Married to a Perfect Stranger (7 page)

Their lives had shifted like one of those newfangled kaleidoscopes that Scottish fellow had invented, John mused as he walked to the livery stable. One of his colleagues had showed him how the bright pieces turned and slid into a new configuration. The change was disorienting, uncomfortable but also rather…intriguing.

Every time he saw Mary his mind slipped that way. She looked very much as she had before he left; that was one view. Then she felt so different; that was the turn of the cylinder, the pieces falling into a startling new order. He was tricked by old assumptions to act as he had before, and then he got a prickly, unsettling response. Like reaching down to pet your cat and touching a…a hedgehog…or a…dragon. It was…sometimes…quite exciting.

As he retrieved his horse and rode homeward, his thoughts were full of Mary. She contradicted him and confused him. But it was all of a piece, he realized suddenly, with the alterations his long voyage had stirred up. His interior life now seemed to be a matter of surges and sparks, waves of intensity, rather than a placid stream he scarcely noticed. He'd become something of a stranger to himself.

John left his horse at the livery near home and strolled off, indulging in a pleasant reverie about the moment when he had thought to drop a kiss just at the edge of Mary's pink bodice. He'd touched that silken skin on their honeymoon, but not, he knew now, with the care and attention it deserved. He had a host of ideas about how to remedy that lapse, if only they could…renew their acquaintance. The idea made him smile. He walked faster, eager to be home. It was almost as if he could hear Mary calling to him.

John stopped and listened. She actually was calling his name. Shouting it, really. Here, outdoors. What the deuce?

Searching for the source of the sound, he discovered his wife and the boy she'd brought from Somerset waving to him from the garden in the center of their home square. He waved back. Rather than heading for the gate to join him, they embarked on a series of frantic motions, pointing and beckoning mysteriously. They looked quite agitated. John walked toward the fence.

“Look out!” shouted the boy, gesturing frantically at the cobblestones. What was his name? Arthur, that was it. Chaser of filthy chickens, at odds with his father. “He's vicious,” the lad yelled. For a disorienting instant, John wondered if he referred to his parent.

“Be careful,” Mary called.

A few steps nearer, John was able to see past a bush and spot a large yellow dog near the garden gate. The animal rose to its feet and bared its teeth.

“Watch it, sir. He's savage,” Arthur said.

“This beast has kept us pent up here for hours,” Mary added.

The two of them peered through the iron bars like little lost waifs. The dog eyed them with what looked to John like malicious satisfaction. He had to laugh.

“This is not funny!” cried Mary.

“You've been in there for hours? Really?” The dog glanced at John, then it turned back to its captives. John would have sworn that he was enjoying himself. Laughter overcame him again.

“Please get us out!”

She sounded genuinely distressed. Suppressing his smile, John moved slowly closer, examining the dog. It was acting threatening but showed no signs of derangement. Its eyes were vigilant, but clear. Since he went back and forth to the livery stable alone every day, sometimes well after dark, John carried a cane. He did not raise it, however. He kept it at his side, in reserve, as he took a few slow steps closer to the dog. A growl rumbled in its chest.

John squatted. With a firm grip on the cane, he extended his other hand and only then recalled that it held a bunch of flowers. This actually proved fortunate, for the colorful petals seemed to rouse the dog's curiosity. Sniffing, it came closer. “You like flowers?” John said. “Be good, and you may have them.” The animal crept nearer. “Down,” John commanded.

The dog sank onto its belly. John extended his arm and set the flowers before its nose. At once, the beast began to paw and mouth them.

Moving swiftly but smoothly, with no sudden gestures, John rose and went to the gate. The dog gnawed on the blossoms. Mary was already opening the bars. “We will walk quickly but steadily to the house,” he said. Seeing Arthur poised to spring, he added, “Do not run!”

Mary grasped Arthur's arm and guided him. John took rear guard, his cane ready. But it wasn't necessary. For some reason, the dog remained transfixed by the flowers and paid them no heed. In another moment, they were through the front door and inside the house.

“That was champion!” said Arthur.

John set his cane in the stand and looked at the freed prisoners. He had to smile again. “Where did that animal come from? I've never seen it around here.”

Arthur's demeanor shifted from open admiration to guilt. His mouth turned down, and his thin shoulders slumped.

“Arthur shot him,” Mary said with some asperity.

“Shot…?”

“It was an accident!” The story spilled out of the boy, with running commentary from Mary. Aware of her annoyance, John pressed his lips together to restrain his laughter. When the tale was finally told, however, and Arthur dismissed to the kitchen, a burst of mirth escaped him.

“I'm
so
glad we could provide you with such a cause for amusement,” said Mary.

Her sarcasm had no effect on his laughter. “I fear your jailor ate the bouquet I brought you.”

“May he choke on it!”

John's snort earned him another searing look.

“I've been trapped out there for ages. I must go…” With a gesture toward the back premises, Mary rushed off.

Half an hour later, as they sat at the dinner table, John was still subject to random grins. “Didn't you see that your mistress was…having difficulties this afternoon?” he asked the maid. She'd been managing to set dishes before them without a single thump or spill, but now the buttered parsnips threatened to tumble onto the tablecloth.

“Difficulties, sir?”

“With a dog.” Mary made a sound, a kind of
hmph
, and he felt his smile broaden.

“I didn't notice any dog,” Kate said, evading his gaze. With a sketch of a curtsy, she hurried out.

“I don't believe that for a moment,” declared Mary. “And I don't care who hears me say so.”

“I suppose she might have been afraid. Of the dog.” He did not add the words “You were.” He was not so foolhardy as that.

From her flashing look, Mary heard them anyway. “The wretched animal was tired of the game by the time you got home.”

“You are probably right.” John sampled the roast beef. He was hungry, and whatever the faults of the maid, Mrs. Tanner was a fine cook.

“I am certainly right!” When he didn't venture to dispute this, Mary sighed. She rubbed a hand over her forehead. “I must get Arthur under control,” she said. She spoke as if she expected him to blame her for the boy's escapade. “He seems to have a genius for doing precisely the wrong thing.”

Without warning, a memory sprang into John's consciousness—vivid, full-blown—four boys lazing on the moss under a trailing willow, the chatter of a shallow brook. He and his brothers in one of their favorite summer haunts. He saw himself at, what, five? And there was his oldest brother Frederick, looking as he had just before he went off to school. George would be eight then. Roger, a toddler, was tied to the willow with a long cord so he couldn't get near the water.

It was the day that Frederick had been reading to them from a life of Sir Francis Drake. And John had muddled up this ancient history with a British ship that attacked Spanish Puerto Rico. He saw himself launching a twig and leaf vessel into a tiny rapid, slashing the air with an imaginary sword, and declaring his plan to be a noble privateer and capture Spanish gold in the Indies.

Frederick and George had laughed so spontaneously, so heartily, over these words. Even little Roger had laughed, though he couldn't have understood why.

They'd found the idea simply ludicrous, that their hapless brother John would embark on a marvelous adventure. It had been somehow established in the family, even that early, that John was a limited and bumbling creature. Their parents had said so; his brothers knew it to be true. He didn't have a shred of greatness in him—not like Frederick with his intellectual skills or George with his stubborn courage. Even Roger, later, had been granted talents to be admired, while John remained the goat.

The affectionate gibes of twenty more years piled onto the memory. How had it become a family joke—poor old John, who always does the wrong thing?

“John?”

From the way she was gazing at him, it was clear that Mary had asked him a question. “What?”

“Do you think it best to send Arthur back to the country? Perhaps my idea was just not…?”

“No! Let him be.” It came out more strongly than he intended.

Mary blinked and sat back a little.

“He didn't do any real harm. And he apologized.”

“If you're sure?”

“Positive.”

Mary looked both relieved and puzzled. She turned her attention to her dinner, and silence fell as they both ate. It was several minutes before she broke it, saying, “I wondered…I'd like to know more about what you do all day.”

The question pulled John's thoughts out of the past like the hands of the
Lyra
crewmen yanking him to safety after the shipwreck. He'd sailed, on a real vessel, to the other side of the globe. He'd seen exotic places, spoken to men so different they almost seemed another species. His analyses were valued throughout his department. “Various kinds of reports, from around the world, come into the Foreign Office. I—among others—read them and, ah, boil them down for the foreign secretary's personal staff.”

“Picking out what's important and what isn't?” Mary replied.

John nodded. She'd gotten to the crux of it right away. “In order to make decisions about the country's policy, and actions, Lord Castlereagh must have the best possible information. It's one way England can uphold standards of justice and fairness.”

Mary looked admiring. “Isn't it difficult to decide which bits to include?”

John leaned forward a little, the remains of his dinner forgotten. “You get to know the style of the writers, you see, so that you can…feel really when they're onto something important. We have to keep up on developments in our areas, too, of course. The sensitive spots and potential threats.”

“Areas?”

“There's so much information coming in, we have to specialize. Conolly and I are East Asia. And Fordyce.” The latter name was sour on his tongue.

“That's why you went to China,” Mary concluded.

John nodded. He still marveled a bit at the luck of being chosen, with no influential backers to push his candidacy. It had nearly killed Conolly to remain behind, and he would have been twice as useful as that damned Fordyce.

Mary's gaze was openly admiring. “It sounds like vital work.”

John couldn't help preening a little. “I like to think I make a contribution to the process of good government.” That sounded pompous. If his brothers heard him talk like that…

“Tell me something you saw on your journey,” Mary added. “It must have been such an amazing adventure.”

Struck by her choice of words, John stared at her. Mary was leaning forward. They inclined toward each other across the dining table. Her dark eyes glowed. Those kissable lips were curved with anticipation. He wanted to make her marvel. He wanted to boast and amaze. “On the voyage out, we stopped at the southern tip of Africa,” he began. “It was autumn there in March, because the seasons are opposite to ours, you know. There were birds that looked like patchwork quilts, all different colors.” Urged on by her obvious interest, he talked, his anecdotes punctuated by appreciative exclamations from his wife. She seemed to take every tale he told as true and wise and enthralling, which was rather a new experience for John Bexley.

“You learned so much on the trip,” Mary commented after a while.

He nodded, caught up in memories. “More than I ever expected. About the job as well as the world.”

“The job?”

“Hard work isn't enough.” He shook his head, recalling a host of observations during the journey. “Though if you work harder than anyone else, it is noticed. And personal initiative—of the right sort. But success at the Foreign Office often depends on social position, or personal connections.”

“Connections outside the office, you mean?”

John met her dark eyes and came back to the present. He nodded.

“So, why don't we invite Conolly to dinner?” she added.

“How do you know of Conolly?”

“You mentioned him several times as you were explaining, as if he was a friend.”

“We get along well. We work closely together.” Conolly was the opposite of Fordyce in every way.

“I'd like our house to be a place where your friends feel welcome. And perhaps it would be helpful, too.”

It wasn't a bad idea. He and Conolly had never seen each other outside the office. Of course, John had never had a home to invite him to before. “I'll see if he'd care to come.”

“Next Wednesday, perhaps? We'll have done the baking. Or Thursday would do as well. Is he married?”

“No.” John realized that he had no idea how Conolly spent his time away from work. He'd never asked. Their conversations were always absorbed by the details of their analyses. Yet Fordyce's ludicrous antics, along with things he'd learned on the voyage, had made him see that people who rose higher in the Foreign Office had a whole network of social ties, some reaching back into childhood. Perhaps they could be built as well as…inherited. Perhaps the plans he'd been hatching weren't the only resources he had for success. “I'll ask tomorrow,” he vowed.