The Windflower

by Laura London

  “Lie with me and watch the morning brighten. Lie with me…” His whisper, a heated flush upon her nostrils, carried the fragrance of kitten, of the spicy hay with its complement of wild meadowsweet, of the warm innocent scents of sleep. “Lie still, love. I only want to touch you.” His hands moved to her body, a heady, eager exploration of her—her fingers, the structure of her wrists, the highly sensitive skin on the inner bend of her arm, the sturdy muscles of her upper arm, and then outward, over the refinements of her body, turning, stroking, caressing her charming parts, and with as much love, the small imperfections of flesh or form that made her a woman and not a statue or goddess created from mixed colors on a palette. His palms and fingers and lips painted what she was, real and appealing and breathless from the sensual quest of his fingers.

  Gasping softly, she whispered, “How s-still do you want me to lie?”

  His husky laughter caressed her nipple as his lips came downward to capture it, massaging it in shuddering waves with his tongue, his hair stroking back and forth on the throbbing surface of her breast. Sensitive, experienced fingers coaxed her to fever, contouring the fretting muscles of her thighs, and then shifting, so that his hand lightly cupped the rise of her silky curls, molding her, kneading her to a lavish fiery ecstasy with the flat of his palm. Wet dancing kisses covered her breasts and then found her open, swollen lips, nuzzling them hungrily, roughly, sinking his tongue into the delicious richness of her mouth. Little cries, weak moans wept from her throat. She sought his warmth, her feet burrowing like lithe mice into the quilt to arc herself in heightened closeness to the hands and mouth that were bringing passion to her in spearlike thrusts.

  Whispering, “Your breasts are so beautiful. I love to feel the weight of them in my hand… all down you… the softness under my tongue… here… here,” he tucked her body beneath him, and the joy of having all his flesh against hers tickled through the eroticized pathwork of her nerves.

  “Devon…” Her voice was almost silence, a dawn-lit breeze upon the leaf of a sweet violet.

  Their gazes found each other, the meeting infinitely sweet, yet defocused, a slow unlocking of self to prepare to become one with another, greater self, as though they were twin bright beings melding within the golden streamers of a comet. His mouth hovered barely above hers, absorbing her dreamy breaths, and feeling one catch against his lips at his first light touch inside her softness. With heart-expanding slowness he brought himself fully into her, the entry as deep as he could make it. The pattern of her breath changed against his skin as her swollen lips tightened into a smile that gemmed her eyes with blinding radiance, and it was not the shape and color of her eyes that moved him—those he could hardly see—but their expression. And then even that was lost as the fierce need of his body to have her engulfed every part of his spirit, and it was no longer necessary to look at her expression because they were so wrapped in each other that he could feel every thought, every feeling that sprang from her in colorful word-pictures. The night before, when he had loved her, the experience had been so close to worship that he had hardly seemed to feel his own pleasure, but now his skin and hers were flushed with erotic warmth, and the exquisite fit of their bodies was moistly feverish, and each was learning the serrated cadence of the other’s pulse. Under the shower of sprinkling light they moved in primal rhythms, each sensuous flow of motion tender, uniquely human, and loving, until the voluntary matched rhythms of their bodies escaped control, and with rapt blindness, eyes closed, they saw each other only through their senses.

  Swan’s-wing clouds dappled a turquoise heaven. The autumnal sun smiled on midmorning, and Devon and Merry, preparing to stroll back to Teasel Hill, found that such a simple walk posed all kinds of logistical problems. No matter how lovingly he finger-combed her hair, or with what housewifely briskness she brushed dried hay leaves from his shirt, they were both tousled and untidy, and while they had never looked more beautiful to each other, they bore every obvious evidence of two people in their honey-month who had spent a night of love in a hayloft. The idea of walking through a busy farmyard in her present condition caused Merry a certain anguish, and so the Duke of St. Cyr and his duchess decided there was no choice but to sneak into their own house. They crept along walls fragrant with plump nectarines and peaches, musical with bees. To avoid being seen was everything, and they hid behind oak trees, where acorns fell on them in a pattering shower; and collapsed with silent laughter behind a cider press. Through an open window in the breakfast parlor they made their stealthy entrance to the house and were flying up the staircase together under the quilt, winded and helpless with laughter, when a young parlormaid happened to come into the entrance hall to dust and was so startled to see a lumpy blanket running up the stairs that she shrieked in alarm. Foiled at the eleventh hour, they had to return downstairs to explain and comfort, and Merry learned that yesterday Devon had spoken no less than the truth. At Teasel Hill two shouts brought the household and half the garden staff on the instant.

  Merry’s aunt and Devon’s mother, Aline, arrived at midday in a black-and-silver phaeton driven by Devon’s mother. Was it really Aunt April with her soft hair dressed in fleecy Parisian curls, the carefree bite of autumn in her cheeks, her lilac-colored pelisse giving a lilylike delicacy to her spare frame rather than bluntly exposing it? Merry met her at a run halfway up the fine stone steps of the front porch. They kissed, hugged, smeared each other’s cheeks with clear gelatin tears, and buried their running noses, so alike, in linen handkerchiefs. And Devon’s mother, a petite figure with golden tendrils falling from her Bibi bonnet over the standing collar of her full blue percale coat, was doing some crying of her own.

  The afternoon was for renewing bonds, and for smiling. By bedtime Merry was hoarse, April was hoarse, Aline was hoarse, and Devon said teasingly that his ears were hoarse. April and Devon’s mother had heard a carefully sketchy version of Merry’s story from Lord Cathcart in London. Merry and Devon embroidered it upon request with details to support its basic fallacious premise: that Devon had rescued Merry from a pair of knaves who had stolen her off the Guinevere intending to hold her for ransom. The falsehood was the same one that would be let out to society at large, and it was designed, strangely enough, to protect Merry from the kind of tasteless speculation that the insensitive are likely to inflict on female captives. In protecting Merry the story also couldn’t avoid protecting Devon, and for that Lord Cathcart and Devon both had apologized so profusely that Merry had been secretly amused. She might have told her aunt the truth; Devon had left the choice to her, but what would it serve beyond her aunt’s suffering? Aunt April had already suffered enough worry. There might be a small part of Merry that was afraid she had not forgiven Devon everything, but she couldn’t use her aunt to exact revenge. And when Devon drew her into his bedchamber that night, undressing her in a crystalline fog of moonlight, kissing each revealed part of her and whispering his love, her exulting body had no thoughts of vengeance.

  He left her at dawn because, as he had told her the day before, they would be expecting him at Whitehall to explain his copious bundles of reports and the raft of conclusions he’d drawn, which were not likely to be very popular with anyone except General Wellington, who was coming to oppose the American war himself, according to Cathcart. And though Devon did not tell her so, he was seized by a desperation more fierce than any feeling he’d ever known to find Michael Granville and make certain Merry’s safety, although he too had lost all thoughts of vengeance. There was a dark sucking spot in his conscience in the place where his hatred for Michael Granville had been, and in it lived the fear that he might lose Merry. On St. Elise when she was ill, he had never believed she would die, no matter what the surface of his logic had told him. He had taken Cat’s concoctions to offer his own life for hers, and he had been so clothed in the mantle of self-certainty that afflicted so many of his blood—his father, his grandmother, his half brother—that he had been convinced, truly convinced, that the focus of his
will must preserve her life. That blind arrogance stunned him now. What had ever made him think he was more than any other man?

  Last night as she slept he had moved downward in the bed to enfold her waist in his arms, catching the downy softness of her thighs against his tightening belly, and to lay his cheek carefully on the undercurve of her breast. Drowsiness had begun to drift through the churning excitement of the past few days, but he had kept himself awake, listening to her working heart. Moments had passed in utter peacefulness. Then a nameless dark feeling had crept from the blank folds of night, and the muffled thrum within her chest had taken on a frightening fragileness. His arms had tightened around her, his lips pressing into the musky warmth beneath her breasts, over her heart. He was not a man given to surrender to the morbid fancies of his imagination, and yet a steely coldness crept into his stomach as the macabre idea came to him that she would be taken from him to pay for his brutalities to her. Sleepless, he had sent a barrage of humble prayers spiraling toward heaven, probably to a stern God who was thinking with a twisted smile that it was a long time since he’d heard much from this quarter. In the silence of his mind Devon promised, and begged, and pleaded, until the blankness of slumber had overwhelmed him, and he had awoken before sunrise with the vague idea that an exasperated God had heard enough nonsense and put him to sleep.

  Waking Merry with gentle kisses on her eyelids, he had made love to her sleepy, hot body, and to her winsome mind, and then left her after another aching kiss. He had stopped once in the airy bedchamber where his mother slept, to touch her cheek and smile, seeing that she was chewing on the lace cuff of her nightshirt, remembering his father teasing her about the quaint habit. Thank goodness Cathcart had been here to look after her while he’d been gone. Thinking that never again would he allow another human being to suffer for his own obsessions, Devon left the house, praying that when he returned he would have cured himself of the most dangerous one.

  And Merry sat up alone in Devon’s wide bed, hugging her knees with naked arms, and began to worry.

  Chapter 28

  Crimson berries nodded gaily among the feathery leaves of the mountain ash tree above Merry’s head as she sat with her aunt and Devon’s mother three days later. Ducklings paddled on the garden’s glimmering pond and wandered, quacking, among the sunlit asters. From the unshorn yews robins whistled, their darting shadows sweeping fleetingly over trailing fuchsias, the mellow roll of freshly scythed grass, and ornamental stones with their gilded lichen crusts. Aline had directed her long-suffering steward and a footman to bring the pianoforte into the garden. Wouldn’t it be charming on such a nice day to have music among the leaves? Puffing and grunting as they bumped the instrument down the porch steps, the male servants gave no particular appearance that they agreed. Aunt April teased that Aline only wanted it outside anyway, as a stand for her gardening tools, and the rapidly growing collection of trowels and work gloves and plant snips that landed on the pianoforte’s back did nothing to belie that accusation.

  Merry sat at the pianoforte trying to pick out the notes of a popular melody while her aunt stitched on a tambour and Aline began to massacre the weeds in a spearmint bed beneath her sundial. Grubby, Devon had said of his mother, and when a footman came bearing an envelope on a silver tray, Aline left little soily fingerprints on the paper as she picked it up.

  Small, impetuous in her movements, quick to smile, Aline Crandall was difficult to dislike. She was by turns playful and enchantingly dour, and she seemed to regard the world outside her garden as a strange, startling place to be approached with caution. She was shy with acquaintances, and with all except her closest friends, warm and wary at the same time. Of the generosity of her nature there could be no doubt. Aunt April had revealed to Merry that on April’s arrival in England, frightened, dejected, fearful for her lost niece, Michael Granville (a most attentive man for all the frigidity of his nature, April asserted) had delivered her unto Devon’s grandmother, a dreadful female, who had demanded to know in a powerful shout what had she done with her niece. All had been a nightmare until Aline arrived with Lord Cathcart to bear off Aunt April to the safety of Teasel Hill, where she had been made to feel welcome as a friend and companion, though she had no claim on them for all that Aline said that any victim of Devon’s grandmother’s conniving became a sister of hers on the instant. In the long months of separation, being helpless and able to search for Merry only through the tortuous channels of diplomacy, April had drawn strength from Devon’s mother. It was nice to think that one thing, at least, had gone well. Nice. But again—ironic.

  A frown gathered on Aline’s face as she read the note. She looked up from the page and said, “We have to go to a ball.” She added with mournful satisfaction, “I knew it.” She stuck the letter between her teeth, chomping downward in a comical gesture of derision, and Merry found herself thinking as she had many times in the three days before how Devon’s mother bent one’s preconceived notions of duchesses. Her appearance illustrated the point that it was possible to be an alluring beauty at age forty-two, even though her hair was usually collapsing like a stack of acrobats, her fingernails were chewed to the quick and, more often than not, grimy, and she had a gap the width of two straws between her front teeth that she poked at nervously with the tip of her tongue when, as now, she was taken with some serious thought. She dropped to the pianoforte’s bench beside Merry, thrusting her forefinger meaningfully at the crest on the embossed envelope.

  “This always means trouble,” she sighed. “The mark of the Crandalls.”

  It was a unicorn rampant, the archetype of Merry’s dreams. She must first have seen it, then, on letters Devon’s grandmother had written to April so many years before—the mythical animal which had taken life and grown in Merry’s dreamy heart. The unicorn. Devon’s heraldic device. An unaccountable smile narrowed the corners of her lips.

  “Devon’s…” She took the envelope from Aline, moving like one in a daze.

  Aline’s fingers went to the keyboard, picking out a bright melody, depositing smears of topsoil on the ivory keys. “Well, it might be Devon’s, but you’ve probably seen by now that he doesn’t care a bean about the trappings of his rank. His armorial emblazonments might bear a wheat sheath and two teacups for all the interest he’s ever displayed in them. Mind you, we have a great bronze statue of one—a unicorn, that is—in the linden grove that Devon’s grandmother had shipped all the way from Italy for him on his christening. Such an inappropriate present for an infant. And Lord Cathcart says the unicorn isn’t native to British legend in any case.”

  “I’m not so certain.” Aunt April, glancing up from her tambour frame, looked not so ready to dismiss the graceful creature. “What about the bicorne and the chichevache? They are like the unicorn in appearance, are they not?”

  “Alike, but different.” Aline finished the short melody with a sloppy trill and folded her hands in her lap. “Do you know about them, Merry?”

  “No.” Merry didn’t look up.

  “The bicorne,” Aline said, “happy creature that he is, roams the countryside feeding on henpecked husbands. When you see drawings of him, he appears always as very plump and satisfied, his prey being so abundant. The chichevache, who only eats dutiful wives, has all its ribs showing from starvation.” Wickedly grinning, “From what I know of your spirit and Devon’s, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about the pair of you becoming a meal for either beast. What we have to worry more about is becoming a meal for your grandmama-in-law. She wants us to visit her.”

  With startled dismay Aunt April said, “Oh, no!”

  “How bad could she be?” Merry, used to pirates, began to smile.

  “She bellows,” Aline said firmly. “She belittles. She throws her snuffbox. Not with men, though. I don’t go next or nigh her unless I have Devon or Cathcart with me. Not that I’m a coward,” she added, misinterpreting Merry’s expression. “But when I see her alone, what she wants is to chastise me for things Devon does,
which are not my fault. He’s a man now, and I won’t hang on his coattails.” Her wide-set hazel eyes grew rueful. “I couldn’t control him if I wanted. Even as a child he didn’t need me. He was always—just himself. He’s changed, though.” A smile flashed. “Love. Oh, please, don’t look embarrassed. I don’t think I’ve been happier in years. Finally Devon says he’s come home to live, and he’s hardly spent more than four consecutive nights here since his fifteenth birthday. It was hard for him, having no one of his very own, and he doesn’t like a thing that men of his class are supposed to enjoy. Cards bore him, and so do prizefights and horseracing and driving in Hyde Park and gossip and talking about sorts of snuff; and he will not have a valet—so there you are.”

  Trimming a thread, Aunt April ventured, “And yet, Aline, even the flower of the ton speak highly of him.”

  “So they do. Hypocrites! It’s impossible not to please them.” Devon’s mother rubbed her nose emphatically, leaving a smudge on the tip. “It’s all due to his rank, and his—well, his etcetera. They followed Jasper the same way. Whatever he did became the fashion. When he married me, two of his most slavish admirers actually wed their gardeners’ daughters also, although one was twenty-five years older than the groom. And after we bought Teasel Hill, farmers could hardly find feed for their stock that season because the aristocracy was so busy thatching cottages for themselves with it. That makes me think! Merry, can you dance?”

  “I—well, perhaps a bit.”

  “A bit won’t be good enough. The old duchess is giving a ball to introduce you into society, and you have no idea how they’ll sneer if you don’t appear to advantage on the dance floor. You’ll be such an object of envy that the least little thing you do will be dissected.” She broke off, laughing delightedly, pulling Merry to her feet with both hands. “You have the drollest face! So expressive! First let’s see what you know of the waltz. Say that I were a man and were to put my hands—so—on your waist. What would you do?”