Pratt

Chapter One

March 1, 1789

On the doorstep, Felicia paused and glanced back. The women were offering comfort to Lady Stavely and her beautiful, vacant daughter. Clarice clung to her mother’s hand, confused by the somber faces and hushed tones around them. Soon Felicia would come back and distract her sister with cake. No need to worry that she would be frightened by her mother’s tears; Lady Matilda had shed none for her husband, nor would she. After what she’d overheard in the conservatory, Felicia at last knew why.

No one had cried for him. The funeral had been dignified. Some of the men had coughed discreetly expressing what emotion an Englishman could comfortably convey. Not even Felicia herself had cried, for the long box of polished wood seemed meaningless, a toy. Her father was not in there.

Hearty voices, raised only to be guiltily dropped, drew Felicia’s attention to where the men had gathered. Before long, no one would remember that they had come to Hamdry Manor to bid farewell to its master. The guests, invited to partake of a small luncheon after the funeral, had begun to talk, not of the deceased, but of the iniquities of Mr. Pitt’s government and the unrest in France. The wine Felicia had ordered to accompany the cakes and savories was cheering hearts and loosening tongues.

James, Viscount Lord Stavely, was dead and buried. Soon the empty space he left behind would close, leaving no scar to mark where he had once been. Only in her heart, it seemed, did the pain of loss penetrate. She recalled the harsh metallic ring of Lady Stavely’s voice as she demanded, “What did he leave me?”

Felicia, as a natural child, had only the rights of affection that her father had extended to her. But she had sat by, stiff and cold, while Mr. Ashton read the will. She did not ask, “What will become of me?” She was too shocked and grieved for selfishness—all the more so when she realized anew what the private scene between the solicitor and the widow, happened on by the merest chance, really meant.

“If you love me ...”

Felicia pushed the memory away. How many times had she exerted her strength to ward off some intolerable thought in the two and a half days since her father had died? How could a mere memory be so heavy? Was that why her head and body ached so?

“Miss Felicia ... ?” The soft voice of the family solicitor slipped under her defenses like miners digging underground to bring down a citadel’s wall.

“Mr. Ashton.” Her eyes felt hot beneath their dry lids as she turned toward him.

“I did not wish to go without extending again my deepest condolences on the death of your father. He will be missed ... he will be most dearly missed.”

“Indeed, Mr. Ashton. Those of us in his family know full well how much.”

“Ah, the love of a daughter is a very precious thing. One day, I hope to be so blessed by affection.”

“You are not married yet, Mr. Ashton.”

He blinked, then smiled slowly as though unused to the exercise. “No. But I have some hopes that I cherish. I shall plead a legal discretion in not saying her name.”

“Put yourself to no trouble, Mr. Ashton. I am not curious.”

Felicia held herself very stiffly, keeping even her skirts away from Mr. Ashton’s contaminating presence. She glanced over him, his scrawny frame like that of a black heron with a long-tailed coat and spindle shanks. His lips were thin and wet, his eyes distorted by thick lids and scanty lashes, whereas his hair was both pale and coarse. How could Matilda bear to be touched by those dead-white flipperlike hands?

She had never found the solicitor to be more than mildly unappealing before. Now she found that to be near him was to court nausea. Her father not even cold in his grave! Not an hour after his funeral, his widow and his legal adviser were embracing with greedy passion in a chamber he had labored to create, the very stones of which held something of his personality!

Mr. Ashton said, “I hope you will find a few moments for me, Miss Felicia, later in the day? Your father left you a small annuity, as you heard when I read his will to you all. There are papers to be signed to see that his wishes are carried out. I also have a small proposal to put to you for your advantage.”

Felicia fumbled out her handkerchief and pressed it to her lips. Every time he spoke, she caught the foulness of his breath. As it combined with the heat of the room, Felicia began to feel as though she would rather not inhale.

“Later . ..,” she mumbled. “Yes, I will make a moment to see you later. Pray excuse me now.”

She slipped away, down through the bustling kitchen and out into the garden at the side of the house. She paused a moment there by the door, gulping in fresh air. The coldness of the day was warmed by the mellow brick walls that held in what heat the March sun grudgingly offered. Though she wore no shawl or cloak, the cold breeze seemed to pass her by. The vegetable beds lay sleeping beneath a crust of snow. Felicia thought, ‘ There was snow mounded like that on the dirt they dug out of his grave.”

Moving quickly, she headed out of the kitchen garden, pushing open the gate. Beyond lay the formal gardens, mathematically laid out around an oval lawn seventy years ago by her own great-grandfather. The great parterres bounded by low boxwood also slept beneath a white mantle, yet here the neat geometric forms possessed a still beauty even without the blaze of color that would embolden them in the spring. Here and there throughout this part of the garden were statues, brought back at great expense from the four corners of the world, or at least those parts visited on Grand Tours.

All around the edge of the garden, straight tall cedars stood like a cordon of soldiers, protecting Hamdry Manor from the great moor beyond the cultivated garden. If she continued this way, she would find herself out in the open where the wind swept away all that was irrelevant. Only the most basic and strongest things survived there—grass, water, and the stone forts and markers of a long-vanished people. Though the untamed moor frightened her, Felicia felt a powerful longing to go out there, to be buffeted by the wind until her thoughts were scoured clean.

“How could she?” Felicia whispered. “How could she do it?”

Beneath her bell-like skirt of thick black silk, her legs were exhausted, trembling, hardly able to support her. She remembered in a vague way that she had not eaten anything since attending her father’s deathbed. Felicia staggered, only to be brought up short by the plinth of a statue, her father’s favorite.

Lord Stavely had believed it to be equal in age with the oldest part of the garden, dating from medieval times. Various authorities had disagreed. How her father had enjoyed comparing the writings of one with another and laughing at their conclusions! An Elizabethan gentleman had claimed the statue to be a Celtic war god; a pompous Stuart collector had disdained it as a crude fraud perpetrated by a local yahoo; while a delicate dilettante not ten years ago had proclaimed it the figure of an unknown saint, sculpted by an unknown master of Gothic artistry, in a stone unknown to science.

Felicia raised her eyes. The figure stood wrapped in a cloak, only a booted toe emerging from the stone folds. His face was turned toward some distant sight. With great skill, the ancient carver had put into his face such an angry yearning that Felicia had been glad when her father had raised the statue on its plinth so that she need no longer look into those lonely, hungry eyes. Yet she remembered the expression with perfect clarity still.

Her head swimming with weakness, she noticed something now that she never had before. Though the stone cloak bore epaulets of snow, none had turned the hair white. She suddenly remembered that in the summer when the creeping moss turned the close-held cloak to green velvet, the face never changed color. Strange that she had never realized it before.

Felicia, her emotions sharpened by grief and bodily frailty, felt the sorrow of the statue strike to her heart. The tears she’d not shed for her father welled up in her eyes. She tried to force them back, blinking rapidly so that the still-crisp carving of the cloak seemed to swirl and shift before her eyes.

Felicia dropped her face into her hands, weaving from side to side. Finding the plinth at her elbow, she leaned upon it, the tears spattering down. Some dripped on the protruding toe of the statue’s booted foot.

Felicia did not cry long. What folly—to weep for stone and not to shed even one tear for dear flesh. The tears left her feeling ashamed for giving way and slightly sick to her stomach. The fingers of one hand creating a grateful chill across her hot forehead, she reached out blindly with her other to push away from the statue.

Instead of frigid stone, her fingers touched smooth leather. A swirl of fabric brushed across the back of her hand. These things might have been dismissed without a second thought as passing too quickly to catch her attention had not the foot itself shifted away from her touch.

Quite against her own inclination, Felicia raised her head. The statue, no longer gray, stood above her still. The once tightly clutched cloak had opened, showing the yet-more-sculpted body of a man beneath.

He was clad in dark leather trousers, clinging close to his body, while above he wore an open-throated shirt without sleeves. She could see the muscles in his arms swell and relax as he clenched his fists. His hair was more fair than dark, caught back by a curving thong. He had a square, strong jaw, an even mouth set in firm lines, and a straight nose. In every detail he appeared to be alive, and moreover, incredibly attractive, with a charisma that beat out of him like bodily warmth.

Felicia squeezed her eyes tight and whispered, “Oh, my God in heaven, hear my plea. Do not suffer me to undergo the madness of my family. Not now.”

She quite clearly heard the thud as the statue leapt down from its plinth. Had her insanity reached such a pitch so soon? Felicia knew it was possible. Clarice had gone from being a vibrant young girl on the cusp of womanhood to a seeming child of seven in the course of an afternoon’s ride. Why shouldn’t her illegitimate half-sister go completely mad in the course of a walk in the garden?

She’d always feared this. Now that it had happened, she felt surprisingly relieved. At least she need no longer dread the coming of the family curse.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

Still without opening her eyes, she said, “I’m sure that is what I should be asking you. So I would, were you real.”

“I’m real enough,” he said shortly. He had a quick, gruff voice, with a strange accent. “I would know your name, for I’ve seen you often in this garden.”

“I’m Felicia Starret. Though I don’t know why I should need to introduce myself to a figment of my deranged mind.”

“Good grace to thee, then, Lady Felicia.”

“No,’’ she said, for she was always at pains to make her position known to save embarrassment both for herself and her family. “I am a natural child. I do not partake of my father’s honors.”

She opened her eyes to find the statue staring past her with a sharp frown between his strongly marked brows. Beneath them were eyes as dark a green as the tops of trees deep in a forest where no men dwell. His gaze dropped to her face.

There was not the faintest hint of compassion in those eyes. A wild beast, pausing in passing to look at her, would have worn exactly the same expression, as though asking itself, “Is this thing edible?” She expected him to sniff the air around her.

“Am I mad or only dreaming?” she asked him intently. “Am I asleep in my bed and all that is wrong will be righted with the sunrise? Or will I awake tomorrow in some Bedlam?”

He did not ask what was wrong. Instead, he returned to looking past her with an expression that might have been the beginning of a smile. As if to himself, he said, “So that is who stands there. I’ve often seen that statue’s shadow, but could never make out what it was. Even when they moved me out to put that block of stone beneath me, they kept me facing the same direction. All the same, I was glad of it. I could not see the other side of the garden after that hedge grew. Being higher, I could, and a welcome sight it was after six hundred years and more in the same place.”

The very cedars towering over them seemed to dance. Felicia felt everything going; her knees, her senses, her balance all abandoned her in the same moment. She stumbled forward, reaching out to clutch his arm for support. The moment her fingers touched his skin, she felt a shudder run through him like a shock. She’d seen the same reaction once when a spider had run over Lady Stavely’s foot—a kind of anguished revulsion, as though the person were about to be ill.

After a moment or two, she felt steady enough to release her grasp and murmur some apology. She hardly noticed when he said in a cold and remote voice, “You have touched me. By our Ancient Law, you may command me to your bidding.”

“I—I would like to go to the house and lie down,” she whispered.

“This will I do.”

He picked her up in his arms, and it was madness indeed to feel comforted. His arms were rigid around her back and under her knees. Making a great effort, Felicia opened her eyes again.