The Shadow and the Star (37 page)

Leda really felt too distraught to eat. She toyed with her soup while Lord Whitberry boomed some lengthy story at her from her right.

"Mano!" Lady Kai addressed Mr. Gerard's silence with a tap of her spoon against her glass. She never had any patience with the axiom that she should not speak across the table at a large dinner party. "We have decided that Tommy will be a botanist when he grows up. He has already tried to eat two of Mum's orchids. If you are to pay his support, as Miss Leda says, then you must arrange for him to enter Oxford."

"Cambridge, my dear!" Mr. Sydney announced his correction with authority. "Cambridge is the place for a scientific young man."

"Cambridge, then. I'm sure they consume orchids with consummate flair at Cambridge." She turned a laughing face toward Mr. Gerard. "What do you think?"

"I'll provide whatever Miss Etoile deems appropriate for the child." He did not look at Leda.

"Miss Etoile is a mere amateur in the field, I greatly fear." Lady Kai shook her head. "She looks at Tommy as if he is a contraption that she can't quite puzzle out."

Leda managed a smile. "I'm afraid I've no experience with children."

"You may give him to me, then. He's such a darling, I could just eat him up! Did you know that he can pull himself up to stand in the crib? And a tooth already! He's very precocious for barely six months. I'm so glad you didn't let them take him to the orphans' home; I can't endure the thought of it." She abruptly grew more sober than Leda had ever seen her. "Mano Kane, you must promise that you will never,
never
send him there."

She looked to Mr. Gerard rather than Leda for this vow, as if somehow his was the primary obligation to the child. He did not deny it. He only said in his even manner, "No, I won't."

With most people, it might have sounded casual, merely placating. But Mr. Gerard had a way of speaking that made one believe.

The soup was cleared away. As the second course began, he looked across at Lady Kai again. "Would you like me to adopt him formally?"

"
Would
you?" Her gasp mingled with her mother's shocked murmur of his name and Lord Whitberry's harrumph of disbelief.

"I'm considering it. I don't yet know what the process would entail."

Leda glanced at him beneath her lashes. The idea shocked her, too; the more because she was certain, utterly, that he mentioned it—and indeed would actually do it—only to please Lady Kai. At Kai's enthusiastic response, there was a certain relaxation in the tautness of his face.

"But would you not have to be married to adopt a child?" Lady Kai frowned.

He took a sip of his wine and looked across at her. "Perhaps."

Lady Tess glanced from him to her daughter, and then lowered her troubled gaze to her plate.

"And how are the jaguar kittens faring?" Leda inquired of Mr. Sydney, her voice emerging only a small degree too high-pitched. "Is the biggest one still a terrible bully?"

The little man calmly cut a bite of fish. "I fear that is the case. And we have another tyrant on our hands in his mother. She's become quite protective—I'm afraid I've had to confine her away from the others in a smaller run."

Mr. Curzon surprised Leda by so far unbending as to mention that he intended to travel out to Samarkand and central Asia soon, and wondered if Mr. Sydney knew what exotic animals he might expect to see there. The dinner-table conversation went back to more suitable topics, and Leda went back to reality.

Mr. Gerard wished to marry Lady Kai. Leda's mother had been French, and gentlemen found it difficult to govern their animal spirits when it came to French ladies. Miss Myrtle had always said so, citing
that unspeakable man
as an excellent case in point.

That was all there was to be made of it. Mr. Gerard's masculine humors had overcome his manners for a moment. He was plainly embarrassed by the lapse, and would certainly apologize the moment opportunity presented itself.

She could just hear what Miss Myrtle would say about it. She could suddenly understand why Miss Myrtle had been so careful to instruct her in proper conduct, and had so often spoken of the foolishness of young ladies, and young half-French ladies in particular—because Leda had the most lowering feeling that she was quite absurdly in love with Mr. Gerard.

And love, Miss Myrtle had always said, was a strong stimulant to unwise minds, only to be indulged in with exceeding circumspection, in small and refined sips, like her special cherry brandy.

Samuel tried to court Kai. He tried. He watched Haye tease her the way he had used to do himself, when she was seven and he years and worlds older. He did not feel so much older now as alien, unable to find common ground in bullfinches and in-and-outs and the proper way to ride an ox-fence and ditch. Even with Tommy, Haye cut him out. As the uncle and cousin of a number of promising young relatives, he turned out to be the kind of man who got down on the floor and hiked squealing babies over his head every day before breakfast.

Not that she ignored Samuel. Their relationship was as warm as it had always been. The same as it had always been. He could talk to her, dance with her, give her advice that she would take. He described the house he'd called Rising Sea and she listened with animation, offering suggestions for decorating it, approving his choice of names. But he could not break through the familiar, well-worn comfort of their friendship; could not bring himself to say he loved her, could not force himself to touch her in any way that might frighten or upset her.

And yet he saw that Haye had intentions. The threat that she might accept another man before he had ever spoken made him uneasy and angry. He fought the feeling, because anger had no place in his intentions, it could only blind and hinder him. But if he could empty himself of hostility, he could not banish the disquiet, the sense of certainties fragmenting, pushing him farther and farther from the people he loved more than his life.

Even Lady Tess seemed to be more distant. He was aware sometimes of her silent attention on him, but when he turned to her, she always found some excuse to withdraw, or speak to someone else. And that, of anything, crystallized his uneasiness into the thin edge of alarm.

He had to act. Things were changing. In politics and business he could keep his balance, but in this—he felt his own clumsiness, his capacity for error.

You care too much
, Dojun said.
You want too much. What I gonna do with you, huh
?

For a week he had avoided Miss Etoile—though "Miss Etoile" was not how he thought of her anymore, even when she appeared in the demure lace collars that she wore.
Her
, was what he thought: heat and softness and desire.

She and Kai went about the house full of secrets, heads bent together, giggling and hushing one another when he came upon them unexpectedly—one more sensation of exclusion, though he knew it was only Christmas, and gifts, and Kai's delight in holiday intrigue. The house smelled sharp and fresh of evergreen garlands: English things, English cold, when at home it would have been the scent of roast pig and flowers, and sand in the coconut pie at the Christmas luau.

He wished they were there instead of here.

Want too much, you.

Mistletoe hung in convenient spots, tacked to chandeliers and a few doorways, under the direction of whom, no one would ever admit, but Robert labored beneath heavy suspicion, particularly since he and the oldest Miss Goldborough were the first to be caught in the drawing-room door.

Miss Goldborough blushed and held her hands behind her back, presenting her cheek—but her mother was at her afternoon nap, and Robert took her arms and kissed her full on the lips. Her sisters shrieked and danced in horrified laughter. Curzon lifted his eyebrows. Samuel saw Kai glance beneath her lashes at Lord Haye.

Haye, standing with a book half-open in his hands and looking on at Robert's gambit, did not appear to notice. As Samuel watched her, she lifted her eyes and met his own. She smiled a little. Her cheeks turned faintly pink.

He froze inside. It was a look he did not know how to answer. He became a sudden coward, finding a Chinese dog in porcelain blue-and-white on the table next to him to be of striking interest. As he picked it up and turned it over in his hands to examine the mark, Kai gathered her skirts about her and chassed to the door, turning and presenting herself there with a little curtsy and a mischievous smile.

In his inaction, staring blinding at the porcelain mark, Samuel felt rather than saw the subtle shift of Haye's stance. Tension surged in him. And yet he sat still, unable to rise: sat there losing his chance, knowing Haye would move.

But it was Robert who grabbed his sister and whirled her in a circle in the doorway, ending with a deep bow over her hand and a kiss on the fingers.

"Oh, fiddle!" Kai snatched her hand away. "Spoilsport!"

He pushed her out of the doorway. "Only trying to keep us from being trampled by the rush. Don't you see the elephants massing to charge?"

Curzon looked down his English nose. Haye grinned and settled on a chair arm, leafing through his novel. "Every dog has his day, Orford," he said to Robert.

" 'Orford'!" Kai gave a delicate snort. "As if he were a real lord. No one calls him that at home."

Robert smirked. "As real a lord as you're a lady, m'dear."

"It is merely a courtesy title, in your case. That's what Miss Leda says. Real lords can sit in Parliament. Daddy could, if he liked."

Haye held up his novel. "I say, you two. Has anyone read this yet? It looks a corking good story." His interruption smoothly forestalled what threatened to degenerate into a sibling bicker. "
A Study in Scarlet
. Listen to this." He cleared his throat and dropped his voice to a dramatic tone. " 'On his rigid face there stood an expression of horror, and, as it seemed to me, of hatred… which was increased by his writhing, unnatural posture. I have seen death in many forms, but never has it appeared to me in a more fearsome aspect than in that dark, grimy apartment, which looked out upon one of the main arteries of suburban London.' "

That caught the attention of Kai and of everyone else.

"Oh, start it from the beginning, do!" She sank back into her chair with her eyes wide and expectant.

As Haye took up the story of Dr. Watson and Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Samuel turned the Chinese figure over and over in his hands. He looked up under his lashes, listening, watching the others respond to the idea of deduction by detail and analysis. He'd read the book, and the character Holmes seemed to him a shadow of Dojun—clumsy and obvious with his magnifying glass and brute logic, too certain of his universe, arrogant in his conclusions. "There is nothing more to be learned here," the fictional Holmes said often. "My mind is entirely made up on the case."

A man could get himself killed believing that. Dojun could kill him with a thought. Samuel knew it, because he carried the potential within himself.

Concentration is intuition. Intuition is action
: the way he had nearly destroyed
her
with
kiai
, a spirit shout, in that critical moment in her attic room. The intensity of his attack had been too much because he could not detach his mind from her. Even then, opposing her, he had wanted her. He had meant only to disable, to daze her for a few moments, but there was more than a casual connection between them. He was not the master that Dojun was: he did not know himself; he made mistakes. He could not remain calm. He was not at peace. He could not even stand up and offer a mere kiss beneath a mistletoe.

Sitting motionless, holding the blue-and-white dog in his hands, he knew that he was in panic flight from himself. And he knew that until he turned and faced what he feared, all his intentions were no more than smoke and daydreams.

The fire in her room had gone to coals, tiny cracks and halos of orange against black, casting no light beyond the grate. He moved past it, though he knew she was asleep and would not see his silhouette before the glow.

The room seemed full of scent and female presence. She slept softly, her breath quiet, undisturbed by dreams. The ease of her sleep gratified something deep inside him. She felt safe here; he had brought her; she was in a subtle way connected to him by peace as well as necessity.

He stood in the darkest corner of the room. He watched, although there was nothing to see. He listened, though there was nothing to hear. He waited, anticipating nothing—no action, no thought, no feeling.

And yet feeling was there. He was aware of every curve of her body. Memory rippled the calm surface of concentration; her skin beneath his fingers, the shape of her face between his hands.

Let it go
. He was here to confront it and let it go. But there were contradictions, paradoxes; to try to let go was to hold more tightly. Dojun had taught him. The hunger that he wished to uproot went so deeply to the center of him that it seemed to
be
him. To separate it, to excise it-nothing would be left.

He imagined lying beside her, over her; things that he knew and yet did not know, never sure what had been real and what his contorted fantasy. He had dreamed and remembered, uncertain which was which, loath to ask questions that might reveal what he kept hidden.

He could not kiss Kai. Not even a light, teasing kiss like Robert's with Miss Goldborough, He was not Robert. There was too much pain and misery in those dreams and memories, tangled and confused with pleasure. One touch—and he did not know what would happen.

But Kai would want children. Her own. His. When he could not even bring himself to touch her.

It was not Kai he burned for.

He stared into the darkness. He gripped his hands in
kuji
, forming the complex interweaving of his fingers that should guide and focus his will, mobilize intent to action, forge his strength and mind into his goal. But there was no focus, no unity, no vanishing of restraint. His body craved what his mind despised. Beyond that, he had power for nothing.