by Laura London
“Makes love—?” I repeated in a voice that sounded pathetically like a squawk to my own ears. “Kill him? How dare you say that? How dare you say that?” My heart began to race, and I could feel the color flame into my cheeks. Shame that I had not had the confidence to take Vincent’s hands off my shoulders did nothing to lessen my discomfort, and the vaguely guilty feeling that there was a small measure of justice in Brockhaven’s accusations made me angrier and more defensive than ever. “There was nothing indecent in the way Vincent treated me! In fact, he was kind, and respectful, which are two things that—”
“… I am not.” He finished my sentence with a sardonically raised eyebrow. “Spare me your comparisons, valid as they may be. It’s so delightfully opportune for the male sex that you’re so easy to seduce.”
Blood surged through my heart in scalding bursts. “To which seduction do you refer—Vincent’s or yours?”
I knew immediately from the coldly suppressed fury on his face that I had said too much, but for once I was too hurt to care. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” I said with a heavy-handed flippancy. “We’re not supposed to talk about that, are we, my lord?”
His fingers tightened on my arm until I was half-afraid that I might whimper. “My sweet little girl,” he said in a calm, hard voice, “that’s one rein that you had better not pull. Do I have to explain to you why?”
“No,” I gasped, wishing I was of a loftier frame of mind than to be curious about what he would have said. Brockhaven released my arm, and I might have collapsed with relief if I had not been mesmerized by bright blue flames that burned deep in his eyes. After a moment, the fire seemed to bank and fold into itself, and he said, “Don’t stay alone with Vincent, Liza. Never.”
It was more than a minute before I could answer him, so harsh was my battle to keep tears from invading my voice. “In the name of heaven, what’s made you so angry? I know that in your world it’s acceptable for me to be acquainted with your cousin. Lady Gwen told me so. How can you tell me I cannot? Why would you want to?”
“I’ve told you as much about it as I intend to tell you.”
“You can’t expect me to obey you without giving me a reason.”
“By all means, let’s have the classic childish garbage. It behooves you to remember you’re a minor, my pretty one, and under the laws of this nation, I can do what I please to see that you adhere to my wishes, without having to convince you by rational persuasion that I’m right.”
My jaw was so taut with emotion that I could scarcely cause it to speak. “Whatever are you going to do, beat me?”
“With the greatest pleasure,” he assured me without so much as a skipped beat, and with blistering sincerity.
“What in the hell has gotten into you, Alex?” said Robert, appearing at his brother’s side to bring me back to earth with a shattering jolt. “This is no time to heat the chit into hysterics. Half the room is staring at you.”
Brockhaven turned to his younger brother, his harsh, set lips stretching into a narrow smile. “Are they? Well, well. I’m sure it will do Liza a great deal of good for society to see her as the oppressed victim of my tyranny.”
“Doubtless,” said Robert sarcastically. “But since her eyes are full of tears, and her angelic bosom is quivering magnificently with restrained sobs, I think we could both agree that you’ve done enough now to create sympathetic interest. Mrs. Perscough is gathering the unfledged chicks together to mother-hen a candlelight walk in the gardens. Ellen and most of the other girls are already below. Would you mind if I took Liza?”
“By all means. Take her,” agreed Brockhaven with unflattering readiness. “The garden should suit her to perfection. She needs cooling.”
Oh, what I would have said if Robert had not removed me from the drawing room, posthaste. In silence, he took me to the ladies’ cloakroom to fetch my shawl, but as the maid handed it to me the only thought that crossed my mind was the joy it would have given me to strangle Brockhaven with it. Robert had apparently spent the measure of our walk to the cloakroom in an inner debate about whether or not to mention my fight with Brockhaven, because suddenly I heard him take a breath and lead me off the main corridor into the hushed stillness of a twilight hall.
“All right,” he said, “what happened?”
“Lord Brockhaven says I am not to talk to Vincent,” I said, pulling my shawl tightly around my shoulders.
“Oh.”
“Oh? What does ‘oh’ mean?” I demanded, turning on him. “ ‘Oh’ is not an answer.”
With an asperity that I sensed was contrived, he said, “I wasn’t aware that you’d asked me a question.”
“I beg your pardon. Why is your brother angry at me for talking with Vincent? He’s been kind to me and… and he promised to show me my father’s schoolroom at Chad. There was nothing more than that in our conversation, and yet—” I looked up at Robert. “He dislikes me, doesn’t he?”
“Of course Vincent likes you,” Robert replied. “He’s made that clear.”
“I meant Brockhaven.”
A guttering wall candle above us sent a warm, yellow wash of light over Robert’s dark hair, accenting the masculine features, the hollows beneath the high cheekbones, the smoothly cut jawline. I watched him, trying to guess his thoughts.
“Damn,” he said, to my surprise. His voice sounded loud in the empty hall. “Has something happened between you and Alex?”
I stared hard at the floor. He swore again, under his breath this time, and repeated his question.
I slowly nodded.
There was a return to a very loud silence before he said, “Oh Lord,” and then, reluctantly, “You’d better tell me about it.”
“I don’t know if I’m able,” I whispered, torn between the need to unburden my desperate secret and the strain of making such an admission. I looked up at him with an expression that I realized unhappily must be beseeching.
I was so prepared for a curt reproach that I was surprised when it didn’t come. Instead, Robert ran a hand distractedly through his hair, took a step backward as though to bring me into better focus, and said incredulously. “Is it that bad?”
My face must have told him yes. He enfolded me in his arms with a tenderness I hadn’t imagined he possessed, and took me to sit on the deep violet folds of a cushioned window seat that ended the hall.
“Liza, could you talk about this to Gwen? It might be the best thing.”
“I had thought of that,” I said in an aching voice. “But—but think how she would feel! What good would it do to give her such distress? There’s nothing she can do about it, and I haven’t told Ellen either, because I just can’t seem to bear for anyone so dear to me to learn… Robert, my emotions, my very being has been in such disorder!”
Robert looked grim, though his voice strove for gentleness. “Have you and Alex been intimate?”
I hope I can say without appearing to boast that my English is very good, but there are subtleties of the language that only broad experience can give. Nor would I have suspected that Robert might try to put a thing delicately.
“Worse than that,” I said.
“Good Lord,” he started. “I didn’t know Alex did any worse than that! Liza, tell me immediately what you’re talking about, because I have a very ribald imagination. Out with it!”
And so that was how I came to tell Robert, surely the strangest of confidants I could have chosen. I told him simply because he was the one who asked me, and I had wanted to tell someone but was too much of a coward to introduce the topic on my own.
As it was, I hesitated and hesitated, not knowing the words that could label the sweet, burning passions that I had learned at my guardian’s experienced hands. I finally settled on the hopelessly inadequate phrase, “We kissed under a willow tree.”
“Kissed under a willow,” he repeated. “My dear girl, I think we had better be blunt so we don’t misunderstand each other. Has Alex taken you to bed?”
“No! Was that what
you meant by intimate? I know this is a terrible thing to say, but if he had, in some ways it would have been… not better, certainly, but more clear. As it is—Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“On the contrary. You’re doing very well. Were you forced?”
“To—to kiss Lord Brockhaven, do you mean? No. No, I wasn’t. In fact, I—you might say that I—Robert, I think you should know that when we kissed, we weren’t standing up.”
“Oh. That was unfortunate.”
“I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.”
“I don’t suppose you can.”
“Then you don’t think it’s so bad?”
“I didn’t say that,” he responded in a measured tone. “Your part in it wasn’t bad. With Alex, it’s a different matter.”
“But I told you, he didn’t force me!”
“If he had, that would have put him beyond the pale.”
I stared out through the thick window glass at a lone star that winked forlornly above the black line of the horizon. “When I met you, you had John Stewart take me to the library in Edgehill. Have you forgotten?”
“That was before I knew you were a lady.”
“Of course. That changed everything.”
“You may not think so, but believe me, society would. If it became known that Alex kissed you, there’s a chance the courts would yank you straight out of Edgehill and stick you in Chad under Vincent’s care.”
Leaning slightly forward, I rested my cheek against the cool window glass, feeling its mist damp against my skin. “I don’t think Lord Brockhaven would let that happen. He likes too much to have me as a tool against Vincent and Isabella.”
“A strong motivation for Alex not to touch you again.”
I nodded, my head making a small, dripping smear on the wet pane. “After he kissed me he said that it wouldn’t happen again.”
He reached up to cup my wet cheek consolingly. “It seems cruel, I know. But it’s best, Liza.”
“Is it so awful for me to wish that he cared for me?”
“He cares for you. Do you think it was easy for him to stop, after one kiss?”
“You don’t understand, Robert. I want him to care far more than that. I want him to care so much that he wouldn’t have to stop. But you don’t have to tell me. It’s not likely.”
I had no anticipation that Robert would contradict me, and he did not. He knew as I did that Lord Brockhaven was hardly an impulsive romantic who might fall headlong in love with an untried girl in her teens.
Later when I looked back on that conversation with Robert, it amazed me that I hadn’t known shock, or even any sense of discovery, as I admitted for the first time aloud, as well as to myself, how much I felt for Lord Brockhaven. To concede my love seemed as natural and guileless as the new leaf uncurling from its stem. It was a soft emotion, linked forever in the past with the dripping sands of time, as though it had been there from my earliest beginning, even before I had met him in the library. My love had been like a bud that was born with me, always there, always waiting for the sunshine of this man’s smile to fall upon it and press it open with gentle, unseen strokes.
Only the hand of a heartless destiny would have chosen Brockhaven for my love. We were as different as the falcon is from the butterfly, he the subtle, soaring hunter, and I vulnerable and full of fears. We were unalike in custom, in temperament, and in the way we looked at and touched the things around us. How could I cross the vast canyons of indifference he had made around him, raised as he was in a way that would have been the ruin of most men? It would be my destruction, more brutal than any other, if I tried to reach him.
We walked for more than a quarter hour in the garden, with a bright candlelit group whose happy conceited chatter rose in the night while I stared into the shadows wishing that I could fly away into the blackness and lay alone on the damp, sweet-scented earth and know myself held in the palm of the Mother of Peace.
I was sad when Mrs. Perscough began to speak of chills and too much exposure to night air. Turning aside laughing protests, she began to shepherd us inside. I did not relish a return to the battle to discover who I must become in this new environment, for I had the added burden of keeping my heart safe from its yearning for my guardian. But I tried to smile with the others and show cheer. Grandmother said if you moan over a missing toe, the devil will come and take the foot. And I wished to conceal my smarting heart from Lord Brockhaven.
Both gorgios and gypsies have a custom that after the dinner, and after the talking, comes a time for the music to be made. For gypsies it’s a way to make merry or to sorrow; the gorgios have made of it an excuse to sleep on the sly. Ellen had warned me that the mothers with daughters of marriageable age would use this occasion to showcase the talent, or lack of it, of their offspring. In vain would a young lady protest to her mother that she hated to play in public and that she could barely stumble through a scale, much less a sonata. What matchmaking mama could acknowledge that she had for years been wasting money on expensive music masters! Happily for Ellen, Lady Gwen thought it intolerable that girls of no ability should be allowed to assault the eardrums of invited guests, but that didn’t stop people from saying, in the course of an evening such as this one, what a pity it was that poor Ellen had no affinity for music. Accomplishments and force-fed doses of European culture were linked inseparably with gentility, and I had claim to none.
The footmen had set out chairs in the music room in precisely straight lines that were immediately rearranged by the company, moving here and there between songs to talk with friends.
I enjoyed the performances more than I had expected to, given Ellen’s grim description. I was no judge of the music, since I had never heard enough gorgio songs to know how things were supposed to sound, and, in all honesty, one piece of gorgio music sounds to me pretty much like another. The worst of the pianists I enjoyed the most, and the best I liked least. Julie Aldgate was the worst, and I’m sure I could have watched her all night. She played a lively tune with many, many verses that she punctuated by hopping on her seat in time to the music until it looked as though her piano stool was connected to the floor by a wire spring, and she pumped the foot pedals with legs that hurled up and down like a thumping jack-rabbit. Adding to that were such atrocities as stopping in mid-bar for as long as twenty seconds (I counted) to glare with avid concentration at the music sheet, as though she suspected it of switching around the notes on purpose to baffle her. She reminded me of a pretty, mechanical toy that one delights in paying a penny to see at the fair, and I’m sure my applause was quite the heartiest when she was done.
Isabella’s talent was so far at the other end of the scale that I wasn’t even sure it should be judged in the same spectrum. In my ignorance, I could still see that she was an outstanding pianist. Her first selection was long, tedious, and melancholy, written by a dead composer in whom the gorgios put much store, though I have forgotten his name. The composition was one that for a time travels a slow, redundant, and quiet pace and then, when one least expects, it goes bang, bang, bang, and almost puts you out of your chair. About Isabella’s playing there was not an ounce of silliness. She looked beautiful, stately, rich, intelligent, and utterly feminine, and somehow I could not keep myself from drawing comparisons between us that made me feel like a shabby kitten that sits meowing in a gutter.
No sooner had she finished playing but she was urged on to give the company the pleasure of a second piece. She agreed merrily, but only, she said, if dear Alex would come sit at the piano with her and play a duet. Lord Brockhaven was instantly besieged by witticisms and mock commands that he join the fair Isabella at once. He went, though I can’t say that he did it with any eagerness. It appeared likely that he only agreed in order to escape what he plainly regarded as the persecution of the many well-wishers who were encouraging him to play.
Lord Brockhaven played as well as Isabella, perhaps better, for he had a greater natural affinity. I learned later that they had
been trained by the same music master. It showed in the fluid blend of their styles, a ballet of sweet, blurring notes that met and melded with the pure sensuality of experienced lovers. His dark head against her light one, she, small and fragile by his shoulder, was as articulate and perfect a thing of beauty as the music they played. Isabella sat so close to Brockhaven that they were touching, but he seemed indifferent to their contact, as though intimacy had bred in him an endless acceptance for their closeness, though I had seen him reject her physical overtures at other times. They were a beautiful and stirring couple, and when the last strain of their melody had died away there was a thunderous applause, even though everyone in the room, save myself, had seen them play together many times before.
I was forced to hear much eulogistic commentary about the charm of their duet before the evening could continue. No sooner had Peregrine’s sister Miss Absalm sat down to play at the harp, but one of the strings snapped under her fingers, and all turned back to conversation while the repair was made.
Across the room, Julie Aldgate had succeeded in cornering Robert and was talking to him animatedly, her expressive hands fluttering through the air like fairy wings, and her curls flying. I saw him put up his hand to catch her chin, no doubt to hold steady her poor little wagging head, but Julie saw fit to interpret it as a caress. She gave Robert a meltingly adoring smile. The squire walked past my view, speaking in a jolly way with Vincent and with his neighbor, Sir Maxwell Whitely, and I tried to apply my mind to what Mrs. Littledean had to say about the acquisition of new altar hangings for the church.
“To be sure,” she was assuring Mrs. Aldgate and Lady Absalm, who were both sitting to my right, “the Norwich cloth is quite pretty, but ladies—tradition! Since seventeen hundred and three the altar scarves for this parish have been made by the ranking lady at Chad Hall, and if we can only prevail upon dear Isabella…” Her voice lifted tactfully and succeeded in catching the attention of Isabella, who had taken a chair in front of me.
