Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
One
* * *
As a princess, Her Serene Highness Olympia of Oriens felt she was unimpressive. She was quite a common height, not petite or lofty, too plump to be delicate but not substantial enough to be stately. She didn't live in a palace. She didn't even live in her own country. For that matter, she'd never actually seen her own country.
She had been born in England, and had lived as long as she could remember in a substantial brick house with ivy on the walls. Her home fronted on the main street of Wisbeach, facing the north brink of the River Nen. It possessed the same laconic, self-satisfied elegance as its neighbors, a little string of successful bankers, solicitors and gentleman farmers tucked deep among the canals and dikes and marshes of the misty fenlands, which Olympia supposed were about as different from the mountain passes of Oriens as it was possible for landscape to be.
She drank tea with her governess-companion, Mrs. Julia Plumb, and was dressed by an experienced lady's maid. She ate dishes provided by a German cook, had two housemaids and three men to keep the stable and the large garden behind. In a cottage at the back of the garden lived Mr. Stubbins, her language master, who had taught her French, Italian, German and Spanish, plus the Rights of Man and the truths held to be self-evident among enlightened thinkers like Mr. Jefferson, Monsieur Rousseau and, of course, Mr. Stubbins.
She dreamed, in her yellow chintz-hung bedroom above the river, of widening the boundaries of her life. She dreamed mostly of returning to Oriens—where she had never yet been—and leading her people to democracy.
Sometimes Olympia felt she had a great bubble of energy within her, a bubble that threatened to expand and explode in the quiet landscape of her life. She should be somewhere, accomplishing something. She should be making plans, executing agendas, fomenting rebellions. She should not be waiting, waiting, waiting for life to begin.
So she had read, and dreamed, and heard in her mind the crowds cheering and the bells ringing freedom through the streets of a city she had never seen. Until one week ago, when the letter had arrived, and real life had begun with an unpleasant jolt.
Now, amid the befogged and treeless desolation of the marsh a few miles beyond Wisbeach, Olympia stood on a set of sandstone steps, gazing reverently up at the snow-dusted walls of Hatherleigh Hall. He was in there somewhere, girded in this modern Gothic mansion that loomed up out of the fens in a dark jumble of spires, towers and gargoyle-infested flying buttresses. Captain Sir Sheridan Drake—descendant of Sir Francis; decorated veteran of the Napoleonic and Burmese wars, of battles in Canada and the Caribbean; celebrated naval tactician; and most recently, created Knight of the Most Honorable Order of the Bath for his valor and selfless heroism in the Battle of Navarino.
Olympia slipped her hand from her muff and adjusted the coverings on the potted fuchsia she was carrying as carefully as her cold fingers would allow. She hoped the plant hadn't frozen on the four-mile walk from town; it was the only one still alive of the five she'd carefully potted in honor of the naval victory at Navarino as soon as the Cambridge and Norwich papers had announced that Captain Sir Sheridan was coming home. A potted plant perhaps had not been a perfect choice of tributes, but she did not excel at needlework, so an embroidered banner had been out of the question. She'd fantasized about a presentation-sized oil painting of the glorious naval battle, but that was far beyond her pin money. So she'd settled for the plant, and a gift from the heart—her own small, leather-bound and gilded copy of Jean Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract in the original French.
She knew just what Sir Sheridan would look like. Tall, of course—splendidly tall in his blue captain's uniform with immaculate white breeches, a white-plumed chapeau bras and gold epaulettes. But he wouldn't be handsome in the ordinary style. No; she envisioned a plain face, a dependable face, saved from homeliness by kind eyes and a noble brow, and perhaps even some freckles and a touching way of casting down his eyes and blushing when confronted with a lady's regard.
She'd pondered what to say to him for days. Mere words seemed inadequate to express her admiration each time she thought of how he had thrown himself beneath a falling mast in order to save the life of his commander and then boldly leapt overboard into shark-infested waters to prevent a live bomb from destroying the ship. She wished she had something more than a frozen fuchsia plant to honor him. And yet she'd dreamed, deep down in the depths of sleepless nights, when the house seemed very quiet and her life seemed very small, that he would smile and understand, and value a potted fuchsia as if it were a medal of royal gold.
But those were dreams. Now that she was here at his door, her heart beat a slow thud of self-conscious terror, confirming her worst suspicion about herself—that in spite of what she wished to be, and ought to be, and would need to be, she was a coward at the bone.
The bell sounded dully beyond the ornate door when she pulled the chain. The moment she let go of it, a quantity of heavy snow cascaded from the portico's roof, pouring over her shoulders and bonnet and landing on the stone with a muffled thump. The front door of Hatherleigh Hall opened just as she was wiping her face and peering out through the broken and bedraggled plume of a green-dyed hat feather.
A small brown man with bare feet and a red fez on his shaved head stood in the doorway, trailing multitudes of blankets wrapped snugly around his body. The servant ignored Olympia's snow-damage and made a rakish bow, sweeping the step with the corner of a blanket. He looked up at her, blinking and squinting with dark eyes in a round face. "O Beloved," he said in a liquid soprano. "How may I serve thee?"
Olympia, standing with snow in small piles on her shoulders and a lump melting off the tip of her nose, wished she might sink through the stone. Finding that option closed, she forged ahead as if nothing had occurred and placed a slightly damp calling card in his shivering hand.
"Ah!" he said, tucking it beneath his fez and hitching up the blankets. Leaving the front door standing open, he led her through the vestibule and across the polished chessboard of pink-and-white marble into the looming depths of a great hall.
Olympia darted discreet glances at the shadowy cavern. Carved wood flowed up the walls in ornate rhythms, punctuated by dusty banners and dark glittering sunbursts of steel: broadswords and sabers, axes and pikes and pistols, all arranged so artistically that they seemed something else entirely until she looked twice.
With much nodding and bowing, the servant told her she must wait at the foot of the paneled staircase. Instead of walking up the stairs he mounted the banister, sliding himself to the top like a monkey up a palm tree, where he disappeared into the gloom above. Far off in the house she could hear the slap of his feet on smooth wood, and then his voice, awakening echoes in the huge hall. "Sheridan Pasha!" The name was followed by the little man's faint shriek. The sound of a scuffle drifted from the darkness. "Sheridan Pasha! No, no! I was not sleeping!"
"Lying dog." A distant male voice carried clearly on the cold air. "Give over those blankets."
The little man cried again, a sound that rose to a mournful ululation. "Sheridan Pasha—I beg you! My daughters, my wife! Who will send them money when I am a dead and frozen corpse?"
"Who sends them money now?" The unseen speaker gave a snort. "They only exist when it suits you anyway. What the duece would you do with a woman if you had one? Look here, you Egyptian donkey—there's a hole in this shirt I could poke a nine-pound cannon through, and I've got no shaving water."
The servant replied vigorously to that, a plaintive rise and fall of tones in a language foreign to Olympia, who spoke five fluently and could read and write in four more. The deeper voice answered in English, the thump
of footsteps closer and clearer as the speaker moved down the corridor toward the stairs. "Well, send her to the devil! Damned if I'll be ambushed by another bombazine horror in a hideous hat." Disgust reverberated in the air. "Females! The streets ain't safe. Get her…"
In the midst of a curse he appeared in the shimmer of candlelight, half naked, a white towel slung over his shoulders and shadows tarnishing his bare chest. He carried the blankets bundled loosely in one hand. His fawn breeches and black boots blurred into the gloom at the top of the steps.
He saw her. He halted. A faint spark of dull gold flashed from a crescent-shaped pendant as it seemed to twist in the light and come to rest against his chest. He closed his fist over the towel on his shoulder, hiding the crescent in shadow. Olympia clutched her gifts tighter, peering through her hat feathers as he stared down at her in abrupt and heavy silence.
He wasn't at all what she had imagined.
Tall, yes—but not plain, not dependable, not kind. Not by any stretch of fancy.
The gray eyes that regarded her were as deep and subtle and light-tricked as smoke from a wildfire. The face belonged to an archangel from the shadows: a cool, sulky mouth and an aquiline profile, and Satan's own intelligence in the assessing look he gave her. The candles behind him lit a smoldering halo of reddish gold around his black hair and turned each faint, frosted breath to a brief glow.
He was not homely, He was utterly and appallingly beautiful, in the way the gleaming steel blossoms of murder and mayhem adorning the walls of the great hall were beautiful.
"Who the dickens are you?" he asked.
Courage, she said to herself. It didn't help. She straightened her snow-crusted shoulders, attempting at least the image of composure. She dropped a slight curtsy. "Olympia St Leger. One of your new neighbors. I've come to welcome you to Hatheleigh."
He looked down at her from the landing with no sign of concern for his state of undress. "Good God," he said, and raised the towel to scrub at a spot under his chin. "I ain't worth the trouble, I promise you." He flipped the cloth over one shoulder and watched her a moment longer, his head tilted a little to one side, like a sleepy panther mildly intrigued by a mouse. Then he turned and bellowed over his shoulder, "Mustafa!"
"Sheridan Pasha!" the little servant cried. "I was not sleeping!"
"Yállah! Brother of vermin, do you see this? Miss…St Leger, was it?…has been soaked. Take her the blankets."
Mustafa appeared, catching the woolen bundle that his master tossed at him. He slid down the banister, his loose white trousers flashing in the dimness. Whispering under his breath, he placed the blankets over her, fussing about and smoothing the corners into place. Olympia noticed for the first time that he, too, wore around his neck a golden ornament shaped like a crescent moon, with a tiny star hung just above the lower point. She peeked up at Sir Sheridan, but could no longer see his pendant in the shadows and the way he held the shaving towel.
Mustafa stepped away when he was satisfied and bowed toward the top of the stairs. "You will have a tête-à-tête, yes? I bring refreshment."
Sir Sheridan made a sound, midway between a word and a groan, which didn't sound promising to Olympia—but Mustafa was already gone into the dark nether regions beneath the stair.
"I don't mean to impose upon you," she said quickly.
"Don't you?" He stepped onto the first stair, but instead of descending, he only sat down where he was, resting one boot on the top step and the other on the next level down. "What exactly do you mean to do?"
She controlled the urge to moisten her lips nervously. It wasn't going at all well. He wasn't dressed. She shouldn't have come. She ought to leave. She wished, rather desperately, that he'd turned out to be plain and freckled and shy after all. And wearing clothes.
She drew the blankets a little closer around her shoulders and disengaged the wrappings from the fuchsia plant. "Well—I've brought you…ah, a gift." Why did it seem like such a silly idea now? "It isn't much. That is—not as much as I would have liked." Unprotected by the muff, her cold fingers were stiff and clumsy. The wrappings fell away to the floor, and the plant drooped forlornly in the freezing air, its bright flowers gone limp and withered. "In honor of your arrival, and your selfless valor on behalf of your country." She bit her lip. "But I'm afraid it's dying."
"Is it?" he murmured. "Most appropriate."
She looked up, and pulled the copy of Rousseau from inside her muff. She lifted her skirt and started to step onto the first stair. "I also wished to give you—"
"Don't!" His command froze her in place as if her limbs didn't belong to her. "Don't come farther."
"Forgive me!" She backed up hastily. "I didn't mean—"
"Just stay there." He stood up and descended midway down the staircase. Then he hiked himself over the banister and pushed away, dropping a full six feet off the other side. His boots hit the marble. The great hall sent back a volley of echoes.
He came around the newel-post toward her. There was an efficient grace to his movement, a swing and balance that seemed to assess the ground beneath him, to interpret and exploit terrain instead of merely walk upon it.
"The first ten stairs can't be trusted," he told her. "They're meant to collapse under weight at random moments."
She looked from his impassive face to the stairs and back again. The feathers hanging in front of her face swayed as she turned her head.
"It's a joke," he said.
He was taller than she'd realized. She had seen paintings of red Indians that looked less intimidating.
He lifted his eyebrows. "What's the matter? No sense of humor, Miss St Leger?"
"Pardon me. I didn't realize it was meant to amuse." She paused uncertainly and then added, with more honesty, "I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Sadly overcivilized, I see. You've probably never understood the sport in pulling the wings off flies, either."
She thought of explaining that she was considered a humorless person by most of the residents of Wisbeach because she often failed to laugh at the proper subjects, such as a goat with its horns caught in a hedge, or a drunken tavern girl falling in a wet ditch. However, she decided to omit that particular information, unwilling to expose herself. Sir Sheridan was a stranger, relentlessly disconcerting, not the least because he was not dressed, and she had never before seen a man undressed at close range—or any range at all that she could remember, discounting marble statues. She found it beyond her ability to look only at his face; from behind the protection of the feathers, her glance kept skipping downward, to his shoulders, his chest, the base of his throat.
Observing him from the edge of her vision, she realized with a faint sense of confusion that there was no pendant resting on his chest after all, nothing but a curve of muscle that must have caught the light and created the illusion. His skin was dark and gold and smooth and mysterious. She wanted to touch him.
"My father," he said conversationally, "delighted in maiming flies. Did you know him?"
"Oh, no. Not at all, I'm afraid. He kept quite to himself after he moved here, you see."
She hoped that was a polite way to avoid saying that the elder Mr. Drake had lived in such isolation in this house built for him in the midst of a fog-ridden marsh that he hadn't even shown himself to his steward, but left the man notes of instruction. These missives told the steward precisely where to place each of the paintings, bronzes, medieval manuscripts, weapons and gemstones the reclusive owner ordered his agents to purchase. It had been the chief topic of conversation in Wisbeach for the first five years of Mr. Drake's peculiar residence, but after eight, it had again lost place to Lord Leicester's prize bulls and the weather—only to receive an enthusiastic revival recently at the news of the old man's death and of his famous son's imminent arrival.
"That's just as well," Sir Sheridan said. "He seems to have arranged for several entertaining pitfalls for the unwary when he built this place."
"Did he?" Olympia was trying, with limited succ
ess, to keep her eyes decently averted from his body. But she was cheating. As she peeked, he suddenly shuddered: an uncontrolled, startling move.
Sheridan crossed his arms and rubbed himself amid the shivers. "Deuced cold in here," he said between his teeth—which was certainly no lie, though he mentioned it chiefly as bait to draw this implausible creature out into the open about her motives. He had yet to determine what she wanted out of him, coming unchaperoned and uninvited as she had; whether it was money, blackmail, minor sin or complete seduction, or just a tale to boost her backwater status among the local gossips.
She looked up at him through the ridiculous mess of wet feathers on her hat, her face obscured by ostrich plumes except for the plump, winsome curve of her chin and one cheek. With the intense silence that seemed to characterize her conversation, she held out the blankets Mustafa had given her. As they slid from her shoulders, he had an intriguing closer view of her high, generous bosom, nicely adorned by moss-colored satin trimmed in black.
Sheridan had spent a sizable portion of his recent visit to London in observing the current state of feminine fashion—from both inside and out. He judged Miss St Leger's costume to be expensive and strictly in style, not to mention appealingly hourglass in shape. However, his concern with fashion being only a minor extension of his interest in what was underneath, he was well aware that the silhouette had little to do with the figure inside it. In this case, he felt, the initial inspection clearly warranted further investigation.
As a first step toward carrying out his dishonorable intentions, he made a brief, noble issue out of taking the blankets, gently refusing to accept them until she was practically begging him to leave her in the cold. The odd little chit became almost frantic over it, to the extent of offering him her redingote, too, and babbling on about how he must be unused to the climate, having just arrived from the Mediterranean. She actually began to unbutton her collar.
He watched in astonishment as she stripped off the coat. His suspicions heightened. He wondered if this weren't some ploy to get her undressed, in which event he could expect Outraged Papa through the door at any moment.