by Valerie King
“Oh, how delightful,” Abigail said, “and so very needful after that stuffy dining hall.”
“Stuffy indeed,” Sarah said, chuckling.
Abigail addressed an earlier subject. “I do wish you had not said anything to Treyford about my beaus. I fear he will only despise me now even more than he already does. Whatever prompted you to do so?”
“Because he was being pricklish about Mr. Carter and rather cynical as to why you had rejected your betrothal to him. I felt I had to defend you. I think he does not believe you had so many beaus. Indeed, I think he feels as Papa does, that you should have married Mr. Carter.”
“And what do you think?”
Sarah appeared quite serious. “Actually, I was able to observe Mr. Carter a little throughout dinner and I must say, he was entirely impervious to Papa’s assaults, as though he did not hear even half of what was said to him. In other respects, he appeared most intelligent, yet his perceptions of those around him seemed wanting. Was he this way in conversation with you?”
“I fear it is so. Worse still, if the subject bored him, he said so, even if the conversation was dear to my heart. He did not see me. A woman, more than anything, ought at least to be seen.”
“I understand. Perhaps that is why I love Mr. Ditchling as I do. When I am with him, it is just as you have said. He sees me. But I suppose the real question is whether or not I am able to see him.”
Abigail was a little astonished. “You have the beginnings of wisdom, Sarah, if this is what you truly believe.”
“It is what I am coming to believe. Oh, no. I hear the gentlemen. Now, why have they intruded on our time together so soon? We have not even had our tea.”
Abigail sighed. “I believe it may be because your father wishes to continue laughing at me.”
Sarah huffed an impatient sigh. “I shall do my best to keep his attention fixed elsewhere. Perhaps I can engage him in a game of cribbage.”
“Thank you. I would be most grateful.”
As it turned out, Sarah was only nominally successful at curbing her father’s amusement in Abigail’s situation. The evening, therefore, languished dreadfully. Lord Treyford did not cease provoking her with his suspicious questions, and Laurence was at his very worst, not attending to anyone or answering any query save such that served to remind him of a recent poem he had written.
By nine o’clock, Abigail began to yawn rather purposefully, which made Mr. Lavant laugh and laugh. Finally, she simply rose to her feet and announced her intention of taking to her bed, possibly for a complete sennight, for she had the most wretched headache.
Lord Treyford lifted a disbelieving brow, Laurence appeared nonplussed, and Mr. Lavant once more roared his laughter.
She had nearly made her escape when, after placing one foot on the stairs and taking hold of the banister, Laurence came running toward her from the drawing room. “I thought I might never steal a moment alone with you. How clever of you to have feigned the headache. Come.”
Before she could argue the point with him or, indeed, object even in the least, he grabbed her hand and whirled her in the direction of the terrace. “Laurence,” she said. “This will not do.”
But he bid her be silent, and with the intention of ending his hopes once and for all, Abigail allowed him to draw her from the house and onto the brick terrace overlooking the duck pond. He swept her into his arms so suddenly, covering her mouth with his, she was unable to utter even a single protest.
He whispered his love for her ardently across her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. She began to wiggle this way, then that, in hopes of extricating herself from his strong grip.
“Please, Laurence,” she said, clutching at his arms. “You must not do this.”
“I feel the same way,” he murmured, his breath heavy with wine. Apparently, he had not heard her, or if he had, he refused to listen, which was always his way.
“No, no. You mustn’t. Laurence, please.”
“I, too, can barely contain my passion. My dearest, my darling Abigail. How happy I am to have found you again.”
“Laurence, release me at once,” she commanded, pushing hard against his chest.
“No need to be so modest, not with me, for you must know I shall never release you. You will come to York with me and be my wife, just as we planned.”
He kissed her again.
She pushed hard once more. “Laurence. Stop, I say.”
“Do not worry. We cannot be seen from the drawing room. Only kiss me again.”
A hard, masculine voice intruded. “The lady has asked you to desist. I suggest you do so at once.”
Abigail was infinitely relieved at the sound of Treyford’s voice. However impertinent he might have been throughout the evening, she would forgive him all if he could somehow persuade Laurence to release her. She once more pushed away from Laurence, who had finally paused in his assault, but he still held her fast. Fortunately, though he might not comprehend her protests, he could hardly ignore Treyford’s presence.
“This is not your concern, my good man,” Laurence remarked dismissively.
“It is any man’s concern when a lady obviously does not wish to be kissed and the man will not release her.”
Laurence smiled. “There you are out,” he slurred. “Abigail loves me. We are to marry. I shall take her to Bath tomorrow and then on to Gretna Green, for I do not wait to wish, I mean, wish to wait even a month to marry my beautiful Abbie.”
Abigail could bear no more. “Let go of me!” she cried, pushing very hard against Laurence.
Her would-be beau was utterly shocked as she finally escaped the tangle of his arms. “Y-you mean you do not wish me to kiss you? But the way you looked at me throughout dinner. I was convinced of your regard for me.”
“You must have been staring at me through your wineglass, Laurence, if you think for a moment anything I did or said was designed to give you the impression I was hoping you might bruise me with your affections. I did not wish for you to kiss me, I asked you to stop just now a half dozen times, but—and this is always the way with you—you did not hear me. You never have, which is why I left Yorkshire as I did. I might have remained had you not pestered me so foolishly.”
“Pestered you?” He seemed rather confused. “That puts me in mind of a poem I wrote but two days past. Only the word I employed was pestilence. It rhymed most fortuitously with extravagance, but then, I don’t know. Somehow the whole thing did not work precisely. I put it in the flames in Wiltshire, at the Stag and Hounds, I think.”
“Good God,” Treyford muttered.
Abigail ranged herself beside Treyford. “You must go now, Laurence, and pray do not come back.”
“You do not wish me to come back?”
“No, I do not wish you to come back. I wish you to leave the Mermaid and Devonshire. I have been given to understand that the Lake District is especially lovely this time of year and truly lends itself to the poetic muse. Wordsworth resides there you know.”
“Wordsworth,” he spit out disdainfully. “Drivel. Pure drivel. Perhaps I should go to Lakeland and take a proper portrait of that fine country, something of merit to hand down to posterity.”
“Yes, yes, do go, by yourself, to the Lake District. Grasmere is particularly beautiful.”
“Yes, Grasmere would be quite suitable,” he stated definitively. “And you shall come with me.”
“No, I shan’t,” she returned, dumbfounded that he was relentless in his misapprehension of her. She felt she needed to be perfectly clear. “I will not go to the Lake District with you, I will not marry you, and I certainly have no intention of kissing you again. I will only say good-bye.” She thrust her hand toward him, and he stared at it as one who was greeting a sword.
“This is good-bye,” he murmured, “for you have never so coldly proffered only your hand before.”
“You have the right of it, Mr. Carter,” she stated coldly. “Good-bye.”
Laurence took her hand and shook it, his expressio
n falling woefully. His sensibilities began to disintegrate as tears brimmed in his poetic eyes. “I feel a sonnet growing just here,” he said dramatically, placing a hand over his chest. “Adieu.”
Abigail said nothing more. She feared uttering even a single word, lest he misunderstand her again. When his footsteps finally faded away, only then did she release a deep sigh.
“What a coxcomb,” Treyford stated.
Abigail turned to look at him. “Yet I strongly suspect you thought I ought to have married him, that I might have been bird-witted not to have done so.”
Treyford cleared his throat. “I suppose I did, earlier, when I first met him. The truth is, I never knew him in London, nor even his reputation. I knew only the particulars of his situation and that a dozen matchmaking mamas in any given Season were thrusting their untried daughters beneath his nose for inspection. Since he was much sought after, I supposed him to be all that a gentleman ought to be.”
“You have more faith in women generally than you do in governesses, I see. You were certainly willing to accept the judgment of the ladies in London but not the decision of a mere governess in Devonshire.”
He smiled again but said nothing.
Abigail moved away from him quite slowly and began a progression down the terrace steps. In the middle of them, she simply sat down and gathered her silk skirts beneath her legs. She felt worn out.
When Treyford took up a place beside her, she said, “I should never have accepted of his hand in the first place. I was utterly foolish to have done so, but he was very different from what you have just witnessed. My former employer told me I had wrought a wondrous change in him, which was my first warning that all was not well. Eventually, his true nature, which is quite self-involved, began to emerge. How glad I am I did not agree to marry as quickly as he desired. I begged for a postponement of six months that I might see at least one of my charges properly prepared for her first London Season. I broke off our engagement in December of that year, but he did not cease plaguing me until we all left for London in late March. I secured a new position with a family of little tonnish inclination in which none of the children were of an age to be taking part in the Season’s pleasures.”
“You were then happily anonymous.”
“Very much so. I had not seen Laurence in nearly two years.”
“And now you are here. But why are you here? Are you running from yet another beau?”
Abigail sighed gustily.
Treyford laughed. “Then we are both outcasts of a sort.”
“I think you may be right, though I had not thought of myself in that way before.”
“I have told you enough of my history for you to comprehend the cause of my own misfortune, so will you not tell me of yours? Why will none of this veritable regiment of suitors do for you? Laurence has proven himself to me, but what of the others?”
“Do you wish for an accounting?” she asked, turning to look at him. “Though I promise you, it will be I who shall appear the coxcomb were I to begin in such a manner.”
“That you could never be. Not Miss Abigail Chailey.” He smiled so genuinely, and without his usual censure, that her gaze was caught. She saw his charm and perhaps in that moment the quality that might have captivated Lady Chandos some twenty years past. He narrowed his eyes slightly and continued, “On second thought, perhaps what I desire is a simple explanation.”
She looked back to the pond, which really was a small lake. The sun was nearly set, the hour being late. The water rippled because of a slight breeze that in turn swept toward the house and ruffled the lace hem of her shift, which she could see was peeping from beneath the edge of her lavender silk gown. The same gentle wind lifted tendrils of curls that had escaped the careful knot in which she habitually wore her hair. Laurence had been quite ardent, it would seem. She realized her coiffure was sitting askew, and laughed.
“I must appear a sight,” she murmured. She began slowly removing the remaining pins, several of which had clearly made their escape when they could, and with several tugs she drew her auburn locks down about her shoulders.
She arranged her hair over her right shoulder and began to tug on the curls and wind them about her fingers as she had as a child.
“You have beautiful hair,” he said quietly.
“Thank you. My father’s gift to me, I daresay, for my mother was very blond.”
“Do you take after your father in other particulars as well?”
“Yes. We were very much alike, hair and eyes, though in temperament I believe I resembled Mama. And in one particular I was so much unlike my father that we frequently quarreled. He was a recluse, you see, always preferring his library to the finest drawing rooms in the county. He was invited everywhere but rarely accepted an invitation and certainly invited no one to our home. I needed friendship but had only his. He was a selfish man, something I have come to understand.
“I loved him, but he was not aware that as a young girl, I had requirements that his society could not possibly fulfill, even had he been utterly devoted to me, which he was not. In truth, he was devoted to his books.
“I made myself a promise that I would marry only where I could enjoy a wide society, where my desires would be paramount in my husband’s eyes, as his would be in mine, where my children would be welcomed everywhere.” She turned to look at him. “This is my answer to your question—invariably, I would discover that in some manner or other, the gentleman who had sought my hand would not bring me into the larger society for which I have always desired so earnestly to be a part.”
Lord Treyford could not tear his gaze from her face. Her large brown eyes had become a point of particular fascination to him, and once more he felt powerfully drawn to the beauty beside him. He valued enormously that she was actually confiding in him, especially since he had been ridiculously inquisitive and provoking the entire evening.
He could not quite explain why he had so teased her, but something about Laurence Carter’s presence had worked like a sliver in his finger. The sting of it would not subside. He realized he had wanted to think ill of her. The very notion that she had been sought after so assiduously as a governess festered. That she had rejected her suitors for reasons he found proper, even noble given her relatively penurious state, challenged his firm beliefs.
When he had ventured out onto the terrace for no other purpose than to enjoy the waning light and had found Carter assaulting her, the sensation that had overcome him was very close to a murderous intent. What he had really desired was to draw Carter’s cork then and there. How dared he hold a woman captive against her will, any woman, not to mention one in whom he himself held a profound and apparently growing interest.
He said, “I wonder if our highwayman also feels like an outcast.” He watched her carefully. Her complexion changed and she blinked several times. “You have a blush on your cheeks, why? Do not tell me you are thinking of the highwayman? Have you met with him again? Has he kissed you . . . again?” What devil was prompting him to be so bold?
She touched her left cheek with the back of her hand. “Yes, but pray ask me nothing further.”
Treyford could not oblige her. He continued. “So he has kissed you more than once and you have let him.” He leaned very close, breathing deeply the scent of roses. He felt intoxicated.
“Pray, Lord Treyford, I beg you will not broach the subject again.” At that, she turned toward him.
Her lips were but a few inches away. He desired to kiss her so much that his lips parted, and he could not breathe nor think. He held her gaze tightly in his. “You have a powerful effect on men,” he whispered.
“I do not mean it so,” she murmured. How her eyes searched his, as though asking him a dozen silent questions he could not quite comprehend. Her expression saddened.
“Why do you look so blue-deviled of a sudden?”
“I seem doomed to fall in love with men who can never offer me a proper place in society.”
Was she spe
aking of him or of the highwayman? Did it matter? He would kiss her regardless. He wanted to know if she would kiss Lord Treyford in the same manner she had kissed the highwayman. He leaned toward her. She did not move. Her gaze fell to his lips. He knew she would permit him to kiss her. How much he desired nothing more than this.
“Miss Chailey.” Sarah called loudly from within the long gallery as though searching for her.
Treyford leaned back and fairly jumped to his feet at the same time.
“Oh, hallo, Uncle Trey. Ah, there you are, Miss Chailey. Papa wishes to know if Mr. Carter would like to join us for an al fresco nuncheon on Saturday.”
Abigail groaned faintly. “Tell him I am not amused.”
The sound of Mr. Lavant’s laughter not far from the door was all the answer needed to reveal his true intent at sending his daughter to the terrace.
With that, however, the moment passed. Treyford lifted Abigail to her feet and had all the frustration of having to bid her goodnight without the least possibility of taking a kiss from her.
He quit Oak Hill shortly afterward, riding Daedalus or, rather, walking him for much of the several miles that separated Oak Hill from Treyford Hall. He had much to ponder, not the least of which was the peculiar circumstance of having begun the evening intent on forcing Abigail to reveal her true nature to him and ending with a desire to kiss her so powerful that he still felt the need of it deeply within his soul.
He realized he had never felt this way before about any lady, including Lady Chandos. Yet, for the life of him, he could not comprehend why he was experiencing these particular sentiments for Abigail Chailey. He had spoken truly when he had said he believed she had a powerful effect on men. Perhaps the daughter of the moon was some sort of witch. How else could a mere governess have elicited twelve proposals of marriage, save that she was like no governess he had ever known before.
The image Sarah had given him of her nocturnal reading habits shot into his mind. His desire for her sharpened almost painfully, and Daedalus, always sensitive to his master, jumped into a canter that Treyford allowed to continue for a time. Better to work off some of his intense feelings in a hard ride.
