Reckless Angel

by Jane Feather

  Daniel sighed. He should have known, of course. Henrietta did not have the patience or the personality for these social dissemblings.

  “There is every virtue,” said Daniel. “You cannot accuse someone of a crime without evidence. Your father has not yet openly withheld your inheritance. He has not yet been asked for it.” He spoke sharply.

  “Indeed,” agreed Master Filbert hastily. “’Tis hardly a seemly matter and one must be careful whom one accuses in these times, and of what. Let us call it a misunderstanding and treat it as such. I am sure ’twill be remedied without delay.”

  Henrietta shrugged. “You may believe that if you choose. I know better, I fear.”

  Daniel stood up. “I think enough has been said. If you will let me look over the letter you have drawn up, Master Filbert, we will be on our way, and wish you godspeed and success.”

  The lawyer shuffled papers on his desk, drawing out a neat black-penned parchment, handing it to Sir Daniel. Henrietta, deciding that she was already in so deep a further indiscretion could make little difference, stood up and went to peer in most brazen fashion over Daniel’s shoulder, reading the crisp, lawyerly script that turned such an emotional issue into a dusty matter of legal terms.

  “Have you finished?” Daniel said, dryly pointed, when he reached the end.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I trust it meets with your approval.”

  “If it meets with yours,” she said meekly.

  Daniel was far from mollified, but he said nothing. Master Filbert’s sensibilities had been scraped sufficiently for one morning. He handed the document back to the lawyer, and they went out again into the cold street.

  “Y’are vexed?” Harry said without preamble.

  “Very,” Daniel agreed. “But as much with myself as with you. I should have known you would not be able to behave correctly.”

  “I do not consider I behaved incorrectly,” Harry said stoutly. “Why should I not read the letter? It concerns me as much if not more than you.”

  “You are my wife,” Daniel said quietly. “As such, anything that concerns you concerns me directly. Wives behave with a degree of decorum; you did not. While it may be well enough for you to go on in your customary ramshackle, hoity fashion when we are private, in public I would have you abide by the rules. I do not care to be put to shame by my wife’s conduct.”

  Henrietta looked for a defense but could not find one. She knew that a wife was required to be gentle, obedient, and bow to her husband’s greater sense and knowledge in all matters. Wives did not set themselves up in opposition to their husbands, or argue with their husbands’ judgment and manner of conducting their affairs. Wives did not intrude upon those affairs. Such a wife would indeed bring shame upon her husband. She knew all these things, but it did not mean she could accept them.

  Daniel glanced down at her as she walked, head bent and in silence, at his side. She was so far from the conventional mold, it seemed futile to try to refashion her. Somehow or other, he was going to have to come to terms with that, but Henrietta was going to have to come to terms with public realities.

  In the interests of encouraging this coming to terms, he offered no softening during a silent dinner of Dorcas’s preparing, and at the end of the meal told his wife that he had business to attend to and would be back later in the afternoon. She should occupy herself about the house as best she could.

  If he had but known it, such a plan suited Henrietta to perfection. When Daniel returned to the house, he would find a very different wife waiting for him, one who would hopefully cause him to forget utterly any unwifelike indiscretions in lawyers’ offices.

  She had two crowns left over from the money Daniel had given her for household necessities before they left Kent, and armed with these she left the house, her cloak drawn tight around her. Dorcas did not seem surprised or doubtful when informed of the impending excursion, so presumably was unaware of Daniel’s proscription on unescorted journeyings. She offered no cautionary advice either, which led Harry to the conclusion that Daniel had been unnecessarily anxious. Anyway, she was not going far, just to the shop they had passed earlier where she had seen scents, soaps, and dried herbs for sale.

  As she passed the entrance to a narrow alley, a small boy, begrimed, his clothing ragged, shot out in front of her. He was clutching half a loaf of bread. From behind him came the familiar sounds of a hue and cry, the bellow of “Stop, thief!” He tripped over a stone at Harry’s feet, and a white face, haunted by a pair of terrified eyes, gazed up at her as he waited for her to lay hold of him.

  Swiftly, she bent and pulled him to his feet. “Make haste!” She accompanied the urgent whisper with a shove in the direction of another alley across the street. Without so much as a backward glance, he was off, streaking between the wheels of carriages and the massive hooves of dray horses, to be lost in the throng.

  “’E came out ’ere, I swear it!” A constable, scarlet with exertion, appeared in the entrance of the alley, flourishing his staff of office; behind him came a mountainous man whose flour-dusted apron bespoke his trade.

  “Thievin’ brat!” the baker declared, wiping his moist brow and looking around him. His eye fell upon Henrietta, who still stood with apparent nonchalance, gazing about her. “Eh, miss, you seen a brat around ’ere in the last minute?”

  Harry raised a haughty eyebrow as if to indicate she was unaccustomed to being addressed by such as he. “I have not,” she declared. “Brats do not interest me.”

  “Hoity-toity!” murmured the baker, but the constable, who knew gentry when he met it, touched his forelock, muttered a word of apology, and dragged his companion in the opposite direction.

  With a satisfied chuckle, Henrietta continued on her way, ducking under the low lintel of the little shop where heady scents of dried lavender, musk, and beeswax filled the air. In the country one prepared such things oneself and it would be unheard of to purchase them, but she swallowed the prickle of guilt at spending coin in this profligate fashion and gave her order to the dame sitting on a low stool beside the smoking fireplace. Dried lavender, a small jar of distilled rose water, and, most precious and important of all, a cake of soap, not of the kind they made at home from lye and animal fats, but soft, delicately scented with verbena, and most dreadfully costly. But Daniel would consider the cost as naught, she determined, squashing her conscience at the pathetic sixpence that was all the change she received for her two crowns.

  With her purchases buried deep in the pocket of her cloak, she hurried back down crowded Cheapside and onto Paternoster Row. A yelling mob had formed a circle outside a butcher’s shop and, curious as always, she moved to see what was causing the ruction. She pushed her way to the front of the crowd, disregarding the curses and shoves of protest, and then promptly wished she had not. Two youths had tied a burning brand to the tail of a scrawny, one-eyed cat. The crowd was roaring with laughter, tossing clods of mud, stones, and anything else they could lay hands on as the poor tormented creature screamed in pain and rage, trying desperately to escape the fire.

  Henrietta was not unaccustomed to country brutalities, but there was a different quality to this vicious crowd-pleasing torture. It was aimless, pointless, just something to pass the time. She plunged into the circle and tried to grab the cat, but it evaded her grasp and the crowd laughed louder, enjoying this new spectacle. Weeping with anger and frustration, she flung every stable oath she knew at the mob, and then quite suddenly a bucket of slops was emptied from an overhanging window all over the cat, effectively dousing the fire and splashing Henrietta’s skirt and boots. The casement closed with a decisive snap and the crowd grumbled.

  “Eh, Lady Drummond, what be ye about? Ye shouldn’t be ’anging around ’ere.” Dorcas’s goodman appeared from nowhere it seemed, his face anxious, his customary taciturnity vanished. He took her arm and hustled her through the crowd as the murmurs swelled and took on an ugly note. “They’d be accusing ye as a spoilsport next,” he mu
ttered, “then there’s no knowin’ what would ’appen.”

  Henrietta shuddered, feeling queasy. Perhaps Daniel had not been overcautious. The mood of the crowd had been such that little consideration would be paid to her age, sex, and social position. The goodman escorted her to the door and saw her within before going off about his business again, and Dorcas came hurrying from the kitchen, exclaiming at Harry’s white face.

  “’Twas some louts torturing a cat,” Harry explained. “It made me feel as if I would puke.”

  “There’s worse than that goin’ on in this city,” Dorcas said darkly. “They’ll be killing the king next, you mark my words.”

  Henrietta unclasped her cloak, beginning to recover her equilibrium as she remembered the purpose of her errand. “I’d like to bathe, Dorcas. D’ye have a tub I could fill in the bedchamber?”

  Dorcas looked a little surprised but agreed readily enough to supply tub and hot water, and Harry hastened upstairs, hoping Daniel would remain absent long enough. She laid her purchases upon the tiring table, the afternoon’s unpleasantness forgotten as she contemplated her plan. Was she being naive to think it could work? Nay! She dismissed such feebleness with a brisk wave of her hand. Daniel was going to come home to a pleasant, and hopefully exciting, surprise.

  Ten minutes later, she stood naked before a steaming wooden tub. She shook the contents of the rosewater jar into the water and stirred it vigorously. The delicate scent filled the room, enhanced by the fire’s warmth. The lavender she sprinkled on the surface of the water, then she stepped in, sinking down into the hot, soothing fragrance. The precious sliver of soap was unlike any she had ever used, smooth as velvet, and when she rubbed it between her hands it lathered instantly with verbena-scented froth.

  She poured a jug of hot water over her hair and soaped it thoroughly, then rinsed it with a second jug. Then she simply lay back, her knees drawn up, head resting on the edge of the bath, and closed her eyes to lose herself in a luxurious, sensuous, wickedly extravagant dream of desire.

  “Sweet Jesus! ’Tis as if all the perfumes of Araby have come here to roost!” Daniel stepped through the door, chilled by his walk through the snow-threatening evening, and stood blinking. The room was fogged with scented steam, wreathing and curling in the warm air.

  Lazily, Henrietta turned her head to the door and smiled. “Y’are earlier than I expected.”

  “What the devil goes on here?” He stepped over to the tub, drawn by that smile although not quite realizing it. He stood looking down at her. Her face was flushed with the warm water…and with something else. That something else lurked behind the dreaminess in her big brown eyes, danced over the curve of her smiling mouth. He allowed his eyes to drift down her body, pink and pearly beneath the lavender-strewn water, her breasts peeping rose-tipped above the surface, and he was suddenly breathless. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time, as if the lean little body with which he was familiar had taken on some other quality, as if there were secrets here that were his to discover. And in the eyes fixed upon his face there lingered the invitation to discover.

  He shook his head, as if to dispel the strange sensation, but it remained, and he began to wonder if he were bewitched, if perhaps Harry, his child-wife, had disappeared, a changeling in her place. Slowly, she stood up, the water flowing from her body. Stretching her arms behind her head, she caught the soaked mass of hair and wrung it out between her hands, her eyes never leaving his face. Where the devil had she learned such a seductive movement, such a wickedly inviting smile? She reached out her hands to him and he took them without volition. She stepped from the water, coming close to him, enveloping him in her mingled lavender, rosewater, and verbena aura.

  “If you wish to bathe also, I will wash your back,” she whispered, standing on tiptoe and lightly brushing his mouth with her lips, before moving to unclasp his cloak.

  “You’ll catch cold if you do not dry yourself,” he managed to say through a husky throat. Turning aside with some considerable effort, he picked up the towel. “Let me do it for you.”

  She stood still for him as he gently blotted the water from her skin, his bare hand occasionally brushing her as if to satisfy himself that she was truly dry. He could feel her skin, soft as rose petals, flutter at each touch, and her nipples stood out, hard and wanting. Her legs parted as the towel moved down and intimately within, then he turned her sideways, placing one arm across her waist, bending her over it as he dried down her back and between her buttocks and thighs, missing not a nook or cranny.

  When he could find no further damp spots for excuse, he rubbed her hair vigorously, then stood back.

  “Now ’tis your turn,” Henrietta said softly, reaching for the buttons of his shirt. “I will maid you, sir.” And quite naked, she proceeded to do just that.

  It seemed to Daniel that he had slid into some trancelike universe where everything accustomed had been turned topsy-turvy, and one whom he had thought he knew in all her facets had become some other person. Her touch was sure, as if undressing a man was something with which she was quite familiar. She seemed to weave and wreathe around him, all soft and pliant nakedness offered to his eyes and hands, as her lips brushed, her fingers tiptoed, over each fraction of his body she unclothed.

  Scented steam, the occasional crackle of a hot coal, the soft yellow glow of candlelight enhanced the dreamy lethargy created by her attentions, yet beneath the lethargy lust’s dragon stirred for the first time since Nan’s death, twitched a fierce tail, played a waiting game.

  Henrietta had discovered the power of fantasy. With every move she made, every whispering touch of her skin with his, the erotic dream grew stronger. Excitement flowed through her veins, set her skin to gleaming rosy and translucent, moistened the deep recesses of her body so she moved with more abandon, and demand began to infuse the way she touched him.

  Leaning over him where he lay in the bath, she brought her mouth to his, her tongue pressing deeply insistent within, the hard crowns of her breasts tingling against his damp chest. He groaned with pleasure, running his hands down her back, nipping the firm flesh of her buttocks between finger and thumb. Her teeth closed over his lower lip in urgent, bold response and her hand slid between their bodies to grasp the rising shaft nudging her belly.

  “You are going to taste the water again, my elf,” Daniel murmured, his eyes now burning as lust’s dragon abandoned the waiting game. His hands spanned her back, holding her against him as he twisted. Water slopped over the rim onto the waxed floor; there was a brief, ungainly tangle of limbs, then Harry found herself back in the tub looking up at him as he knelt astride her.

  Her body, moist and slippery in welcome, took him deep within; her eyes, huge pools of hungry wonder, were fastened upon his face; her tongue, damp and eager, ran over her lips; her hands gripped the corded muscles of his upper arms as he braced himself against the rim of the tub.

  Slowly, wickedly, he withdrew to the very edge of her body and held himself there at the nerve-stretched tender opening. Her hips shifted in the now-cooling water and her body quivered around the tantalizing tip of the pleasure bringer. A warm languour spread through her lower body. It filled and then engulfed her so that she heard her own voice from a great distance making strange, incoherent sounds. Then, as he drove deep within, the bottom fell out of the universe and she felt herself sinking, without shape, without identity, into delight’s embrace.

  Daniel shuddered in glory on his own mountain, looking down at the heart-shaped face rapt with joyous wonder beneath him. There was a moment when her eyelids fluttered, opened, and the wide eyes gazed into his, their expression one of tenderness and an amazed gratitude, as if she had been given a priceless gift. And he knew that his own expression would mirror hers. She had indeed gifted him this day and laid to rest the ghosts of past glories he had thought never to re-create.

  He felt her shiver suddenly and the world reasserted itself. They were once more a man and a woman with limbs entangled
in a bathtub of tepid water, and the fire was getting low, and the wind fingered its way through cracks in the casement. “Come,” he said softly, brushing a wet tendril of hair from her brow. “I think you have bathed sufficiently for one day.” He drew himself upright, stepping from the water.

  Henrietta lay, still too languid to make the effort to move, feeling the water lap her skin where, despite the chill, a faint sheen of perspiration glowed. Daniel bent and splashed water between her breasts, ran a cleansing hand delicately between her thighs, then lifted her from the tub. She smiled dreamily at him, making no attempt to reach for the towel. He pushed her close to the fire, grabbed the towel, still damp from her previous bath, and rubbed her down vigorously, with none of the lingering caresses of before. It served to bring her back to herself and the world again, and she shivered anew.

  “Put on your nightgown, love.” Daniel threw a scuttle of coals upon the fire, poked it fiercely, and the flames spurted high, throwing out renewed heat. “Quickly,” he said, as she huddled toward the warmth, reluctant to cross the room to fetch her fur-trimmed nightgown of dark blue wool.

  She paused for a moment, savoring the endearment he had never before used, warmed to her core by the softness of his tone, the ease and naturalness with which he had spoken it.

  Daniel fetched the gown himself, tossing it around her shoulders. “Y’are bewitched!” he said with a laugh, setting to dry himself. “And I can hardly blame you. I think I am myself.”

  “I had thought to create such a wonderland,” she said, finding her voice at last and sounding just a little smug.

  “Mmmm.” He put on his shirt, stepped into his britches, then stood regarding her quizzically. “Such a sweet-scented wonderland, it was. May I ask how you acquired such luxuries?”

  A tinge of pink colored her cheekbones. “I spent a little of the money you gave me for household expenses last month. I thought ’twould not be a bad use.”

  “No,” he said thoughtfully, “I will not quarrel with that. Did you ask Dorcas to make the purchases for you?”