by Julia Quinn
“Sarah.”
“How do you make my name sound like such a threat?”
“It doesn’t really matter if it sounds like a threat,” he said. “It only matters if you think it sounds like a threat.”
Her eyes grew wide, and she burst into laughter. “You win,” she said, and he was quite sure she would have thrown up her hands in defeat if they had not still been depending upon one another to stay upright.
“I think I do,” he murmured.
It was the strangest, most awkward waltz imaginable, and it was the most perfect moment of his life.
Chapter Fourteen
Several nights later, well after dark
in the guest bedchamber shared by
the Ladies Sarah and Harriet Pleinsworth
“Are you going to read all night?”
Sarah’s eyes, which had been speeding along the pages of her novel with a most pleasurable abandon, froze in place upon the word forsythia. “Why,” she said aloud (and with considerable aggravation), “does that question even exist in the realm of human activity? Of course I’m not going to read all night. Has there ever even existed a human being who has read all night?”
This was a question she regretted immediately, because this was Harriet lying in bed next to her, and if there was anyone in the world who would respond by saying, “There probably has been,” it was Harriet.
And she did.
“Well, I’m not going to,” Sarah muttered, even though she’d already said as much. It was important to get the last word in a sisterly argument, even if it did mean repeating oneself.
Harriet turned onto her side, scrunching her pillow under her head. “What are you reading?”
Sarah pushed back a sigh and let her book fall closed around her index finger. This was not an unfamiliar sequence of events. When Sarah could not sleep, she read novels. When Harriet could not sleep, she pestered Sarah.
“Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron.”
“Haven’t you read that before?”
“Yes, but I enjoy rereading it. It’s silly, but I like it.” She reopened the book, planted her eyes back on forsythia, and prepared to move forward.
“Did you see Lord Hugh tonight at supper?”
Sarah stuck her index finger back into the book. “Yes, of course I did. Why?”
“No reason in particular. I thought he looked very handsome.” Harriet had dined with the adults that evening, much to Elizabeth’s and Frances’s chagrin.
The wedding was now but three days away, and Whipple Hill was a flurry of activity. Marcus and Honoria (Lord and Lady Chatteris, Sarah reminded herself) had arrived from Fensmore looking flushed and giggly and deliriously happy. It would have been enough to make Sarah want to gag, except that she had been having a rather fine time herself, laughing and bantering with Lord Hugh.
It was the oddest thing, but his was the first face she thought of when she woke in the morning. She looked for him at breakfast, and she always seemed to find him there, his plate so nearly full as to indicate that he’d arrived mere moments before she had.
Every morning, they lingered. They told themselves it was because they could not partake in the many activities that had been planned for the day (although in truth Sarah’s ankle was much improved, and even if a walk to the village was still out of the question, there was no reason she could not manage bowls on the lawn).
They lingered, and she would pretend to sip at her tea, because if she actually drank as much as one normally might over the hours she sat at the table, she’d be forced to cut the conversation short.
She did not reflect upon the fact that a conversation truncated at the hour mark could not possibly be construed as short.
They lingered, and most people didn’t seem to notice. The other guests came and went, taking their food from the sideboard, drinking their coffee and tea, and leaving. Sometimes Sarah and Hugh were joined in conversation, sometimes not.
And then finally, when it became past obvious that it was time for the servants to clean the breakfast room, Sarah would rise and casually mention where she thought she might take her book for the afternoon.
He would never say that he planned to join her, but he always did.
They had become friends, and if occasionally she caught herself staring at his mouth, thinking that everyone had to have a first kiss, and wouldn’t it be lovely if hers was with him . . . Well, she kept such things to herself.
She was running out of novels, though. The Whipple Hill library was extensive, but it was sadly lacking in books of the kind Sarah liked to read. Miss Butterworth had been haphazardly shelved between The Divine Comedy and The Taming of the Shrew.
She looked back down. Miss Butterworth had not yet met her baron, and Sarah was eager for the plot to get moving.
Forsythia . . . forsythia . . .
“Did you think he looked handsome?”
Sarah let out an annoyed groan.
“Did you think Lord Hugh looked handsome?” Harriet prodded.
“I don’t know, he looked like himself.” The first part was a lie; Sarah did know, and she had found him heartbreakingly handsome. The second part was the truth, and was probably the reason she thought him so handsome to begin with.
“I think Frances has fallen in love with him,” Harriet said.
“Probably,” Sarah agreed.
“He’s very kind to her.”
“Yes, he is.”
“He taught her to play piquet this afternoon.”
It must have been while she was helping Anne at her final dress fitting, Sarah thought. She could not imagine when else he would have had the time.
“He didn’t let her win. I think she thought he would, but I think she likes that he didn’t.”
Sarah let out a loud, long-suffering sigh. “Harriet, what is this about?”
Harriet tucked her chin back in surprise. “I don’t know. I was just making conversation.”
“At”—Sarah looked vainly for a clock—“whatever time it is?”
Harriet was quiet for a full minute. Sarah managed to get from forsythia to pigeon before her sister spoke again.
“I think he likes you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lord Hugh,” Harriet said. “I think he fancies you.”
“He doesn’t fancy me,” Sarah retorted, and it wasn’t that she was lying; it was more that she hoped she was lying. Because she knew that she was falling in love with him, and if he did not feel the same way, she did not know how she could bear it.
“I think you’re wrong,” Harriet said.
Sarah turned resolutely back to Miss Butterworth’s pigeons.
“Do you fancy him?”
Sarah snapped. There was no way she was going to talk to her sister about this. It was too new, and too private, and every time she thought about it she felt as if she might burst out of her skin. “Harriet, I am not having this conversation right now.”
Harriet paused to think about this. “Will you have it tomorrow?”
“Harriet!”
“Oh, fine, I won’t say another word.” Harriet made a big show of turning over in bed, pulling half of Sarah’s covers off in the process.
Sarah let out a snort, since an obvious display of irritation was clearly called for, then she yanked at the blanket and turned back to her book.
Except she could not concentrate.
Her eyes sat on page thirty-three for what seemed like hours. Beside her, Harriet finally stopped rustling around and fell still, her breathing slowing into light, peaceful snores.
Sarah wondered what Hugh was doing, and if he ever had difficulty falling asleep.
She wondered how much his leg hurt when he went to bed. If it pained him at night, did it still hurt in the morning? Did he ever wake from the pain?
She wondered how he had come to be so talented at mathematics. He’d explained to her once, after she’d begged him to multiply some ridiculously long sums, how he saw the numbers in his head, exc
ept he didn’t actually see them, they just sort of arranged themselves until he knew the answer. She hadn’t even tried to pretend that she understood him, but she’d kept asking questions because he was so adorable when he was frustrated.
He smiled when he was with her. She didn’t think he’d smiled very often before.
Was it possible to fall in love with someone in so short a time? Honoria had known Marcus her whole life before she fell in love with him. Daniel had claimed love at first sight with Miss Wynter. Somehow that almost seemed more logical than Sarah’s journey.
She supposed she could lie in bed all night and doubt herself, but she was feeling too restless, so she climbed out of bed, walked to the window, and pushed back the curtains. The moon wasn’t full, but it was more than halfway there, and the silvery light sparkled on the grass.
Dew, she thought, and she realized she’d already donned her slippers. The house was quiet, and she knew she shouldn’t be out of her room, and it wasn’t even that the moonlight was calling . . .
It was the breeze. The leaves had long since dropped from the trees, but the tiny points at the ends of the branches were light enough to ruffle and sway. A spot of fresh air, that was all she needed. Fresh air and the wind tickling through her hair. It had been years since she’d been permitted to wear it down outside her bedroom, and she just wanted to go outside and . . .
And be.
The same night
A different room
Sleep had never come easily to Hugh Prentice. When he was a small child, it was because he was listening. He didn’t know why the nursery at Ramsgate wasn’t off in some far-flung corner like at every other house he’d ever been to, but it wasn’t, and it meant that every now and then, and never when they expected it (which was not true; they always expected it), Hugh and Freddie would hear their mother cry out.
The first time Hugh heard it, he jumped out of bed, only to be stopped by Freddie’s restraining hand.
“But Mama . . .”
Freddie shook his head.
“And Father . . .” Hugh had heard his father’s voice, too. He sounded angry. And then he laughed.
Freddie shook his head again, and the look in his eyes was enough to convince Hugh, who was five years his junior, to crawl back into his bed and cover his ears.
But he didn’t close his eyes. If you’d asked him the next day, he would have sworn he had not even blinked. He was six, and he still swore to lots of impossible things.
When he saw his mother that night before supper, she didn’t look as if anything was wrong. It really had sounded as if his mother had been hurt, but she didn’t have any bruises, and she didn’t sound sick. Hugh started to ask her about it, but Freddie stomped on his foot.
Freddie didn’t do things like that without a reason; Hugh kept his mouth shut.
For the next few months Hugh watched his parents carefully. It was only then that he realized that he almost never saw them together in the same room. If they ate supper together in the dining room, he would not know; the children dined in the nursery.
When he did see them at the same time it was very difficult to determine what their feelings toward the other might be; it wasn’t as if they spoke to each other. Months would pass, and Hugh could almost imagine that everything was perfectly fine.
And then they would hear it again. And he knew that everything was not perfectly fine. And that there was nothing he could do about it.
When Hugh was ten, his mother succumbed to a fever brought on by a dog bite (and a small bite at that, but it had turned ugly very quickly). Hugh grieved for her as much as he might grieve for anyone he saw for twenty minutes each evening, and he finally stopped listening each night as he tried to fall asleep.
But by this point it did not matter. Hugh could no longer fall asleep because he was thinking. He lay in his bed, and his mind buzzed and raced and flipped and generally did everything except calm itself down. Freddie told him that he needed to imagine his mind as a blank page, which actually made Hugh laugh, because if there was one thing his mind would never be able to duplicate, it was a blank page. Hugh saw numbers and patterns all day long, in the petals of a flower, in the cadence of a horse’s hooves on the ground. Some of these patterns caught his immediate attention, but the rest lingered at the back of his mind until he was quiet and in bed. That was when they crept back, and suddenly everything was adding and subtracting and rearranging, and did Freddie really think he could sleep through that?
(Freddie did not, as a matter of fact. After Hugh told him what went on in his head when he was trying to fall asleep, Freddie never mentioned the blank page again.)
Now there were many reasons he did not drift easily into sleep. Sometimes it was his leg, with its nagging clench of muscle. Sometimes it was his suspicious nature, forcing him to keep one metaphorical eye on his father, whom Hugh would never trust completely, despite his current upper hand in their battles. And sometimes it was that same old thing—his mind humming with numbers and patterns, unable to shut itself off.
But Hugh had a new hypothesis: he could not sleep because he had simply got used to this particular brand of frustration. Somehow he had trained his body to think that he was supposed to lie there like a log for hours before finally giving up and resting. He’d had plenty of nights with no reasonable explanation for his insomnia. His leg might feel almost normal, and his father not even a dot in his mind, and still sleep would elude him.
Lately, however, it had been different.
He still wasn’t finding it easy to fall asleep. He probably never would. But the reason why . . .
That was the difference.
In the years since his injury, there had been plenty of nights that had found him awake and wishing for a woman. He was a man, and except for his stupid left thigh, all parts of him were in working order. There was nothing unnatural about it, just a lot that was uncomfortable.
But now that woman had a face, and a name, and even though Hugh behaved with perfect propriety throughout the day, when he was lying in his bed at night, his breathing would grow ragged and his body burned. For the first time in his life, he longed for the numbers and patterns that plagued his mind. Instead all he could think about was that moment a few days earlier, when Sarah tripped over the rug in the library and he’d caught her before she fell. For one ecstatic moment, his fingers had brushed against the side of her breast. She’d been wearing velvet, and God knows what else underneath, but he’d felt the curve of her, the soft tenderness, and the ache that had been growing inside of him turned rampant.
And so he wasn’t particularly surprised when he rolled over fitfully in his bed, picked up his pocket watch, and saw that it was half three in the morning. He’d tried reading, as that sometimes nodded him off, but it hadn’t worked. He’d spent an hour doing really boring equations in his head, but that hadn’t done the trick, either. Finally, he admitted defeat and walked to the window. If he could not sleep, at least he could look at something other than the insides of his eyelids.
And there she was.
He was stunned, and yet not surprised at all. Sarah Pleinsworth had been haunting his dreams for more than a week; of course she’d be out on the lawn in the middle of the night the one time he stood at his window. There was some sort of insane logic to it.
Then he blinked himself out of his stupor, because what the hell was she doing? It was half three in the morning, and if he could see her from his window, at least two dozen others could, too. Hugh let out a string of expletives that would have done any sailor proud as he strode to the wardrobe and yanked out a pair of trousers.
And yes, he could stride when absolutely necessary. It wasn’t pretty, and he’d feel it later, but it did the trick. A few moments later he was more or less dressed (and the parts that were “less” were covered by his coat), and he was moving through the halls of Whipple Hill as quickly as he could without waking up the entire house.
He paused briefly just outside the rear door. Hi
s leg was nearly in spasms, and he knew that if he didn’t stop and shake it out, it would collapse beneath him. The delay gave him time to sweep his gaze across the lawn, looking for her. She’d been wearing a coat, but it hadn’t completely covered her white gown, so she should be easy to spot . . .
He saw her. Sitting on the grass, so still she might have been a statue. She was hugging her knees to her chest, gazing up at the night sky with an expression of serenity that would have taken his breath away if he weren’t already so wrecked by fear and fury, and now by relief.
Hugh made his way slowly, favoring his leg now that speed was no longer of the essence. She must have been lost in her thoughts, for she did not seem to hear him. At about eight steps away, however, he heard her sharply indrawn breath, and she turned.
“Hugh?”
He didn’t say anything, just kept walking toward her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, scrambling to her feet.
“I might ask the same thing of you,” he snapped.
She drew back in surprise at his display of anger. “I couldn’t sleep, and I—”
“So you thought you would wander outside at half three in the morning?”
“I know it seems silly—”
“Silly?” he demanded. “Silly? Are you bloody well kidding me?”
“Hugh.” She reached out to place her hand on his arm, but he shook her off.
“What if I hadn’t seen you?” he demanded. “What if someone else had seen you?”
“I would have gone inside,” she said, her eyes searching his with an expression of such perplexity that he nearly flinched. She could not possibly be so naïve. He had raced through the house—he, who on some days could barely walk, had raced through this bloody monster of a house, unable to beat away the memory of his mother’s cry.
“Do you think that every single person in the world has your best interest at heart?” he demanded.
“No, but I think every person here does, and—”
“There are men in this world who hurt people, Sarah. There are men who hurt women.”
Her face went slack, and she didn’t say anything.
