by Eloisa James
“I am rather confused,” Griselda observed. “You are not a penniless man.”
“Luckily, no.” Darlington was cutting perfect squares of cheese, and handing them to her to eat with the apple.
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” Griselda said. “Does your father make you an allowance? It must be very generous.”
“Nosy, aren’t you?”
She grinned at him, feeling her hair down her back and the pure deliciousness of knowing that there were only the two of them in the whole house. She’d never been alone in a house in her life. She and Willoughby lived in a house populated by at least fifteen other souls at any given time. But this house was quiet. The only thing that could be heard was the distant rumble of a carriage passing now and then. “In my house,” she said, “one can always hear the sound of someone walking down the corridor, or building up a fire, or washing dishes.”
“I like to live alone.” He handed her another piece of cheese, balanced on an apple. “There are servants’ quarters in this house, small though it is, but I still send everyone home.”
“Why do you have so many books?”
“I enjoy them,” he said, putting the knife away. “What do you read for pleasure? Have you read Canto IV of Byron’s Canto Harold? It was just published.”
“At the moment I am absolutely absorbed by Hellgate’s Memoirs, as I told you the other day. I think I’ve figured out every single one of his amours. I know without question, for example, who Hermia is, and no one else seems to have figured that out.”
“You do?”
“Hellgate says that Hermia is a duchess; he met her at court, and she made love to him in a broom closet. Well!” Griselda leaned closer. “I myself spied the Duchess of Gigsblythe emerging from just such a broom closet a year or two ago. I was in St. James’s Palace, on my way to the Chapel Royal. You know that monstrous long passage that leads from the Office of the Treasury? She sneaked out of the closet ahead of me!”
“How on earth did you know it was a closet?” Darlington said, looking amused and not at all dazzled at the wonderful piece of gossip she had just handed him.
“I opened the door and checked, of course!”
“My goodness, how enterprising of you. What if her amour had been still there, perhaps wearing only his smalls—or not even that?”
“There was nothing but a small room with a few buckets and the like. You could stop cutting cheese and apple if you wish; I am no longer hungry.”
Darlington looked almost surprised as he looked at the plate full of wafer-thin cheese and apple slices before him. He pushed it slightly to the side. “But Griselda, what would you have done had you surprised one of the Royal Dukes straightening his stockings?”
She giggled. “The truth is that it hadn’t even occurred to me that the room was used for such encounters…not until I read Hellgate’s memoirs. Then of course I knew who he was talking about. She must use the room on a regular basis. I would never have thought it of her.”
“Fibster,” Darlington said. “There’s not a person in the ton who wouldn’t have imagined Gigsblythe using such a room if it struck her fancy.”
Griselda laughed.
“The more interesting point is how do you know that she ever met Hellgate in that room? There may be many who know of that convenient closet.”
“Did you?” Griselda demanded.
“I did,” he said. “And yet I have an unblemished history that is quite the opposite of Hellgate’s. I do believe that useful little closet, and one or two others like it, are known to most of the ton. You, my dear”—he reached out and tapped her nose—“are a virtuous woman. There are few of you.”
“I’m not virtuous,” Griselda protested. “How can you say such a thing when I am sitting opposite you, in your own house? And nary a chaperone in sight!”
“Nor a chemise either,” he said, his eyes catching hers.
“No corset,” she whispered, feeling the brush of soft cotton against her breasts.
“No servants.”
Griselda couldn’t quite sort out how it happened…whether she laid back on the table of her own accord, or whether he picked her up. The only thing she could do was think that whatever virtue she had possessed before that night was gone indeed.
For a man who claimed slim experience, Darlington had a powerful imagination. For once she was there, on the table, her dressing gown wrenched open so that she was all creamy curvy flesh, Darlington didn’t leap on her.
No, he carefully placed moist, cool wafer-thin slices of apple about her body, “As if you were an apple tart of the French persuasion.”
And Griselda, caught between laughter and trembling, argued that she was an apple pie, but never a tart.
But then he braced his arms on the scrubbed table and announced a wish to bite each piece of apple without biting her.
And what began with laughter amid nips—he proved to be terribly awkward and was constantly missing the slices of apple—turned into something quite different by a half hour later.
It was entirely the fault of the apples.
The cheese…
Well, that was another story.
34
From The Earl of Hellgate,
Chapter the Twenty-fourth
To say that I was cast into despair is to underestimate the height of my agony. Darling Mustardseed was to save my tarnished soul, keep my eyes from all other women, and put my feet on the path of righteousness. Instead, she died before, in all honesty, Dear Reader, I had managed to persuade her to do more than fumble about under the bedclothes. In short, she died without experiencing a woman’s pleasure; ’tis a burden that will stay with me until my benighted and much-desired death.
It was her wedding night, and Josie was unable to sleep. Never had she felt like more of a failure. When she attempted to tell Mayne the truth of her unravished state, she lost her nerve, and consequently, he still thought she had been ravished.
If there was any woman in the world capable of being blunt about an embarrassing subject, it was she. Josie knew herself well enough for that. She could have said—there were a million things she could have said.
She could have said it elegantly: I am untouched by that loathsome viper.
Bluntly: After I struck him with a shovel of manure, the gentleman in question left with haste.
Even more bluntly: My person is untouched and there is no need for you to marry me.
The most bluntly of all: I am a virgin. Still.
Sentences she could have said to Mayne kept tumbling through her mind. I am not ravished would have worked. Or this one: The man never touched me intimately, beyond a few fumbling grabs at my chest.
The truth was that she spent years thinking about how to trick a man into marrying her, and now that she’d done it, the enormity of her mistake was choking her. Minerva Press novels were just that—novels. No one worried about what the heroine said to the hero once she’d tricked him into marriage.
Her mind reeled, thinking about the enormity of her crimes, to give the act its proper due. She had married under false pretenses. She had allowed Mayne to sacrifice himself, thinking that she was unmarriageable—while really she was unmarriageable because she was a conniving, horrible jade.
But it wasn’t as if she’d stolen Mayne from someone. Josie was certain that Sylvie would never take him back. Not after the way she’d spoken to him with loathing.
Though, of course, Mayne might have wished to marry someone with Sylvie’s exquisite little figure. Josie kept swallowing back tears. Compared to Sylvie, she was a great galumphing beast, all curves and flesh.
Sometime later Josie sighed and rubbed her forehead. She was in a strange house belonging to a man who would likely annul their marriage on the morrow. She had a headache that wouldn’t stop, and no matter how she thought about it, the mortification she faced in the morning would be unlike anything she had experienced before.
Over the breakfast rolls, if not earlier, she wa
s going to be absolutely clear. She would simply tell Mayne that she was virgo intacto. It would be much more comfortable to say such a thing in a foreign language. If there were footmen in the room, they wouldn’t follow her reference. The only problem was that she wasn’t entirely sure of the phrase.
Virgo immaculata also sounded familiar. Immaculate certainly meant untouched by a man. So maybe that was it. She kept going back and forth between the two: was she immaculate or intact?
A half hour later Josie was sure she was going out of her mind. If only she were in Rafe’s house, she would check his Latin dictionary. Finally she made up her mind to go down to Mayne’s library and find the proper words. She just could not bring herself to say I am a virgin in English.
The house was silent as a grave when she crept out of her door. Mayne had a very pretty upper floor, with a curved hallway that belled gracefully over the antechamber below. Presumably, the door just at the top of the stairs was his bedchamber. Josie held her breath and tiptoed. It went without saying that she would die of embarrassment if he woke.
She sneaked down the stairs in the cool wash of moonlight coming through the front door, clutching her dressing gown around her. Still she heard nothing. The antechamber was a wide circle of marble floor, the walls lined with portraits.
A painting of a woman who was likely Mayne’s mother was positioned just in a splash of light. She was colorless in the glow from the moon, but Josie’s eyes flew to the Dowager Countess’s tiny waist. She probably didn’t even need a corset; she was that small. On her face was the utter confidence of a perfect woman, the kind of woman who never experienced a blemish or felt a traitorous desire for another buttered muffin.
The very sight of Mayne’s mother strengthened Josie’s resolve. His mother was French, and Sylvie was French. Everyone knew that Frenchwomen were all slender. Mayne’s house was the sort of house for which Sylvie was an appropriate mistress.
The door to the left surely led to a sitting room. If Mayne’s house were laid out in the same fashion as Rafe’s town house, the second door would be to a dining room, and the third…
She pushed it open softly. The room was dark as pitch. She groped forward into the darkness, stumbling her way to the wall. The first thing her outstretched fingers encountered was a row of books, the cool feeling of their leather bindings unmistakable. Relief flooded her chest.
She felt sideways until she encountered the soft velvet of a curtain. She pulled it back, shivering at the rattle of curtain hangers above her. A French window looked onto a stone railing that glowed oddly silver in the moonlight. Beyond the railing the garden looked magical and rather frightening, as if it were a place where wishes came true and fairies danced.
“Ridiculous,” Josie whispered to herself.
The moon was so bright that it was almost like daylight, except that daylight is a bright amber, and moonlight is a wilder, shimmering light. The whole lawn looked as if it were underwater.
Entranced, Josie stepped forward. The handle of the French door turned in her hand, and she walked outside. For a moment she froze, looking up at the windows of the house. But Mayne was undoubtedly asleep, dreaming the just sleep of a charitable man, a man who treated marriage as a mission by which to rescue maidens in distress. She couldn’t hear a sound from the house behind her.
The path of moonlight lay across the lawn like a broad band of silver, except it was silver that looked alive to the touch. At the bottom of the garden trees sprang up and the moonlight played over fragile green leaves as yet unburned by summer sun. The little grove looked like a fairy city, a fairy forest, stretching up from the lawn to a sky studded with stars.
Josie blinked across the lawn. There was something she didn’t understand about those trees. That was a little hawthorn, and there an oak tree. Next to it an apple and perhaps a mock pear. It looked almost as if faint lights caught for a second in the trees and then winked out.
It should have been frightening, she thought. She never believed in fairies, after all, not even when she was small. Some part of her still didn’t believe in them, and never would, not until she was face-to-face with an elfish creature. Preferably with wings.
Yet somehow she couldn’t be frightened, and even all her worry and misery over the marriage and Thurman’s horrid groping fell away. It was warm outside, the kind of sweet spring warmness that makes you feel overdressed in a dressing gown. Josie felt suddenly comfortable in her skin and her bones and her body, the way she used to feel when she was a child, before she understood that she’d been born with the wrong shape.
She almost laughed out loud. But instead she ran forward, leaving her slippers on the threshold to the house. She hadn’t been barefoot for years, and yet it felt exactly right to curl her toes into the soft grass. Before her the moon path cast its wavering, underwater light and the grass turned to an ocean. It was intoxicating, the way the broad band of light invited one to dance. Though of course she wouldn’t dance. She was a grown lady now…
Perhaps just a swinging, running step here and there.
Across the lawn, and in the shade of a young hawthorn, she turned to look back at the house. Nothing was stirring. The house was sleeping, each window blank, and not even the dim glow of a candle could be seen.
She caught another flicker from the corner of her eye, like a fairy twinkle. So she reached up into the tree, feeling her hair catch on a branch. She had to untie her hair ribbon and shake her hair free to come away from the branch. But then she reached up again and caught hold of one of the little objects hanging from the branches, pulling it hard.
She took it back out in the moonlight to examine it.
No fairy, this.
It was a glass ball. A perfectly round glass ball that hung by a ribbon from the branch. Josie frowned over it. She couldn’t imagine why such an ornament would be hanging on a tree. Could Mayne have done such a thing?
There were etchings on the glass, but she couldn’t see them well in the moonlight. Yet how beautiful it was! When she held up the globe, it caught the moonglow and threw it back on her hand. For a moment she just held it, turning it so the watery light of the moon danced over her hands and her arms, catching the rumpled darkness of her hair. There were glass balls in all the trees, big ones and little ones, casting a lovely confusion of light and shadows over the lawn.
Josie danced a little bit farther. All her misery was gone, all the grief and self-loathing and hatred washed away in the moonlight. Tomorrow was another day. That thought felt like a blessing, as if there were indeed fairies dancing in Mayne’s woods.
The thought made her laugh. Her husband was a man known to have slept with most of the married women in the ton…was he a man to have a fairy wood in his backyard? His fairies would be small lascivious nymphs, playfellows of Bacchus.
The inside of the woods beckoned like a dark dream. There were early roses growing somewhere; she could smell their faint, rather ragged smell. Their perfume beckoned too, and so without another glance back at the sleeping house, Josie drifted into the wood, holding her drop of moonglow in her hand.
Mayne stayed on the threshold of the library until he was quite certain that Josie was finding her way to the rose bower and wouldn’t reemerge from the wood. Then he walked after her, feeling queerly as if he didn’t believe his own eyes.
Was that truly his young wife—the words echoed in his chest with an odd resonance—his young wife who had danced into the woods with a swirl of midnight hair? She held one of his glass globes up to the moonlight as if she were an ancient pagan priestess in some sort of act of moon worship.
Perhaps she was a pagan goddess, a distilled intoxicating version of womanhood. He had frozen there, watching the sweet panel of her cheek, icy cream in the moonlight. Even from the other side of the lawn he could feel the force of Josie’s capacity for joy.
She was wearing nothing more than a sturdy dressing gown, tied at the waist, and yet Mayne discovered his heart beating wildly, as he watched the lin
e of her flank, the intoxicating way that she curved in at her waist. She looked like a painting by the great Raphael, one of those he painted for his adored mistress. Josie had the same soft arms and rounded breasts as the lavishly beloved Renaissance paramour.
Every inch of Mayne’s body burned to run across the lawn and snatch her into his arms. She didn’t look like a subdued, ravished maiden any longer. She was enthrallingly sensual, with her bare feet and unbound hair.
A deep certainty settled in his chest, and with it a gladness so profound that he almost laughed aloud. Josie had not been ravished. Whatever had happened to her, his darling girl had not been thrown onto the ground and taken. More likely, she left the man in question on the ground. In fact, now that he thought about the manure story…he could hardly stop himself from laughing.
Instead he stopped for a moment on the stone portico and pulled off his boots. He hadn’t retired to bed; he had just been sitting by the fire in his bedroom, brooding over what to do with an injured wife…
Who wasn’t injured.
The joy of it flooded his body. She was his, and she wasn’t hurt. Every pulse of blood in his body was informing him exactly what to do with that exquisite nymph who just danced her way into his woods.
Mayne ran across the grass in his bare feet, feeling a hedonistic pleasure that he never experienced in all his tawdry meetings by candlelight with women tired of their marriages. When he reached the wood he cast an experienced eye over the glass balls. They all appeared to be sturdily moored to their branches, swaying a bit in the rustling wind, but just as beautiful as they’d been since Aunt Cecily first envisioned them.
He walked quietly through the few trees, heading to the rose arbor. That’s where she would be, of course. It all had a queer sense of inevitability, as if all the terror and upset of the last twenty-four hours came down to this moment of walking toward his new wife. The rose arbor was in the very back of his garden, sheltered on two sides by the ancient stone walls that separated his house from that next door. The roses had grown and grown until they hung in great tattered sheets over the walls.
