by Laura London
Lynden’s complexion had fluctuated sharply from rose to milky white as she listened to Melbrooke’s cool, emotionless voice. “In short,” she said wretchedly, “you married me out of pity!”
The hard grayness of his eyes softened to silver. “Not at all.” He perjured himself unhesitatingly. “Let us rather say that I offered my support to a new friend in the only way I was able.”
“It sounds awfully noble to me,” said Lynden doubtfully. “But perhaps you are that way on account of your being a poet?”
“I suppose that would explain it,” agreed Melbrooke, keeping a stern command over his attractive features.
“You can’t go marrying every woman you want to help, you know,” pursued Lynden.
“I shall contrive never to do so again,” offered Melbrooke, finding it impossible to contain his smile any longer, even at the risk of offending her. “But I think that you ought to go back to bed now. You’ve had a very long day. You must be tired.”
“I am a little,” said Lynden, rising promptly and starting for the door. She had no wish for his polite dismissal to be restated more bluntly. He arose from the settee and opened the door for her. As she passed him, he reached up a hand to touch her cheek, gazing at her reflectively as she paused in the doorway.
“Don’t stay awake worrying whether you’ll be a ‘good’ wife,” he said softly. “You’ll find my expectations can be most elastic.”
Chapter Six
The morning was well advanced before Lynden and Lorraine were able to rouse themselves and appear in the morning parlor where they breakfasted together upon fluffy scrambled eggs and fresh oranges. To Lynden’s secret and not quite acknowledged disappointment, she learned from Mrs. Coniston that Lord Melbrooke had ridden out earlier to visit several of his tenant farmers. After the twins had eaten, the conscientious Mrs. Coniston was at once ready to conduct them on a tour of the house and outbuildings. Lynden was perfectly ready to peek about in the several old hay barns, laughing at the plump ducks and chickens and searching the lofts for kittens. She spent a pleasant half hour in the stables, cheerfully renewing her acquaintance with the grooms and Mr. Coniston; but as for the scullery house, the bake shack, and the cold cellar—those could wait for another day, couldn’t they? Mrs. Coniston reluctantly agreed and took the sisters inside where she showed them the most important rooms, explained that the house had been decorated by His Lordship’s grandmother on the event of her marriage, and made a futile attempt to interest Lynden in the more mundane details of household management.
“You keep the keys to the linen closet, Mrs. Coniston,” insisted Lynden. “I’m sure I’d lose them, and then a merry fix we’d be in with no clean sheets or dry towels. As for showing me inventories of tablecloths and canned jellies and china plate—I haven’t the faintest idea what to do with them. In my opinion you ought to go on as you have been; you do a much better job than I could!”
Mrs. Coniston had saved the kitchens until last. Here she introduced Lynden to the French chef and the idea that Lynden, as the lady of the house, was called upon to approve the menu for this evening’s supper. Here Lynden was more in her element, and Mrs. Coniston was able to appreciate in full the pitfalls of having a seventeen-year-old mistress. Lynden immediately canceled the vegetable dishes, announcing that she was not partial to them; and, on hearing that le sauté de ris de veau à la provencale meant sautéed calves’ sweetbreads with tomatoes and garlic, informed the already inflamed chef that they would not have it—it sounded nasty! Her pièce de résistance was a demand for the addition of no less than two extra desserts. Lynden found herself bundled in her cloak and mittens and out the door in record time with Mrs. Coniston’s fervent wish that the sisters might enjoy a walk on the fellside and her admonition—certain to pass unheeded—that they be sure not to leave the path.
Lorraine observed her sister’s air of smug satisfaction as they set off on the northbound pony trail, and said, “I’m sure you’re pleased with yourself, Lynnie, but you behaved dreadfully. ’Tis your classic way to avoid doing what you don’t like by pretending you’ll make a botch of it if you’re left the task. What poor Mrs. Coniston must be thinking! You’d be well served for your mischief if you found yourself taken at your word and the chef served no green peas or apricot fritters this evening when you know you are so partial to them!”
“Ho! They won’t take my advice for a minute, and you know it!” returned Lynden triumphantly. “Mrs. Coniston and I understand each other better now, I think, and she won’t feel she must consult me every time the tea cozy needs an airing.”
“No, she won’t. But she must think you a very odd sort of female for all that.”
“Fiddle Mrs. Coniston! We’ll help her sometimes, Raine, but I won’t walk around with a heavy jangling knot of keys at my waist like a gaol guard! What do you think of Fern Court?”
“It’s a wonderful place, Lynnie! Such an extensive library! The piano in the music room is an exceptionally fine instrument, and the art—why, a walk down any hallway gives one the feeling of being in an elegant gallery.” Lynden looked unimpressed as Lorraine continued. “But what I enjoyed most was seeing Lord Melbrooke’s study, where Mrs. Coniston says he spends his afternoons writing. Think, Lynnie. That comfortable-looking oak desk is the very surface he used to write his ‘Ode to Agamemnon,’ his ‘Songs from the Northern Shires’! I find it hard to believe that he is actually my brother-in-law. Not a month ago I spent an entire Sunday in my room reading his collected works! You are married to a genius, Lynnie. You should read some of his works, then you could perhaps appreciate that.”
“And start to lick the dust from his boots like everyone else, I daresay,” exclaimed Lynden. “That’s not what I care for! But, Lorraine, look at the view. Did you ever see anything like it?”
They had been following the rugged course of an ancient pony track on its wandering path from the valley, up the side of Loughrigg Fell. The air was mild enough for February, with some sun, though the ground was frozen; the path’s crisp, dry surface was pleasant. Their track had traveled north, then northwest, and, looking south, Fern Court was no longer in sight.
A hushed valley bed stretched west, its surface a quilt neatly patched with small woods, square fields, and quiet whitewashed farms resembling tiny embroidered patterns. More mountains rose in dull blues from the horizon, like lumpy pillows heading an enormous, homely bed. Ice-covered Grasmere Lake loomed to the northwest in silent, crystal slumber. A pebbly beach confined the lake. From there a slope, silver with winter-bleached grasses, ramped to where Lorraine and Lynden were standing.
The massive, rounded summit of Loughrigg Fell dominated the east. Lavender and gray tones dappled its sides, and copper swatches appeared where the sun struck. At the remote peak lay a dazzling vein-work of snow. Above it a few secretive, wispy clouds drifted in the soft blueness of the sky.
“The valley is just as Wordsworth described,” cried Lorraine. “Do you recall? ‘Behold! Beneath our feet, a little lowly vale, a lowly vale and yet uplifted high Among the Mountains… Urn-like it was in shape, deep as an Urn; With Rocks Encompassed’!”
“I suppose it is,” conceded Lynden, “though how you’ve managed to commit so much of that stuff to memory will always be a mystery to me! Are you cold or shall we go further?”
Lorraine immediately denied that she could be daunted by such a niggling annoyance as the chilly temperature in so magnificent a surrounding. The pair walked on.
Presently the path split, one branch continuing further along the fellside through a pair of barbed stone columns, the other angling sharply to the right where a level limestone shelf looked toward the valley. Lynden walked onto the stone platform, and in a movement that made Lorraine’s stomach pitch, she sat fearlessly on the very edge, dangling her legs over the side.
“Come sit, Raine, you’ll be able to see forever!”
Lorraine came cautiously to join her sister, dropping to her knees a safe four feet from the edge a
nd crawling the remainder of the distance. Below her, the cliff dropped a sheer two hundred feet to end on jagged screes. There was a road at the foot, its surface smooth enough for horses, perhaps even a coach-and-four. Lorraine’s gaze followed the road, which led up a long, gentle slope to the walls of…
“A castle!” breathed Lorraine. “A real castle!”
The castle stood high on a natural mound, its rear protected by a mammoth wall of rock. In their innocent enthusiasm, the medieval builders of the castle had unsuspectingly added every element to its taciturn form that later generations would come to view as romantic. There was a high stonework curtain, supported at intervals by splendidly crenellated round towers. Pilaster buttresses streamed from the great tower, and, miraculously, a heavy planked drawbridge spanned the fifty feet width of a moat.
“ ‘A fair pavilion, scarcely to be seen, / That which was all within most richly dight, / That greatest princes living in it mote well delight,’ ” quoted Lorraine reverently.
“I don’t know how that fits,” objected Lynden. “After all, we can’t tell if it’s rich inside, and as for greatest princes delighting in living there—why, I think they’d remodel it right off!”
“Certainly not!” exclaimed Lorraine stoutly. “Now, Lynie, close your eyes and make a picture in your mind. Listen! Can you hear the sweet tones of a mandolin? A knight serenading his lady! And the clatter from below-stairs? A squire cleaning the honorable stains of battle from his master’s armor. Now sniff the air. There! Do you smell the pure fragrance of the fresh rushes the loyal maidservants spread on the floor?”
“No,” said Lynden, with a sly glance at her sister’s dreamy countenance. “I do smell something, though, but what…? Ah, yes, ’tis—’tis the stench of the moat, where, so cousin Elmo says, the gallant knights found it convenient to…”
“Stop!” cried Lorraine, clapping her hands over her ears. “Horridest of sisters! And how Elmo could have been so indelicate as to tell you anything of that sort is…” She broke off, staring at a pair of riders who had been coming toward them on the valley road. They had been a featureless, animate couple until now. One was a woman unknown to Lorraine. Beside her rode a gentleman on a particularly beautiful bay stallion with a striking blaze on its forehead. She heard her sister stir besides her.
“Melbrooke!” exclaimed Lynden. She changed position, swinging her legs back from the edge to lay flat beside Lorraine. “Do you think he saw me?”
“No. But does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. Who knows what he’d think? Probably that I was spying on him or something.”
The woman, who was almost below them now, was clad in a mink-trimmed riding habit of a particularly lively shade of crimson, an elegant plumed bonnet perched on her ornate curls. The twins were too far away to make out her features, but her style and self-confident bearing bespoke a genteel beauty. The two riders were moving at a walk when the woman suddenly turned her horse to block Melbrooke’s path, and his stallion reared slightly and pawed the ground. She rode back to him and pulled her horse beside his so that the horses were facing in opposite directions. As the girls watched, the woman pulled so close that her leg was touching Melbrooke’s leg full length, and she leaned over to place her hand on his chest. They were evidently having a conversation, but from the stone platform overlooking the road the twins could hear nothing, not even a murmur. After a moment the pair rode on out of sight.
Lorraine turned her head to look wonderingly at Lynden. “Who was she?”
“Not one of his tenant farmers,” said Lynden grimly. She rested her chin thoughtfully in her cupped hands. A robin’s song drifted incongruously from the twisted branches of a bare mountain ash on the slope nearby.
“Do you think she’s from the castle?” asked Lorraine.
“The castle,” repeated Lynden slowly. “The castle! Silvia in the castle! Lorraine, don’t you remember? When I told the highwayman that Lord Melbooke and I were married he said something about Silvia waiting for him in her castle. And then he had the audacity to refuse to explain what he meant by it. And she was blonde, too! The highwayman said Melbrooke’s mistress was blonde!”
Lorraine sucked in her breath sharply, watching her sister with worried eyes. “Do you feel bad?”
“I—I’m not sure how I feel. I mean, Lord Melbrooke hardly pretended to be in love with me when he asked me to marry him, and everyone says he has a reputation as a rake.”
“They say that all gentlemen in the first rank of society have mistresses,” said Lorraine in an uncertain attempt at consolation. “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything.”
“I suppose not,” said Lynden. But somehow the robin’s song took on a mournful ring and the placid valley had lost some of its magic.
If Lynden could have decreed her thoughts, she might well have decided to banish all traces of Lord Melbrooke’s blonde companion. Unfortunately, it seemed that the more she tried not to think about her, the more vivid were the pictures her wayward imagination drew. Again and again on the walk home she saw the woman place her hand on Melbrooke’s chest, in a gesture at once intimate and flirtatious—a lover’s gesture.
Well, thought Lynden. Am I to be that most pitied of women, a deceived wife? How clever Aunt Eleanor has been, and how complete was her revenge, to have matched me with a man whose libertine propensities would cause his wife endless humiliation. Drearily, Lynden decided that the only respectable course would be to model her behavior after that of her favorite fictional heroines; to withdraw virtuously into a gentle shell, never betraying a glimpse of her travail. How proud she is, the world would say. How noble! Through all her husband’s philandering, no matter how public, she would bear herself with dignity! At least this was Lynden’s plan until she was half dressed for supper. Then, as a cheerful young maidservant was laying out her tired gray dinner dress, a new and vastly more appealing scheme danced brazenly into her mind.
“Not that one,” she announced in a markedly decisive voice. “Not the gray, Alice. Tonight I’d like something more…” She rushed to her cabinet and began searching energetically through her wardrobe. At last she found the very thing. “This!”
“This” proved to be an ankle-length ball dress in a shade of peacock blue, which had an undeniably flattering effect when combined with Lynden’s lush black hair and fresh complexion. She had worn it only once, in Yorkshire, at a small evening ball given in honor of one of the twins’ particular girl friends on the occasion of her seventeenth birthday, and so arranged that the young ladies in the birthday girl’s set might attend, even those not yet out. The ball had been a great success, but Lynden, in her peacock blue, had been an even greater one.
The gown’s neckline was rather daringly décolleté, especially for one so young as Lynden, which was, of course, one of the reasons she was so particularly pleased with it. Frowning at her reflection in the gilt-framed dressing mirror, Lynden regretted for a moment that she had no necklace to wear—of course her tiny gold heart-shaped locket would not do; but she then decided that perhaps a plainer effect might be more gracious. As an experiment, she asked the maid to pull her hair straight back from her forehead, leaving a few locks to fall from the crown in long Grecian curls and brush teasingly against her shoulders. Yes, she looked older!
So, appropriately costumed, she had only to put herself into the proper mood for her new role—that of the gay, heart-whole sophisticate. It would be better, so much better than her previous plan, not only because she had strong doubts about whether she would be able to maintain an air of virtuous resignation for more than a quarter hour running, but also because she had the uncomfortable feeling that a martyred withdrawal might be misinterpreted by persons of little sensibility as a teenage sulk, or, worse yet, as the sign of a broken heart! Intolerable! Instead, vowed Lynden, she would show The World (and her unfaithful husband) that so little did Melbrooke mean to her that his extramarital affairs were a matter of unconcern to her. No, better—amusement. Lynde
n dismissed her maid and practiced in her mirror.
“Why, Lady Marchpane,” she exclaimed brightly to her own flushing image, waving her hands with great animation. “What ever do you mean? Oh, was my husband seen entering the apartments of Lady X last night? Really, it is too naughty of him. Not that I care a penny pepper, of course! Oh, Lady Marchpane, didn’t you know? I’m surprised at you. I thought you knew everything! You see, Melbrooke and I have an agreement—we each go our own ways. We’re quite the modern couple!” She blew the mirror a flippant kiss and went to see if Lorraine was ready to go down to dinner. Lorraine was not. She had gotten involved in reading a new poetry anthology and somehow the minutes had slipped away unheeded. She eyed Lynden’s ball gown askance, but said nothing about her tomboyish twin’s sudden fancy for fashion and urged her to go along to the dining parlor. She would join Lynden there presently.
The dining parlor was small and formal, its walls miraculously hung in strong blue damask, forming a very pretty background for Lynden’s gown. Over the mantel hung a large, Louis XVI tapestry which depicted Venus directing a come-hither look at a handsome mortal Adonis. Adonis was gazing back at her with wary speculation, leaning his broad shoulders against a leafy olive tree. He was tall, slim, and blond—in a word, Melbrooke-like. As Lynden looked at the picture, fantasy replaced Adonis’s loincloth with knee-breeches and a formal dinner jacket, and Venus’s mantle with a mink-trimmed crimson riding habit and fashionable bonnet, Adonis abandoned his lazy posture against the tree and, walking over to Venus, took a firm grip on her shoulders. Suddenly Lynden was back at the church altar in her wedding gown and Melbrooke was leaning toward her, holding her shoulders. In the tapestry the nineteenth-century Adonis brought his lips slowly to Venus’s waiting mouth, and she closed her eyes, pressing closer against his body. Lynden felt again the pressure of Melbrooke’s kiss, the gentle intensity, the insistent caress.
