Patrica Rice (18 page)

But Peter had grown into a great strapping lad with ideas of his own, and bowing and scraping before effeminate lords and their vain ladies had not been among them.

But he'd had his stomach full of sea now, and it was time to turn his mind to new pursuits. He had every confidence that he could achieve whatever goal he set himself, but this particular pursuit seemed to be dragging out to tedious lengths and prospects weren't looking good.

Denning sighed as he took his usual table, acknowledged the salutes of several of the younger gentlemen with whom he had spent time, and ordered his meal. He knew he would be joined shortly by several of the young idlers, and before the evening ended, he would have tried his hand at cards, downed a bottle of port, and no doubt toured one or more of the brothels near Hay market.

The gentlemen considered him a rare good sport, a dab hand at all the rigs, and an easy touch for a bit of the ready when needed. He could whistle the days away in idleness forever more if he wished.

But he hadn't been bred for idleness, and as entertaining as the company might be, it didn't ease the ache of loneliness Denning had suffered since returning to England to discover his mother dead and himself alone.

He had spent years at sea imagining a cozy cottage in England with his mother keeping warm by the fire and a laughing maid in the doorway waiting for his return, with curly-haired children at her knee. He hadn't thought it would be difficult to find the woman of his choice once he had a home and a bit of savings to offer. He had never imagined returning with great wealth and the complications that would ensue.

Sipping at his glass of port and cutting into his beefsteak, Peter attempted to avoid the ennui that had begun to haunt him with greater frequency, but he could not find a successful diversion for his thoughts. Great wealth should have opened all the doors that had been closed to him in the past, but he was discovering that there were doors behind doors and that breaching them was tedious business.

The gentlemen accepted him for what he was as long as he had the coins to keep up with their play, but the ladies were entirely another story. He was caught between two worlds with this charade he acted, and he was beginning to doubt that he had set the right course when he had donned his expensive clothes and knocked on the doors of society.

Coins opened that first set of doors and appearance allowed him to remain in those outer circles, but to reach the inner sanctums where the ladies waited seemed impossible without the right credentials, and he couldn't manufacture those as he had his image.

At the same time, he had no real dealings with the layers of society to which he had been born. His wealth, appearance, and speech placed him outside their world, and any female servant would only look at him with suspicion did he ask to call. It was an awkward situation at best, one that Peter felt certain he would conquer with time, but it left him restless and alone while he sought the solution.

As he finished his meal and his second glass of port, Peter was joined by two younger gentlemen eager to attend a prizefight on the outskirts of town. His tilbury was required to carry the lightskirts they meant to accompany them, and they gallantly offered to acquire a third for Peter's use. Contemplating that evening of entertainment, he shook his head and bowed out with an excuse of other plans.

It wasn't a complete lie. The plan he had in mind didn't include the tilbury or horses or loose women. The plan he had included a warm study, a good book, and the painting he had acquired last week. The more he thought about it, the more eager he became to seek that source of comfort.

Setting out on foot for his apartment, Peter conjured up the image of his first artistic acquisition with satisfaction. Had he been told while lying in his bunk at sea that one of the first things he would do upon obtaining riches was to buy a piece of oil and canvas, he would have laughed himself to the floor.

But that painting had called to him from the first moment he had set eyes on it. He was well aware that the great houses of the land had such paintings scattered haphazardly across their walls and stacked in their attics and buried in closets, and few were paid any attention no matter what their resting place. He couldn't describe a single one of the oils that had adorned the house where he had attained maturity.

But this painting hanging in a shop window had leapt out at him, caught his eye in such a fashion that he had to return the next day to be certain it was still there.

And he had returned again the day after that. He had never set foot inside a gallery of art in all his life. He hadn't even been certain one could buy a piece of artwork like that or if it had just been hung for the appreciation of all. But on the third day, he had pushed open the gallery door and walked in.

He had acquired the canvas at an amazingly low price for the amount of satisfaction it brought him. He knew nothing about the cost of art. In all likelihood they had named an absurd price in hopes of obtaining half that, but Peter had merely signed the bill and walked out with the package and not questioned the cost in the days since. For all the money he had thrown away in gambling and drinking and whoring, not one cent had brought him the contentment of that painting.

Arriving at his apartment, Peter dismissed his valet for the evening, and retiring with a bottle of wine to the study he had purchased complete with books, he settled into his desk chair to admire the framed canvas on the wall before him.

The lamp lit below it cast the oils in murky shadows, but he knew every line and color by heart. Not that there was a wide range of colors to know. Almost the entirety of the background was filled with the broad gray walls of stone of some substantial country mansion. The walls could only be seen from behind a forest of trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, but the darker colors of these seemed to blend into the very nature of the building until, after a while, it became difficult to detect where nature ended and man's work began. Peter delighted in discerning new and previously unnoticed quirks in the house's exterior: the griffin on the lintel, a child's toy in a window, a shutter painted with a rose in the corner
.

But the artwork he appreciated most in the picture had naught to do with house or grounds and all to do with a fleeing fairy figure in the forefront. In broad daylight the figure all but disappeared into the landscape of trees and overgrown shrubbery, but by night, with the lamp at just the right angle, she flew wild and free through that landscape, moonlit hair streaming in long cascades down a back as slender and feminine as any he had ever seen.

That figure fascinated him. She held her arms up in glorious embrace of the night, head flung back, face turned toward the moon that couldn't be seen anywhere in the portrait. And the face! Peter moved from his desk to the wall to better observe the delicate features.

She shimmered with moonlight even from this proximity. Her skin seemed to sparkle with silver. Large, almond-shaped eyes danced with a darkness that made his blood shiver. Perfectly formed rosebud lips turned upward in a smile of welcome that stripped him of all pretense and left him longing for more. He ached to reach out and touch her, to know the warmth of that welcome, to feel at home in that house with rosebuds on the shutters and toys in the windows.

How just one painting could bring him so much happiness and so much misery was beyond Peter's ability to reason. It represented everything he wanted while disguising it all in shadows and mockery. There were times when he had drunk enough that he thought it might be best to destroy the canvas, to slash it from top to bottom and heave it from the window into the night. And there were other times, like now, when he only wished he could step inside the painting and became a part of it.

Imagining being another shadowy figure in that forest of trees, one toward whom the lady was running, Peter smiled and lifted the canvas from the wall. He was not only growing maudlin, but fanciful.

Perhaps the painting was a sign that he had chosen the wrong place from which to make his entrance into society. The country house and the trees called to him. He had always enjoyed the country as a boy. He could remember fishing in wide ponds, hunting in rolling fields, tumbling down snowbanks in the winter. The country was a good place to raise children. Perhaps the women were easier to meet and less arrogant in their requirements in a solitary place such as the one in the painting.

Setting aside his whimsical fantasies, Peter pried at the back of the painting with his pocket knife. Perhaps he could find some clue as to the house's origins. Much of everything in this world was for sale. It would be amusing to locate this place and see if anyone would accept an offer for it.

The protective backing peeled off without a great deal of trouble, revealing a blank canvas and some spidery writing in one corner. Peter carried it to the lamp on the desk and tilted the frame until the light caught on the words and played them back to him:

Lady Honora Chelmsby, Rosebud Cottage,

near High Wycombe

Peter sat down in his chair and stared at the words with a sense of satisfaction. Perhaps he had just found a home.

Several days later, Peter was pulling the collar of his redingote up against the drenching downpour of steady rain and cursing his moment of whimsy. He didn't think it snowed in October in England, but the sharp chill of the wind certainly made it seem a possibility. He was beginning to think his soaked gloves and coat might be a little warmer should they freeze into solid walls.

And currently, he didn't give a damn where Rosebud Cottage might be or even High Wycombe. He would settle for a warm inn and a cozy fire and a return to London in the morning.

His fancy city horses objected thoroughly to the rutted roads and muddy puddles of this rural outpost. The leather seats of his expensive tilbury would no doubt rot into tatters before the night was over, if the delicately balanced wheels did not fall off first. He would not only return to London as soon as he could find a road that might lead in that direction, he would sell the damned painting at the first break of dawn. Imagine a grown man falling in love with a bit of oil and canvas! He had to be out of his bloody mind.

Thinking he saw a gleam of light further ahead, he urged the horses faster, and as if they sensed a dry stable and grain, they surged forward with a jerk, their long legs breaking into the matched strides for which they were famous.

A second later, they were squealing in terror and raising up on their hind legs in frantic disobedience, and the light carriage went skidding off the muddy road, hitting a stone and breaking a wheel, throwing its occupant head over heels into the hedgerow as the wind howled gleefully through the trees.

* * * *

"Shhh, Hodges, you'll wake him," the slight figure beside the bed warned as the manservant entered with a steaming kettle of water.

"Don't b'lieve the wrath of God would wake him right now," Hodges grumbled as he poured some of the water into the basin, mixing it with the cold already there. "If I'm any judge of head knots, that one's going to be sleeping for a while. You'd best get some rest and let him be."

Cecily used the warm water to remove more of the grime from the stranger's mud-splattered face. Now that she could see his features she thought them very nice, if a trifle out of the ordinary. Drying now, his thick black hair was springing up in unruly curls. His short side-whiskers framed a square face with a determined chin that had just a touch of a cleft to it. His eyelashes were short and blunt, as were the fingers on the hands beneath his soaked gloves once they were removed.

But it was the slight scar on one side of his mouth that drew his lips up in a perpetual half-smile that fascinated her. Combined with the weathered lines around his eyes and the exotic bronze of his skin, that half-smile gave him a rakish appearance that she had only seen in books.

"Do you think we ought to add more coals to the fire? He still feels chilled." She took the heated cloth to his hands to stir the blood there. He had rough hands, a workman's hands, for all that he had been dressed in the best of London fashion. She smiled as his fingers curled reflexively beneath her touch.

Hodges gave the unconscious stranger a grumpy glare and turned to toss another piece or two on the grate. "Them animals of his are like to eat us out of house and home, and now you'll have us using the last of the fuel to keep him warm. I say we check his purse to see if he will be properly appreciative."

Cecily sent the man an admonishing look. "Now, Hodges, we are not so desperate that we must resort to thievery. I'm certain the gentleman will be happy to reimburse us once he recovers."

"Well, he's not likely to be paying you for your time in fretting over him. I'll linger a whit and you get some rest. I'll come fetch you should he wake."

Cecily smiled at that, and Hodges admired the increasingly infrequent sight. When she smiled, her thin little face lit up from within, and any fool could see that she was a beauty. But puddles of worry still lingered in her eyes, and the smile slipped away as quickly as it had appeared. He cursed the world in general as she once more became the brown little wren fussing over the blanket covers and wringing at the wash cloth.

"If rest were all it took, I would rival the Toast of the Season. I've had naught but rest for too long now. I'll sleep a little here and wait for him to wake. You'll have to rise first thing in the morning to see if the river is down enough to fetch the physician. So go on with you. I'll be fine."

Hodges gave the overtly masculine stranger a look of suspicion, then returned his glance to the young woman beside the bed. In the drab brown round gown with her hair pulled beneath a cap and held with pins, she looked like some frumpy old-maid servant. He growled at the thought, but he supposed she was safe enough. The blighter wasn't likely to rise from that bed anytime soon.

Cecily breathed a sigh of relief as the manservant left, then settled back in the comfortable chair and studied the stranger once again before she closed her eyes. Living alone as she did, she was given to odd fantasies, but none was so odd as this. Even her imagination had never conjured up a handsome, wealthy stranger practically crashing into her doorstep. If only she had some fairy dust . . .