“You’re not as familiar with the woods,” she pointed out. “I grew up here in Sussex.”
“I might get lost?” He’d gained an octave, which wasn’t easy to do when one was whispering. “I might? These woods are dense and it isn’t safe for a woman to wander about alone. You will stay and I will go.” He said this curtly and dismissively and pulled away from her grasp.
If she’d been a cat, her fur would have been erect with outrage. “I never just . . . wander.”
“For the love of God, woman . . .” he growled. He clapped an exasperated hand to his forehead, which sent his precariously perched hat tumbling off.
He spun about, lunged for it, missed, bounced it futilely a few times off of his fingertips, and one final valiant lunge to capture it merely served to bat it across the clearing.
It cart-wheeled merrily over the ground and came to a rest well out of his reach.
Just as the top of Lisbeth’s shining head and her exquisite profile came bobbing into view over the top of the hedgerow.
“Erk!” was the last thing he said before he threw himself to the ground and slithered on his belly over the wet grass, aiming like a lizard for the hedgerow. His boot heels were just disappearing from view behind it when Lisbeth appeared, humming happily to herself. She was followed by Waterburn, who was followed by the hound.
Phoebe was frozen. She felt certain she would never forget the image of a marquess vanishing like a lizard into a hedgerow.
“Phoebe does wander off now and again on walks all by herself,” Lisbeth was telling Lord Waterburn, “but she knows this part of Sussex fairly well, so I shouldn’t worry. I thought I heard voices right about here. Didn’t you hear them, too?”
The ensuing noncommittal syllable from Waterburn could have meant anything. Phoebe doubted he was expending very much concern over whether she might have gotten lost.
She could almost feel Jules’s triumph radiating from behind the hedgerow: You never wander, Miss Vale?
“I walk but I don’t get lost,” Phoebe called out loudly, cheerily, pointedly . . .
. . . and prematurely. Because: Bloody hell! His hat. She’d forgotten about his hat!
It throbbed with significance on the ground like a great poisonous toadstool right where Lisbeth would see it the moment she entered the clearing.
She snatched it up, wondered why on earth she would do that since having it in her hands was hardly better than leaving it on the ground, then thrust it behind her back in both hands as Lisbeth burst into view and came to a surprised halt at the brink of the clearing.
Lord Waterburn’s towering blondness hovered over the top of the hedgerow and his boots crunched to a halt as he dispassionately surveyed his surroundings. He was still cradling the musket. Likely he considered the day a sort of purgatory, one in which he was destined to wander and wander and never shoot anything.
“Well, there you are, Phoebe!” Lisbeth sounded pleased. “It is just you?”
Chapter 13
She took a cursory look about the clearing to ascertain the truth of this, but it was clear she’d already drawn that conclusion. And Phoebe knew a quick, sizzling irritation that Lisbeth didn’t at all doubt she was alone and not doing anything untoward with anyone, let alone a marquess. She was tempted to touch her still-burning lips again to prove to herself she had indeed been kissed, because the mere appearance of the glowing and no doubt eminently kissable Lisbeth made it seem an impossibility.
And she would have touched her lips, if she hadn’t been holding a beaver hat behind her back.
The three new arrivals—Lisbeth, Waterburn, and the hound—regarded Phoebe for a silent bemused instant.
Jonathan and Argosy’s laughter came to them distantly.
Then the dog sighed and tipped over with a snort and began to doze.
“I thought I heard more than one voice,” Lisbeth said finally.
“Oh! Well, likely you just heard me . . . singing.” Phoebe’s voice fluted from nerves; she cleared her throat to restore her usual pitch. “A duet. I like to sing both of the parts when . . . when I’m alone. To feel less alone. Signora Licari inspired me.”
Perhaps that was laying it on a bit thick.
Lisbeth clapped her hands together, which made Phoebe jump, since her nerves were a bit sensitive. “Singing! What an excellent idea! Perhaps we should all sing, and if Jules is lost he’ll be able to hear us.”
“I will not be singing,” Lord Waterburn said flatly.
“Does he often get lost?” Phoebe couldn’t resist asking, “The marquess?”
“Never,” Waterburn said, and shifted the musket into his other arm and looked at his nails, as if they were infinitely more interesting than she could ever be. You’ve still five of them, Phoebe was tempted to say snidely. “Would get you killed in the army, getting lost would.”
She could practically feel the rays of satisfied vindication pouring over the shrubbery.
A quick sideways glance told her the marquess had rolled over on his back. If she looked very closely, she could see his boot toes pointing up at the air, gleaming.
She imagined herself lying next to him, his arms around her, staring up through the trees at the blue sky and suddenly she couldn’t breathe as a fresh wash of lust swamped her.
She nearly swayed with it. What had happened to her? What had he unleashed?
Was it permanent?
“What a lovely clearing you’ve found, Phoebe. Odd that I haven’t seen it before. It’s downright magical, isn’t it?” Lisbeth spun slowly, arms outstretched, head tipped back, embracing it, and she was so fair and flushed and glossy that the gesture didn’t seem at all contrived. She looked like a nymph surveying her domain.
Phoebe wondered how quickly his heart was beating. And whether a squirrel had ambled over to sniff him, or whether insects had decided to have a look at a prone marquess, and were perhaps crawling for the intriguing openings his nostrils and ears presented.
She almost smiled.
“Oh, and look, there’s your sketchbook, Phoebe. I’ve finished naught in mine. Let’s have a look at yours!”
Her sketchbook! Bloody hell!
It was soaking up grass and dew a few feet away from where she sat, closer to Lisbeth than to her. From where she stood she could just make out her quick, impassioned charcoal of the marquess. He looked angular and tempestuous and the masses of dark hair she’d given him resembled nothing so much as flames and smoke shooting from a burning building. The sketch glowered up at the sky much the way the real marquess was likely doing right now.
Really more of a reflection of her own feelings than of the man himself. And this was incriminating indeed.
Oh, God. Lisbeth started merrily toward the sketchbook. Time torturously slowed. One step. Two steps. The crunch of her friend’s boots over the grass rang in Phoebe’s ears like the crunch of her own bones. Phoebe stared helplessly into her doom. Short of throwing herself bodily at her friend’s ankles, there was nothing she could do to stop her from reaching the sketchbook first.
And then out of the corner of her eye, she saw the musket gleaming. Inspiration alighted like an angel, and she blurted:
“If you saw a grouse right now, would you prefer to shoot it or sketch it?” she blurted.
“Sketch it,” Lisbeth said at the same time Lord Waterburn said, “Shoot it.”
“Because I think I saw one right over there by that tree! The . . . the tree that looks like an old man.” She pointed in the opposite direction.
Her friends whirled in unison, and when they did Phoebe hurled the marquess’s hat like a discus over the hawthorn hedge and made a lunge for her sketchbook.
There was a startled grunt from over the hedgerow.
Lisbeth and Lord Waterburn whirled back around.
Lisbeth stared at Phoebe, who froze in something perilously similar to a pointer position.
What looked suspiciously like . . . like suspicion . . . creased Lisbeth’s brow.
Behind her Lord Waterburn’s face scrunched infinitesimally, registering distaste—but a bit insultingly, not surprise—at the notion she might have made a grunting noise.
There was no hope for it. She was going to have to grunt.
“Ugh,” she said, as she lunged gracelessly, seized the corner of her sketchbook and dragged it across the grass safely into her hands.
When she was upright again she saw the vestiges of a wince vanishing from Lord Waterburn’s face.
She clutched the sketchbook to her bosom. Her heart was thudding sickeningly.
Lisbeth studied her for a silent moment, a bit nonplussed by Phoebe’s sudden lunge.
“I don’t see the resemblance.”
Phoebe felt faint. “Resem . . .”
“To an old man. The tree.” Her gaze was fixed.
Phoebe had seen a man aim a gaze down a rifle just like that.
“Oh.” Relief swamped her: not the sketch. “Don’t you? I suppose I thought so, since it’s gnarled, and bent, and . . .” She gave up when she saw Lisbeth’s expression go patient and tolerant, complete with humoring upraised brows. “Fanciful of me, I suppose. Something about this clearing, perhaps. Magical. As you said.”
Carnal, was more like it. Dangerous. A trap!
Lisbeth gamely turned back toward the tree to give it another examination.
“I see it a little bit around the north side of the trunk,” she allowed charitably. “Perhaps that knot might be construed as a nose?”
Waterburn snorted.
She really is a lovely person, Phoebe thought despairingly. She glanced down; her charcoaled marquess glowered back up at her. He was smudged.
She glanced down at her bodice; it was smudged, too. And then a horrible possibility occurred to her: she may have inadvertently pressed a perfect charcoal image of the marquess to her bosom. She might as well have sewn a scarlet A for herself.
She slapped the sketchbook back to her chest.
For heaven’s sake. Gather your wits, Vale, she told herself.
It seemed desperately unfair how quickly life became chaotic, given the years she’d spent ensuring it was orderly.
“Yes! I suppose I was imagining the knot as nose.” She lowered her arms just a few inches and sent a wistful glance down at her sketchbook. “It’s just as I thought. My sketchbook is ruined. The pages have warped from the damp.”
Lisbeth clucked sympathy. “I’m sure your drawings were very pretty, too,” she indulged. “Now where do you suppose the marquess has got to?”
“Perhaps he got lost for the very first time.”
She said it with deviltry in mind, and specifically for the person flattened behind the hedgerow, but she heard uncertainty, and something very close to query, in her voice. Damnation. She was the one who was lost. She’d collected knowledge like gemstones, amassing her very own treasure chest in the absence of a fortune. She buffed and polished all the rough corners from the young ladies at school with facts, just as her teachers had more or less refined her. Her reputation and comportment were considered faultless. She was held up as an example for all the young ladies.
And now she might be sporting a charcoal marquess on her bosom and she’d just grunted twice.
If she’d correctly interpreted the expression on the marquess’s face right before he gripped her wrist . . . he was lost, too. At the very least, he was confused.
No man had ever looked at her that way before. And no matter what happened, no matter what continent she lived on, she would never forget it. She half suspected it would be the last thing she saw every night before she slept.
But a man who’d lost his moorings was liable to do anything, she thought.
“Well, let’s help him find us.” Lisbeth was purposeful. “What song were you singing before we arrived, Phoebe? The one you took in parts?”
Twigs cracked as Lord Waterburn’s boots shifted restlessly.
Oh, no. Phoebe stared at Lisbeth blankly while her mind whirred. She knew so few songs, really, in their entirety, and her voice was tolerable at best.
But she was on a quest to distract Lisbeth, and suddenly she knew just the way to do it.
“The . . . the one about Colin Eversea! I learned a new verse from a young lady at school. It’s very funny and . . . and . . . bawdy.”
That last word was a reckless inspiration. She presented it almost defiantly.
Lisbeth blinked as though she’d flicked water into her eyes.
Lisbeth and Waterburn eyed her for a silent nonplussed instant.
A finch peeped somewhere in the hedgerows.
Apparently it wasn’t a word anyone associated with her, or particularly wanted to associate with her, judging from the carefully bland expression on Waterburn’s face.
Next I’ll try the word whore in a sentence, she thought wildly.
“Oh, do let’s sing it now!” Lisbeth said finally, as though Phoebe had just broken wind and they’d all just chosen to ignore it. The Redmonds were bloodthirsty when it came to the Everseas, thanks to the business with Lyon, and eager to perpetuate the worst of their reputations in song. “I’ll start, and then you can sing your new baw . . . your new verse,” she humored. “Do let’s!”
Oh, God. She’d now have to invent a bawdy verse on the spot. She’d never had to improvise so much in her entire life as she had in the last five minutes.
Improvise being another word for lie, of course.
Lisbeth took a deep breath, and flung her arms out, and with gusto began, “Ohhhhh, if you thought you’d never see, the end of Colin Ever—”
With shocking speed, Lord Waterburn sighed, cocked the musket and fired straight up in the air.
A cloud of tiny startled birds burst from out of the shrubbery like so much shrapnel and disappeared into the sky. Phoebe and Lisbeth jumped and waved away musket smoke and coughed.
Woof, the dog said disinterestedly, after a moment.
When the smoke cleared Waterburn was greeted by a pair of baleful stares.
“That should flush Dryden out,” Waterburn said mildly, finally. “He’ll follow the sound. Not to mention Jonathan and Argosy.”
“Was that necessary?” Lisbeth finally said reproachfully. “You could have just refused to sing.”
A lazy smile tugged up one corner of Waterburn’s mouth. “What fun would that have been? And I did refuse.”
Interesting, Phoebe thought almost sympathetically. Waterburn really was bored. He was tolerating a good deal more than they had realized. But what he made up for in fortune and manners he lacked in imagination. So he was perhaps destined to suffer at the hands of the likes of Lisbeth, who took for granted that men would indulge her, enjoy or pretend to enjoy her company, and happily consent to holding her embroidery silks or carrying her picnic basket or otherwise being steered to wherever she wanted them to go, like a mule. Because she was beautiful and young and wealthy.
Until, of course, she married. In which case, her husband would do whatever he wished and she would do whatever he wished her to do.
Women really were afforded so few windows of power. Perhaps she couldn’t fault Lisbeth for seizing the moment while she could.
And how perilously close she’d been to giving away whatever power she did have . . . to a man.
“Well, I do wonder where he could have got to,” Lisbeth fussed, irritable now. “You must have seen him, Phoebe, for you both seemed to vanish at about the same time.”
Oh, dear. Phoebe darted a glance toward the shrubbery. The boot toes had disappeared. Jules must have taken advantage of the musket roar to scramble—or slither—away.
“I . . . fear I didn’t see him. And I didn’t vanish, I just found a clearing,” she pointed out, trying for good humor, and stammering when Lisbeth’s blue eyes fixed on her unblinkingly. “I didn’t see him. I suppose I thought he was with you. And I’m sorry, but I don’t know which direction he took.” It wasn’t strictly a lie. Not at the moment. “I was distracted, you see, when I saw this clear
ing, I was drawn toward it. And then I began sketching and—”
She reared back when Lisbeth stepped abruptly toward her. So close she could see the tiny fine, fine hairs on Lisbeth’s upper lip.
“How on earth did your bonnet become so askew, you silly thing.”
Phoebe blinked. Lisbeth had never said such a thing to her before. She was patently not a silly thing, had never been, and everyone knew it. Everyone in fact counted on it. And while the words had the ring of affection, the question was strangely uninflected.
Lisbeth reached out and made a great show of rearranging Phoebe’s bonnet, unknotting the ribbons, freeing them from her hairpins, drawing them smooth between her fingers, her gaze unnervingly direct and uncharacteristically inscrutable. Phoebe remained as motionless as a rabbit before a wolf. Phoebe was certain that if Lisbeth were later interrogated about the number of hairs in her eyebrows she would surprise everyone with a correct answer.
“I must have knocked it askew on a branch,” she managed faintly.
While she submitted to having her bonnet rearranged, it occurred to her a word or two from Isaiah Redmond could remove her from her position at the academy and render her forever unemployable in England.
Whereupon she’d have no place to go—she hadn’t yet enough money saved for her journey to Africa—and would be ruined in nearly the blink of an eye.
She maintained what she hoped was an inscrutable expression. But now her palms were perspiring.
Lisbeth gave a brisk satisfied nod when she got her friend neatly wrapped and tied, precisely the way she liked her.
Which was when they heard the rustle of something significantly larger than a finch moving about in the woods nearby. Before they had time to flinch there came a voice.
“It’s Dryden, not a wolf or a bear. Don’t shoot, Waterburn.”
The marquess parted the hedgerow with as much dignity as anyone bursting through a hedgerow could muster, and emerged.
His hat was restored to his head. And he looked otherwise crisp.
The dog lifted its head, stared at the marquess with an expression remarkably like Waterburn’s disdain, gave an obligatory woof and rested its head on its paws again.
How the Marquess Was Won Page 13
