A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong: A Blackshear Family novella (B 0.5) (2 page)

Livingston, to be sure, was a liberal-minded sort, willing to tolerate a good deal of nonsense if a fine hound or horse or fowling piece lay at the other side of it. Probably he hadn’t once been troubled, while doing his own business here, by the notion of a baron neglecting his place in Parliament to stay out in the country fooling about with birds.

“I expect the birds spend much of their time in some sort of shelter during winter?” Andrew glanced at the mantelpiece clock. Twenty minutes now he’d been sitting in the man’s drawing room, and Lord Sharp had not yet proposed to show the falcons, though he had indeed dropped a mention of Hume. “I’m sure I look forward to seeing the particulars of how they’re kept and trained.” In fact he had no interest whatsoever in any aspect of falconry, but if feigning such interest could move his errand along, then feign he would, with an untroubled conscience.

“They stay in a proper mews in such weather, you may be sure. I’ve never yet lost a bird to disease.” Sharp swung one long leg over the other and appeared to settle more firmly into his armchair. “But I should have thought your sister would like to come along, since she is to be the huntress. A person usually likes to select his own bird, or hers.” With an air of profundity he tapped two fingers against his thick gray side-whiskers. “It’s not unlike a marriage, the partnership. All the effort and good intentions in the world can’t make things right if you choose poorly in the first place.”

That seemed a bit of a stretch, to say the least. First of all, a falcon was a
bird
, a dumb beast, and its interaction with its keeper consisted mainly of flying off and bringing back dead voles and such. Lord help the baron’s wife if he considered that to be comparable to marriage.

Second, the fatalistic nonsense about effort and good intentions just tried his patience. That was what came, no doubt, of priding oneself on a distant connection to David Hume and reading too much philosophy in consequence. Effort and good intentions, he might tell the man, built cathedrals. Found cures for disease. Mapped the oceans, the continents, the stars. If
he
were ever to make an imprudent marriage—which of course he would not—he would call heavily upon effort and good intentions. Indeed he would do everything he could to ameliorate the consequences for himself and the lady, if only as an exercise in atonement.

All this he might say, if it were in his nature to unburden himself of every passing thought. “I’m sorry she couldn’t come along as well,” he said instead. “However I’ll do my best to choose the most suitable bird for her.”

“Indeed you’ll have help at that.” Sharp sat forward, smiling, and the smile plucked at something in the back of Andrew’s brain. “We have questions, you see, that we ask in these cases, just for the purpose of making a good match. By the time we’ve finished our tea, we’ll know Miss Blackshear nearly as well as if she sat there with us. We’ll know just what sort of bird will serve.”

Tea. Andrew’s heart sank. He didn’t want tea, he didn’t want to undergo whatever interrogation the baron had in mind, and he didn’t want to spend a minute more than necessary in picking out this bird, which was beginning to seem like the most ill-conceived Christmas present of his five and twenty years. He fished out his pocket-watch and snapped it open. “I appreciate your lordship’s thoroughness as well as your hospitality, but I’m not sure I have time for—”

“No, that’s how it’s done.” The man was already on his feet, again with that unsettling, vaguely familiar smile. “Nothing for it. Come along to the parlor; you may meet my daughter and we shall all discuss your sister over tea.”

His body knew before his brain, somehow. The word
daughter
fell like a hammer on a pianoforte string and the note reverberated through his every last bone. Not that his brain was any laggard. By the time he’d risen from his chair and trailed the baron from the drawing room, certain suppositions were beginning to form. The man’s smile, a jostle to his memory. The girl’s poise, her genteel accent, and of course her proximity to this house.

No point in getting exercised until he was sure. A prudent man took note of suppositions, and waited for evidence. And indeed, when they entered the parlor to find a quiet, neatly coiffed lady with her chair drawn near to the fire and her head bent over a book, it seemed for a moment that both brain and bones had been deceived.

“Lucy, my dear, will you be so good as to ring for tea?” Lord Sharp marched straight up to the hearth, delighted as if some long-lost relation had come to call. “Our gentleman from Cambridgeshire is come and we must find out all about his sister.”

She looked up. Then she put her book aside and rose out of the chair to her glorious, unmistakable, Amazonian height.

“Mr. Blackshear is our caller,” the baron went on, and Andrew bowed, which gave him nearly enough time to banish all traces of discomposure from his face. “Mr. Blackshear, may I present my daughter, Miss Sharp.”

She curtseyed. She smiled, as she might surely smile at any caller. And with the gait of a victorious racehorse
,
she crossed to the bell-pull to ring for tea.

* * *

Lord above, this one was charming. Handsome, to begin with: if she was to be perfectly honest—and she usually was—she would probably not have found the blushes of a stout, spotty-faced, patchy-haired man nearly so agreeable. Not
disagreeable
by any means. Stout and spotty-faced and patchy-haired men aplenty had come to buy birds, and many of them had seemed able conversationalists with possibly excellent philosophical foundations, from what she could discern in a half-hour visit. She hoped she did not begrudge them the right to blush. Mere outward beauty, after all, made no signifier of real virtue.

But looking across the tea table now, it struck her that beauty itself was a virtue to which she had perhaps not accorded sufficient weight in her reckonings on these matters.

“Would you care for sugar, Mr. Blackshear?” Lucy said, for no good reason other than to see if he might blush again.

“Thank you, no,” he said to his tea, which was halfway already to his mouth. He had a strong, expressive mouth, fit for barking out commands or whispering improprieties to a lady as he brushed by her in a dance. He had eyes dark as the mahogany inlay on the tea-chest, and hair like polished cherry-wood, and arms and legs and shoulders made to take up space. Men who looked like Mr. Blackshear generally strode through life helping themselves to what they wanted, or so she’d always assumed. They didn’t take pains with courtesy, and they certainly didn’t look aghast at having innocently offered a seat in a dry carriage to a young woman walking in the rain.

If he were handsome and unblushing, or modest and plain, he would not intrigue half so much. That was the trick of it. Not the handsomeness all on its own. She would be sorry, now, if there were no men of this stripe at Aunt Symond’s party.

“Has your sister owned a hawking bird of any sort before?” She stirred a lump of sugar into her own tea. Time enough to think of the party, and the men she’d meet there, after this transaction was done.

“No, never. I expect I’ll want your most tractable specimen.” His mouth kicked up into a guarded smile, revealing a dimple on the left side. It changed all the lights of his countenance, hinting at a mischief utterly out of keeping with his blushes and the polite distance in his speech.

“Never owned a bird?” Papa, unconcerned with dimples, jumped in with the right response. “But she’s flown them, I trust. Perhaps at a house party?”

Mr. Blackshear brought his teacup to his lips at that moment, preventing a reply and probably giving him time to deliberate on what answer would best serve his purpose. “No,” he said after swallowing. “She’ll be new to the sport.” Whether on principle, or because he doubted his powers of dissembling, he’d opted for the truth. She couldn’t disapprove of that.

But she could—and Papa could—disapprove the ill-thought-out acquisition of a bird. Too many times they’d been visited by fashionable men and ladies who viewed falconry as but another diverting fad, the bird an accessory to be shown off like a new beaded reticule or gold-topped walking stick. They always sent those customers away.

And so they must do with Mr. Blackshear. Almost certainly they must. Never mind how drab the parlor would look without him.

“Is it something in particular that’s precipitated her interest?” She leaned a few degrees forward. As if by proper application of will she could somehow compel him into giving an answer more to their liking.

His eyelids lowered; he frowned at his tea. He didn’t like the questioning, obviously. But he was too polite to say so. “She’s to be married soon, to a fellow of sporting tastes.” His left hand held the saucer and that thumb was fidgeting, edging back and forth along a half-inch of the rim. “He likes shooting and fox-hunting and so forth. A hawking bird will give her a way to…” His thumb stilled, all energy redirected to choosing the proper words. “Share in his amusements… without simply adopting all his preferences for her own.” His cheeks were flushing. He seemed a little amazed at himself for telling so much. “I thought she ought to have something that belonged only to her.” He ended with a long swallow of tea, eyes still lowered, thumb now clamped down hard on the saucer’s concave surface.

Lucy slanted another inch toward him, consciousness blooming like a spoonful of cream dropped into tea. This was why he’d come all this way in the rain, and why he sat here now submitting to impertinent questions, uncomfortable in his still-damp cravat. He cared for his sister. He wanted her to be happy in marriage, but to remember her separate self. It was admirable and elegant, from a philosophical perspective. It was also…

She bent her head to study her own cup as a tiny fissure opened just under her heart. Mama had not lived long enough to give her brothers or sisters.

There was little point in mourning a thing you’d never had, and so she didn’t mourn, most days. Indeed she’d had a fine childhood, full of books and occupations for the mind and of course Papa’s benevolent attention, doled out in such measures as would not have been possible had there been other children among whom it all must be shared. She understood that. Only, confronted with this example of a brother’s warm affection, it was difficult to not at least reflect—in an objective way—on how different life might have been if she’d grown up with siblings.

“Do you mean to say the falcon isn’t her own idea?” Papa’s voice jerked her back to the business at hand, and rightly so. Brotherly affection was neither here nor there in the question of whether the bird would go to a fit keeper.

“It’s mine, I suppose.” Mr. Blackshear set his tea down on the table by his armchair. Impatience threaded through his voice. “But it’s an idea based on three and twenty years of acquaintance with my sister. I know her habits. I remember her picking up fledgling birds fallen from the nest and feeding them on bread dipped in milk when she was but seven or eight years old. I wouldn’t have come all this way to purchase a bird without I was sure she’d care for it properly.”

Poor Mr. Blackshear. So well-intentioned, so sure of himself, so very very handsome in asserting his case, and so woefully mistaken. She sent one look to Papa.
I shall manage this. Leave it to me.

She would be honest with the man, perfectly honest, because she almost always was. But she would be mindful of his fine feelings, too. As gently as truth and facts allowed, she would disappoint him.

She set aside her tea. “I think we ought to visit the mews now, Mr. Blackshear. I’ll have the butler fetch your coat.”

* * *

“The one nearest you is a goshawk. Don’t offer him a finger; I cannot vouch for his manners.” She made the joke for her own benefit. Clearly Mr. Blackshear had not the least intention of approaching the goshawk or any of the other birds.

Nor of approaching her. He’d stationed himself mere inches from the mews door and remained there, hands thrust in his greatcoat pockets, face still showing remnants of the abject disapproval he’d worn when Papa had raised no objection to her leaving the house with him.

Well, it made a useful reminder, didn’t it, of how the world viewed a young lady’s conduct with men. Papa might put his trust in her good sense, and in the three or four outdoor servants who worked within earshot and would spring to her aid at the slightest alarm, but Papa’s views, as Aunt Symond and more than one governess had gently hinted, were not quite regular.

Nothing to be done about it now. She would be more mindful of appearances when she went into society. And in the meanwhile, she would not be cowed by Mr. Blackshear’s dour looks.

“The next two are both peregrine falcons, and the small one there is a sparrow-hawk.” He did at least glance from bird to bird as she pointed each one out. “The sparrow-hawk kills, as its name suggests, the sorts of birds your sister used to rescue. In fact all of these birds kill those birds. None of them is meant to eat bread and milk.”
None of them is suitable for a tender-hearted lady.
She would give him a minute to draw that conclusion for himself, before voicing the words.

He tilted his head, frowning up at the rafters. His jaw worked for a moment; doubtless he was seeking some tactful reply. “I appreciate your being plain with me as to the nature of these birds. I hope you will do me the courtesy of believing that I—” He stopped. His chin came down and his gaze met hers through the afternoon shadows. “Pardon me, but can we please acknowledge that we met earlier, in the lane? To speak any further without owning that fact feels… less than proper.”

“Of course.” Lucy sent her own gaze to the straw-covered floor. So very odd, the effect he had on her, when she ought by rights to find his manner irritating. She ought to pity him, really, his behavior so constrained by rules and precepts he’d had no hand in forming, nor probably ever once subjected to a rigorous evaluation. She oughtn’t to feel so diverted and disarmed. “I did suspect you to be the gentleman from Cambridgeshire, when I saw you. Probably I ought to have said something.” She brought her eyes back to his, because to keep them averted was missish and silly. “It wasn’t my intention to take you by surprise.”