The Conquest of Lady Cassandra

by Madeline Hunter

  Cassandra took the answer to mean that no servants would attend on them, and there would be no pavilion. “It is a private spot, you said.”

  “Are you worried for your modesty? Have no fear. No one even knows the way down to the water except me, and the cove is such that even fishing boats cannot see the shore. Follow me. I will show you.”

  Lydia turned her horse toward the coast and an unpromising stretch of rough, high ground. Cassandra followed, impatient to bathe in the sea. The storm had not refreshed the air the way summer storms could. Now the sun created a steam off the ground that only increased the discomfort.

  “We need to go up this rise, then down the other side,” Lydia said. “Do not worry about the horse’s footing. She will not fall.”

  “Is it as steep on the other side as this one?”

  “More so. Once we are in the sea, you will agree it was worth it, I promise.”

  Lydia guided her horse up a path that only she could see. Cassandra followed with misgivings. She was not a bad horsewoman if her mount traversed London’s parks. She imagined falling into the rocks and brush that she passed.

  Her horse and her prayers absorbed her attention until the path leveled and she came up beside Lydia. To her dismay, the little plateau on which they stood appeared to fall away in a cliff in front of her.

  She groped for courage while she stared at the steep decline. “Let us stop here a minute, if you do not mind.”

  “I think there is no choice,” Lydia said.

  Cassandra looked at her. Lydia gazed down, with her lids lowered and her expression one of engrossed curiosity. Cassandra followed the direction of that gaze.

  Others had also decided to bathe in the sea. Ambury and Kendale stood down by the water, stripping off their clothes. Their horses had been tied to a marooned ruin of a ship’s mast close by the rock face.

  “I thought you said only you knew about this spot, Lydia.”

  “I suppose my brother does too. He must have brought them at some time in the past.”

  Ambury had just thrown aside his waistcoat and was unfastening his shirtsleeves. At the moment, with the breeze tossing his hair and dressed in only shirt, pantaloons, and boots, he appeared like a buccaneer. In a few moments, he would appear like a naked sea god.

  Cassandra vaguely noted that Kendale was further along. His shirt had already been removed, revealing a strong, muscular back that displayed some odd scars. Soon Ambury’s own back came into view too, as he pulled off his shirt.

  The muscles in his shoulders knotted and moved with a most appealing tension when he sat down and stretched to remove his boots. He said something to Kendale, and both men laughed. It sounded different from any laugh that Cassandra had ever heard. It was a masculine laugh, shared only with their own kind.

  Spying on this private camaraderie captivated her. So did Ambury’s body when he stood again. He had loosened his pantaloons. He slid them down his hips, along with his small clothes. He bent to pull the garments off his body.

  A sharp intake of breath sounded in her ear. She turned to see Lydia wide-eyed.

  “Close your eyes, Lydia! You should not be—”

  “Oh, stop,” Lydia said. “You sound like my aunts or, worse, my brother. You are looking and you are unmarried. Why can’t I?”

  “I should not either.”

  “Yet you are staring so hard you might be doing sketches of them.”

  “My reputation is already tainted. Yours is not. Furthermore, if it becomes known you were here, I will end up blamed.” Imagining Southwaite’s withering accusation, Cassandra leaned over and stretched out her arm so she could cover Lydia’s eyes with her hand. Lydia laughed and paced her horse away so Cassandra could not reach.

  “Lydia! Really.”

  “Oh, tosh. I believe that I am too old to be as ignorant as I am, and rumor says you have not been so ignorant in years. If we are caught, we will be damned together.”

  “If either of them turns around, you must look away. Do you hear me? I will not be responsible for that bit of ignorance being lost by you.”

  “Such delicacy. I think I like the Cassandra of the scandal sheets more than the real one.”

  “Lydia.”

  “I promise. By the by, I had no idea, none at all, that a man’s bum could look like that. Sort of molded from stone. The shape suggests softness like ours, but there is much that implies enough hardness to cause an arrow to bounce off.”

  Cassandra assessed the bums in question. Ambury’s, in particular, arrested her attention. It was indeed a very hard one, well formed and charmingly swelled. “I have heard that not all men possess posteriors of such aesthetic superiority, Lydia. Soft men will be softer there too, I expect.”

  “You have heard that, have you?”

  “Yes. That is the rumor.”

  “I think I should not enjoy a soft man so much, then. I think those indentations on either side adorable.”

  One man who was not soft at all stood in naked splendor now, gazing out to sea. Sun glistened off the water behind his form, and even off his hair and body. White ripples nibbled at his feet from the surf’s eddies. Legs separated and limbs tense, Ambury raised both his arms and grasped his hands over his head. He stretched as if waking from the night, and all those taut muscles responded. Even the admired ones of his hard bum tightened more.

  “Mercy, but the sun has become hot today,” Cassandra muttered.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Lydia said.

  Kendale was already in the water, with only his shoulders and arms visible as he swam against the waves. Ambury waded in. Inch by inch, water covered him. First his feet and lower legs. Then his thighs. Finally, he was submerged to his waist. He kept walking deeper, with his hands trailing through the water at his sides.

  He stopped. Kendale called something and swam farther out. Ambury just stood there with the sun carving his back into planes and ridges and his hands pushing against the sea so that his shoulders tightened.

  Lydia turned her horse. “We must go. Now! He knows we are here, I think.”

  “He has been looking east the whole time, Lydia.” Cassandra began to turn her horse too. It took a bit of doing on the little plateau.

  While she struggled with the reins, she saw out of the corner of her eye that Ambury had turned around. That distracted her enough that she gave the horse its head to find the way down on its own. She twisted to admire the front of the torso rising out of the sea, and a very well-formed torso she considered it to be.

  She did not know if he saw her, or if he even looked where she and Lydia had been watching. In the next instant, he was on his back in the water, floating toward Kendale. Churning water obscured that which she had insisted Lydia not see, but not totally. Cassandra looked away, in part because her horse had decided to take the hill faster than she dared allow it.

  Lydia waited at the bottom. She burst out laughing as Cassandra bounced toward her. “I hope my brother is enjoying his wedding day as much as we are.”

  “You must tell no one.”

  “I know that, but I shall burst. When we arrive home and Hortense asks how our afternoon went despite the loss of her company, I may choke. Do you think either one of them saw us up there?”

  “I do not think so.”

  “What if one did? What if something is said?”

  “Nothing will be said.” At least, not to Lydia. “Some oblique teasing might come from Ambury, but I expect only stoic silence from Kendale. However, should either of them, or anyone else, so much as allude to it, you must pretend total ignorance of what they mean. No giggles, Lydia. No blushes. Look through them as if they are made of glass, and do not react at all.”

  “That is easy. I can do that.”

  Of course she could. Lydia spent most of her days doing that.

  “Since we did not get to go into the sea, baths in our chambers are in order after this ride,” Cassandra said. “Let us return to the house so I can call for one.”<
br />
  A nice cold one.

  “I’m telling you someone was up there,” Kendale said as he and Yates directed their mounts up the steep hill.

  “I saw no one.”

  “I sensed it. We were not alone.”

  Yates had sensed it too. Right before Kendale had called out a warning, he had felt the presence of others, and of being watched.

  “I think it was that woman.”

  “She has a name, Kendale. If she was there, and I do not think she was, she would have been there in the hopes of coming down to bathe too.”

  “Perhaps, but having seen us there, she should have left. Instead, she watched.”

  “You do not know that.”

  “I think that I saw bits of color through the brush and trees, and not huge flowers. Someone else was there too.”

  Yates preferred to avoid where this was going. If that woman saw them stripping, it would be bad enough. If Southwaite’s sister had…

  “Since you are not certain about any of it, let us assume no one was there. It is the conclusion any gentleman would make.”

  Kendale rode on. His expression displayed his consternation. “When we see them next, it will be difficult to act as if nothing happened.”

  “Yet we must, since nothing did happen for certain.”

  “That woman will probably let us know she saw us, without saying so directly. She will be clever and arch about it, but she will let us know.”

  “If she does, you must not react in any way. Appear confused if necessary, but better to look through her as if she were made of glass and her allusion has no meaning to you at all.”

  Kendale nodded, but hardly appeared appeased.

  They crested the hill and started down to the road snaking below. Two colorful dots, pink and blue, moved along it, heading south. The close proximity of the ladies in question did not bode well for Ambury’s insistence that no one had watched from the ridge.

  Kendale’s posture turned military and rigid. His jaw squared. His face took on more color.

  “It would help if you did not look guilty, Kendale. I said you must not react at all. Instead, you are blushing like a schoolboy, and we are still a good seven hundred yards away from them.”

  “I don’t like it, is all.”

  “No one likes such discomforting situations, but—”

  “Not the awkwardness. I do not like that a woman saw me naked but I did not see her naked. There is disadvantage in that, you must admit.”

  “Are you concerned that they were judging us the way we might judge them, regarding the aesthetics of that particular view?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Then I do not understand why—”

  “Women don’t do that. Look at men that way, I mean.” Kendale laughed. “The idea is unnatural.”

  “Do they not? And you know this for a fact because of your vast familiarity with women, I assume. Having been naked with scores of them, you noticed that not a single one ever reacted warmly to the sight of your body? By Zeus, I stand corrected then.”

  Kendale’s jaw firmed again.

  Yates noticed that their pace had slowed to where, if Kendale had his way, they would never catch up with the ladies in question.

  “If you say women might look at men that way, I must concede it could happen, since you probably have been with scores of them. It is a definite possibility with one of the women in question, I will grant you that.” Kendale picked up the thread of the conversation as if several minutes had not passed. He had been chewing over the revelation all the while, it seemed. “If so, I am definitely not concerned. Unlike you, I do not spend my time in hedonistic pursuits, but lead an active life. If any judgments on bodies took place, I am confident that I, at least, passed muster.”

  “Then I guess all eyes were on you today. I am relieved to know it. Now I can converse with either lady without the slightest embarrassment.”

  While Kendale absorbed the implications of that, Yates kicked his horse into a gallop.

  “We have company,” Lydia said, her gaze aiming to the northeast.

  A horse had just descended the hill and now galloped in their direction, its hooves throwing up clods of mud. Another rider came slower and aimed south toward the house and not at them.

  “I think it is Ambury,” Cassandra said.

  “Oh, dear, it is. He has seen us and is coming to join our outing.” Lydia turned her horse. “Forgive me, Cassandra, but I cannot face him so soon after—I dare not stay. If I do, I am sure to giggle.”

  With that, Lydia galloped away.

  Vexed at being abandoned, Cassandra turned her attention to Ambury. If he found it odd that Lydia had chosen that moment to exercise her horse, his expression did not reveal it. He pulled up his horse just as Lydia disappeared into a copse to the north.

  His gaze contained no indications that he knew she and Lydia had been on that ridge. None at all. And yet, in that instant, she knew that he knew she had been there. She could not identify what about him told her that, but it was in him as plain as could be.

  She looked back as blandly as he looked at her. She was sure that she revealed no more than he did. All the same, it passed between them in that gaze—the mutual acknowledgment that she had watched him undress and that he knew she had.

  An image flashed in her head of this man walking into the sea naked. Then another one, of him naked right now on that horse. She pushed both pictures away, lest she betray herself with a flush.

  “Lady Cassandra, I see that you can call up the weather’s obedience at your command. I am sure everyone in the party is grateful that you ordered the sun to appear.”

  “My command had little influence. It was a gesture of mercy on the sun’s part, so Lydia and I could steal away to avoid having to entertain Southwaite’s aunts. Both ladies would have been discomforted by my presence.”

  “I see Lydia has now decided everyone would be discomforted by her presence.”

  “She loves to ride hard. I was holding her back.”

  “Then allow me to accompany your return to the house. We will hope the sun remains generous.”

  Cassandra looked for Lydia again, but she was well gone. She moved her horse forward. Ambury fell in beside her.

  “Finding you out here, away from the wedding party, was fortuitous,” he said. “I want to thank you for your forbearance and discretion about the auction. It was gracious of you not to mention it at the party or at breakfast. You have been extraordinarily patient.”

  She thought about the letter she had sent. It had been a blazing example of patience abandoned. “Will more time be required? Please do not be insulted by my question. I truly need to know. I sold those earrings out of necessity, and my situation has not changed. I have not sold them elsewhere, because you promised to settle within a few weeks, but rather more time has passed than that.”

  “The delay in paying up was not caused by lack of funds, if that is what you think.”

  It was exactly what she thought. Everyone knew that Ambury’s father, the Earl of Highburton, kept his heir short of the kind of allowance a man in his position might expect. It was the financial expression of an estrangement between them.

  “I have not mentioned this in our correspondence, but perhaps I should have, so you did not doubt my word regarding family matters preoccupying me. My father is very ill,” Ambury said. “Gravely so. I have spent all of the time I could spare this summer with him and the solicitor, helping them to get his affairs in order.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. It is wise to involve yourself, I suppose, and take care of it while he can help.”

  “He thought to do most of it himself. However, he lacks the strength, so more has fallen to me these last months than I expected.”

  “Is that where you were this week?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are taking great care in this duty to him, it appears.”

  “It matters to him that everything is in perfect order.”

&n
bsp; “Is it your peace offering? Your attempt to mend the differences that grew over the years?”

  He looked at her as if she had just said something surprising. He appeared almost vulnerable for a moment. “A small attempt, perhaps.”

  “The reasons for those differences probably seem very insignificant now that time is running out.”

  “Yes. Damned insignificant.”

  So this was the reason for the repeated delays over the last months, as he put her off again and again. The harsh accusations in that letter now mortified her. Under the circumstances, they would read as unfair and cruel.

  “The earrings are exquisite, and I, of course, will be glad to pay what I bid for them and finally take possession,” he said. “How did you come by them?”

  “Almost all the jewels that I sold at Fairbourne’s were given to me by my aunt.”

  “Were those earrings among the jewels that you received from her?”

  The question sounded rather pointed. Now that she thought about it, he had asked this in one of those earlier communications too.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  He shrugged. “Fairbourne’s is very careful about the provenance and history of the paintings it sells. Less so about the jewelry.”

  “The provenance is very clear. They came from me.”

  “And before you?”

  “A ruby is a ruby. A diamond is a diamond. The provenance, or history of ownership, is not needed to support the claim of what it is, like collectors expect with a Raphael drawing.”

  “I suppose not. Still, I would like to know more of their history. Part of the pleasure of owning something rare and beautiful is knowing its history,” he said. “At least it is for me.”

  She could tell him. There was no real point in not doing so. So why did she find herself hesitating, and feeling very suspicious? Perhaps because right now, for all his pleasantness, he did not really appear friendly. His best features, his eyes and that mouth, betrayed him in nuanced ways.

  They rode along another hundred feet before he spoke again. “Then you did receive them from your aunt?”