Unclaimed (3 page)

People might even believe that he was
human
here—the sort of person who had faults and who committed sins—instead of some sort of saint.

“Why,” the rector continued, “I assure you, everyone here feels a debt of gratitude to you on that score.”

The first discordant note sounded in Mark’s bucolic dream. “Gratitude?” he asked in befuddlement. “To me? Why on earth would anyone be grateful to me?”

“Such humility!” Lewis beamed at him. “Everyone knows it was your favor that brought Her Majesty’s eye upon us!” As he spoke, Lewis leaned forward and tapped Mark’s lapels lightly.

A deep dread welled up inside of him. This was not a forward, grasping sort of fumble. Instead, it was a reverent little touch—the way one might dip a forefinger into a font of holy water.

“Oh, no,” Mark protested. “No,
no.
Really, you mustn’t put that complexion on it. I—”

“We here in Shepton Mallet are truly grateful, you know. If the silk manufacturers had failed…” Lewis spread his arms wide, and Mark looked around. The few people dispersed around the square were all staring at him in avid curiosity.

Not again. Please. He’d come here to escape the adulation, not to be feted once more.

“This town owes you much. Everyone’s been waiting for me to make your acquaintance, so I might show you around. Let me start with
this
introduction.”

Lewis motioned with one hand, and a figure slouching against one side of the Market Cross straightened. The man—no, however tall the figure, it was a boy—came dashing over, nearly tripping over ungainly feet.

Whoever this young man was—and he could not have been a day older than seventeen—he was well-dressed. He was wearing a top hat. He raised his hand to adjust it every few seconds, as if the article of apparel were new to him after years of the quartered caps that boys favored.

“Sir Mark Turner,” Lewis was saying, with all the pomp of a high-church official, “may I present to you Mr. James Tolliver.”

James Tolliver wore a blue ribbon cockade, artfully formed into the shape of a rose, on the brim of his hat. Mark’s hopes, which had so recently soared as high as the church’s tower, fell eight stories to dash on the cobblestones underfoot. Please. Not a blue rose cockade. Anything but a blue rose cockade. Maybe the ornament was just an accident. Maybe some peddler had brought through a batch, without explaining their significance. Because the alternative—that he was
not
escaping the hubbub of London, that he had
not
left behind the hangers-on and the constant reports in the gossip columns—was too appalling to contemplate. He’d come to Shepton Mallet to relax into its relative timelessness.

But Tolliver was peering up at him with wide, brilliant eyes. Mark knew that look—that gaze of utter delight. Tolliver looked as if he’d just received a pony for Christmas and couldn’t wait for his first ride.

And by the way he was staring, Mark was the pony. Before Mark could say anything, his hand was captured in an impassioned grip.

“Forty-seven, sir!” Tolliver squeaked.

Mark stared at the earnest young man in front of him in confusion. The boy had barked out those words as if they had some special significance. “Forty-seven
what?
”

Forty-seven people who might accost him on the street? Forty-seven more months before society forgot who he was?

The boy’s face fell. “Forty-seven
days,
” he said, sheepishly.

Mark shook his head in confusion. “Forty-seven days is a little long for a flood, and a bit short for Michaelmas term.”

“It’s been forty-seven days of chastity. Sir.” He frowned in puzzlement. “Didn’t I do it right? Isn’t that how members of the MCB greet one another? I’m the one who started the local division, and I want to make sure our details are correct.”

So the cockade was real, then. Mark stifled a groan. It had been foolish to hope that the MCB had restricted itself to London. It was embarrassing enough there, with those cockades and their weekly meetings. Not to mention the secret hand signals—somebody was always trying to teach him the secret hand signals.

Why was it that men had to take every good principle and turn it into some sort of a club? Why could nobody do the right thing on his own? And how had
Mark
gotten himself embroiled as the putative head of this one?

“I’m not a member of the Male Chastity Brigade,” Mark said, trying not to make his words sound like a rebuke. “I just wrote the book.”

For a moment, Tolliver simply stared at him in disbelief. Then he smiled. “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “After all, Jesus wasn’t Church of England, either.”

Beside him, the rector nodded at this piece of utter insanity. Mark wasn’t sure whether he should laugh or weep.

Instead, he gently removed his hand from Tolliver’s grip. “One thing to consider,” he said. “Comparing me to Christ is…” Ridiculous, for one, but he didn’t want to humiliate the poor boy. A logical fallacy, for another. But this young man, however exuberant, meant well. And he was
trying.
It was hard to be angry about a youth throwing his heart and soul into chastity, when so many others his age were off pursuing prizefights and fathering bastards instead.

But without any chastisement on his part at all, the boy turned white. “Blasphemous,” he said. “It was blasphemous. I was just blasphemous in front of Sir Mark Turner. Oh, God.”

Mark decided not to mention he’d blasphemed again. “People are allowed to make mistakes in front of me.”

Tolliver lifted adoring eyes. “Yes. Of course. I should have known you’d have the goodness to forgive me.”

“I’m not a saint. I’m not a holy man. I just wrote a book.”

“Your humility, sir—your good nature. Truly, you are an example to us all,” Tolliver insisted.

“I make mistakes, too.”

“Really, sir? Might I inquire—how long has it been for
you?
How many days?”

The question was invasive and impolite, and Mark raised an eyebrow.

Tolliver cringed back a step in response. Perhaps he’d recognized the impertinence.

“I—I’m sure it’s in all the papers,” he said, “but we only get a handful of them, when someone visits London. I…I surely should know. P-please forgive my ignorance.”

Perhaps he hadn’t. And what did it matter if he asked Mark? Mark
had
written the book on chas tity. Literally. He sighed and performed a rough calculation. “Ten thousand,” he replied. “Give or take.”

The boy gave an impressed whistle.

Mark was less impressed. If there was a local MCB here, all that remained to cut up his peace was—

“Your worshippers are not restricted to the men, of course,” Lewis said. “On Sunday, after service, I hope to introduce you to my daughter, Dinah.”

—that. The constant efforts to thrust suitable women in Mark’s way. In all truth, Mark wouldn’t have minded meeting a woman who
actually
suited him. But beside him, Tolliver frowned, rubbing his chin, and glanced at Mark in consternation, as if the man had set himself up as a sudden rival. If this
Dinah
was someone that interested the youthful Tolliver, it meant that this exchange was following the usual pattern. After all, the only women that others deemed suitable for a gentleman of his supposed righteousness were—

“She’s a sweet girl,” Lewis was saying, “obedient and chaste and comely. She’s biddable—a confident, strong man such as yourself would make her an extraordinary husband. And she’s not quite sixteen, so you could form her precisely as you wished.”

Of course. Mark shut his eyes in despair. Write a book on chastity, and somehow the whole world got the notion that your preferred bride would be a malleable child.

“I’m twenty-eight,” Mark said dryly.

“Not yet twice her age, then!” the rector said, with a smile that contained not a hint of awareness. He leaned forward and whispered confidentially, “I should hate to see her saddled to an old man. Or—” he cast a pointed look at Tolliver “—a young pup, who scarcely knows his own mind. Now. I know you’re keeping a bachelor household. I can start drawing up a rotation immediately. If we have you scheduled for tea and supper on a daily basis, why, within six weeks, all of the best families—”

“No.” There was nothing for it. Mark was going to have to be rude. “Absolutely not. I came here for peace and solitude—not daily engagements. Certainly not
twice
daily engagements.”

The man’s face fell. Tolliver flinched, and Mark felt as if he had just kicked a puppy. Why, oh,
why,
could his book not have disappeared into a sea of anonymity, as most books did?

“Weekly,” Mark conceded. “No more.”

The rector gave a long-suffering sigh. “I suppose. Perhaps if we had larger events. A church picnic? Yes. That should answer. Followed by—oh, dear.” Lewis glanced across the square and his voice hardened. “Well. At least this way, we can keep you from the unsavory elements.”

Mark followed his gaze. A few rays of sun shone through the clouds, brightening the produce in the market shambles across the square. The patrons at the marketplace had arrayed themselves so that they all had a view of him. But the rector was staring at a woman who had entered the square.

For an instant, all Mark could see was her hair—an ebony spill of ink, braided and pinned up in intricate loops that just kissed her shoulders, covered with the barest excuse for a lace bonnet. He’d always thought of black as a colorless hue, but her hair seemed so black it was every color at once, the rays of the sun spangling it. And there was a great mass of it on her head. Freed from the pins and braids, rid of that flimsy bit of lace, all that dark hair would reach past her thighs. It would be a great warm cloud of silk in his hands.

She moved smoothly, almost gliding over the cobblestones. Her strides suggested long, lean legs beneath her flowing skirts. She stopped before the public house. Even though it was not yet market day, the greengrocer had begun to gather goods for the next morning. She peered at the items and made the act of examining a head of cabbage seem like a verse of poetry.

It was only then that he noticed precisely what the rector was staring at. Her gown was the lightest shade of pink, but she had cinched it at her waist with a cherry-red ribbon. Yet more ribbons were threaded through the bodice of her gown, drawing attention to the curves of her breasts. Not that her bosom needed attention to be drawn to it; her figure was, to put it mildly, stunning. She wasn’t impossibly thin and delicate; nor was she extraordinarily buxom. Still, she somehow made every woman around her seem wrong and ill-proportioned by comparison.

For just one second, Mark felt a wistful tug.
Why doesn’t anyone ever try and foist women like
her
off on me instead?

In London, she would have garnered second and third glances—more out of curiosity and admiration than contempt. Here? No doubt the inhabitants of Shepton Mallet had no idea what to make of a woman like this one—or a gown as daring as the one she wore. But Mark knew. That was the sort of dress that commanded:
look at me.

Mark had never taken well to commands. He turned away.

“Ah, yes,” the rector said. “Mrs. Farleigh.” The stuffy tone of his voice suggested that Mrs. Farleigh was an unwelcome inhabitant of the village, but it was belied by the rector’s posture. He watched her, his eyes following her across the square with an expression that was closer to avarice than outrage. “Just look at her!”

Mark wasn’t one to gawk. In his mind, he built a wall of glass bricks—clear, yet impenetrable. With every inhalation, he reminded himself of who he was. What he believed. Breath by breath, brick by brick, he built a fortress to contain his want before it had a chance to roar to uncomfortable life. He stood behind it, lord of his own desire, until nobody could command anything of him.

Not want. Not desire. And definitely—most definitely—not lust. When he was in firm control, he looked again. Even with that gut-struck feeling of stupidity walled off, she was objectively, undeniably beautiful.

“She arrived almost two weeks ago. She’s a widow. Still, she’s said little about her people or her past. I suspect it’s because she feels it’s best left unsaid. One has only to look at her to imagine what she’s done.”

Rectors, Mark supposed, were as free to imagine lascivious goings-on as anyone else. He didn’t think they should
gossip
about them, though. Mrs. Farleigh looked up across the market square, and her gaze fell on him. Her expression didn’t change—which was to say, that small mysterious curl of a smile stayed on her lips.

Still, even through his fortress of glass, he felt a tiny jolt of electric resonance, as if lightning had struck nearby. She started in his direction.

Before she could come much closer, the rector snapped into motion. He darted through the stone arches of the Market Cross and took hold of Mrs. Farleigh’s shoulder. Not in a friendly, rectorlike way. Nor even as a rebuke. His gloved hand landed rather too close to her breast for any of that.

Mrs. Farleigh’s artful smile suggested that she was worldly. Her revealing gown shouted that she was a temptress. The rector’s gossip said she was worse. But when Lewis placed his hands on her, she flinched—no more than a half step backward, a twitch of her skin, but that was enough. For one instant, she had more the look of scalded cat about her than graceful swan, and that half second of response betrayed her air of worldly sensuality. She was not who she appeared at first blush.