A Reluctant Courtship

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  Fortunately, everyone walked to the public assembly rooms, as they stood halfway down the steep hillside upon which the village perched. No vehicle except perhaps a handcart could maneuver the steep incline of the main street.

  At Huntley’s advice, Meric didn’t arrive too early. Music and dancing was well under way by the time he and Chilcott strode into the main room. At least two score farmers, tradesmen, and their ladies cavorted around the floor to country dances bearing little resemblance to their more sedate counterparts performed in the ballrooms of the haut ton. The thunder of roughshod feet on wooden floorboards nearly drowned out the two violins and a flute. A pity too. From what Meric caught, the musicians possessed more than a modicum of talent.

  “They are not here yet,” Chilcott called above the tumult. “I wonder if they have changed—” He broke off, for Miss Morrow sailed past at that moment, her hands firmly in the grip of a red-faced farmer.

  The farmer was grinning from ear to ear. Miss Morrow’s whole face glowed from the brilliance of her smile and bright eyes. She wore a pale yellow dress with a lacy frill at the bottom that swung out with each turn, displaying just the hint of a dainty ankle.

  Meric felt rather than heard Chilcott’s sigh.

  He grinned at his steward. “You’ll have to cut in, I believe it’s called.”

  “Terribly rude. I shall wait until the music ends.”

  But the music didn’t end. Each set spun directly into the next. By some form of signals, partners changed, the lines of dancers shifted into the right formation, and the skipping, spinning, and dipping commenced again.

  Without a sign of Miss Honore Bainbridge.

  If Miss Morrow was present, surely Miss Bainbridge was too. Meric stepped over the threshold of the door left open to allow the brisk night wind off the sea to keep the chambers cool. Even so, the odors of burning candle wax, perspiration, and a quantity of perfume created a cloud in the room nearly thick enough to see. Through another doorway, Meric caught a glimpse of tables and older women laying out a veritable feast for what would surely be famished dancers. He skirted the crowd to peer inside the dining room for a glimpse of Miss Bainbridge. She wasn’t there either. Unless she had gone outside, which she would surely never do alone in town, she must be in the room with the dancing.

  With care, he began to skirt the chamber. A few chairs had been set against the walls. All were occupied by older persons—fathers and mothers chaperoning their daughters, or maybe men accompanying younger wives to the festivities. Two chairs were occupied by young women whose plain appearances had probably condemned them to going without partners. So unfair. They deserved to enjoy themselves too.

  Vowing to invite both of them to join him for a set, Meric turned another corner and found Miss Bainbridge. She sat behind the two men with violins, whose size had blocked her from view and whose instruments had drowned out the tinkling of the ancient harpsichord she played.

  For several moments, he could only gaze upon her. She perched on the edge of a three-legged stool, her back straight, her head tilted so her eyes rested on the other three musicians. And her fingers flew over the keys as swiftly as the bows swooped across the violin strings. A smile played about her lips, a secretive smile, as though she knew something no one else had yet worked out.

  There was something Meric was working out—the state of his heart whenever he found himself in her company. It began when he saw her so bravely clinging to that sapling on the edge of a crumbling cliff—the prick of Cupid’s arrow. Watching her in her gown the color of a rosebud with silver sparkling at each movement of her arms, her joy in the music . . .

  The arrow nearly struck all the way home.

  Logic, the same sense that told him she was exactly the wrong wife for him, warned him he should run. He should go home and avoid all contact with her in the future. Yet he could not. He needed her help. Whatever was amiss on the north shore of Devonshire, Bainbridge was somehow involved. She was possibly involved. He needed an excuse to call at Bainbridge, and she was the best one.

  She was indeed the best one.

  She understood they could have no future together, that he needed a wife above scandal and rumor to lend his own sullied name consequence. She had offered him friendship, nothing more. She had, without realizing it, shown him that in no way could he wed Miss Carolina Devenish.

  As though the very thought brought her near, a flurry of movement in the doorway drew his attention—drew everyone’s attention. The music ground to a halt. The dancing slowed and stopped like an automaton whose clockwork mechanism had run down. Across the chamber, half a dozen ladies and gentlemen spilled into the room wearing what was apparently their notion of country dress. The ladies wore bodices that laced up the front, but not quite far enough for modesty, and wide dark skirts a little too short. On their feet they wore their satin dancing slippers, in absurd contrast to the plain cotton of their other garb. Likewise the young gentlemen wore rough woolen breeches, waistcoats, and full-sleeved shirts with no coats. They, at least, wore boots instead of evening pumps.

  “Do not stop on our account!” Miss Babbage cried. “We have come for the dancing also.”

  “But we need partners,” Miss Jane Devenish said, then burst into a peal of giggles.

  A young farmer with bold, dark eyes strode forward and grasped her hand. “I’ll partner with you then, milady. Music, lads. Get up the mu—”

  “Wait!” Miss Babbage’s cry froze everyone in place. “Is that not Miss Bainbridge at that wreck of a harpsichord? How droll that she has stooped so low. Do play something for us, dear Miss Bainbridge. I see the gentleman I wish to invite me to dance.” Her gaze fell on Meric.

  He bowed. “I beg your pardon, Miss Babbage. I am spoken for this dance, and so is Miss Bainbridge.”

  Before she could give him a by-your-leave, he clasped Miss Bainbridge’s hand and drew her from the stool. With his other hand, he dropped a crown into the open violin case on the floor. “Play a good long set.”

  “My lord, you cannot,” Miss Bainbridge said through clenched teeth. “They will never forgive you.”

  “And for what Miss Babbage just did, I will never forgive her.”

  Not a Christian thought to have. At that moment, he felt none of the spirit of love and grace he knew he should. No forgiveness reigned where a young woman could make mistakes in her youth—where she had been left too much to her own devices, neglected by the standards his parents had employed with the eight of their surviving children—and be not merely ostracized but publicly ridiculed by her peers.

  He pulled her into the nearest set as the music began with a few hesitant notes warbled on the flute, then a long string of notes drawn out from a bow, and then the full swing of the music launching into the atmosphere.

  “People here like you if they asked you to play.” He managed to get the comment out before the dance separated them.

  Feet stomped, skirts flowed out like draperies billowing in a high wind, the lines of dancers moved. Meric spun Miss Bainbridge into the hands of a green grocer and found himself partnered with a pretty matron no taller than his middle waistcoat button, then he was with Miss Morrow. She took the time to mouth, “Thank you,” and then he held Miss Bainbridge’s hands again.

  “They did not ask me. I invited myself,” she told him.

  “Hiding out?”

  From the corner of his eye, he spied Misses Devenish and Babbage pressed against the wall near the door as though afraid someone would trample on their satin slippers. Their male companions had entered the dance, and Miss Jane hopped and skipped with the best of the country folk, but the two who had initiated this mockery of the harvest ball and then tried to humiliate Miss Bainbridge had joined the wallflowers.

  As he had instructed, the music played longer than a usual set of three dances at a time, adding three more. By the time they drew the last reel to a conclusion, everyone was mopping brows and calling for refreshments.

  “I’ll fetch you some
cider,” Meric told Miss Bainbridge.

  She took a step back from him. “No, do not. I-I shall fetch my own. You must make repairs with the Devenish crowd.” Spinning on her flat-heeled slipper, she ducked beneath the upraised arms of two stonemasons and vanished toward the refreshment room.

  Meric could not follow without pushing aside two men larger even than he. Only one path lay open to him, a path directly past Misses Devenish and Babbage.

  “Time for my medicine,” he grumbled, then he headed straight for them.

  They stuck their pretty noses in the air, nostrils pinched as though he smelled bad, which he just might after all that vigorous exercise. The notion made him smile.

  “You may smile now,” Miss Devenish snapped, “but you won’t be smiling when we neglect to invite you to our next social engagement.”

  “Mama was just about to send out the invitations to our harvest ball,” Miss Babbage added. “After she hears about tonight, I expect yours will be removed from the list.”

  “A pity,” Meric said. “I’ll have to seek a wife farther afield.”

  “As if anyone of note will have a man who consorts with the likes of that Bainbridge baggage.” Miss Devenish’s cheeks burned with hectic color, and tears shone in her eyes. Rage or frustration?

  Both. She knew her words held no teeth. A number of eligible females would be more than happy to accept his suit. He had hoped not to have to leave Devonshire but would if he must.

  “She demeaned herself by playing music with these . . . ruffians,” Miss Babbage persisted. “It is almost worse than dangling after a traitor and a murderer. Once Mama tells her brother, I expect he will send her into isolation.”

  “I believe,” Meric drawled, “that the rest of you already have. Now I am off for some refreshment, so I shall bid you good night.” He bowed to them, then slipped through the crowd to the refreshment room.

  He couldn’t find Miss Bainbridge in there. He procured a tankard of freshly pressed cider, drained it, then kept searching. After a quarter hour or so, he found Miss Morrow hemmed between Tuckfield and Chilcott as though they were about to grab her arms and begin a game of tug-of-war. He considered offering to rescue her. She, however, was laughing, so he simply asked if she had seen Miss Bainbridge.

  “I thought she was with you, my lord.” Miss Morrow’s face sobered. “Perhaps I should go—”

  “No, no, I’ll go find her.”

  He continued his hunt through a withdrawing room for those wishing quieter entertainment, and once again into the ballroom. The Devenish party had departed, and Miss Bainbridge was nowhere to be seen.

  He started asking people in the crowd. They all knew who she was and offered to hunt for her, but none had seen her for several minutes.

  “Why’d that lady have to be so unkind to her?” one little maid asked. “She never does naught but be kind to folk.”

  “Some ladies are jealous,” Meric said.

  The girl nodded. “She is pretty.”

  She was better than pretty. She was strong and kind and intelligent and—

  “Milord.” An apprentice tapped Meric on the shoulder. “The young miss you’re looking for is outside.” He leered. “It’s a fair night.”

  It was a fair night, but she had no business being out in it alone.

  Meric thanked the boy, handed him a sixpence, and slipped outside. Many people milled about the lane, all couples with arms or hands entwined and faces turned up to the brilliant yellow glow of the full moon sailing right overhead. Meric passed them without so much as a nod and entered the main street running up and down the hill. No diminutive feminine figure descended the hill to the harbor, but a hundred feet up the incline to his left, a torch burning outside a shop lit a flash of pink and silver.

  Meric closed the distance in seconds and dropped a hand onto her shoulder. She jumped and gasped, but didn’t scream. She went perfectly still.

  “You’re lucky tonight, Miss Bainbridge, it’s only me and not whoever wanted you to fall to your death on the rocks.” His tone was deliberately harsh, and her shoulder rippled beneath his hand.

  “I did not think about that,” she whispered. “I just wanted to get away, to breathe air not befouled by those—those cats.”

  “Do not, please, malign the feline species. I happen to like cats.”

  “You happen to like Carolina Devenish too.” She shrugged off his hand then and recommenced walking.

  He joined her, tucking her hand beneath his elbow. “I don’t care for the Devenishes much now.”

  “You will when you receive no more invitations.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Ha! You will wish to make up to them and shun me like the social leper I have become. I understand how it is.”

  “I don’t think you do understand.”

  A throng of inebriated-sounding young men charged up the hill, singing a song not fit for anyone’s ears, let alone a lady’s. Meric drew Miss Bainbridge into a side lane and stood in front of her, blocking her from the men’s view, his hands over her ears.

  They passed, and he slipped his hands from her ears but found his fingers entangled in her hair, masses of her hair rippling around his hands like skeins of silk glowing golden in the moonlight.

  “I don’t think you do understand,” he repeated.

  And then he kissed her. Her lips parted beneath his in an instant, perhaps in surprise, perhaps in a protest she didn’t express in word, sound, or movement, or perhaps in welcome. The welcome of his caress was what mattered, the full softening of her mouth beneath his, her person leaning against him, her arms sliding around his neck. She tasted of cider, sweet and sharp just like her. She smelled of perfume, sweet and soft just like her. She felt like a lady he wanted the right to kiss every moonlit, dark, cold, wet, or balmy night—and again in the mornings.

  The late Lord Bainbridge had been right. His third daughter was the perfect choice to be the next Lady Ashmoor. In those moments, as he gloried in the contact of their lips, he forgot why he had thought otherwise.

  Then she drew away slowly, as though reluctant to do so, and murmured, “My reputation, my lord.”

  And he remembered she had associated with a traitor, and the taint could destroy his fragile hold on respectability. He remembered that she was practiced at kissing, by all reports. He had fallen into a trap of moonlight, a sweetly curved mouth, and a womanly figure, and she wasn’t as innocent as she should be. Too close an association with Miss Honore Bainbridge could damage his reputation beyond repair until his own innocence was established.

  With even more reluctance than she had shown, he let her go and ordered his heart not to demand he draw her back to him.

  18

  He had known what she meant by her reputation. He understood in an instant she had not meant that her consequence in the county would suffer if someone caught her kissing a man in a dark lane off the main street of the village. No, she meant his consequence would suffer for kissing her in a dark lane off the main street of the village. And the impact of him releasing his hold on her could not have hurt more had he shoved her tumbling down the hill and into the icy waters of the harbor.

  She reached up to assess the damage to her coiffeur, found her hair a tangled mass of curls around her shoulders, and took a step back. “You had best return to the assembly rooms. You still may have a chance to repair the damage you created dancing with me in public.”

  “I can’t leave you here alone.” He reached out his hand to her. “I’ll take you back to Miss Morrow.”

  “Looking like this?” Her hair was not merely a disaster, her lips felt . . . kissed, softer and fuller, still tingling.

  All of her still tingled, except where her heart ached like a bruised limb.

  “The church is along here. I will tuck myself upon the porch while you fetch Miss Morrow for me,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t feel right leaving you alone with these drunken yokels cavorting about.”

  “Do you want t
o escort me home all the way to Bainbridge?”

  “I, um . . .” He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and turned his face up to a moon that looked close enough to touch. “I’ll be happy to escort you with Miss Morrow.”

  “And call on me tomorrow for a walk along the cliffs?” Honore swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. “Perhaps you will call on my brother when he arrives and ask permission to court me, though I do believe the kissing comes after the courtship has progressed, not before it s-s-starts.”

  “It takes two to kiss, Miss Honore Bainbridge, and I didn’t feel you resisting, with or without a courtship.”

  “And that makes me a lady beyond the pale of acceptability, while you are merely a-a dashing rake and all the more desirable to the ladies of the haut ton.” She crossed her arms over her waist and gripped her arms hard enough to hurt. “Well, that is quite all right then. Just do your dashing—right off to your acceptable ladies. I am going to the church.”

  She spun on her heel and tried to march along the lane. She stumbled instead, her toes catching in the rough cobblestones, her chest expanding to bursting with the wail of pain demanding release.

  There just was no forgiveness. Her transgressions had occurred sixteen and eleven months ago. She had repented. She had spent hours on her knees begging God to set aside her follies with the male gender, make her a truly new creature, and give her a purpose in life, especially the kind of love her sisters enjoyed. Instead, this attractive rogue of a foreigner pulled her away from certain death, was kind to her, and won her heart. Another man who would do nothing for her reputation. He needed a respectable wife to ensure his reputation did not tarnish any more than having spent three months in prison—through no fault of his own—a father accused of murder, and suspicious military men dogging his heels at every lawless action in the county.

  He dogged her heels. He said nothing, but he followed her down the lane to the church. She let herself through the gate and quite deliberately shut it between them, held the latch down so he could not release it from the other side, and scowled at him from over top of the bars.