“And what if I did?” the dowager retorted. “Some of them are for gifts, of course.” She gestured to the parcel on the seat beside her. “I have chosen a green shot silk for Marguerite that will complement that red hair of hers.”
She paused as if an unpleasant thought had crossed her mind. “I do trust she still has red hair,” she added. “It has been so long since I saw her, she may be gray by now.” Her gloved hand touched her own chestnut curls self-consciously, as if to convince herself— Nicholas knew exactly the way his mother’s mind worked—that her own hair still maintained its natural color.
“You may count upon it, Dorothea,” Mrs. Hargate said. “All those redheaded Sutherlands keep their color long past their prime. Only remember Marguerite’s grandmother, the Lady Giselda. She was seventy if she was a day, and I have heard tales of her riding into Helston on her big roan gelding with that wild red hair flying all over the place.”
His aunt’s description of their late, lamented neighbor nudged the earl’s memory. He still retained childhood recollections of the flamboyant Countess Giselda Weston before she was carried off one winter with a severe attack of the colic brought on by an overindulgence in raw oysters. She had been a female who lived on the edge of propriety—as did her granddaughter, Lady Marguerite, whose open liaison with an Italian artist had scandalized the countryside years ago.
“I wonder if that sculptor is still in residence at Whitecliffs,” he remarked, more interested in scandalizing the two ladies in the carriage than in any real interest in Lady Marguerite’s amours. “What was his name? Giovanni Patomo ... Patemo?”
His mother blushed a bright pink, but Aunt Lydia merely smiled tolerantly. “Petomo. You may count upon it, Nicholas,” she replied, when it became obvious that the dowager had pretended not to hear the question. “And it appears that Marguerite now has a niece staying with her. I would not be surprised to learn that the Sutherlands have produced yet another black sheep. The men in that family are steady enough, but the females seem to kick over their traces with alarming frequency. I would not mind a small wager that the girl has red hair.”
The vision of a tall female in shabby gray muslin and wisps of red curls dancing about her angry face flashed through the earl’s mind. Yes, indeed, he thought wryly. It would be just his luck to have mortally offended a relative of Lady Marguerite’s. Not that he greatly cared for himself, but his mother counted their scandalous neighbor among her dearest friends, an incongruity he had long ago ceased to marvel at.
“Oh, how lovely!” the dowager exclaimed as the carriage emerged from beneath the lime trees and approached the entrance to the manor house. “I do believe that sunken garden is a vast improvement over those terraced beds of peonies dear Marguerite used to have in front of her door. I never did like peonies; they are so very . . . well, so flamboyant and lewd, if you know what I mean.”
“Lewd?” Nicholas gazed at his mother in astonishment. “Flowers cannot be lewd, Mama,” he argued. “People are lewd. Or art perhaps, but not flowers. Now, if you had complained about that statue”—he gestured to the lightly draped figure pouring a stream of water from a Greek amphora into the rippling surface of an artificial pool—“I might have understood your objections. Not agreed, of course,” he added with a laugh, “for the statue is quite lovely.”
“I must agree, Nicholas,” Aunt Lydia said. “I have always admired the classical Greek style. I would not be surprised if Marguerite herself had posed for it. She is capable of every bizarre extravagance, as we all know.”
“Shameless extravagance, I trust you mean, Lydia,” the dowager interrupted huffily, averting her eyes from the offending statue. “I shall insist that she remove it,” she muttered under her breath as she allowed the earl to assist her out of the carriage. “It is quite beyond the pale to have one’s park dotted with nude females.”
Nicholas raised an eyebrow and winked at his aunt. “I must agree with you, Mama. If the park were indeed dotted with nude females, it would be a sight for sore eyes,” he remarked, hard put to keep the amusement from his voice. “I, for one, would be a constant visitor. Lady Sutherland would become sorely vexed at me, I imagine.”
Mrs. Hargate chuckled. “Try not to tease your dear mama, Nicholas,” she cautioned. They mounted the steps in the wake of the dowager, and Nicholas noted that his mother was vainly attempting to pretend she had not heard his outrageous remark. Her rigid back told him otherwise, and he knew that he had indeed ruffled her sensibilities a trifle too roughly.
The front door swung open before the earl could think of a mollifying rejoinder, and the dowager swept in with a regal nod at Hobson, the ancient Sutherland butler.
“Welcome back to England, milady,” the butler remarked in a tone calculated to convey the message that he had been holding his breath for the past ten years in anticipation of the dowager’s return. Giving Mrs. Hargate the merest nod, Hobson turned to the earl with something approaching a smile on his wizened countenance.
“Welcome, milord,” he said, taking the earl’s tall beaver and malacca cane. “It is indeed good to see your lordship back home again. Her ladyship is awaiting you in the Italian Saloon,” the butler added stiffly, turning to lead the party up the marble staircase to the first-floor apartments.
Nicholas was about to follow the ladies when his attention was caught by a full-length portrait in a gold-leaf frame hanging in what was obviously a place of honor facing the entrance.
The gray eyes that gazed down upon him reflected a secret, mischievous amusement rather than outrage. The mouth, which he had last seen drawn into a thin line of repressed fury, had softened into a sweet, mysterious smile that gave the face such a glow of confident loveliness that Nicholas felt his breath catch briefly in his throat. The wide-brimmed straw bonnet, embellished with a single large pink rose, full-blown and voluptuous, was a far cry from the shapeless hat she had worn on the cliff two days ago. The red hair was unchanged: less riotous perhaps, but still escaping—a wisp here, a wayward curl there—from the severe clusters of ringlets that framed her face.
Her gown, a simple, shimmering gray silk, was nothing like the old-fashioned gray muslin he remembered. The effect was the same, however, giving her a ghostly, untouchable aura found only in truly exceptional females. Her sculpted arms, covered by the palest of pink gloves, buttoned modestly from wrist to elbow, held a bouquet of pink roses carelessly against the rich gray silk.
Ignoring his mother’s voice, and the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs behind him, Nicholas felt himself drawn towards the luminous female in the painting. Leaning forward, he read the small brass plaque fastened to the center of the gilt frame.
Nicholas looked up into the amused gray eyes and smiled wryly. So, he thought, playing coy, are we? In a few minutes he would be called upon to tender this same mysterious female in gray an apology—an abject apology if his memory of their first encounter was anywhere as uncouth as he remembered it.
He shrugged and turned his back on the portrait, wishing he had not come.
Lady Sylvia glanced critically at her latest canvas. The afternoon sunshine pouring in through the high, domed windows of her studio offered another two hours of prime working conditions that she was reluctant to squander. She wished she might have stayed in the village that morning, and taken her midday meal with the family of the two elfm-faced girls whose wide eyes stared at her from the unfinished painting.
She sighed and turned to put away her brushes. Taking tea with her Aunt Marguerite and Giovanni inevitably developed into lively discussions on some aspect of the art world that often lasted until dinner time. Only yesterday she had slipped away, leaving Lady
Marguerite heatedly defending the style of a relatively unknown artist, one of her aunt’s numerous proteges, whose work was presently displayed at one of London’s galleries.
This particular afternoon Sylvia had been summoned to meet the Morleys, one of the neighborhood’s principal landowners, recently returned afte
r a lengthy sojourn in India. It had been futile to assure her aunt that she had no interest whatsoever in the Morleys. Or in any other of the landed gentry who all too frequently descended upon Whitecliffs to make the obligatory morning calls.
Privately, Sylvia considered these social calls nothing but endeavors to embellish the scandalous rumors that had followed her into Cornwall ten years ago. Aunt Marguerite had originally put it about that her niece’s health was the cause of her prolonged sojourn in the south. But it was not long before wildly exaggerated versions of the truth began to filter down from Sussex. Both ladies had derived much amusement from these indiscreet attempts to ferret out what locals began to refer to as Lady Sylvia’s peccadillo. Now they simply ignored all such impertinences.
As she trod down the stairs to the Italian Saloon—so named in honor of her aunt’s companion—Sylvia wondered which of the Morleys would be the first to probe her past. She wished people would accept her at face value, judging her not on her past mistake—and Sylvia freely admitted that she had committed a major error in judgment in trusting the word of a charming blackguard— but on her growing reputation as an artist.
Hobson was waiting on the landing, ready to usher her into the saloon with his unbending formality, a carry-over from the days of Sylvia’s great-grandmother, the flamboyant Giselda, Dowager Countess of Weston. The ancient butler had been but a stripling in those days, an under-footman, but the years had passed slowly in the old man’s life, leaving him embedded in traditions that sat oddly in the informality of an artist’s household.
Lady Sylvia smiled warmly. “I see I am late again, Hobson,” she remarked. “I only hope these Morleys are worth the interruption in my work.”
Barely acknowledging this breach of decorum with an imperceptible nod, Hobson threw open the doors of the Italian Saloon with his usual flourish.
Sylvia stepped inside reluctantly. She did not relish spending the next half hour talking about the unseasonably warm weather, or the lack of rain that threatened the apple crop, or the fate of the young poacher caught in Squire Robinson’s wood the week before. None of these subjects interested her as vitally as the two elfin faces waiting for her up in the sunny studio.
As Sylvia paused on the threshold, she intercepted Lady Marguerite’s smile from across the room. The two ladies sitting with her aunt could not have been more different, and with her artist’s eye Sylvia easily distinguished the elegant Dowager Countess of Longueville from the comfortable-looking lady in drab green bombazine.
She trod resolutely across the room and sketched a curtsy to the dowager, who acknowledged her with a brief nod. Sylvia was conscious of the hint of disapproval in the pale blue eyes taking their toll of her plain gray afternoon gown. Accustomed to disapproval, curiosity, disdain, and other ignoble sentiments from callers of all stations, Sylvia gritted her teeth and forced herself to smile.
“My aunt tells me you have recently returned from India, my lady,” she remarked. “I do so envy you the experience. I understand the colorful pageantry quite dazzles the senses.”
When the dowager stared at her without responding, the plump lady reclining in one of the blue satin chairs-—whom her aunt had introduced as Mrs. Hargate—chuckled. “If colors, sights, sounds, and smells intrigue you, my dear,” she remarked kindly, “Calcutta is the place to be. It is beyond anything amazing to one accustomed, as I was, to the quiet English countryside near Bath.”
“You are too kind, Lydia,” the dowager protested. “I declare I never did become accustomed to the noise and filth. I was just telling my dear Marguerite that the streets were so full of beggars, and cows, and stray dogs, that one dared not venture out without a carriage.” The dowager wrinkled her nose as if the smells had followed her into the drawing room.
“It sounds like an artist’s paradise,” Lady Marguerite said with a hint of laughter in her rich contralto voice. “I am tempted to pack my palette and brushes and depart tomorrow. I wonder if we could persuade Giovanni to accompany us?”
There was a slight, uncomfortable pause, and Sylvia knew that her aunt had mentioned Giovanni, her longtime paramour, quite deliberately.
Lady Marguerite had never been one to live in the shadows. Her nature was open and spontaneous, and she despised hypocrisy in any form. When Sylvia had first come to make her home at White- cliffs, her sensibilities had been severely shocked at her aunt’s passionate relationship with Giovanni Petomo, the Italian sculptor who had, according to local gossip, debauched and ruined Lady Marguerite Sutherland as a young girl.
Hounded by fantasies of depraved goings-on in her aunt’s opulent bedchamber every night, Sylvia had locked herself in her room and avoided any contact whatsoever with the foreign lecher. A week later, Lady Marguerite had taken her by the hand, and the two had walked for hours through the riotous flower beds of the estate.
Sylvia had learned her first lessons in true passion from her aunt. She realized that, contrary to her earlier belief, the romanti- cal haze she had taken for love and that had carried her straight to ruin in that poky little inn in Dover was a beautiful but dangerous illusion.
“Gentlemen—although too many of them do not deserve to be so named—” her aunt had said, “are all too often driven by desires that have little or nothing to do with the heart. You and I, my dear Sylvia, have clear evidence of this lamentable fact. As do far more unfortunate females than I care to consider,” she added calmly.
Sylvia blushed painfully at this vivid reminder of her recent experience of the perversity of a certain gentleman.
“He promised . ..” she began, her voice choked with tears.
Her aunt put a comforting arm around her shoulders and guided her down a brick path shaded by a riot of climbing pink roses. “I know, my love. They will all make promises. But promises are like so many candles in the wind. Some will hold steady through every storm; others will flicker and die at the least sign of adversity. I am lucky to have known both in my lifetime.”
“Lucky?” Sylvia had exclaimed, incapable of following her aunt’s logic. “How can you say so, Aunt? I have been disgraced forever.” She paused, her attention caught by her aunt’s last words. “You have known both ... ?”
Lady Marguerite smiled, a beautiful, contented smile, Sylvia thought.
“Yes, love. And contrary to what you will hear from the local gossipmongers, Giovanni is not the villain in my life.”
This had become increasingly obvious to Sylvia as the months and years went by. The Italian artist was a permanent and essential part of her aunt’s life at Whitecliffs. It was not long before he had become a valued companion and critic to Sylvia as well.
“Where is Giovanni?” she demanded, following a perverse impulse to emphasize the Italian’s place in her aunt’s household. “It is not like him to miss Mrs. Riley’s lemon tarts.”
Sylvia caught the amused glance that flickered across Lady Marguerite’s face. “Oh, you know Giovanni, my love. He is forever puffing up your landscapes to anyone who will listen to him.” Her aunt’s gaze wandered to the far end of the long saloon, and Sylvia suddenly became aware of the murmur of male voices.
She whirled around, her eyes settling not on the familiar slim figure of the sculptor but on the taller, broad-shouldered gentleman standing beside him. The stranger seemed absorbed in her latest attempt to capture the somber turrets and towers of Longueville Castle, perched in lofty isolation on the cliffs south of Helston, as it had since the eleventh century.
Even as she stared, Sylvia felt a prickle of apprehension.
Longueville Castle had always been one of her favorite subjects. The threatening power implied in its medieval presence, the hint of violence within its massive walls, had been impossible to resist. But most of all the legend of that pale rider on the cliffs above the lonely stone hut had aroused her artist’s imagination to fever pitch. She had not been able to stay away.
The two men turned, and as they sauntered towards the group of ladies around the tea-table,
Sylvia could not help remarking on the striking difference between them.
Giovanni Petorno radiated elegance and supreme self- confidence. His power was internal, springing—as Sylvia well knew—from his achievements and reputation as an artist. His gaze was relaxed and affectionate as it locked with hers across the room.
The man beside him, taller, broader, his deeply tanned countenance suggesting an inner darkness of the soul that Sylvia could only guess at, struck her as a medieval Goliath next to Giovanni’s slender David. This man’s power was there for all to see, resembling nothing so much as the massive stone fortress on the cliff top that had spawned him. For this could be none other but the Earl of Longueville, the man villagers held responsible for the tragedy behind the legend of that pale rider on the cliffs.
And unlike the urbane Italian, the earl had, by local report, been the villain in that poor lady’s life.
If the legend had any truth in it whatsoever.
Sylvia had not really believed it. She did not want to believe it now, but as the men approached, she could not blame the local fishermen for casting this dour man in that violent role.
He certainly looked the part, and he had acted it with her two days ago on the cliff. His rage had been palpable. The coldness in his dark eyes was palpable now.
With an effort Sylvia repressed a shudder and forced herself to smile. She had put her own particular villain behind her years ago, and refused to allow a cold, arrogant stranger to disturb her peace of mind.
Chapter Three
Echoes from the Past
The earl had not expected the Lady in Gray to receive him with any degree of pleasure. He had treated her with extraordinary rudeness up there on the cliff, and was prepared to apologize profusely. But as their eyes locked across Lady Sutherland’s drawing room, Nicholas was startled at the open hostility he detected in the lady’s gaze.
The Lady in Gray Page 3
