by Jill Barnett
But he was staring at it. Like he was afraid, which didn’t make sense. Her father wasn’t afraid of anything. Huge horses. Or the thunder. Or the rain. He wasn’t afraid of dying or being lonely. He wouldn’t have nightmares or wake up crying. She’d bet he wouldn’t even be afraid of those mid-evil knights.
She waited for what seemed like forever with the grandfather clock in the hall ticking and tocking and her hand feeling number and number the longer she stood there.
Finally he reached out and took her hand in his rough and callused one. She let loose the breath she hadn’t even known she’d been holding. She felt funny deep inside, like she’d just eaten a big and really good dessert.
His hand was warm around hers; it felt special, holding his hand, almost as fine a feeling as she’d have had if he’d actually done something wonderful like pick her up in his arms and hug her.
They walked out the door together, and down the broad hallway with its long line of sour-faced portraits, the best of Harrington’s students over the years.
Kirsty stopped in front of the worst one. “Do you know who that is?”
“Who?”
“Governor Farriday. He looks like he’s been sucking on a pickle.”
Her father looked at the painting.
“They all look like pickle-suckers,” she told him.
He looked down the hallway at the others, then he laughed.
It was the best sound in the whole wide world. She pulled him along with her for a few steps, then he was leading the way and she had to skip a little to keep up with his long strides.
She didn’t care. She just held his hand a little tighter and remembered the sound of his laughter.
By the time they caught up with Graham, Kirsty was feeling better. And for the first time in what seemed like forever, she didn’t have that uneasy scared feeling that always seemed to be hiding in her shadow like a closet monster, ready to grab her and make her cry.
No, now she and her father and her brother were all walking down the wide stairs, side by side, Graham on their father’s left and her on his right.
“I’m still waiting for that long story, Kirsty.”
She stopped and stared down at the last two stairs. She hopped forward with her ankles and toes together. If her shoes weren’t touching when she landed, her father wouldn’t believe her tale. If her shoes were touching, then he would believe her story
She landed, staring intently down at her red leather shoes. They were touching as if they were pasted together. She grinned, then fixed her face in a more serious expression and looked up at her father. “It wasn’t our fault at all. The brick, I mean.”
He gave her a look filled with suspicion, but that didn’t stop her. They were finally in the foyer. She pulled him along toward the huge front doors of Harrington Hall, which seemed to grow larger as they walked closer and closer. Kirsty felt that same anxious bees-buzzing-in-her-stomach kind of feeling she got whenever something special was going to happen, like Christmas or her birthday or a visit from her father.
They walked toward the stack of trunks and bandboxes that held her and her brother’s belongings, and she wanted to run out those doors, run really fast, because outside, only a few short steps away, was freedom and home.
But her father stopped and looked down at her, waiting for the explanation she hadn’t thought up yet. She took a deep breath, crossed the fingers of her left hand behind her back and looked way up at the most important person in her whole world.
“You see, Father,” she told him, tugging on his hand with her free one and finally making him walk through those doors. “Everything happened because of . . . of . . . ” She paused, then the excuse came to her like an epif—epit—epifunny. Phooey! She’d missed that spelling word.
They stopped outside on the front portico of Harrington Hall and she felt her father’s grip loosen. He was going to pull his hand free, probably so he could cross his arms in that “I’m-waiting-for-an-answer” kind of way he’d been doing.
She didn’t look at Graham, who had learned to stand back and let her talk, but squeezed her father’s hand really tight, clinging to his thick fingers so he couldn’t let go. Then she met his serious look with as stern a one as she could manage, and said, very seriously, “Everything happened all because of Chester Farriday . . . ”
Chapter 9
So soon may I follow,
When friendships decay,
And from Love’s shining circle
The gems drop away.
When true hearts lie wither’d,
And fond ones are flown,
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone ?
—Thomas Moore
Take it, William.” Amy held out her hand with the emerald ring which felt as if it were burning the word fool into her palm.
William’s color turned even paler in the spill of moonlight falling on the manicured gardens of the Bayard estate. He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time that evening. “Really, Amy, what sort of nonsense is this?”
He hadn’t looked at her . . . all night. She’d noticed that for the first time tonight, then wondered if it had always been like that and she had just been too lost in an imaginary world where she was loved and accepted to see the truth: that the man she thought was in love with her couldn’t even bear to look her in the eye. “Take the ring. Please.”
He stood there like stone.
“I understand now, William. You can stop pretending. I know.”
“What do you know?” His voice held amusement, which was almost more insulting to her than the things she had overheard his friends and him saying: the jokes, the rhymes.
She raised her chin and hoped to God in Heaven that it wasn’t quivering. “December is the doom and devastation of the De Pysters. You can marry for money and still have love. Spend her money, spend her body . . . ” She could feel her voice growing weaker. “And love every minute of it.”
His face colored. He began to stammer and started to step toward her, his hands out in supplication.
“Please. Don’t. Don’t even try.” She held up her hand so he wouldn’t touch her and to keep him from seeing the glimmer of tears that flooded into her eyes the moment she had repeated those cruel sentences.
She didn’t want to cry in front of him. She didn’t. But those words she had repeated hurt. They hurt so much.
A second later she was crying, sobbing hard enough that people began to turn around and look at them. She just stood there, frozen in shame and hurt and unable to will her feet to move, unable to do anything but hold out the engagement ring and sob.
William’s expression changed. He wasn’t looking to placate her anymore. He looked around quickly and uneasily, his gaze going from face to face as if standing with her was humiliating to him.
His friends, the same people who never welcomed her, prowled closer like jungle cats moving in to view a kill. She was shaking so hard the ring fell from her hand and hit the stone walkway. The sound was small, just a ping, which seemed impossible when the ache she felt was so huge.
William took a step, bent down, and picked up the ring. He looked at it, then began to laugh, laugh loudly, exaggeratedly and more cruelly than he had that afternoon.
“She’s breaking our engagement,” he told everyone and held up the ring like a trophy to be proud of. “Can you imagine? She is breaking our engagement.” He laughed as if she had done the most amusing thing.
She heard titters, then giggles, and snickers.
“Did you hear that?” William raised his arms out and shouted. “Amy Emerson is breaking an engagement, to me . . . ” He thumped his chest with a fist. “A De Pyster.”
The laughter grew, both his and theirs; it became sharp and stinging like slaps in the face.
“Looks like the little bourgeois heiress doesn’t want to buy her way into society, and after those sharp-eyed lawyers purposely sent her down here to marry her off.” He looked at her then
with the meanest glare of contempt she had ever witnessed. “They used her money and their loan power to make certain she was accepted.” He scanned the crowd again. “See the joke?”
She cried openly, unable not to, and she looked at all those faces, laughing at her as the meaning of his words registered. The lawyers had bought her society entree. “But I didn’t know,” she whispered half to them and half to herself. She looked at each person, one at a time, at each and every face, unable to believe that human beings could treat another person as they were.
Her blurred gaze flicked up to her William, and the sneer and the contempt on his face showed through clearly, as if she weren’t seeing it through a sea of tears. “I thought,” she choked over the words, “I thought you loved me.”
There was anger in his eyes, but he laughed harder and more cruelly. She turned and ran, ran faster, her shoes tapping across the flagstones in a rhythm that echoed behind her like clapping hands.
She saw nothing in front of her but a blur of shame. Her head down now, she shoved past a small chattering group gathered near the champagne table. Her skirt caught and she heard a tearing sound and felt a pull. She didn’t look back, but clutched a handful of silk and lace and jerked it with her as she rushed on.
She heard a shout, then the breaking of glass, but she wouldn’t stop. She ran down some stone steps and away, away to the very back of the estate, where a tall stone wall and the darkness were more welcoming than where she had just been.
Her breath catching, she leaned against the wall, her damp cheek pressed against the cold wet ivy. When her chest stopped heaving, she flattened back against the stones and stared up into the night sky through eyes that burned.
Above her were the stars and the moon, those elusive, shining things people were supposed to wish upon. Wishes, hopes, and dreams. What were they really? Just foolish ideas? Like love? Like acceptance? Like kindness?
Those things didn’t seem to exist. Or had died like her parents. She couldn’t believe that her father had lied when he taught her to believe in them. She kept staring up, searching for answers, for something to cling to.
The scents of roses and honeysuckle were around her, smelling sickeningly sweet. In the distance she could hear the party: the voices that never welcomed her, the music she seldom danced to, the clinking of glass that sounded just like stars falling.
She was nothing to them. An echo in a room full of deaf people. Slowly she sank to the ground as if her legs couldn’t bear the weight of her shame. She drew up her knees and buried her head in them, locking her arms around her legs and pulling them tightly against her chest. She rested her cheek on one knee and closed her eyes tightly so no more tears could squeeze through.
With the stars shining brightly overhead, she sat there on the damp ground in the fall of moonlight and listened to the sounds of laughter, of the chatter and the music all going on without her. She held herself a little bit tighter, like someone who is freezing and can’t get warm enough, then she cried. Because her tears were all she had left.
Chapter 10
The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;
It shines on thieves on the garden wall.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Georgina rushed down the brick path toward the kitchen, her skirts gripped tightly in her fists, her shoulders back like a conquering general charging toward the enemy lines. The silver lobster and crab trays were picked clean, there were only two servants on the grounds, and the champagne fountain was empty.
That bourgeois Emerson girl, the one that had all the money Georgina should have had, had just made a spectacle of herself by breaking her engagement to William De Pysters.
Georgina hadn’t seen the quarrel, and barely knew the girl, but she’d arrived in time to see the aftereffects. The girl had run away somewhere, but not before she’d destroyed a refreshment table and a dozen full bottles of French champagne.
This was the night to make matches, not to break them off. Silly foolish people. She was surrounded by them.
And the silliest one of them all was Phoebe Dearborn. She was all over John Cabot. Georgina’s John Cabot. Georgina’s rich John Cabot.
“Phoebe Dearborn,” she muttered with complete disgust. The woman had a huge fortune all her own. Her father was in banking, shipping, and mining, and if that wasn’t rich enough, her maternal grandfather owned half of Portland and a goodly part of Maine and New Hampshire.
Phoebe Dearborn laughed like a braying goat with the hiccups, and whenever she was around a man she fluttered her eyelashes and cooed. It was common knowledge that Phoebe had more faces than the town clock.
Unlike Georgina, she didn’t need the Cabot money. Who cared if she could trace her family back to the Dark Ages? Georgina’s ancestors had been battling invading barbarians right alongside of them.
Besides, Georgina thought, she had snagged John Cabot first. Well, after tonight she will have snagged him.
Georgina walked a little faster, her narrow heeled evening slippers clicking on the bricks like the precise second hand of a Bayard clock. She marched past the high fieldstone fence covered with lush trails of ivy and flaming red bougainvillea, past a wagon and team that she sincerely hoped was filled with more cases of champagne, round the corner of the brick building that housed the kitchens, and right into a man’s chest.
A pair of strong hands gripped her by the shoulders and kept her from falling right on her backside. She looked up, way up at the man’s face, a face so sharply handsome that gazing at it made her knees suddenly weak and she forgot to breathe.
Behind him the full moon was shoulder high, and its light made his blond hair look golden. He was tall, so very tall that the top of his head almost touched the low eaves of the kitchen, and he had shoulders wide enough to block her view of the building beyond.
But it was his face that left her, Georgina Bayard, a woman with a comment on almost anything, speechless and frozen, standing there and staring at him. He had a chiseled sensual face that made her feel weak and powerless, a face that made her think she was facing something she couldn’t handle. She’d seen this kind of face in weak youthful dreams she’d learned to give up years ago.
He wore a pale yellow shirt with an open pointed collar and leather laces instead of mother-of-pearl buttons. Even the local fisherman managed to have shell buttons on their shirts instead of strings.
His tan vest was dull and smudged and made of the kind of soft wrinkled leather that came from weather and wear. He wore it open, as if he had just thrown it on. His dark brown breeches had faded spots from wear and they fit tightly on his long legs. His boots were tall and black, of good leather, but they looked absolutely ancient because of the mud, grass, and nicks.
For one insane moment she wished this man were dressed in white tie and richer than any Cabot, Dearborn, or Winthrop could ever be.
His hands were still firmly gripping her shoulders, which her evening gown bared, a calculated choice since the neckline was elegant but low enough to help pull a proposal from John. She could feel the calluses on this man’s palms against her skin.
He had hard hands, the kind that were used to holding leather reins, she thought, then remembered the wagon parked at the back of the kitchens. Those hands were used to handling a team, to unloading wagons. He had the hands of a deliveryman.
“In a hurry there, lass?”
Oh my . . . He had a deep voice, the kind that went right through you, that deep male voice of a girl’s wildest dreams. Dreams that had held those last vestiges of innocence. Dreams of recklessness and desire.
If John had a voice like this man’s she could forget he was half bald and short. She could close her eyes on her wedding night and just listen to him.
Then it hit her that she must look as stupid as Phoebe Dearborn, standing there and gaping at a delivery man.
“You are in my way.” She gave him her most quelling look.
“Aye.” He laughed, a rich sound that should have
irritated her instead of ringing right through her and making her stupid breath catch in her throat. Too much champagne, she thought. Then she remembered she hadn’t had any champagne.
“I’m Georgina Bayard.”
He started with the top of her head and gave her a long, slow, bold, and completely insolent looking-over. He said her Christian name as if testing the sound of it on his tongue.
“Miss Bayard,” she corrected.
He gave her a wicked grin.
She waved at the wagon she’d passed. “Go unload your delivery wagon.” She started to move around him.
He moved with her, arms crossed in a cocksure way that annoyed her to no end.
“I have no time for your play. Move.” She glared upward. “Now.” Her voice was ice.
He just stood there.
“I said, move, you oaf!” She jammed her elbow into his side and hit solid muscle, which she hadn’t expected, especially in someone so big. He laughed quietly, which she should have expected, but she didn’t care to hear it. She looked up, gave him an overly sweet smile, blinked like Phoebe, and stomped on his instep with her squat heel.
He swore and moved out of her way.
She grabbed her skirts and swished past him, but found herself listening for some response, some cocky word from behind her. All she heard was the distant sound of the party, so she walked on, willing that handsome face of his to disappear completely from her memory, and a minute later she entered the kitchen doors at full steam.
The door banged against the walls and she stood there, hands on her hips. The servants were standing around talking. Talking while her gala was on the brink of failing. She clapped her hands twice and the voices drained away.
