by Juliana Gray
“Look here.” Roland heard his own voice with horror. Here it was. The rash thing, unstoppable as one of Great-Aunt Julia’s obscene anecdotes at the dinner table. “Enough of this rubbish. We shouldn’t dream of causing any inconvenience to you and your friends, Lady Morley. Not for an instant. Should we, Wallingford?”
“No, damn it,” the duke grunted, folding his arms.
“Burke?”
“Bloody hell,” muttered Burke, under his breath.
“You see, Lady Morley? All quite willing and happy and so on. I daresay Burke can take the little room upstairs, as he’s such a tiresome, misanthropic old chap, and my brother and I shall be quite happy to . . .”—he swept his arm to take in the dark depths of the common room—“make ourselves comfortable downstairs. Will that suit?”
Lady Morley clasped her elegant gloved hands together. “Darling Penhallow. I knew you’d oblige us. Thanks so awfully, my dear; you can’t imagine how thankful I am for your generosity.” She turned to the landlord. “Do you understand? Comprendo? You may remove His Grace’s luggage from the rooms upstairs and bring up our trunks at once. Ah! Cousin Lilibet! There you are at last. Have you sorted out the trunks?”
Roland couldn’t help himself. He swiveled to the doorway, desperate to see her, now that he’d recovered his wits; desperate for even a glimpse of her, without all the rain and darkness and bloody damned hats in the way. He wanted to know everything. Had she changed? Grown cynical and world-weary? Had her fresh-faced beauty faded under the blight of marriage to the legendarily dissolute Earl of Somerton?
Did he wish that it had?
She was kneeling by the door, unbuttoning her son’s coat. Typical of her, that she would make the boy comfortable first, the little martyr. She turned her head to answer her cousin, her voice as even and well modulated as ever, despite the raspy edge Roland had noticed before. “Yes, they’ve all been unloaded. The fellow’s coming in the back.” She straightened and handed the boy his coat and began unbuttoning her own.
Roland held his breath. Her gloved fingers found the buttons expertly and slid them through the holes, exposing inch after inch of a practical dark blue traveling suit with a high white collar, pristine and ladylike, her bosom (fuller now, or was that his imagination?) curving tidily beneath the perfect tailoring of her jacket.
He felt a sharp poke in his ribs. “Oh, for God’s sake. Keep your tongue in your mouth, you dog,” hissed his brother.
The landlord hurried down the steps to assist her. She had that effect, Roland thought crossly. “I take the coat, milady,” he said, dipping obsequiously, folding the wet wool over his arm as if it were cloth of gold. “And the hat. The hat. Ah, mia donna, it is so wet. You come to the fire, you dry. Mia povera donna.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Grazie.” She allowed herself to be drawn to the fire, smoothing her dark hair with one hand, pulling young Philip with the other. The light gleamed gold against her pale skin, casting shadows beneath her cheekbones. She looked tired, Roland thought, taking an involuntary step in her direction before he remembered himself. Concern! For Lady Somerton! As if she couldn’t take perfectly good care of herself without him. She’d proven that well enough.
Roland looked around and found that both Burke and Wallingford had resumed their seats, and he was standing there like the village idiot, staring after her ladyship’s decorously clothed backside.
TWO
For a small folded square of notepaper, it burned with unnatural energy through the material of Lilibet’s best navy blue traveling suit to brand the skin beneath.
She ought to have tossed it away at once, of course. Roland had pressed it into her hand in the bustle of greetings before dinner, and she’d been too stunned to throw it on the fire with a haughty quirk of her chin, or whatever her mother would have expected of her.
Now, of course, she couldn’t remove it; not with the sharp eyes of Abigail and Philip trained upon her.
Philip, especially. Her son, her innocent angel, her damned stubborn nemesis, the one good thing she’d salvaged from six years of misery.
He didn’t want to go to sleep. Not unusual in a boy of five and a half, of course, but Lilibet, who would have given anything to collapse into bed herself, felt almost affronted by his reluctance. “Darling, you’re exhausted,” she pleaded. “Just lie still and close your eyes.”
“I’m not tired,” he said, eyes rolling. “I’m not.” He kicked off the covers.
Lilibet drew them back.
Philip kicked them off again.
She felt it rising, the tide of her temper, so strong this time it took an almost superhuman strength to muscle it downward again. Be calm, she told herself, as she always did. Dignity. Clarity. She counted to ten, eyes closed, pausing on each number.
There. She opened her eyes.
Philip wasn’t on the bed.
She spun around and saw Abigail, laughing, snatching him up in her arms just before he reached the door. “Naughty boy,” she said, and rubbed her nose into his tummy. “Naughty, wicked, despicable boy.” She blew rude noises into his skin, until he was giggling helplessly, writhing with joy.
“Abigail, you’ll overexcite him,” Lilibet whispered, and put her fingers to her temples.
How heavy could a piece of paper be? It dragged in her pocket like a stone: the massive, sharp-sided kind they collected in more primitive cultures to lob at adulterers.
“You don’t deserve a story, you dreadful rascal, but I’ll tell one anyway,” Abigail said, tossing him into the bed. “But you’ve got to eat this bun for me while I’m telling it. It’s a magic bun, you see.” She drew it from her pocket and held it before him. “A wonderfully magic bun. It lets you understand me, even though I’ll be telling you the entire story . . . in . . . Italian.”
“Italian! No, you won’t. You don’t know Italian.”
“Yes, she does,” Lilibet said, drawing up the blankets. “She knows it perfectly.”
“But this bun,” Abigail said, rotating it solemnly, “will make the words sound just like English.”
“Ha,” Philip said. But his eyes narrowed.
Abigail shrugged. “If you don’t believe me, then fine. C’era una volta, viveva un re e sua figlia . . .”
Philip snatched the bun from her fingers and trained his eyes on her lips.
Abigail said: ”. . . in un castello antico solitario in cima a una collina.”
Philip bit into the bun.
“The queen had died long ago, and the king was so stricken with grief that he ordered all the ladies of the castle to be banished, so he might never see another woman again,” Abigail continued, without missing a beat.
Philip stared at Abigail’s lips, transfixed, nibbling away at the bun. Lilibet watched his little body relax into the mattress, his energy fading and settling around him. His eyelids drooped, and his hand dropped against the pillow, still clutching the bun between his fingers. Abigail continued on a minute or two longer, until his breathing became deep and regular and peaceful, the candlelight glowing softly around his round, smooth cheek.
“They look so innocent when they are asleep,” Lilibet said softly, brushing the hair from his forehead. “It makes me feel guilty for being angry before.”
“You were angry?” Abigail asked, and Lilibet, turning to her, saw that she was genuinely surprised.
“Yes, of course.”
Abigail straightened from the bed and smiled at her, a great, wide smile in her oval face. “Even-tempered Lilibet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you angry.”
Lilibet looked back at her son’s sleeping face. “All the time,” she said. “I’m angry all the time. Only I’ve learned how to hide it.”
“You don’t need to hide it,” Abigail said. “We’d understand.”
No, you wouldn’t, Lilibet though
t. All that anger, those wicked, immoral emotions, kept in check by a network of fine interlocking threads that strained and cut viciously and yet somehow held against the pressure. You wouldn’t understand at all, Abigail, my artless virgin.
“Are you angry at him?” Abigail ventured. “At Lord Somerton?”
“Of course not,” Lilibet lied. “I don’t know why you should ask.”
“I’m not a fool, Lilibet. Just because I’m not married doesn’t mean I don’t hear things. And if we’re running halfway across Europe just to escape him . . .”
“Eavesdropper.”
“Of course I eavesdrop. There’s no better way to find out what one’s not supposed to hear.” Abigail hesitated and reached out to clasp Lilibet’s hand. “I know he’s a beast, for one thing.”
“He’s a man.”
Abigail’s hand squeezed hers. “You’ll feel better when we reach the castle tomorrow. Think of it, a whole year to ourselves! You’ll be safe, you’ll be among friends. No one can get past Alexandra. Everything will sort itself out.”
“Yes, of course.” Lilibet drew her hand away. She moved restlessly to the wing chair in the corner, oddly out of place against the rustic plaster wall, as if left behind by some English traveler who couldn’t pay his bill but happened to be transporting wing chairs upholstered in hideous bile green paisley. She dropped herself into it and trained her eyes on the sleeping figure of her child. “Go back downstairs, Abigail. I’ll watch him.”
“And leave you by yourself?” Abigail protested.
Lilibet smiled. “Abigail, darling, I know very well that you’re desperate to go back down to that common room. Don’t think I didn’t see the way you were examining poor Wallingford.”
Abigail’s arms crossed against her ribs. “I wasn’t. He’s a perfectly ordinary duke. There are princes in Italy, Lilibet. Princes. Much more interesting than dull English dukes.”
“Go, Abigail. I’m all done in, really.” She made a whisking movement with her hand. “Go, for heaven’s sake.”
Abigail left at last, and Lilibet leaned her head back against the chair with a sigh of relief, free at last to let the urgent thought explode across her brain: Roland.
The shock had been so great, at first, that she hadn’t even felt it. It was as if he were a ghost, conjured up by her exhausted brain. Lord Roland Penhallow, here in a dreary, wet hillside in Tuscany, on the doorstep of the very inn she was about to enter herself, locked in negotiation with her own son? The coincidence was too catastrophic to be true.
Only later, when she’d made the arrangements for the trunks, gathered Philip to her side, and swept through the doorway of the inn, had the truth smacked her in the jaw. Never in her life had she felt so self-conscious as she had in that moment, removing Philip’s coat and then her own, feeling Roland’s eyes trained upon her every gesture. Her hands had shaken; had he seen it? Did he care, if he had?
Six years; six and a half, really, since last she had met him. Of course his ardor had faded. It had faded quickly, if reports were true. Lord Roland’s bachelor exploits about London were the stuff of legend. Mistresses of preposterous unsuitability, country weekends that had gone on for months, pranks and hijinks of fiendish ingenuity and frivolity. Racehorses in the Prince’s bedroom, to her certain knowledge.
The ingenuity she recognized; the frivolity she did not. This Roland of scandal and innuendo could not possibly be the same young man she had met at a river party in Richmond nearly seven years ago; the handsome brother of the Duke of Wallingford, laughing and careless and eloquent, with a knack for verse that might be achingly silly or breathtakingly romantic. She had just come to London, fresh from the schoolroom, and fell in love with him at once. “Darling, here’s Lord Roland Penhallow, Wallingford’s brother, who’s been begging me for an introduction this half hour,” her hostess had said. Roland’s hazel eyes had gleamed, and he’d bent over her hand, and she was his.
They’d lost little time going conveniently astray in the shrubbery, while everyone else gathered by the tea tables near the water. He’d wanted to know everything about her; she’d told him what little there was to know, and he’d seemed fascinated by every word. “But that’s marvelous!” she could still hear him exclaim, into the motionless, pollen-laden May air, his cheekbones faintly flushed and his arm steady and warm beneath hers. “I’ve been a devoted disciple of Browning for years. I’d no idea there was a girl in the world who’d agree with me.”
“He’s indispensable, of course,” Lilibet remembered herself saying, “but his work suffered badly after his marriage.”
“Are you arguing against marriage, Miss Harewood?” he’d asked, leaning toward her, eyes merry.
“I’ve no intention of marrying at all,” she’d said. “I believe there should be no obligation on either partner. In a free union, a genuine union, the marriage vow would be utterly superfluous.”
He’d thrown back his head and laughed, all careless, youthful joy, and she’d laughed with him. Later, as they’d emerged from the shrubbery, he’d drawn her back and pressed his lips against the back of her hand, so the heat of his breath penetrated the thin kidskin of her glove and warmed the marrow of her bones. His fingers had brushed once along the underside of her wrist, in the gap of bare skin between her glove and her sleeve. “Do you stay in London all season, Miss Harewood?” he’d asked, quite soft.
“Yes,” she’d replied, unable to say anything more.
“Then so I shall, as well,” he’d said, and they had rejoined the party, flushed and alive, and the air around them had shimmered with anticipation. Even now, after everything, Lilibet could feel her heart accelerate, feel the thread of excitement in her veins that the memory always awakened. The night before her marriage, she’d burned all the notes and letters, had locked away all the memories, because it was her duty and because they were little use to her, now that she was marrying another man. All the memories, that is, except for the scene of that first meeting. Surely God could not deny her one innocent afternoon, she’d pleaded: a few paltry hours against all the days and months and years ahead of her.
Lilibet slipped her hand into her pocket and fingered the folded edge of the paper there. Such a look he’d given her, dark and meaning, when he put it in her hand. Not an innocent look at all, not the sort of look one gave a woman when offering a note that read Bread moldy; avoid at all costs or else Large stain on back of your dress; suggest immediate soaking in bicarbonate.
She couldn’t control her thoughts entirely; she’d given up on that long ago. But she could control her actions. Whatever her husband had done, whatever the lengths to which she now went to protect herself and her son, her own conduct was spotless, blameless. She should not open this note.
Her hand slid upward and out of the pocket, with the paper trapped between her thumb and forefinger.
She stared at the innocuous white square for a moment, and then at Philip, asleep in his little bed, eyelashes spread like fans against his cheeks.
She turned away from the boy and opened the note.
I have long wished to assure myself of the happiness of my dear friend, whose honour remains sacred to me. If she can spare a moment or two at half eleven, I shall be waiting with all reverence at the end of the stable block.
Unsigned, of course. Considerate, gentlemanly: the Roland she recognized, rather than the Roland of public reputation. The Roland she trusted.
Her Roland.
She read the note again, ran her fingers over the black letters, lifted it to her nose and inhaled the plain, unadorned scents of paper and ink. She folded it and placed it back in her pocket and drew out her watch.
Not quite nine o’clock.
With silent steps she went over to the bed and knelt beside the sleeping body of her son. His hair made little dark whorls on his forehead; she wound and unwound them around her
forefinger, savoring the silken feel, fine and strong and unbreakable. Below them, the sounds of the common room drifted up through the wooden floor: muffled thumps and laughter and the low vibrating hum of conversation. People connecting, life going on.
She rose, picked up her book from the table by the bed, and settled herself back in the bile green English armchair to read, with her watch tucked into her lap.
THREE
A betting man by nature, Roland gave himself about four-to-one odds against Lilibet’s appearance at eleven thirty.
Not that long odds troubled him much. He’d faced them often enough. He set his lantern on a wooden shelf and leaned against the stable wall, arms crossed, listening for the sound of human movement through the faint drum of rain against the roof above. The warm scent of the stable filled the air around him: horses and leather and grain and manure, all mingled together, familiar and comforting. The smell of his boyhood, of that authentic Roland who still existed, somewhere, beneath all the layers of frivolous disguise.
Of course Lilibet would have heard all the stories. Much of the energy he’d thrown into his role had come from the angry knowledge that she’d be told of his latest absurdity, his most recent rashness, by some gossiping London countess. She’d hear of his actresses and his pranks, and know that he wasn’t wasting away for regret of her blue eyes and ringing laugh. The luminous Lilibet he’d once adored.
And how he’d adored her. He could still picture her in his mind, that first moment at Lady Whatsit’s river party. He’d met pretty debutantes without number, of course; all very charming and that sort of thing, laughing like songbirds into the dulcet spring air. But Elizabeth Harewood had stood out at once. Not just her beauty, though that in itself was endless, flawless, a miracle of color and freshness and symmetry. No, it was something about the amused, half-shy gleam in her eye, the queenly way she held herself, the mixture of reserve and freedom with which she cast her eye about the scene. She had something in her, something different, noble and reticent and irreverent all at once. A streak of something earthy and passionate, deep inside her, carefully hidden. And then he’d wrangled an introduction, and led her into the shrubbery and talked to her, and he’d known within five minutes that he couldn’t live without her.
