“If you are against the idea”—her voice caught—“you have but to walk away and I will never trouble you again. If not, you have also but to walk away—and dismiss the hansom cab on your way out. I’ve already paid the cabbie for the wait.”
Ralston could just see the very rear of the hansom cab from where he stood. He should bow, walk out of the gate, and go home, leaving her to deal with the cabbie and her mad desires.
And never see her again.
Silence escalated. Her fingers clasped tightly together. She stole a peek at him, then glanced away just as quickly, almost as if she could not bear the sight of him.
The cabbie’s horse snorted. A breeze rustled the pine needles overhead. Somewhere deeper in the gardens, a bird took flight, the flapping of its wings startling her.
“Before I can consider your request, Mrs. Englewood,” he heard himself say, “I need to ask you a few questions in return.”
MR. FITZWILLIAM’S FIRST QUESTION Isabelle could guess. “Fitz is the man I would have married, had he not inherited a bankrupt earldom that required him to marry an heiress instead.”
His brow lifted slightly. “You speak of Earl Fitzhugh?”
The dissonance of Fitz’s face and another man’s voice still flummoxed her, even more so when that voice brought up his name. “Do you know him?”
“Not personally. But I’d heard talk—his seat is not that far from here.”
Doyle’s Grange’s proximity to Henley Park, Fitz’s estate, had been one of the reasons she’d chosen the place.
“It must have been a number of years since Lord Fitzhugh married his heiress,” Mr. Fitzwilliam went on. “Does it still matter so much to you?”
She took a deep breath to steady herself. “I came back from India not long ago. Fitz and his wife had always lived in a platonic marriage. So when he and I met again, for the first time in eight years, we decided that we would pick up our old dreams where they had fallen apart.”
How she missed those first sweet moments of their reunion, when everything—the sun, the moon, entire constellations—had appeared not only possible, plausible, or probable, but absolutely, staggeringly certain.
Ironclad.
But soon Fitz’s conviction had begun to waver. He never said anything to the effect, but she’d sensed, increasingly, that his mind was not so much on her as on the girl he’d married most unwillingly eight years ago. During Isabelle’s long absence, he and his wife had grown close—much too close.
It was stupid to sign the lease for Doyle’s Grange without first having his firm agreement, but as Isabelle’s vision of happiness slid from her grasp, she’d needed to do something. And securing the house had felt like a solid something.
She wanted desperately to believe that Fitz would be utterly charmed by the rhododendron hedge, the gate with its whimsical wrought-iron carvings, and the garden full of blooming pinks and delphiniums. And when he roamed the bright and comfortable rooms of the house, he would instantly feel at home—the home they would have made together, had life not intervened eight years ago.
But as he walked through Doyle’s Grange this morning, he had regarded the property not with the dreaminess of a man about to embark on a new chapter in life, but with the solemn ruefulness of one coming to the conclusion that he had been reading the wrong book altogether.
Can you picture yourself here? she’d asked, holding on to one last shred of hope.
I’m sorry, Isabelle, but I picture myself elsewhere, he had answered gently, but his words had been daggers in her lungs.
The corners of her lips had quivered. You mean you’d like to look at a different house?
No, I picture myself at Henley Park.
Henley Park was the estate he had inherited, the albatross around his neck that had destroyed their happiness. That hovel? Her voice had risen with her despair. I never told you but I went to see it before you married. It was a horrible place.
It was. But it isn’t anymore.
He’d taken her to see Henley Park, an undeniably beautiful place, radiant with hope and vibrancy. They’d spoken not a word on the state of his marriage, but Isabelle had felt all too clearly the devotion and nurturing that had been imprinted upon every square inch of the soil.
She could have made a scene. She could have demanded, with a tantrum to end all tantrums, that he honor his promise to her. Instead, she’d wished him well through her tears and bid him goodbye, too proud to debase herself when she had been told that she was no longer needed.
She forced herself to speak past the raw pain in her heart, to finish answering Mr. Fitzwilliam’s question. “Until this morning, I had believed—and hoped—that Fitz and I would indeed put those dreams to fulfillment. So yes, he still matters.”
And he would always, always matter.
Mr. Fitzwilliam was silent and still. She could no longer distinguish his individual features in the encroaching darkness. He was but a silhouette of a man, upon whom she could project all her starkest needs.
He bowed and walked away.
HE HAD DONE AS SHE’D SPECIFIED, leaving without a word to make his decision known to her by dismissing the cabbie. Or not.
But already she felt rejected. And with it, a sense of utter incredulity.
What had come over her?
He might have been forward, but not mad. She, on the other hand, had proved herself completely barmy. He would take himself home without a backward glance, revisiting her antics only to amuse his gentlemen friends the next time they were deep in their cups.
Slowly she made her way back into the house, her legs heavy, her heart heavier, her head spinning with mortification.
In the upstairs sitting room, she lit the lamp and located her great-great-great-grandmother’s miniature portrait. Two days ago, she’d come through the house to make sure everything was perfect and to set the portrait on the mantel of the sitting room. Great-Gran Cumberland had also been an Isabelle, a woman both terribly wild and terribly lucky. Among her descendants, it was said, in every generation there would be a girl as wild and as lucky as she.
Isabelle had always hoped she would be that girl of her generation. But while she’d had wildness aplenty in her younger days, luck had been elusive. But that, she was promised, would change once her mother’s cousin, Mrs. Tinsdale, passed down to her Great-Gran Cumberland’s miniature portrait, as reliable a talisman against the woes of fortune as anything the family had known in a century. Why, on the day Mrs. Tinsdale received the portrait, the physicians had advised her to make funeral arrangements for both her sons. But within a week, they’d miraculously recovered and went on to produce a total of nine grandchildren for Mrs. Tinsdale.
But the talisman had not proved effective for Isabelle. And in coming back for it—she’d already boarded a train that would take her from London to her sister’s place in Aberdeen, Scotland when she remembered that she’d left it behind at Doyle’s Grange—she’d only added humiliation to her heartache.
Had she been younger she might have thrown the miniature portrait into a fire. But this older, sadder Isabelle wrapped it carefully and put it into her satchel. It might yet change someone else’s luck someday, when the woman most needed it.
And now there was nothing else left to do in this house. It was time to take herself to the hansom cab, then onto the next train going back to London. In the morning she would start for Aberdeen, where her children were having a riotous good time with their cousins. Perhaps in time, some of their fresh joy in life would rub off a little on her.
She wiped the tears that gathered anew at the corners of her eyes, lifted the satchel—and stopped before she’d taken a single step.
The sound of a carriage moving.
There was no other carriage within hearing range except her hansom cab.
She rushed to the window and threw it open. In the light of its own lantern, the hansom cab rolled away, picking up speed as it went.
Mr. Fitzwilliam would be calling at ten o’clock
.
For a long minute she couldn’t breathe, let alone move. Then it occurred to her she needed to get ready. She lugged the satchel to the bedroom she’d have shared with Fitz and pawed frantically through its contents, while having not the least idea what she might be looking for.
After a while, it dawned on her that she was about to embark on her first ever affair. With a man she’d spoken to for all of five minutes, whose Christian name she did not even know.
She gave a wild little laugh, smacked her hand against her forehead, and went on with turning her satchel inside out.
Chapter Three
THE LAST TIME RALSTON approached a lady’s house at night, feeling as if he had been turned upside down, he had been twenty-one. That, too, had been an illicit visit: He’d climbed up to her window and knocked, hoping she was alone.
From time to time he still saw her face in his dreams, her smile wide with surprise and pleasure. They’d giggled madly—and kept telling each other to shush while laughing. It was a wonder he hadn’t lost his grip and plummeted into the boxwood hedge below.
It was odd to think of her so openly. He’d become used to the opposite, to snipping his thoughts in the bud, rarely allowing full, uninterrupted recollections.
Perhaps it was the effect of Mrs. Englewood’s naked pain and undisguised yearning. Perhaps it was simply the result of walking past the same door year after year without ever glancing its way. One of those days he was bound to fling it open, to come face to face with—what had Mrs. Englewood called it?
Old dreams that had fallen apart.
And here he was, about to help create an illusion that Mrs. Englewood’s old dreams hadn’t fallen apart.
EVERY MINUTE CRAWLED—it had been ages since Isabelle had eaten the sandwiches she’d brought with her and changed into somewhat more appropriate attire for seduction. A wonder her restless pacing hadn’t worn the carpet threadbare down the center.
The front door of the house opened. Her hand went to her throat. Now she would hear his footsteps coming up the stairs and approaching in the passage.
But that did not happen. After the front door closed, all became quiet. Straining her ears, she heard him moving below quietly, as if he were looking into each one of the rooms below.
Her pulse sped. What if—what if it was not Mr. Fitzwilliam, but a thief, grinning from ear to ear at the bounty of this unlocked, undefended house? And what if this thief were to see her in only her nightgown and dressing robe?
Now the footsteps ascended the stairs. Now they came swift and resolute. Her chest tightened. A glance toward the fireplace showed no sign of a poker, so she gripped the silver hairbrush her mother had given her when she became a bride—it wasn’t much of a weapon but it would still give a man a nasty bump on the head.
As the man neared the door, she realized that he carried a handcandle: its light swayed upon the wall. He extinguished the light and knocked on her door.
Not a criminal then, only Mr. Fitzwilliam, who had remembered her requirement for dim light. She panted in relief, only to have her heartbeat race for a different reason altogether.
She set down the hairbrush and hoped her voice would hold. “Come in.”
She’d left a lamp in a far corner of the room, the wick trimmed so short it was practically drowning in lamp oil. In this gauzy, barely-there light, the man before her bore such an uncanny resemblance to her erstwhile sweetheart that she could not quite suppress a gasp.
Fitz, her heart cried.
Just this one night. This one bittersweet night, so that she could look back as an old woman, when she had forgotten everything else, and remember what it was like to have her beloved in her arms.
Her palm hurt. She realized that she was clutching Great-Gran Cumberland’s miniature portrait and the frame was digging into her skin. She let go of it and beckoned him to approach her.
He did, but he did not fall upon her, as she’d meant him too. Instead, he reached past her for the miniature portrait and studied it. Then he studied her face.
They did not look much alike, she and Great-Gran Cumberland, except for the pitch black hair they shared—and even that was hardly discernible, as Great-Gran Cumberland’s coiffure, done up in the style of Madame Pompadour, had been enthusiastically powdered.
“She is an ancestress from six, seven generations ago,” she offered, made uneasy by the silence. Silence, to her, manifested grief. Or unhappiness. Or the distance of two lovers drifting apart. “Each of her four husbands cherished her. Her eleven children all survived her. On her seventy-fifth birthday, she had what she declared to be the best meal of her life at the dinner her favorite granddaughter threw in her honor, then she retired to bed and, with truffles and a forty-year-old claret in her stomach, passed away in her sleep.”
He nodded.
It didn’t feel terribly odd to speak of Great-Gran Cumberland—she had yet to tell Fitz about the latter. In her younger days, when she’d believed herself invulnerable, tales of Great-Gran had been just that, stories about a woman who lived in a different century. Then she’d had no need for anyone else’s luck; now she put her faith in legends and relics, no longer quite trusting her own ability to navigate life’s bitter seas.
He returned the miniature portrait to its place. Belatedly she noticed that in his other hand, he held a bottle of wine by its neck, two wineglasses, and a corkscrew.
Several times since her return she’d suggested to Fitz that they could have something more potent than tea or coffee, but he’d always turned her down, leaving her to recall wistfully those occasions years and years ago when he’d come to visit, and all the young people in the house would sneak out at night. They’d always had a bottle of something and a handful of thimbles. Hidden behind a high hedge, they’d pass around thimbles of the night’s tipple, tittering all the while, drunk as much on youth and the first taste of freedom as on port, sack, or champagne.
He set down the wine on the nightstand and extended a glass toward her. Their fingers brushed as she took the glass from him. A harsh heat sizzled along her nerve endings, but he did not seize on the moment or even remark upon it. Instead, his attention turned back to the bottle and he removed the cork with an audible pop.
He poured. The wine landed with a beautiful sound, nectar on glass. She took a sip; the claret flowed over her tongue, cool, delicious, leaving a trail of reassuring warmth in its wake. “Good idea,” she said. “The wine.”
He poured for himself, casting her a glance as he did so. Now she began to feel odd, carrying on this monologue, even though it was by her request that he remained silent.
“Nice claret,” she went on, unable to stop herself.
He turned the bottle so she could read the label. “Château Haut-Brion. I see from your pride that it is probably the Mona Lisa of wines. But I can’t tell the difference between a French red and an Italian one, let alone distinguish the parcel of land that produced a wine by the taste of it. All I know is that I like the conviviality a little wine brings.”
He drank from his glass and waited for her to speak more. She stared a moment at his almost unbearably familiar face, mesmerized, before her mind seized on the length of his hair to remind her that no, he was but a stranger.
“My—my late husband was a conscientious officer, always stern before his men. But every evening at dinner, after half a glass of wine, he’d begin to smile. After an entire glass of wine, he’d tell me the jokes he’d heard from the other officers. And on rare days when he allowed himself a second glass, he might even imitate his horse, a gorgeous bay stallion who ran like the wind, but had the habit of breaking wind loudly at the most inopportune moments.”
She could not quite believe what she had said. But oh, how she’d loved those two-glasses-of-wine evenings. Lawrence had mastered a marvelous parody of himself, and when he would copy the noises that issued from his horse’s hindquarter, she almost invariably dropped her fork laughing.
After a moment of surprise, Mr. Fitzwill
iam smiled. She had the sensation that he relaxed somewhat. Of course he must have been on guard: This had to be the most outlandish situation in which he’d ever found himself.
His increasing ease made her unclench a bit—she hadn’t quite grasped how tense she’d been, caught between her desire to make love to Fitz and her—thankfully—still quite sane awareness that no matter how much Mr. Fitzwilliam looked like Fitz, he remained another man entirely.
Mr. Fitzwilliam indicated a chair by the fireplace.
“Of course. How inconsiderate of me. Please have a seat.”
He settled himself in the chair and raised his glass to her.
She reciprocated the gesture. “How did you know I’d like some wine?”
He lifted a brow. He had a livelier face than Fitz. The small gesture conveyed a wealth of meaning, not the least of which was an even-tempered awareness of the ludicrous demands that had been placed on his person.
She reddened. “Please forgive me. Of course you may speak. I don’t know what came over me earlier.”
“I’d like to say I have that effect on women,” he answered, smiling slightly. “But I don’t—not these particular effects, in any case.”
There was no mockery in his voice, but something that was the audible equivalent of a friendly nod. It put her further at ease—he hadn’t taken her mad request too seriously. Or at least, he’d treated her moment of insanity for what it was and did not consider her permanently batty.
“And to answer your question, I had no idea whether you would like wine, but I was fairly certain I would like some.”
“To gird yourself?”
He hesitated a moment. “In a way.”
It was unnerving to keep looking at his face, so she lowered her gaze a few inches. But it was almost as disconcerting to contemplate the width of his shoulders, the length of his arms, and the casual way he held his wineglass, the stem dangling between his fingers.
She noticed for the first time that his waistcoat was scarlet—Fitz never wore such flamboyant colors. And he slouched to a degree, whereas Fitz’s back would have been straighter than a yardstick.
A Dance in Moonlight (The Fitzhugh Trilogy) Page 2
