“Would you prefer that I go somewhere else?” he asked abruptly. He walked off to a side door beyond the wardrobe and opened it, looking through. “There’s a sleeping couch in here.”
Of course there was. Leda had not even noted the dressing room; most probably that was where his dressing gown and all his clothes had been placed, too. When the late Lord Cove’s cousin and wife had come to visit Lady Cove, Leda recalled that such had been the arrangement—and much toil and trouble it had been, endless conversation and question and flutter over the provision of coat-brushes and slippers to outfit the dressing room and obtain a borrowed cot for the gentleman, who had never used any of it.
Not even the cot, when she came to think.
From this recollection, Leda made a leap of logic. Perhaps married gentlemen did not really care to sleep in their little dressing rooms. Perhaps the unfortunate husbands were required to make the request every night, hoping that their wives would grant permission for them to sleep in a comfortable bed, but relegated to the cots if approval was not forthcoming.
“Certainly I don’t wish you to go anywhere else.” Leda gave him a bright and magnanimous smile. “You must feel free to sleep here in the bedroom. You needn’t ask me, on any night, Mr. Gerard.”
“Samuel.” He sounded rather annoyed as he picked up a silver snuffer. “We’re married, for God’s sake. My name is Samuel.” He walked to the mantel and lifted his arm to extinguish the candle in the mirrored wall sconce. Reflected light focused on his hand.
She had opened her mouth to reprimand him for his language, but she closed it.
If Lady Tess had not told her, Leda would not have instantly recognized the slight scar across his wrist. She would not even have noticed it. But the intensity of candlelight heightened the contrast, picking out an unmistakable band of paler skin across the base of his hand. When she looked at his other hand, she could see it there, too, just distinguishable.
“You should not swear, Samuel,” she said, in a quieter tone than she had meant to use. She almost said nothing at all, but that seemed somehow uncomplimentary—as if, like some jungle-raised creature, he could not even be expected to conduct himself in a civilized manner.
“I beg your pardon.” He gave her an ironic look.
To show a spirit of full conciliation, Leda smiled. “I’m honored that you should prefer the informal address. I would be pleased if you also would—” A sudden shyness caught her unexpectedly. She clasped her hands and turned a little. “If you would feel comfortable to—do the same—and call me Leda.”
He snuffed the last candle. The room went to darkness and firelight, tinged with the faint pungency of smoke. “I already have, haven’t I? In certain moments of forgetting myself.” His disembodied voice seemed strangely angry still.
Leda pulled her robe around her and went to the bed, feeling with her bare toes in the chilly shadows for the step stool. The collar of her robe pulled at her as she tried to lie down, but she had no intention of removing the garment. She dragged the bedclothes up, fluffing and arranging them, and lay carefully close to the edge.
She stared up at the orange glow of the fire on the underside of the canopy. Then she closed her eyes.
It seemed a long time before he came. The motion of the bed surprised her; his touch surprised her even more. He took her in his arms, pressing himself close to her all along his body. He had nothing on; she plucked her hand away—and then had nowhere to put it.
He nuzzled his face into the curve between her shoulder and her neck. She blinked up at the canopy.
“Good night, dear sir.” She barely whispered it.
“Leda,” he murmured. He curled his fist in her hair. His arm lay across her, tight at first, and then slowly, slowly relaxing. She felt every small slackening of tension in his body and easing of his breathing as he fell asleep.
“Dear sir,” she whispered again, and laid her hand on his forearm. “Pleasant dreams.”
Twenty-nine
Lady Kai, in her friendly way, wished to go with Leda to see the South Street ladies off at the station. This required a little adjustment, as the carriage was not quite suited to five persons, and while everyone knew that Mrs. Wrotham must be seated next to a window to relieve her traveling sickness, and the younger ladies of course offered to occupy the forward seat, Miss Lovatt insisted that she would take the middle as a compliment to Lady Cove, who felt that it was not perfectly right that her elder sister should give up the more comfortable position by the window.
Lady Cove attempted to precede her sister to the lesser seat, eliciting a brisk remark to the effect that after fortytwo years as a peeress, one might think that the common notion of proper precedence would have finally made an impression upon the mind of some people, who apparently still had no idea of their rank as the wives of barons. Lady Cove was no proof against such sisterly kindness, and meekly stepped aside.
Miss Lovatt settled into the middle of the seat, making certain that she appeared cramped by hunching her shoulders in a suitable way, which would have been most affecting if she might have maintained it all the way to the station. However, as soon as the carriage began to roll and Mrs. Wrotham complained of faintness, Miss Lovatt forgot to crouch, being too busy producing the smelling salts that Mrs. Wrotham had overlooked, and making certain that the rug was securely over Mrs. Wrotham’s lap, and the window adjusted just to her liking, to remember to appear painfully confined to a narrow seat.
After Mrs. Wrotham regained her composure, Miss Lovatt sat back and said, “Well, Leda. I have wanted an opportunity to tell you that I am glad to see you so nicely settled. I had had some fears when I heard, I must confess. But your young gentleman is most agreeable. He has given me his personal promise to have the cook forward the receipt for the lemonade to South Street.”
Before Leda could thank her for her compliment, Miss Lovatt recalled an instance of a similarly well-set-up young man, most respectable, who had married a lady of her third cousin’s acquaintance, and subsequently taken an ax to the gardener and been hanged. This unfortunate story reminded her of another example of masculine character, this one not having occurred to anyone of her personal acquaintance, but issuing from that spotless source, the confectioner’s wife. It appeared that a serious young lady had wed a wealthy and admirable doctor, only to find, to her dismay, that the fellow was not a real physician at all, but had smuggled himself back from deportation to Australia and posed as a medical man with such success that he’d treated upward of three hundred patients, and killed the half of them with mistaken practices, before he was found out.
Similar stories beguiled the entire ride to the station. As the carriage stopped, Miss Lovatt concluded, “I’m afraid matrimony is a very risky thing. I’m not sure that I would have your courage, Leda, if a gentleman were to take a fancy to me.”
“Well, you do take a gloomy view,” Lady Kai protested. “Samuel is not in the least untrustworthy!”
“Of course he is not, Lady Catherine!” Miss Lovatt’s eyebrows rose. “I would not for the world suggest such a thing!”
“It seems to me that you were suggesting that very thing. I would trust Samuel with my life, and so may Miss Leda! Mrs. Gerard, rather.”
“Certainly!” Miss Lovatt stiffened so much that Mrs. Wrotham and Lady Cove had to hunch to accommodate her raised feathers. “I found him most admirable, for an American.”
Fortunately, the porter opened the door at that moment, and no reply was required, for Leda feared that Lady Kai’s pink cheeks denoted some heat upon the subject. While Miss Lovatt was overseeing the porter’s disposal of their baggage, Lady Cove laid her glove on Leda’s arm, smiling at Lady Kai as she did so.
“You must not allow my sister to worry you, my dears,” she said softly. “Rebecca has often felt it her duty to warn young people of matrimony, so that they do not rush into trouble, but I fancy you will find that a little innocence and trust is a very fine thing in a marriage.”
“Do you t
hink so, ma’am?” Lady Kai asked, with more anxiety than Leda had expected from her.
She took Leda and Lady Kai each by the hand. “Well, I’ve never been very strong-minded, as Rebecca is, but I will tell you what I think of marriage. I think that if married people, man and wife, always think of one another through their cares and heartaches, and find their joys in one another in better times, then life will proceed very well.” She had a smile, and a little glitter in her eyes as she spoke. “That is what I hope for you, Leda. And for you, too, Lady Catherine.”
A silence reigned in the carriage as they returned through the wintry lanes to Westpark, until Lady Kai said, “What nice friends you have. I especially liked Lady Cove.”
Leda felt that she must defend Miss Lovatt a little, but had only got as far as describing how she always made quite certain that the coal man brought the right measure, when Lady Kai interrupted suddenly.
“Leda—may I call you ‘Leda’ now that we are as good as sisters? I must speak to you privately!”
The suppressed excitement in her tone made Leda glance at her warily. “Of course,” she murmured.
“I hope…I suppose you may have thought that I haven’t been quite…quite friendly, in the past few weeks! I do hope you’ll forgive me!”
Leda looked down at her gloves, and then out the window. “You mustn’t apologize. I hadn’t noticed anything at all.”
“Because you’ve been in a daze!”
“Yes. It’s all—happened so quickly.”
“Leda…this is very difficult to say, but—I wanted to explain…that is, there was the most infamous rumor just when you and Samuel became engaged, and I—I believed it, for a little while. I know it’s not true! I understand now. Mother explained it to me, and I’m so ashamed that I ever even listened to such a wretched thing, and I’ll never speak to Miss Goldborough again! I hope Robert isn’t so stupid as to marry the silly girl, but I don’t think he likes her more than half.”
Leda said nothing. She only sat in mortified agony.
“I was jealous, I think,” Lady Kai said matter-of-factly. “I was so afraid that you and Samuel would take Tommy away.”
Leda looked up. “Tommy?”
“I want to keep him, Leda! I really do. And if it’s not true that you’re his mother—then he really is an orphan, and I think I have as much a right to keep him as you and Samuel! Especially since—”
“I’m not his mother!” Leda cried. “Why must everyone believe that?”
“No—no, Mum told me that it was impossible, even if we should think such a thing. It was only that I was upset, that I believed it even for a moment. Because Samuel had said that he would adopt him, and I hadn’t thought, at that time, that things would…turn out…as they’ve turned out…” She rubbed her gloved palms together and turned pleading eyes on Leda. “Lord Haye has asked me to marry him. And I’ve said yes, I would. And he’s come to love Tommy, too, and said that he’d be glad to be a father to him. So you see—”
“You’re engaged?” Leda drew in a quick breath. Her first thought was Samuel.
“Yes. It’s going to be announced this evening. Daddy and Mum asked us to wait to say anything until you were married.”
“Oh, my.”
“Would you mind very much, Leda?”
“No! Of course not. Not for myself. I wish you very happy!”
“Do you think Samuel wants him so dearly?” Lady Kai gripped her hands together. “Except that he said he would adopt him, I hadn’t really thought he acted as if he was very much attached to Tommy. But lately—you know him better than I do lately, I suppose.”
Leda could not look her in the face. “I’m not sure I know anyone very well lately. Including myself.”
“I know,” Lady Kai said. “I know exactly what you mean!”
But Leda found that she knew him well enough. The moment she saw him, standing by the fire in the drawing room as she and Lady Kai came in, she knew that he’d been told.
He carried off his congratulations with the same composed bearing that he’d maintained through the wedding. Lady Kai immediately accosted him in the matter of Tommy. He wasn’t so easily convinced as Leda had expected, but merely said that he would speak to her parents and Lord Haye. Leda thought that very wise, but Lady Kai was inclined to pout and protest her devotion to the child.
“You’re eighteen,” he said.
“I’ll be nineteen in two weeks. And what has that to do with it?” she demanded.
“Everything,” he said unhelpfully.
“I suppose you think I’m too young to know my own mind. I assure you, if I’m old enough to marry, I’m old enough to know that I want babies. Tommy is only a little sooner than I should have my own, anyway.”
He turned away. “I’ll speak to Lady Tess,” he repeated.
“And what of Leda?” Lady Kai wasn’t going to give up so easily. She waved a hand to where Leda had sat down and pretended to interest herself in a book of scientific monographs. “She hardly knows enough to change his napkin. If I can’t manage Tommy, how is it that you expect Leda to? Your own babies will be quite enough for her to contend—”
He flashed her a look that seemed to startle her. She pressed her lips together.
“Manó” she said, in a hurt tone. “Are you angry at me?”
He hesitated, and then said, “No.”
“You are! When this should be the happiest day of my life!” She grabbed her skirts and whirled, marching to the door. She paused there dramatically. “I’d hoped that you, of all people, my very best friend, would wish for everything to be perfect.”
He made no answer. He only stood still, his hands locked behind his back, and Leda wondered that Lady Kai could not recognize what was in his face.
“Oh!” Lady Kai cried. “You’re disagreeable, both of you! I’d wanted you to laugh, and swing me about and be truly happy for me! And you act as if—as if someone’s great-aunt has just died! Please…Manó! Won’t you even smile, at least?”
He looked a little to the side. Then he made a sweeping bow. “Certainly, madam.” He came up smiling. “Your slightest wish—!”
Lady Kai clapped her hands with a satisfied squeal. She ran to him and gave him a hard hug. “There! That is my Manó. I knew you weren’t truly vexed. And you’ll tell Mum and Daddy that I’m perfectly, absolutely capable of keeping Tommy?”
“Yes.”
She kissed him soundly on the cheek. “Good. Now—I have to go and find Lord Haye. He’ll be so pleased.”
The room seemed to grow very silent when she was gone, with only the hum of the fire and the small flutter of a page as Leda turned it, staring down at the Latin names and colored prints of vividly marked parrots. She did not look up as he walked to the window behind her chair.
I’m sorry, she wanted to say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—even though she thought it would have been the most dreadful thing in the world if he had ever asked Lady Kai to marry him.
“We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” he said. “Important affairs at Honolulu.” The depth of self-mockery in his voice matched the bow he’d given Lady Kai.
Honolulu. Even the exotic sound of it unnerved her. Unimaginably distant, utterly isolated, a tiny speck she’d scarcely been able to see on the globe of the world.
She took a deep breath. “I shall be honored to accompany you wherever you wish to go, dear sir.”
She felt him come close behind her. He touched the nape of her neck. His finger stroked a line beneath her ear and along the angle of her chin. He spread his hand: the heat of it hovered over her skin, as the things he had done to her the night before hovered over everything she thought or did.
“Thank you,” he said.
He left her. She did not even see him until dinner, where the talk was of Tommy, how little good a long trip to Hawaii would do him at such a young age, how it would be perfectly satisfactory to Lady Tess to keep him right there at Westpark until things were better settled all round, and of when the w
edding would take place. Lady Kai gaily insisted that whatever business it might be that took Samuel and Leda home now, they had to return for the ceremony in July.
But late in the night, after coffee and the engagement toasts, long after the men had gone to smoke and the ladies to bed, he came silently to their room. He touched her body as he had touched her before, all sensation and hot possession—and afterward held her fast and fell asleep with his face nestled into her shoulder.
And she lay awake a long time, gazing at the fading glow of the fire reflected in the canopy above their heads, thinking of what Lady Cove had said of marriage, and hoping.
Samuel lied—“a small prevarication,” as Leda put it meticulously—about their schedule, manufacturing a steamship departure within the week from Liverpool. But once they had left Westpark and arrived in London, he saw no particular reason to rush. He saw no particular reason to do anything. He lay in bed in a hotel suite the first morning in the city, dozing—the only time in his life he’d ever done it in full health.
Not precisely dozing. The muted clatter and grind of traffic beyond the closed drapes mingled with the faint chink of silver as she brought a tray of tea in from the sitting room. She wore a cream-colored dress, her hair pinned up in that intricate heavy mass, her slim waist flowing into the ornate folds around the bustle. He watched her through his lashes, as he’d watched her when she rose from the bed, a pale nymph in the semidarkness, and took up her robe where he’d dropped it last night on the floor.
She put the tray down on a marble-topped table. He saw her glance at him, her head tilted a little to one side. Then she went to the window and drew the drapes, so that a crack of foggy light crept through.
She waited. After a moment, she drew the drape a little wider.
“It must be time to get up,” he said.
She jumped, and dropped the curtain closed. “I beg your pardon—I didn’t realize—I thought perhaps…a little gentle light would not be amiss.”
He pushed up in bed. It still felt strange, to be bereft of weapons and clothing, to be deep among pillows and soft encumbrances; to be more vulnerable than he had allowed himself to be for a long, long time.