Love's Reward (18 page)

“Your sister, Lady Mary?”

“She is ill, possibly dying. I visit her every day that I can.”

“My dear fellow!”

“It’s one of the reasons why I resent all this so damned much.” Fitzroy pulled on his gloves. “There aren’t enough hours left in each day. Flanders and Green were both single, thank God, but I have taken on the care of Herring’s family. In fact, I have hidden them, in case innocent women and children might be the next target.”

“You surely don’t think that children—?”

“I don’t know what to think. But many men served under me in the Peninsula. I cannot protect them all, were I to ride the length and breath of this island every day, though I’m still doing what I can. You know, if she wasn’t already with the angels, I would say that this is just the kind of game Juanita would have enjoyed. It has the very mark and stamp of her. In fact, it reeks of it.”

“Juanita? Oh, your first wife, of course.” Lord Grantley looked distinctly uncomfortable. No doubt an unholy suspicion had arisen in his devious mind, one a little awkward to verbalize. “There’s no question that—?”

“That she died? None at all. I was there. You might say that she died because of me.”

Fitzroy stopped in the doorway to glance back at the older man.

“Unless we are being beleaguered by a ghost?”

* * *

Joanna did not see Fitzroy at all the next day. She visited Lady Mary and worked on her portrait.

It was easy to take pleasure in this painting. Their visits were becoming ever merrier, even when interrupted by Lady Mary’s fits of coughing, and the face taking shape on the canvas glowed with laughter. Joanna stood back to look at it and found an answering glow in her own heart. It would be the best she had ever done.

So she was leading the life of a spinster while married to a rake. Surely it didn’t matter as long as she could do this?

Nor did Fitzroy come to her studio that night. Joanna waited for him, nervously pacing, until at midnight she doused the candles and went to bed.

So he could not even keep his promise to sit for her every day!

Yet in the morning she came down the stairs to find him waiting.

Joanna stopped, surprised, her heart beating a little fast. He seemed drawn, preoccupied, as always. But as she stood on the stairs, lost for words, Fitzroy grinned up at her, the corners of his mouth supple with a laughter that she could not trust.

“‘There was a roaring in the wind all night; / The rain came heavily and fell in floods; / But now the sun is rising calm and bright; / The birds are singing in the distant woods,’” he quoted without preamble. “I thought I would take you and my sister into the country today. If you would like.”

“Good heavens!” Joanna replied tartly. “How I am honored, to be sure! What on earth brought about this sudden change of heart?”

He still looked amused, but there was a strange, deeper undertone.

“We can visit our old nurse, a gentle and harmless creature, whose day will be gladdened by our arrival. Or at least by Mary’s arrival. My sister will love it.”

Joanna would not let him escape so easily. “And what about all the other business that usually keeps you so busy?”

“I have taken care of it by working through the night.”

“How very diligent! And that’s enough?”

“Alas, I have also recently received a lecture about doing my duty. Surely escorting my wife and sister on a rustic outing is dutiful enough?”

“I am to believe that the person exists who dares lecture you?”

He leaned on the newel post as if considering this. “There are many, Joanna. You among them. And now you’re about to object that it didn’t rain at all last night.”

“How did you know?” She laughed. It was impossible to stay hostile when he was looking up at her beneath his lashes like that. “Very well. I was.
The rain came heavily and fell in floods?
It did not.
There was a roaring in the wind all night?
Stuff! It was exceptionally calm and peaceful.”

“Oh, no, my dear, it stormed. Graves yawned, spirits roamed, and wolves wailed and howled like banshees. I can still hear the noise of it.”

Joanna gave him a keen glance. “On the contrary. The night was perfectly still. How the devil did you spend it that you thought otherwise?”

He glanced away, the amusement gone. “In unholy enough pursuits, of course.”

She knew he would not say more and was proved right.

As he looked back at her, he changed the subject. “I would be grateful if you would allow me to act the gallant, and take you and Mary away from this godforsaken town for just one day.”

Joanna stepped down off the last tread and gave him a formal curtsy, practiced often enough for Miss Able.

“I should enjoy it above all things, sir. Pray, allow me a few moments to change.”

* * *

Fitzroy drove west out of London in an open carriage, the high strung bays in harness. He handled the horses with confidence, tact, and authority.

Once again Joanna studied his hands and the set of his shoulders, limber, graceful, intensely masculine. Why was he so impossible to paint?

Under a tasseled cream silk parasol, Mary leaned back on her seat and exclaimed enthusiastically about the beauties of the spring countryside.

“Oh, look, Fitzroy! Lambs! May we stop for a moment?”

Fitzroy instantly pulled up the horses and held them steady, while the ladies watched newborn lambs cavort in a pasture.

Joanna pulled out her sketchbook and began to make rapid studies. The page filled with gamboling, tumbling lambs, with the stolid ewes mumbling their cries through mouthfuls of cud.

They stopped again for a tree full of blossom, for nesting swans, for two young children fishing in a pond.

It was bright and warm, the sun climbing strongly in the sky, when they reached a small thatched-roofed village straggling along its millstream.

Soon Joanna found herself being introduced to an elderly lady, who sat in her best parlor like a robin on its nest. Lady Mary’s childhood nurse, now retired to the village of her birth.

They took tea, which Fitzroy had brought, and chatted of sane, ordinary things, while the old lady patted Lady Mary on the knee and smiled at her.

Joanna let them talk, making a few quick sketches of the nurse and her quiet room.

She glanced up only once to find that her husband was watching her hands moving on the paper. For a moment she even thought that his eyes betrayed an odd longing, before he laughed and looked away.

“Come, Joanna,” Fitzroy said at last. “Let’s take a stroll and leave these two friends to their reminiscences.”

For Lady Mary’s sake, Joanna took his proffered arm and left with him.

Dappled sunshine mottled the dry dust and rough cobblestones of the village street. It was quiet, almost hushed, as if the dogs had forgotten how to bark and the thatched houses held their breath, afraid to awaken the baby.

“Who, do you suppose, managed to slip this serene moment unnoticed into the normal bustling country routine?” Fitzroy asked quietly.

Joanna could not afford to be charmed, to be beguiled by this unexpected truce or this calm, bright day. Only two nights before he had publicly seduced Lady Reed in a manner guaranteed to humiliate her. It still hurt.

“I don’t know. I’ve been wondering how you fit this outing into your outrageously busy schedule.”

They turned off the street and began to follow a path that wound down through a birch wood.

The answer was taut. “So have I. Don’t make me question it! Life is nothing but moments, anyway. Take each one as it comes, for God’s sake.”

Joanna took her gloved hand from his sleeve and turned to face him.

“What fustian! Life is a great deal more than moments. Everything that happens takes meaning from what’s happened before and from the expectations we bring to it. By your philosophy, Lady Mary simply sits with an old woman, and it wouldn’t have mattered that you brought her here. I do understand why you did it, you see—in case there’s never another chance for either of them.”

“And is that enough?”

“No, because it’s the years of shared memories that make it meaningful—the baked apples on the nursery fire, the stories told to a half-sleeping child—and the trust in mutual love and caring.”

A bird flew away through the trees in a hiss of wing beats.

Fitzroy looked back down at her with something close to anger. “By God, are we allowed nothing pure and fresh, untainted by thinking and recollection?”

“It’s impossible. When Lady Mary looks at an apple tonight it won’t be the same as one she looked at yesterday.
This
apple will have the aura of childhood about it, bubbling and hissing in the flames, tender and wholesome. Or it will be half red and half green and poisoned by a jealous stepmother, the magic apple of a fairy tale. Nothing exists entirely by itself. Everything comes trailing its retinue of associations and memories with it.”

He was carrying a cane. With the end he sketched rapid shapes in the dirt. A circle, a stalk, two leaves.

“Can’t an apple simply be an apple?” he said. “What the devil is it when you draw it? Just a shape, a fruit, without all this trail of remembrance.”

“No,” Joanna said, passion rising in her voice. “It becomes what I bring to it. No human being ever saw just a fruit, unless he were a saint or a mystic.” She grabbed the cane from his hand and sketched a curve like a bite out of the fruit before handing it back. “Snow White bit into something luscious and innocent, but the wicked stepmother gave her a deadly poison that made her appear dead. Which was the real apple?”

Fitzroy swept the cane through the shapes in the dirt, scattering the lines.

“They were both the real apple, two halves of one whole. Oh, God! By your argument we are forever doomed by our prior experience. Nothing can be new and innocent. There can be no forgiveness and no salvation.”

She couldn’t bear what she heard in his voice.

“Why doomed? We are made by what we have done, but must we be cursed by it? Snow White was rescued, wasn’t she? Kissed by a prince?”

He looked up, straight into her eyes. Her heart seemed to stop for a moment, then lurched wildly.

“We know Snow White. We have been shown her life: the time in the castle with the wicked stepmother; her naive, kind-hearted days with the seven dwarves; the more innocent, indeterminate period while all life was suspended in the glass coffin. But the prince has no former existence at all in the story. He has never seen a woman sleeping before. He doesn’t even accept the finality of death. Hadn’t you noticed? He isn’t real. If he were, he would never have believed that he could raise Snow White from the dead.”

“Fiddlesticks!” Joanna knew she should turn away, flee this man and this moment, but her attention was caught, straining to understand. “He just believed in the healing power of love, that’s all.”

They were standing far too close to each other. His dark, heated gaze threatened to singe her.

“Did he?” Fitzroy asked softly. “Did he believe that a kiss could cure anything?”

Joanna felt the roaring of awareness in her ears. Every nerve seemed to sing, shout for her attention. His lips were infinitely beautiful to her—as he formed the words “Snow White,” as he took a breath—every detail highlighted, magnified, fascinating.

She knew exactly what those lips could make her feel, if he wished it.

You have eaten the poisoned, forbidden apple
, sang a high, wild voice in her ear,
and only the kiss of a prince can save you
. Then the words spoken eons, ages ago, by a child came rushing in like a storm surge:
a woman can’t do anything of her own, nothing real anyway, if she’s gone soft in the head for a man and children. So if it has to be marriage, then very well, let it be to a self-centered, arrogant bastard like Fitzroy Mountfitchet. At least he will leave me alone!

Joanna longed to believe it. She longed for the desire to be left alone. But this man, who had swept into her life like a demon, could not be exorcised from it. Could not? She did not want him gone. She did not want him to leave her alone. She wanted his children.

She stepped closer, lifting her chin, offering herself.

Fitzroy gently touched her face, as if he might unwittingly lean forward to press his burning mouth onto hers.

A sharp crack shattered the air.

Birds flew up from the trees in a thunder of wing beats.

Fitzroy lunged at Joanna to fling her down. She hit hard onto the damp ground, the smell of bruised grass and dead leaves flooding her nostrils.

He landed on top of her, pressing her into the earth, while he cursed under his breath.

“Damnation! Damnation!”

The air was crushed from her lungs. He was heavy, and ruthlessly covering her body with his own.

Joanna wanted to turn her head, but wet grass was stuck to her cheek.

“What?” she tried to say.

“Lie still,” he whispered. “Someone is shooting at us.”

A second ball thudded into a tree above their heads.

Silence. Thick. Impenetrable.

Fitzroy quietly rolled away.

As Joanna took a deep breath she heard the faint click of something sliding, hard and metallic. Afraid even to turn her head, she lay pinned on the ground, a small stick pressed uncomfortably into her hip.

The undergrowth rustled, the leaves shaken by something living.

Joanna heard it lunging past, then circling and coming back. She pressed her lids shut as the rustling came closer and stopped, only to be replaced by a loud panting. A large drop of saliva landed on her cheek.

Swallowing her fear, she looked up. A bright yellow face with a pair of honest brown eyes grinned back. A dog, tongue lolling, sniffed at her chin. She smelt the scent of its breath and wrinkled her nose.

Someone whistled. The dog looked around and barked.

“It’s all right,” Fitzroy said.

Joanna sat up, rubbing grass and dead leaves from her hair.

“Are you quite mad?” she asked.

Fitzroy was sitting with his back against a tree trunk, staring up at the canopy of leaves overhead. Sunlight caught the strong line of his chin and throat. He held a naked blade in his right hand and he was gazing up at it. Sunlight glanced from the bright steel, running along it like fire.