“In and out, in and out,” agreed the Squire in a dry voice.
“I’d heard he’d been struck down with gout these last five months and never left Taunton?”
“ ’Tis not the father but the son who haunts our gates,” his host hastened to assure him.
“Indeed?” Tom gave Ned a droll look. “Come to pay court, has he? Constance, is there anyone has not asked for you?”
Conscious of Pamela’s sudden frown, Constance spoke up. “Oh, ’tis Pamela, not me, he comes to see.”
“And indeed I may take him,” put in Pamela recklessly, furious at Tom’s calm assumption that it would be Constance Dick Peacham was after. “For he’ll be Lord Peacham when his father dies!” Her lifted chin invited Tom to match that.
Tom’s gaze focused on her in amazement. “You’d want a title enough to marry a fellow who stumbles over his own feet? And who can barely stay astride his horse?”
“The Honorable Richard does not need to stay astride,” laughed Constance. “He travels in his father’s coach.”
“Which must jar his teeth loose,” interposed Ned equably. “The roads to Taunton being what they are.” For discovering that Constance was not the attraction, he had warmed to Dick Peacham.
“Ah, but consider his magnificence,” mocked Tom. “A gilded coach wheeling up to the door—see, it has already snared Pam!”
That he should take this bantering attitude! Pamela flushed. “Dick is but one of my suitors,” she declared airily.
As they went in to dinner, Clifford Archer gave his daughter a thoughtful look. Interested in young Peacham, was she? Well, the name was old, the family wealthy, and if she chose to marry a bumbling lad, he supposed he would not stand in the way. Of course, he’d always hoped that Tom... In his reverie he did not notice that Tom laughed a bit uncomfortably as he studied Pamela, whose pretty face seemed to emerge from her stiff high-necked finery like a little girl’s dressed up in her mother’s clothes.
Tom bent over her as he pulled back her chair. “You’re not ready for marriage, Pam,” he said almost roughly.
“Oh, am I not?” she challenged him. “Well, I’m going to let Dick Peacham propose to me twice more. And then—” She tossed her daffodil golden curls and let the words drift off, trying to give Tom the clear impression that she would accept Peacham.
The Squire heard that. “I will be glad when they have both chosen and have done with it. What’s the gossip, Tom? In your rovings, you always glean some.”
Tom shrugged his broad shoulders. For some reason he was at a loss for conversation tonight.
That evening was a nightmare for Constance. Pamela, forgetting she was angry with Tom, became her usual self again. But Ned Warburton, driven to mightier efforts by the Squire’s refusal to award him Constance at once—which had been tersely reported to him by Captain Warburton on the driveway—kept his attention riveted on the graceful darkhaired girl who sat stiff and pale, only toying with her roast capon and oysters.
“I know you went to school in London but were you born there?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Constance, and the very name of London brought back in a rash the narrow streets, the crowded overhanging half-timbered houses, the noisy hawkers and the creak of carts and coaches, the heavy pea-soup fogs and the ever-present smell of wood smoke and sea coal. And the magic of frost fairs on the frozen Thames and blooming gardens in the spring—it had been an exciting place for a child, had London.
“Your mother’s people, were they Londoners?”
Constance sighed. “My mother’s people were all dead by the time I came along. They had perished of the Plague while my mother visited in the West Country.”
“Ah-h-h ...” Ned’s voice hovered on a sigh, for although he had been but four years old when the Great Plague stalked the land, there was hardly a family in England but whose lives had been touched by it. “So your mother was left with an empty house when the Plague marched on?” he prodded helpfully.
“She was left with no house at all!” Constance’s voice was tart. “For the Great Fire that ravaged London the next year burnt her house to the ground and destroyed everything in it. Nothing was saved.” Her mother had been bitter about that. She had been in the West Country herself, but it had seemed to her that the servants—who had fled at the first whiff of smoke—should have saved something, some of the plate, some of the fine vellum volumes her father had collected, her mother’s delicate embroideries—something.
Ned’s bland young face was sympathetic. His mouth was not as firm, his hands not of the same fine cut as the Captain’s, she thought. But for all of that he was a fine-looking young man in his scarlet coat and buff vest and trousers. A man any girl would be proud to have—except herself, of course.
“Your father’s people, were they from London too?”
“No, from Yorkshire.” His questions were getting too close. She saw the Squire’s gaze fixed upon her at the head of the table and said quickly, “Do you think it will snow all night? Pam is mad to build a snow fort and pelt us all with snowballs!”
“It will be Tom and me against you and Ned,” declared Pamela merrily from the other side of the table.
“Good, I’ll take you on,” laughed Ned, looking at Tom.
“Before breakfast, then?” Pamela was eager to keep them for the night.
Constance grimaced inwardly. The thought of doing anything before breakfast always appalled her. She had a reluctance to rise, inherited no doubt from her father, that made her a child of the night, at her best in the evening hours, while sunny Pamela was the very opposite, a true daughter of the light.
The Squire cleared his throat and brought the conversation briefly around to politics, but his guests backed warily away from that. Pamela brought up the subject of parties, and then a heated discussion of which was the fastest horse in the Valley carried them through dessert—custard and the delicious little pastries whose making Pamela always supervised.
Pamela was a charming combination, thought Constance, studying the golden girl who sat across from her. Half tomboy, half homemaker, part child, part woman. In her stiff pink damask gown, so heavily stitched with silver thread that it blazed silver in the candlelight, she looked strikingly young. And yet, in her own way, she was deeply in love with Tom. She worshipped him.
And Tom loved his freedom and flirted with every attractive skirt that flirted by. Constance sighed. She was not the only one who had trouble.
After dinner she pleaded a headache and would have fled up the broad Jacobean staircase to the safety of her room where no one would ask her about her shaky past. But Pamela, who had never had a headache in her life and whose health was always glorious, merrily brushed off her excuses. With childish exuberance she seized both of Constance’s slender hands and fairly dragged her into the drawing room, where the servants had lit a pair of branched candlesticks and a fire blazed on the hearth. Pamela flopped down on a stool before the delicate rosewood harpsichord, arranged her silvery pink skirts about her, struck a key dramatically and urged Constance to sing to her accompaniment “because your voice is better than mine and we all know it.” She dimpled at Tom as she spoke.
There was nothing for it but to sing, but Constance’s thoughts were chaotic. She leant against the polished rosewood with her slender back slightly arched and tried to compose herself as Pamela’s clever fingers ran a scale or two. She was unaware of the picture they made: Pamela with her silver dusting on pink and her golden hair glinting in the candlelight like a freshly opened Maiden’s Blush rose sprinkled with dew, and Constance in her figure-hugging plum velvet, its wide skirts swaying and rippling about her long slim legs, her white bosom and the pearly expanse of her upper breasts barely covered by the sheer “pinner” of almost transparent white lawn. Her head was thrown slightly back from a swanlike throat and crowned by a cloud of darkness lit by the red-violet glitter of brilliants that flashed like fireflies from her hair. She did indeed resemble a tall-stemmed purple iris,
soft, velvety, a miracle to touch.
Ned’s gray eyes glinted as he looked at her. His brother Tony had not been eloquent enough—he’d have a go at the Squire himself after the girls had trundled off to bed! For have her he must. He’d decided that the moment he first saw her at the Midsummer Masque at Huntlands last summer. She had winged into his life like a swallow, borne on the wind. He’d been bowled over by her beauty then as now. The Squire would come around!
His imagination raced on, making short work of a betrothal, skipping past the ceremony to the wedding night when Constance, with a circlet of gilt flowers and pearls around her gleaming dark hair, would stand there looking radiant while the guests snipped riband favors from her costume—this very dress in his vivid imagination. And after all the toasts to the bride’s health, he would at last be alone with her in a big canopied four-poster.
He imagined himself in that warm darkness removing her nightclothes with his own hands, letting his palms slip over the smoothness of her skin, letting his yearning lips rove at will over her bare pulsing breasts. And then he would draw back the heavy hangings that draped the big four-poster and let the moonlight in—and devour with his eyes the delicate beauty of her naked body.
She would make a soft protest at first at being thus exposed, her body would quiver—and then she would hold out her arms and welcome him. And then—beads of sweat had appeared on Ned’s brow, although the big room at Axeleigh was drafty. His breath came unevenly. Then he would explore all the sweet mysteries, all the delicious secrets, of her woman’s body! He looked at the swaying reedlike velvet figure before him and was engulfed by desire.
He had tried to tell Tony how he felt about her, but his brother had only regarded him with a troubled gaze. Ned could see no reason for that. Constance was but toying with him—as girls were wont to do. Before long she would be his. Forever.
But the velvet beauty avoided his gaze. She looked instead past the roaring fire across from her out to the snow swirling down past the windowpanes through the midnight blue outside. To Pamela’s tinkling accompaniment, she lifted her voice in song—and fought to keep her thoughts from Captain Warburton, who was out there somewhere riding through that blue and white world. She sang to please Pamela—and saw, stricken, that she was pleasing Ned, who sat watching her raptly with his heart in his dark gray eyes.
Constance’s singing had a misty quality, intimate, beguiling. Like her speaking voice, it had a soft sensuous rustle, like the whirr of wings, and it rose lightly to heights that had an angel chorus ring to them. It was not a strong voice, nor yet a cultivated one, but in the long drawing room of Axeleigh Hall that night with the snowflakes dusting down over a magic landscape, no one remained unmoved by it. It enchanted its hearers.
“Beautiful,” breathed Ned, rising to his feet and coming to stand beside her. “Sing another.”
Pamela cast Tom a wickedly laughing glance. That glance said she would bring the lovers together even if Captain Warburton and the Squire failed. Tom’s friendly answering smile said he hoped it worked.
Constance, miserably aware of both glances, felt Ned’s breath warm upon her cheek as he bent over to arrange Pamela’s music for her. She edged away slightly.
“Don’t stand so close,” she chided.
Ned gave her a wicked look, from that face that was so like his brother’s, as if to say, So my nearness affects you, does it? And for a moment his grin might have been Tony Warburton’s.
Constance didn’t want to sing—she wanted to scream.
Somehow the evening was got through. Somehow they were off to bed, but for Constance there was little sleep. And when she did sleep she was nagged by troubled dreams in which Tony Warburton and his lighthearted brother rode in and out of her life, exchanging places.
Axeleigh Hall, Somerset,
December 23, 1684
Chapter 5
Constance woke, heavy-eyed, to Pamela’s shake.
“We’re all going out into the snow before breakfast—remember, we decided that yesterday? Hurry and dress, lazybones!”
“Oh, do go without me.” Constance tried to wriggle back down under the covers but Pamela wouldn’t let her. “You’re already dressed and—”
“Tabby can get you dressed in no time!”
And so it was that Constance, still sleepy, found herself propelled protesting into the corridor with half her bodice hooks hooked wrong by a hurrying Tabitha. By the time they reached the stairs, Pamela cried, “Oh, bother the hooks—we’ll throw a cloak over your shoulders and no one will know whether they’re hooked right or not!” Tabby, taking her cue, promptly gave up the endeavor and tossed a fur-trimmed hooded cloak over a protesting Constance, mismatched hooks and all. In the lower hall—its floor littered by Christmas greenery where a roguish Puss had scattered it—the girls were greeted by Tom and Ned, already dressed for the outdoors. Pamela was wearing riding boots and waited impatiently as Ned helped Constance on with her high pattens.
So, willy-nilly, Constance found herself venturing out into the snow beside Ned Warburton, whose scarlet coat made a brilliant patch of color against the dark shrubbery, the black and gray tree boles, the white glitter of the snow. Warily she avoided a snowy mound that concealed a sturdy example of the lovely Maiden’s Blush rose, that pink cousin of the famous White Rose of York which had graced English gardens these hundred years and more.
Tom and Pamela immediately began throwing snowballs at each other, laughing and shouting like children as they darted about under the big trees.
“I didn’t bargain on this!” Constance ducked a snowball. “Pamela said we were going to build a snow fort!”
“She’d rather make war,” chuckled Ned. “Pamela’s a real tomboy. I always think she’d be happier wearing trousers than a skirt!”
And riding astride instead of aside. Tempted to agree with him, Constance dodged another snowball, and Ned laughed. “We’ll have to leave the scene if we’re to avoid them. Would you like a snowy walk through the maze?”
“Anything would be better than this!” Constance gave a small scream as two snowballs struck her, neither very hard but both spattering her plum velvet cloak with snow.
Glad of a chance to get his lady alone behind tall box hedges, Ned escorted her to the entrance to the maze, and to the accompaniment of a disappointed wail from Pamela, who had hoped to engage them in mock battle, they disappeared into the snow-frosted boxwood maze.
Pamela’s crystal blue eyes followed them thoughtfully. Perhaps Constance was not so averse to Ned as she seemed.... Pamela jumped at a sudden demonic scream behind her, then laughed as she realized it was only the harsh cry of a peacock that, careless of the snow, was strutting along the snow-covered top of a low stone wall nearby with his great train of tail feathers dragging along behind him. He was moving at a leisurely pace toward a peahen. She chose to ignore him, concentrating instead on the grain that had been spread by a servant along the top of the low wall to feed the brilliant ornamental birds. He screamed again and the peahen looked up and gave him what Pamela considered to be a most scathing look.
Undeterred by his lady’s indifference, the handsome crested cock executed a series of intricate steps, whirling about so that his back was turned to her and suddenly opening up the great fan of his tail feathers and flashing it aloft.
“Watch this,” Pamela told Tom, and he straightened up from rolling up snow for the snow fort and followed her gaze. The enormous fanned tail, held stiffly erect, seemed almost to overpower the sleek iridescent blue-green body of the bird, and as the peahen pecked nearer to the edge of that fan he swirled about suddenly to face her and the beautiful overarching plumes of his burnished green tail, dotted with beautiful “eyes,” hovered over her, rustling seductively. He was a sight to take the breath.
Except to the peahen. With studied disinterest she concentrated on her breakfast, pecking at the snow even when there was no food there.
Instead of being put off by this, the crested cock redou
bled his attempts to interest this disdainful bird, making an even more gorgeous display of multihued glittering feathers.
Pamela chuckled. “They remind me of Ned and Constance. The more she ignores him, the more he pursues her!”
“ ’Tis lucky there’s no other peacock about,” said Tom dryly. “Else this gaudy fellow would go after him with his spurs!”
Pamela shot Tom a swift look. “You’re saying he’d fight for her?”
Tom gave a laconic shrug. He had no need to answer—indeed Pamela often understood his slightest gesture more clearly than words. Ned was itching to fight for her, was the implication, to show his lady the depth of his regard!
“I’m not sure how Constance feels about Ned,” she said, going back to helping Tom roll up the snow and mound it for the sides of the fort. “Sometimes I think she’s mad about him and just refuses to show it and other times I think she’d be glad to be rid of him!”
Tom frowned. Ned had asked him to find out through Pam how Constance felt and this was a most unsatisfactory answer. “You’re saying she doesn’t know her own mind?”
“It isn’t that exactly,” puzzled Pamela. “She just seems to—veer, if you know what I mean.”
“Missishness!” laughed Tom, suddenly flipping a bit of snow down her neck.
Pamela squealed and—regardless that the snow fort wasn’t finished—they went at it, with herself crouching behind the snowy barrier and heaving snowballs at Tom and he running about trying to “take” the fort. It was all grand, lighthearted fun—the kind of fun they had had together as children and enjoyed so little of, of late, and they both lost themselves in it.
Meanwhile, inside the maze, Ned was lightly brushing the snow from Constance’s cloak. “Of course there’s really nowhere to go now we’re in here,” he told her. “There used to be a narrow way cut through to the family burial ground, but it’s grown up solid now.”
“I’ve already seen that,” said Constance hastily, forestalling an offer to view it in the snow. “I think the family burial ground was the last thing Pamela showed me when I came here—the first was the stables!”
Lovely Lying Lips Page 7
