by Laura London
Lynden’s wardrobe at first appeared to be extensive, but closer examination showed it to consist of such articles as a flannel day frock with a ripped shoulder seam, a frilled muslin nightcap with stained lace, a pair of scuffed kid boots with a loose heel. Over the years it had not been Lynden’s habit to cull from her wardrobe items either outgrown or abused. By the time the fourth mateless, left-handed mitten was listed, even the loyal Lorraine went so far as to comment, “Really, Lynnie, you take shockingly bad care of your clothes.”
“We’re to inventory your closet, next, Raine, and we’ll see if it’s in any better shape” was Lynden’s retort. But Lorraine’s closet, to her sister’s disgust, proved to be a model of organization. Outgrown clothing had been neatly folded and placed in labeled boxes, a touch that Lynden found particularly obnoxious. Not a seam needed mending, and frayed laces and tired ribbons had been systematically repaired or replaced.
“Changeling!” muttered Lynden.
Lady Eleanor’s response to the inventories was a disgusted sigh. “We shall all be made to look like fools if Lynden prances around as Lord Melbrooke’s wife dressed like a penny-pinched country dowdy.” She had detailed measurements taken of both girls; informed Lynden smugly that she was too thin and had a little nothing of a bosom; and ordered for them both, from a topnotch London tailor, a fashionable trousseau to be delivered to Melbrooke’s Lake-country home.
Mama recovered from the exertions of hysteria sufficiently to take what was for her an exceptional interest in the wedding preparations. She ordered Mademoiselle Ambrose to go to the attic where she would find the wedding gown, wrapped in tissue paper and stored in a trunk, in which Lynden’s mother had made her own vows. It was to be altered for Lynden’s use. Mama then requested Lynden’s presence for a long, depressing lecture on the duties, intimate and otherwise, of a new bride to her husband. Lastly, the invalid announced that she would rise from her sickbed to attend the wedding of her beloved daughter. This last was a Maternal Sacrifice. Though the church was only three cottages away, she had not considered herself well enough to attend services there since her husband’s funeral five years earlier.
There were the bride’s visits, too. News of Lynden’s approaching marriage swept the parish like a wind rippling through a wheat field. The local gentry came calling to bring hastily purchased wedding gifts and to gossip and exclaim over Lynden’s good fortune. Despite the twin’s popularity in the neighborhood and Lorraine’s acknowledged standing as one of the prettiest girls in the county, no one had thought to see either of the Downpatrick twins make so exalted a match. One simply did not expect the future Lady Melbrooke to spring from one’s own backyard. Lynden, or Miss Ruckus, as she was known in the parish, had always been the uncrowned queen of the local younger set. To the girls she was a trustworthy confidant and cheerful companion, guaranteed to enliven the dullest gathering. She had been a prime favorite with the boys since, as a wild nine-year-old, she had accepted a dare to mount the squire’s half-broken stallion and refused to cry when she broke her arm in the inevitable tumble. Her friends gathered around her now, full of excited, teasing questions; demanding to know how she could have been so sly as to have been engaged to the famous Lord Melbrooke for six months and not told a soul. Where had she met him? Had he wooed her with love poems? Did she think she would like being so horribly rich? Lorraine could only hope that Lynden’s evasive stammered replies could be attributed to the natural nervousness of a bride-to-be.
Lynden’s wedding day dawned too soon, and she huddled, cold with despair, under her blankets, her thoughts chasing each other in frantic circles. Justin, Lord Melbrooke. Lynden had tried desperately to avoid all thought of him. What thoughts she did permit herself had been of the legend: poet, aristocrat, Lothario. It was safer to think of the legend than the man. He was back in Yorkshire, that Lynden knew. He was not staying in Downpatrick Hall, though. Last night he had sent Uncle Monroe a short note, informing Downpatrick that he could make himself comfortable in the local inn, that there was no need for Lady Eleanor’s household to be put to further trouble on his account. He would see them tomorrow at the wedding.
The wedding. It seemed incredible to Lynden that Melbrooke could make so casual a reference to an event that was to her a major shift in her life’s fortunes. How detached he must be, how poised. She envied him that. The more she thought about it, the more she decided that a facade of equal nonchalance was the only dignified course left to her. And yet… he was as foreign to her as a Hindu god of love, with the mystically remote smoke tones of his eyes and the subtle curves of his lips. Then, there was the barely explored thought that she might be expected to share a bed with him, perhaps that very evening. The idea fairly shriveled her with apprehension. Lynden sat upright and gave a shriek that would have aroused the household had it not been muffled by a hastily gathered double handful of bedclothes.
It was to be a morning wedding. The twins had little time to dress and fix their hair before the family coach would arrive to carry them the fifty yards to the church. Lynden’s bedroom became a disordered scene, with a light fog of talcum powder floating in the air and creeping to rest on every flat surface. Strands of ribbon and torn pieces of tissue paper from Lynden’s wedding presents were trampled underfoot. When Peg brought the news that the carriage had left with Mr. Downpatrick, Lady Marchpane, and the twin’s mother, Lorraine quickened her arrangement of Lynden’s coiffure and gave a hopeless moan.
“Oh, no,” she cried. “The carriage will be back for us in a cat’s wink, and we aren’t nearly ready. And the room is in such a muddle, and we haven’t even begun to pack Lynden’s things! We’re supposed to leave for the Lake country right after the ceremony!” Unconventional though it might be, there was to be no festive breakfast following the wedding. February weather was unpredictable; a delayed trip might have to be postponed indefinitely due to roads made impassable by snow or fog. The wedding principals would take advantage of the day’s clear weather to leave immediately after the ceremony for Lord Melbrooke’s estate.
“Don’t fret, Miss Lorraine, Mademoiselle Ambrose and me’ll see to your packin’ and straighten up th’ room besides,” Peg reassured her. “It’ll be no trouble a’tall. And since you was packed last evenin’, we only have to worry about Miss Lynden.”
Lord Melbrooke had been at the church long enough to exchange a few civil words with Lady Marchpane and bow formally over Mrs. Downpatrick’s limpid hand before Monroe Downpatrick could monopolize his time with a series of ostentatious introductions. Politeness forced him to shake hands in quick succession with a country squire, a rustic knight, and a justice of the peace. Downpatrick’s heavy voice boomed at his side, introducing him as “my good friend Melbrooke.” Lord Melbrooke assumed a fixed, vague smile and thought his decision to stay the night in a nearby inn rather than under Downpatrick’s roof to have been well taken.
There was a stir near the doorway, followed by the rustle of silk as the guests took their pews. Lady Eleanor Downpatrick entered, beaming like Mother Nature. Lord Melbrooke saw that she was followed by a tall, dark-haired girl whose da Vinci eyes were misty with tears. Nice effect, thought Melbrooke; that must be the twin. Her gown was a deep burgundy with a half train. Flattering. And yet its cut and color marked it as inappropriate dress for a girl in her seventeenth year. Melbrooke guessed it had been hastily converted from Eleanor’s wardrobe.
Monroe Downpatrick left the sanctuary and returned a moment later with the bride on his arm. Now that Melbrooke had seen her sister, Lynden looked smaller still and infinitely dainty. She wore a winter-white silk wedding gown in floating empire lines, with an overdress of gauze embroidered with silver thread and tiny lustrous pearls. Her hair was done in curls atop her head; two small French locks rested at the nape of her neck. A wreath of wild roses had been settled cleverly among the dark curls, and she carried a tall bouquet of hothouse lilies. Her heavily lashed eyes peeked uncertainly to the right, then across her uncle’s wide body to t
he left, scanning the rows of wedding spectators. Melbrooke thought she looked like a curious earth sprite entering the Cave of the Mountain King. The thought amused him, and he smiled.
The vicar was elderly, and slow of speech and movement. The words issuing from his wrinkled mouth came in dry, intermittent rasps, like the hollow smack of wood-chopping on a windy day, leaving his audience waiting for his words with irritated, resigned suspense. Melbrooke began to mentally recite lines memorized from Homer, and then glanced down when a slight movement in the small figure next to him caught his attention. Lynden leaned toward him and whispered, “Do you know what these lilies mean?” She crossly indicated her bouquet.
“No,” he whispered back, cautiously.
“Virginity!” returned Lynden in a whisper so loud that Lord Melbrooke was forced to resist an impulse to clap his hand over her mouth. “Aunt Eleanor said I must carry them. It’s so embarrassing.”
“Don’t worry. You can fling them in the ditch at the first crossroads. And lilies symbolize many other things besides virginity,” whispered Melbrooke. He immediately regretted his comment because she asked him, in a voice he was sure carried to the farthest pew, what the other symbolic uses for lilies were. He was relieved that the vicar had reached the point in the ceremony that required them to recite their vows.
At last the vicar pronounced them married and advised Melbrooke that he might kiss the bride. During the last moments of the ceremony, Lynden had divided her time between tapping impatiently on the stone floor with one small foot and glaring alternately at the offending lilies and the equally oblivious vicar. It was plain to Melbrooke that she had innocently forgotten this final part of the ceremony; she started, gave a hasty step backward, and dropped the lilies. He caught her shoulders in a firm, steadying grip, brushing her cold, soft lips with his own. Her liquid brown eyes were wide with surprise; her red, curved underlip quivered nervously. She was scented of lilies and talcum, and he could see, on a creamy cheek and barely reflected in the light from the stained-glass windows, the dried course of a tear.
Lynden’s breath caught in her chest as Melbrooke pulled her to him in a powerful move. She felt her head falling limply back into the support of his broad hand, and he kissed her so deeply, so passionately, that her lips felt swollen, pulsing under his. She was afraid of falling and clutched at his hard shoulders, searching anxiously for a hold as his lips searched for her soul. Then he released her, and she stood alone, looking at her dropped bouquet, afraid to raise her eyes to him.
“You have trod upon the lilies,” she said, shaken.
Melbrooke laughed softly. “I see I have. But we were going to toss them out at the first crossroads, after all.”
Chapter Four
The coach thundered north, taking the frozen road through Ripon where children playing in the snow at the roadside pointed excitedly at the Melbrooke crest. The twins were seated side by side in the rear of the coach, kept snug against the encroaching cold under mounds of furs. Lorraine occasionally freed one mittened hand to scrape a sparkling oval in the hard frost invading the glass window to her left.
The twins would not see Lord Melbrooke again until that evening. He had ridden ahead with the stated purpose of preparing his household for their arrival. The sisters had been discussing the wedding in exhaustive detail when Lynden’s voice trailed off in midsentence and she stared abstractedly at the upholstery button set into the plush fabric of the seat cover opposite them. Lorraine waited patiently, but in vain, for Lynden to finish her sentence, then shrugged and searched in the wicker basket by her side, lifting out a slim, leather-bound volume. The book’s title page boasted its purpose: “Guide or Companion for the Minds of Persons of Taste, and a Feeling for Landscape, who might be inclined to explore the District of the Lakes with that degree of attention to which its beauty may fairly lay claim.” Lorraine studied the book for a while before Lynden’s eyes refocused.
“What were we talking about?” said Lynden. She looked disapprovingly at the book in her sister’s hands. “There. If I don’t watch you every moment, you go poking your nose into some fusty old book. What an ugly cover. What’s it about?”
“It’s a guide to the Lake country. And it says, ‘There are three approaches to the Lakes through Yorkshire; the least advisable is the great north road by Catterick.’ ”
“Well, we haven’t taken that one, at least,” said Lynden cheerfully. “What does it say about the road we’re on?”
“Well,” began Lorraine, “it says, ‘this tract leads through an avenue of rocks that must be of interest to the geologist.’ ”
“And dull as boiled yams to anyone else, I’ll wager,” sniffed Lynden. “If you’ve been wasting your pin money on stupid guidebooks that take pains to memorialize in print every boring feature of the countryside, then I must say, Rainey…”
“But it does tell some interesting things, Lynden. For instance, it says, ‘one may turn off the main road at Masham to visit the Jerneaux Abbey.’ The book says it’s a noble scene.”
Lynden brightened. “Well, we’re not to Masham yet. Let’s take the turn and see the thing.”
“I don’t think we ought, Lynnie,” said Lorraine, setting her book aside. “Lord Melbrooke wished us not to stop so that we would be sure to reach his home by nightfall.”
Lynden was already pulling the rope that was connected to the small silver bell by the coachman’s seat outside. “Fiddle! If Lord Melbrooke wants obedience then he ought to train a greyhound instead of taking a wife.” She clamped a hand on her sister’s arm. “How dreadful! I’ve just realized that I’m a wife.” Her grip on her sister’s arm tightened. “We are going to the abbey!” she said with determination.
It was not so easy to convince Mr. Coniston of this. A fatherly, gray-haired man in his forties, he had been in service to the Melbrookes all his life, first as a groom, now as coachman. He explained kindly that Lord Melbrooke had given him orders to come direct, a diversion of this type would mean traveling partway in darkness, the northern roads could be bad at night, and he had only two grooms with him and one of those a mere lad.
But Lynden’s mind was so fertile with inventive and intricate counterarguments that he soon perceived that Her Ladyship was prepared to keep them in their present stationary position by arguing until nightfall. He yielded, saying that he hoped nothing bad would come of it, but she should know it was against his better judgment.
“Fiddle!” said Lynden.
But when the coach arrived before the noble abbey, the twins found to their dismay that it had been demolished centuries earlier in the Dissolution, leaving only a motley collection of crumbling ruins.
“The writer of your guidebook ought to be arrested,” said Lynden indignantly as she and her sister marched resolutely through the rubble. “Mr. Coniston must think we’re a pair of nodcocks, wanting to come out of the way to traipse around in a heap of rubble.” To save face, the twins spent a full hour exclaiming with forced enthusiasm over an indistinct bas-relief, an indecipherable inscription, and an unidentifiable fragment of a statue. They returned to the coach almost frozen into statues themselves. Mr. Coniston hid his smile and drove on.
Thus it was that within five miles of their destination, two hours after sundown under a distant, indifferent moon, the dozing twins were awakened by the sharp scrape of the carriage brakes. The coach horses halted in stamping confusion. There were shouts cut by the crack of a pistol shot. After more stomping and more shouts, the carriage door was wrenched open and Lynden and Lorraine were confronted by a masked man who waved a pistol and growled, “Come out and deliver!”
As they scrambled out, Lorraine clinging weakly to her sister, they heard a soft chuckle from a dark figure seated on horseback before them.
“That’s stand and deliver, oakhead,” said the dark figure in a youthful voice that was mellowed by an Irish lilt. The speaker wore a black chapeau-bras, tipped back on his head and angled in the French manner. A patch covered one eye and
the lower half of his face was obscured by a strategically tied neckerchief. His powerful shoulders bulged beneath a soft leather cloak attached at the neck with a chain; he wore tight whipcord breeches tucked into high leather boots. His horse wheeled and danced beneath him, but he brought it sharply under control as the twins came into view. He sat back in the saddle and said, with a huge measure of surprise, “My God! It’s ladies!”
“Of course it’s ladies, you villain!” said Lynden angrily. “And if you’ve shot Mr. Coniston or one of the grooms, then I shall have to live my life knowing it was my fault for stopping at the Jerneaux Abbey!”
The figure swung a long, well-formed leg over the back of his horse and dropped to the ground. “I may be a villain, but I ain’t stupid enough to stop at the Jerneaux Abbey. Everyone knows it’s just an old pile of stones. And if you look behind you, you’ll see your coachman and grooms sitting up on the box. I only fired my pistol to get their attention. They were squawking like cooped hens.”
Lynden turned to look at the box. To her relief, Mr. Coniston and the grooms were in their places atop the coach, staring warily at the third highwayman, a rugged-looking scamp guarding them with an old Brown Bess musket. The horses were nosing impatiently for forage through the pile of brush which had been used to block the roadway. The steam rising from their backs made a silvery mist in the moonlight. Lynden, ready for battle, took a step toward the young highwayman before her.
“If you’re not stupid, then why did you become a highwayman instead of entering one of the professions?” asked Lynden sternly.
“Lynnie, please,” Lorraine interrupted in a shaking voice, clinging to her sister’s elbow. “Don’t, I beg you, stir an argument with these men. You can have no idea of the circumstances. Perhaps they have wives and hungry children at home. Perhaps they’ve not been able to get work. What good purpose will it serve to anger them?” As she spoke, she stripped off one of her buff-colored kid gloves, removed a small pearl ring from her index finger, and, in a gesture of conciliation, held it out to the tall cloaked highwayman standing before Lynden. “Sir,” she said, addressing him, “will you take this please and leave us in peace? The stone is small, I know, but the quality is excellent. My father told me so when he gave it to me as a confirmation present.”
