Reckless Angel

by Jane Feather

  Daniel looked her up and down in a teasing appraisal before placing his hand on the top of her head and twirling her around so he could view her back in the same fashion.

  “Do you like what you see, sir?” she inquired sweetly.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he observed solemnly.

  “Why you…you…” Speechless, she spun on him, pummeling him with her small fists while he doubled over with laughter, making no attempt to defend himself until at last he caught her against him, pinning her arms at her sides, his hands flattening warmly against her bottom.

  “What a humorless termagant I have taken to wife! Be still, now.”

  “’Twas not in the least amusing,” she declared with an attempt at lofty dignity. Unfortunately, lofty dignity and nakedness were not natural partners, she discovered, particularly when that nakedness was clasped so firmly to a powerful and fully clothed body. Her skin rippled where it touched the softness of silk, the cold silver hardness of a button. Her nipples peaked; her buttock muscles clenched involuntarily against the hands holding them. She felt amazingly vulnerable, but it was a heady sensation and not in the least alarming. She looked up into his face and saw in his eyes the recognition of what she was feeling. A dark eyebrow lifted quizzically, and a tremulous smile hovered on her lips in response.

  “Well, now,” he drawled softly, “I seem to have discovered the way to tame a virago.” Her tongue ran over her lips, but she said nothing. “Fetch the pillows from the bed and put them on the floor by the window in the sun,” he instructed, slowly taking his hands from her.

  She obeyed in silence, her blood coursing swift with anticipation, the sweet juices of arousal beginning to flow. Then she stood by the makeshift bed, watching him undress.

  He sat on the chair to pull off his boots. “Lie down and close your eyes. Imagine y’are in the garden, lying naked and alone under the sun.”

  She did as he said, closing her eyes, yielding herself to the warm air, the play of the sun fingering her skin as she shifted to catch it, the sensuous depths of the cushions beneath her. Her hands roamed slowly over her body, feeling the living heat of her skin, the shape of herself, the languid power of rising desire, and when those other hands joined her own in delicious exploration, she slipped into a dreamland of delight, where the mind held no sway and only the sensations of the flesh were of importance…

  When she awoke, the sun was low in the sky and shadows lurked in the corners of the chamber. She stretched, lazy and languorous on the pillows, and her mouth curved in a smug smile of memory as she opened her eyes.

  “You look like the cat with the cream,” Daniel said with a chuckle from the chair, where he had been sitting watching her as the sun went down.

  “’Tis how I feel.” Still smiling, she rolled onto her side and propped herself on one elbow, examining him. He was once more in shirt and britches. “Did you not sleep?”

  He shook his head. “Nay, the play that sent you to sleep merely served to refresh me, and I would not miss for a minute the enjoyment of such an entrancing sight.”

  Her eye fell on the strongbox resting on the marquetry chest, and other memories pushed to the forefront of her mind. Perchance, in the soft glow of after-love, Daniel would be more responsive. She sat up on her cushions and regarded him speculatively. “D’ye love me?”

  A tiny frown appeared in his previously tender eyes. “Why would you ask such a silly question, Harry?”

  It was not encouraging, but having fixed upon this course she decided to pursue it regardless. “Well, I do not see why, if you truly love me, you would not share with me what is in those dispatches.”

  The love light died completely from the black eyes. “We have had this discussion once. I do not care to repeat it.”

  Henrietta uncurled herself from the cushions and came over to him. “Please,” she coaxed, bending to kiss his forehead. “I am your wife and a part of you. ’Twould not be betraying the king’s confidence to tell me.”

  Daniel sighed and stood up, putting her from him. “I do not wish to grow angry with you, Henrietta, but if you persist in this fashion I shall become so. I have said no, and I meant it. ’Tis past time you learned that I mean what I say, and I do not tolerate pestering.”

  Henrietta flushed with annoyance. “There is no need to talk to me as if I were Lizzie.”

  “If you were Lizzie,” Daniel said deliberately, “there would be no need for me to say this. She is far too well schooled. Mayhap you should take a leaf from her book.” He stalked to the door, then stopped and turned back to her, shaking his head ruefully. “Oh, come now, sweetheart, let us not quarrel. ’Tis the last thing I wish to do.”

  “I do not wish to either,” she said with perfect truth, cuddling into his arms. “’Twas only that I thought…Oh, well, never mind. We will not talk of it further.”

  Daniel accepted this apparent compliance without question. He kissed her and told her to hurry with her dressing as they were expected at the Prada for a reception. “I’ve a powerful thirst for that Rioja I acquired from the wine merchant last week. I’ll go down to the cellar and fetch up a bottle.” So saying, he left the chamber, closing the door after him.

  Henrietta reached absently for her discarded smock, slipping it over her head, tying the ribbon, flicking her hair free of the collar, a preoccupied frown drawing her fair eyebrows together. She looked again at the strongbox and her feet seemed to take her across the room without order from her brain. Slowly, she lifted the lid. It was not locked. Daniel only locked it when they were traveling, and, besides, there were only themselves and the señora, who knew no English, in this house. The crisp white parchment lay at the bottom of the box, the royal seal imprinted in wax. It would take but a second to apprise herself of the contents, then she could play her own little game and outwit the Spaniards who were so intent on outwitting her. And then, when Daniel had achieved his object, she would tell him the whole and he would count this little trespass as naught. And he would surely realize that she could be taken into his confidence in all matters, and could be trusted to behave with skill and care in the trickiest of situations.

  Slowly, slowly, her hand went into the box, hovered over the parchment, closed suddenly over it, and lifted it clear. Feverishly, she opened the sheet, which crackled under her fingers, and gazed upon the hard, clear penmanship flowing over the paper.

  The door opened behind her. She whirled, guilt and confusion flooding her cheeks with scarlet. Daniel stood in the doorway, a bottle and glasses in his hands, utter incredulity on his face. Then the incredulity vanished, to be replaced with a look of cold disgust that started a deep, trembling chill in the pit of her stomach. She tried to say something…anything…but her throat seemed to have closed and she could do nothing but stand there with the incriminating parchment between her hands.

  He put the bottle and glasses on a side table and crossed the room, his boots clicking on the tiled floor. Without a word, he held out his hand, snapped finger and thumb imperatively. She held out the document. He took it, replaced it in the strongbox, and locked the box, pocketing the key. Throughout, his expression remained the same and the chill in her stomach threatened to overwhelm her. But he turned from her, poured wine, and began to dress in the formal garb suitable for an evening at the Prada. In silence, Henrietta did the same.

  She was to remember that evening for the rest of her life. It was a memory that came to her whenever the hour was dark and the spirit low, inevitable conditions on occasion. She remembered it mostly for the quality of the silence. Even in the thronged palace, where the lilting strains of musicians and the constant rise and fall of voices provided a background of continual sound, she heard only her husband’s absolute silence. Not a word had he spoken to her and whenever she felt his eyes upon her they held that same cold disgust. It was a look she had never encountered before, from anyone, and to have it directed at her by that loving, tender, humorous man, who in conflict had never shown her anything less tha
n understanding and anything more than the occasional flash of annoyance, cut her with a hurt and shame so deep she felt as if she were bleeding from her soul.

  Somehow, she managed to talk, to smile, to move as if she were not impaled by dread and shame. The magnitude of her error increased the more she thought of it, and she began to see herself through Daniel’s eyes: poking, prying, refusing to acknowledge his right to privacy, refusing to accept that for him that privacy was a matter of honor, wanting only to satisfy her own gratuitous curiosity in whatever fashion conveniently presented itself. It was an appalling picture, yet she had not intended deception of that despicable kind. She had intended nothing but good, had transgressed, she thought, only temporarily and with good cause—a cause that Daniel would acknowledge willingly once all that was supposed to happen had happened. But now there was to be no good conclusion to justify the offense, and she stood condemned by her own hand and judged in her husband’s silence.

  It was barely midnight when she felt him come up behind her as she stood listening to an enthusiastic discussion about an upcoming feast of the bulls.

  “Have you attended a feast, Doña Drummond?”

  “Not yet, Don Alva,” she replied, hearing her voice as quite level although her stomach seemed to be sinking into the toes of her dainty satin pumps as Daniel appeared at her shoulder. “But I understand ’tis a most magnificent sight.” She looked up at Daniel, her smile brittle, and said, “I do trust we will still be in Madrid on the next occasion.”

  “Possibly,” he replied, barely looking at her before directing some casual comment to one of the members of the circle. Wretchedly, Henrietta started to move away, but his voice, cold and level, arrested her. “’Tis time we made our farewells.”

  After a seeming eternity of smiling, curtsying, and murmuring the polite but necessary inanities, Henrietta was enclosed in the litter, Daniel, as was his custom, walking beside as she was carried home. Surely he must say something when they reached the house. Say something…do something. In her innocence, she thought it didn’t matter what he said or did, so long as this dreadful, condemnatory silence was broken.

  The litter halted and she stepped out. Daniel held open the gate of the courtyard and she brushed past him, wondering sickly if she imagined his recoil as her arm touched his sleeve and her skirt swished against his knee. Inside the small, candlelit hall, he lit a carrying candle for her from the bigger one on the marble-topped table. She took it and went ahead of him up the stairs to the bedchamber. It was only as she reached the head of the stairs that she realized Daniel had not followed her.

  The casements stood open to the warm night breezes carrying the fragrance of hibiscus and lavender from surrounding gardens. The pillows that had formed the love couch of the afternoon had been replaced on the bed, presumably by the señora when she tidied up after they left for the Prada. The memory of the sensual glories of the afternoon brought an agonizing wrench. It seemed to her in this dread wasteland to have happened in another time, another place, to another person.

  She undressed, listening fearfully for the sound of Daniel’s footstep on the stair. The door opened at last as she stood in her smock, brushing her hair with ritual, repetitive strokes that faltered as the door closed gently. She remained with her back to the room, yet hearing his every move in the continued silence as he took off his cloak, his sword belt, his wine-red satin doublet with the sleeves slashed to reveal the fine lawn of his shirt.

  Daniel sat down in the armless chair beside the bed, looking at the slight figure, who remained with averted back, again rhythmically brushing the gleaming corn silk-colored cascade as if the normality of the act would restore the world to its accustomed course.

  “Henrietta, come here.”

  The quiet command crashed into the silence she had begun to imagine would never be broken. Her heart jolted against her ribcage, and she turned slowly to face him. He presented such a picture of grim purpose, sitting in his shirtsleeves, arms folded across his chest, that the painful pounding of her heart increased and her stomach churned.

  “Why?” she heard herself ask tremulously.

  “Come here.”

  Hesitantly, she went to stand in front of him. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a minute as if in utter weariness. “I do not know what to do,” he said in a near-expressionless tone. “I have been racking my brains all evening to decide upon the appropriate course of action for a man whose wife creeps behind his back to pry into his most private affairs, who sees nothing repugnant in ransacking his possessions, possessions he has expressly forbidden her to touch, who will not accept reasons of honor—”

  “Please,” she interrupted despairingly. “’Twas not like that.”

  “Do you deny, then, that I walked in here and found you holding my private papers?” he demanded, cold and harsh, before she could continue. “Do you deny, then, that I took those same papers from you?”

  Henrietta shook her head. What was the point of explanation when the act itself was for this man so clearly inexcusable and unpardonable?

  “For some reason, I had believed it impossible that you would resort in my household to the duplicitous, dishonorable tricks of your childhood, but I should have realized, of course, that such ingrained habits of dishonesty die hard.”

  Henrietta began to weep helplessly, unable to stop the tears of pain and shame welling from deep within her, but Daniel, unmoved, continued to flay her from his own depths of hurt and disappointment until her bitter sobs filled the chamber and he felt himself drained and empty of all emotion. Then he got up and left her.

  She crawled into bed, shivering, aching as if she had been savagely beaten, but the bruises were to the spirit, not the flesh, and she curled tightly over her hurt, enclosing it within her, praying in futile despair for this day not to have dawned.

  Chapter 15

  When she awoke, she was still alone, and she knew that she had been alone all night. Her body told her so as clearly as the cool, unruffled space beside her in the bed. She lay in the dawn-washed chamber, leaden with misery, her eyes still so hot and swollen with weeping that she knew the tears must have flowed even during her exhausted sleep. How had it happened? How had something so catastrophic occurred from only the happiest of motives? She had only wanted to help him. How could they continue to live together after such a horrendous happening? After those dreadful things he had said to her? She felt as she had as a young child, facing yet another day in the wilderness of rejection and unlove, before she had built up the carapace behind which the hurt soul could shelter. She had torn down that carapace since meeting Daniel, but now it seemed she must rebuild it.

  He came into the bedchamber just as she had reached that melancholy conclusion. “Good morning.” The greeting was curt, and he barely glanced in the direction of the curled figure in the big bed, who mumbled a response, peeping over the bedcovers to see what he was doing. If he had slept, he had done so in his clothes, it seemed, judging by their rumpled condition as he changed shirt and britches with brisk, impatient movements.

  She had to do something; in a voice hoarse with weeping, she managed to form some words. “Daniel, ’twas because the queen wanted—”

  “What?” He whirled round, staring with that same stunned incredulity. “You were spying for—”

  A knock heralded the arrival of the señora with his shaving water. Her greeting was cheerfully voluble as usual, and if she noticed any lack of enthusiasm in the responses she gave no indication.

  “Just do not say anything further.” The instruction came hard and clipped, once they were again alone. “I am sickened by the whole sordid, disgraceful affair.”

  Henrietta gasped with the sharp pain of his words and despairingly watched him sharpen the knife blade on the leather strop, watched him go through all the routine morning actions that she knew so well. But it was if she were watching a stranger, and when he was finished and was once again his daytime, immaculate self, he left the room
without a further word.

  Slowly, she rose, washed, dressed, brushed and braided her hair, examined her image in the glass: a wan, swollen-eyed picture of misery. She could not possibly go out looking like this and she was supposed to attend a morning party at the house of one of the English merchants resident in Madrid. Perhaps she could send a message excusing herself. But no, she could not do that. She had somehow to lead her life as if it had not collapsed in dust around her. If she retreated into herself, she would shrivel away with self-pity.

  Resolutely, she reached for the pot of rouge and applied the lightest touch to her cheekbones and lips, wishing in a perverse fashion that Daniel would walk in and object as vociferously as he had once done. Such a trivial show of annoyance could only be a relief. But he did not come in, and when she went belowstairs, she found that he had breakfasted already and had left the house.

  She went to Mistress Troughton’s party, sat sipping lemonade and nibbling grapes and sliced pears as if nothing had occurred to disturb the even tenor of an existence she shared with the other young and not-so-young matrons making the best of their residence abroad. But Betsy Troughton, some six years older than Henrietta, the mother of two small children and the bearer of a third, saw something in the young woman’s face that she thought she recognized.

  “My dear Henrietta, you look a little peaky,” she observed, sitting down on the wooden settle beside her guest, fanning herself languidly. “Perchance y’are feeling a trifle queasy? I suffered most dreadfully myself with the first and the second, but it has been much easier this time, although the heat is at times insupportable.” She smiled confidingly and patted Henrietta’s hand.

  Sweet heaven, Betsy thought she was with child! Henrietta floundered, searching for the discreet words of disclaimer, and then drew breath sharply, remembering that glorious joining in the garden two weeks past. Her impulse had not been repeated since then, at Daniel’s behest, and she had almost forgotten the whispered possibility that they had made a son under the Spanish moon. What if they had? Such an event would have to heal the deepest breach.