by Jane Feather
She held the last note, her voice soaring, after Alasdair’s fingers on the keys had fallen still and his own voice was quiet. The note faded slowly, perfectly controlled, and in the silence the sweetness continued to ring in sonorous echo for seconds after the note itself had died.
Alasdair let his hands fall from the keys. “You have more power than when I last heard you sing.”
“My voice is better trained now,” she said, rising from the bench as with the end of the music she became aware of Alasdair’s thigh pressing against her skirt.
“Did you continue with Rudolfo?”
“Through two summers. He came to the country and stayed in the house and drove the staff insane with his fussiness. He’s such a valetudinarian. But an amazing voice teacher.” She straightened a pair of candlesticks on the mantelpiece, tidied a pile of sheet music on the table, her eyes darting restlessly, her fingers unable to be still.
Alasdair swung around on the piano bench and watched her for a second. “So, what did you wish to see me about?”
Emma’s restless fidgeting ceased. “Horses,” she declared. “I intend to purchase a curricle and pair. Oh, and a riding horse,” she added. “Aunt Hester decided that all my horses belonged to the estate.” Her eyes sparked golden fire with remembered indignation.
“Of all the unmitigated old cats!” Alasdair exclaimed. “It’s not as if she could ride them herself.”
“No, indeed,” Emma scoffed. “I should like to see her try. She’d be thrown before they left the stable-yard. But they are to remain as part of the estate.” Her lips were tightly compressed and she stared for a minute unseeing at the garden through the window.
“You couldn’t lay claim to them?”
“If you mean, were they clearly my own … gifts from Ned or whatever … no. Strictly speaking, the old cat was right. They belong to the estate.” She fell silent, her hands clenched at her sides, then she continued briskly, “So, I intend to set up my stable.” She turned to him, saying with a touch of belligerence, “You have no objection, I trust?”
“No, why should I?” Alasdair responded amiably, ignoring the belligerence, rightly assuming that for once it was not really directed at him. If Aunt Hester had been in the room, it would have found the right target.
Emma flushed slightly and said more moderately, “I need you to escort me to Tattersalls to buy my horses. I know I cannot go there alone.”
“You cannot go to Tatts at all,” Alasdair stated, taking a lacquered snuffbox from his pocket.
“Why ever not?”
Alasdair examined the snuffbox minutely. “Because, my dear Emma, women do not frequent Tattersalls.”
Emma regarded him in bewilderment. “But I went there with you and Ned once.”
“Good God!” he said solemnly. “Whatever can we have been thinking about? It’s not at all the thing.”
“Alasdair, you’re Winning,” Emma accused. It was impossible to imagine Alasdair giving a tinker’s damn for pointless conventions. Three years couldn’t have changed him that much.
“No, indeed not,” he denied vigorously, but Emma could read him like a book and the little glimmer in his eye did not go unnoticed.
“Don’t be absurd,” she said roundly. “You know perfectly well that while a woman buying her own horses might be unusual, ifs not a fatal flying in the face of convention. As long as I have a suitable escort, of course. And who more appropriate than my trustee?”
“Ah, so I have some uses after all,” he observed, flicking open the snuffbox and taking a delicate pinch between finger and thumb. He looked at her from beneath lowered lids, his mouth curving in a wicked smile.
“Since I have to put up with you for the time being, I might as well put you to good use,” Emma returned smartly. “Now, will you be serious for a minute? Do you have time this afternoon to escort me to Tatts?”
He appeared to give this question some consideration. Emma watched him in growing suspicion, guessing that he was still teasing her. Then he rose from the piano bench, dropped the snuffbox into the deep pocket of his coat, and said with a small bow, “I daresay I can put off my other plans for the afternoon. I am at your service, ma’am. Shall we go at once? My curricle is at the door and you appear to be in driving dress already.”
Emma hesitated. “Do you really have other plans?”
“Would you really care?” he asked, his smile now quizzical.
Emma almost stamped her foot. “You are so perverse!” she declared. “I am trying to be polite.”
Alasdair laughed. “I am entirely at your disposal, my sweet.”
Emma bit her tongue on her automatic protest. If Alasdair was determined to use the endearment, there was nothing she could do about it. Better to ignore it. He wouldn’t use it in public.
“We had best not tell Maria our destination,” she said instead.
“My lips are sealed.” Alasdair went to the door and opened it for her. “I heard a handsome pair of chestnuts is to go on the block at Tatts next week. Chesterton’s breakdowns, I believe. You might be able to get them before they go for auction for around three hundred pounds. Shall I go and make my bow to Maria while you fetch what you need?” He followed her out of the music room into the hall.
“I’ll be just a minute.” Emma hurried up the stairs to fetch her hat and gloves. She knew she could trust Alasdair to buy horses for her without her being there, but she had always made her own decisions in such matters and was not about to change the habits of a lifetime to accommodate some ridiculous notion about what a female should and should not do, or where she should or should not go.
She surveyed herself in her mirror as she adjusted the set of her little velvet hat with its single plume curling on her shoulder. Her nose wrinkled slightly as she took inventory of her reflection. Her nose was too large, her mouth too wide, she had always thought. And her eyebrows were too thick and had a distressing tendency to fly away at the edges. Not that she cared twopence for her physical imperfections, she told herself firmly, grabbing up her gloves and heading for the door. It wasn’t as if she was out to impress anyone this afternoon. She was only running an errand with Alasdair.
Her hand brushed unconsciously over the back of her neck as she ran down the stairs.
Alasdair was waiting in the hall, idly slapping his gloves into the palm of one hand. He turned as she came down. “Maria is taking a nap,” he informed her. “Harris will tell her that we’ve gone for a drive.” His eyes appraised her as if it were the first time he’d noticed her appearance. “That is an entrancing hat,” he observed. “But … allow me … there, perfect.” He made a deft adjustment to the brim where it turned up on one side, and smiled down at her.
It was his old smile, the one she’d first seen all those years ago when an eight-year-old girl had fallen irreparably in love with her brother’s best friend.
Emma felt the ground shift beneath her feet. It had been so long since she’d felt the pure warmth of that smile. The sardonic curl, the ironical glint, were gone, the once familiar understanding and invitation in their place.
His hand slipped down the length of her arm, his fingers closing lightly over her wrist. “Truce, Emma?” he said quietly. “We can deal better with each other than we have been doing.”
It was the first reference to their dreadful last meeting, and it was a relief to have it in the open. “We both said things to regret,” Emma said, her own voice as low as his. “I will engage to be civil, Alasdair.”
His mouth took a wry quirk. “Civility? Well, I suppose I must be satisfied with that.”
“It is perhaps a greater concession than you imagine,” she said, but without heat.
He looked at her for a moment, his eyes unreadable, then his fingers dropped from her wrist and he cupped her elbow, escorting her to the door held open by a footman.
Alasdair’s tiger, a wizened ex-jockey by the name of Jemmy, saluted Emma with a grin and touched his forelock. “You drivin’, Lady Emma?”
“If I may?” Emma glanced inquiringly at Alasdair.
“By all means,” he said without batting an eyelid. He handed her up into the curricle, adding almost apologetically, “But I should warn you that the right leader is inclined to take exception to stray dogs, pedestrians, and most other traffic on the streets. I’m trying to break him of such unsociable habits.”
“Then of course I won’t drive them,” Emma declared. “It would be the very worst thing for him to have someone else’s hands on the reins.”
“That was rather what I thought myself,” Alasdair agreed solemnly. “But I didn’t wish to cast aspersions on your driving skills.”
“You are absurd!” Emma couldn’t help laughing. “You knew perfectly well I wouldn’t take it like that.”
He cast her a quick sideways glance as he took up the reins. “I’m a little uncertain of the ground these days. It has a habit of shifting.”
Emma made no response. She sat back, folding her hands in her lap with the air of one determined not to rise to provocation. Alasdair grinned. “Let go their heads, Jemmy.”
The tiger complied and scrambled in his ungainly fashion onto his perch as the curricle swept past him.
“How’s the rheumatism, Jemmy?” Emma glanced over her shoulder.
“Oh, there’s good days and bad, thankee, Lady Emma,” Jemmy said. He’d broken so many limbs in his career as a jockey that his thin frame was a mass of misshapen, ill-set limbs and crooked joints. But what he lacked in agility was compensated by his unerring way with horses. Alasdair had found him begging outside Newmarket racecourse five years earlier and on impulse had offered him a job. Jemmy had rewarded the impulse with unswerving loyalty and blunt and unstinting advice on the handling of horses. Advice that the youthful Alasdair had been wise enough to accept, with the result that Alasdair now had the reputation of a nonpareil and his tiger’s advice was eagerly sought by every young blood in town.
Alasdair’s impulses had always been idiosyncratic, Emma reflected as she chatted with Jemmy, but they frequently had a humanitarian motive that surprised those who didn’t know him well—those who mistook the sardonic smile, the sharp tongue, the insouciance for the true Alasdair, instead of the mask that they really were.
“Penny for them.”
Emma realized that she’d been sitting in frowning silence for an uncivil length of time. “Oh, I was just daydreaming.” She turned her attention to the team of bays. “Does that leader always pull to the right?”
“Oh, ‘e’s jest objectin’ to the rubbish in the kennel,” Jemmy told her. “Thinks ‘e’s passin’ too close to it. Right cantankerous bugger, ’e is.”
Alasdair turned his horses through the Stanhope Gate into Hyde Park. It was close to five o’clock, the fashionable hour when anyone who was anyone was driving, riding, or promenading, engaged in the delightful twin occupations of seeing and being seen.
It was immediately apparent that they were the object of much interest. Emma said curiously, “Why would you choose this route? It’s hardly on the way to Tattersalls.”
“I thought we might as well get it over with,” Alasdair replied. “If we do the circuit twice, acknowledging our mutual acquaintances, showing off our amity, we should put some of the nastier tongues to rest. So smile, Emma, and look as if there’s no one you’d rather be sitting beside.” He glanced at her with a slightly malicious smile of his own.
Emma’s responding smile was as artificial as it was broad. “Like this?”
“If that’s the best you can do.”
“I thought we had agreed not to provoke each other.”
“I didn’t realize that suggesting you smile could be considered provocation,” he disclaimed with an air of injured innocence.
“You are not going to succeed in making me uncivil to you, Alasdair,” Emma stated, continuing to smile. “I’m not going to be the first to behave badly again.”
He just laughed and Emma, despite herself, laughed too. But the laugh died abruptly. A woman driving a sporty-looking tilbury was coming toward them, waving a hand in greeting.
“I believe Lady Melrose is trying to attract your attention,” Emma said distantly.
Alasdair’s countenance was suddenly wiped clean of all expression. He bowed in the direction of the approaching tilbury and looked as if he intended to continue driving, but when the lady holding the reins pulled up her horses as she reached them, he drew rein alongside her.
“Alasdair, I haven’t seen you in days,” the lady exclaimed. “I expected you at my card party on Monday.” She gave a little trilling laugh. “I daresay you’re going to say you were out of town. And not a word of apology … not a note of excuse. I declare it is too bad of you.”
“My apologies, Julia, but I was called out of town rather suddenly,” he said evenly. “You’re not acquainted with Lady Emma Beaumont, I believe.”
“Only by repute,” Lady Melrose said with a pointed stare in Emma’s direction. Her gray eyes were less than friendly as she bowed, and she gave another of her trilling laughs, managing to make it sound like an insult. “So tedious an arrangement for you both … in the circumstances,” she added, dropping her voice conspiratorially. “Not to mention how irksome for you, Lady Emma, to be burdened with a trustee. It must make you feel like a naive chit.”
“Watch your horses, Julia!” Alasdair said sharply. Lady Melrose had inadvertently dropped her hands, and her horses plunged forward.
She dragged them back with a heavy hand. “Such ill-schooled nags!”
“A poor workman always blames his tools,” Emma murmured, smiling sweetly.
Lady Melrose flushed and her mouth tightened. She turned deliberately to Alasdair and said in a honeyed, cajoling voice, “Alasdair, you will come to call soon, won’t you? I do so miss you when I don’t see you for a few days.” She pouted soulfully. “Tonight … I shall expect you tonight. Don’t fail me.”
Alasdair merely bowed again, but there was something in his eyes that shook Lady Melrose a little. She caught a glimpse of steel, something she had not seen before. She had been very sure of Alasdair Chase, sure enough to enjoy teasing him about the awkwardness of his present situation, sure enough to enjoy needling the woman who had jilted him, the woman whom she had no doubt he now detested. He had been her own lover for the last six months, and Lady Melrose was firmly of the opinion that she could twist him around her little finger. But that glimpse of steel was unnerving.
She returned the bow, said with the assumption of great good humor, “Good day, Lady Emma. I daresay we shall meet again about town. Now, don’t forget, Alasdair. I’m counting on you.” She shook the reins, flicked her whip, and set her horses in motion.
“Those horses must have the hardest mouths,” Emma declared, her horsewoman’s outrage for the moment overcoming her other reactions to Alasdair’s latest conquest. “The way she jabbed at them! Poor brutes.”
“She is cowhanded,” Alasdair agreed calmly, giving his own horses the office to start. “And she has the worst hands and seat imaginable on a horse. You’ll take the shine out of her the minute you show yourself in the park, driving or riding.”
“Take the shine out of her? I can’t imagine why I should wish to do anything so vulgar,” Emma said in frigid accents. “What could it possibly matter to me how Lady Melrose rides or drives … or indeed does anything else,” she added, and immediately regretted the furious addendum.
Alasdair looked at her, his expression once more sardonic. “Anything else? Whatever could you mean, my sweet? You aren’t by any chance suggesting …” He raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, if you think to put me out of countenance, Alasdair Chase, you will need to do better than that!” Emma said with asperity. “If you think I could possibly be snubbed by a philandering rake, you are very much mistaken, my friend.”
“Eh, steady on, now. A bit near the knuckle, we’re gettin’,” Jemmy was heard to mutter sotto voce from his perch. He had sat behind these two on count
less occasions in what he considered the good old days, and he was accustomed to their volatile banter. But the bitter tone of this exchange was something new.
The observation went unanswered. Alasdair sighed deeply and said in a tone of mingled patience and exasperation, “I don’t know what you expected, Emma. Did you think I’d reached the age of twenty-four living like a monk?”
Emma struggled with the surge of angry disbelief. He still didn’t understand! “I had not expected you to be emulating the duke of Clarence and Mrs. Jordan,” she said, a slight tremor in her voice. “Devoted father, loving—”
“Emma, for God’s sake!” he interrupted. “It’s over. Why can’t you put it behind you now?”
Emma gasped. “How could it possibly be over? How could I possibly put it behind me? How could I possibly forget such a betrayal … such a deception? If you had told me … if you’d just said something instead of leaving me to find out in that hideous humiliating fashion! Why didn’t you tell me?”
Alasdair without replying turned his horses through the Apsley Gate. Why hadn’t he told her? He should have done, of course, but hindsight was a futile teacher—her lessons came too late. He hadn’t told Emma because he’d been afraid to. And instead of acknowledging that fear, he’d told himself it was none of her business. She didn’t need to know. It didn’t affect her and never would. He could divide his life into compartments and there was no reason why the business of one should affect the business of another.
Dear God, he’d been so callow … such an ignorant, arrogant fool. But he had not been the only one at fault. Emma had been every bit as responsible for the hideous debacle. She would not listen to reason.
