A Reckless Desire (28 page)

“My
friend,
” Rivers said with gentle emphasis. “This is Mrs. Willow, Tomlin, and she is a dear friend of mine. And no, we shall not stay for tea. I would not dream of distressing the kitchen staff by appearing without any warning.”

“Very well, my lord,” the footman said, bowing one last time and to spare him further embarrassment Rivers hurried Lucia across the patterned marble floor, past a pair of gilded crouching lions, and up the staircase.

“Poor Tomlin,” Lucia said when they were out of the footman's hearing. “You were very kind to him. Many gentlemen wouldn't be.”

Her genuine sympathy reminded Rivers of how often she herself must have been treated rudely by gentlemen in the tiring room. She had changed so much in these last weeks that it was hard to realize she'd still been working there less than a month before.

“At least you've been spared being greeted by Mr. Maitland,” he said as they turned down another grand hallway. Because his father was in London, the halls and rooms were all empty, and without the usual small army of servants bustling about and standing guard outside rooms. “He is the Hall's butler, and never was there a more fierce Cerberus to guard our doors than Mr. Maitland. He has the unique ability to approach without a sound, and catch small boys in the very act of willful misbehavior.”

“I'm sure all three of you were quite willful,” Lucia said, gazing around her. “Poor Mr. Maitland must have had his hands full when you were home. Rivers, I have never seen so many paintings!”

“We Fitzroys do seem to have a weakness for them,” he admitted. She was right: every spare wall was hung with at least one large canvas, framed with a heavy gilded frame, something he took for granted. “I never gave it much thought, really. My cousin Hawk is the true connoisseur. He's advised Father on buying new pictures, as well as suggesting which other ones might be better retired to the attic.”

She glanced at him curiously. “You have a cousin who's named Hawk? Like Hawkesmoor?”

He chuckled. “It's not his Christian name,” he said. “Not that I can recall exactly what that is. Most likely John or George or somesuch. And it's not Hawkesmoor like the architect, but Hawkesworth for his ducal title, which we shorten to Hawk. The same applies to my older brother Harry, who isn't really a Henry or Harold, but Earl of Hargreave.”

She paused, running her fingers lightly over the polished edge of a long satinwood sideboard while she considered. “So your true name isn't Rivers after all?”

“No, it is,” he said, a little sheepishly. Most of the greater world went through life without any honorific whatsoever, but since his family was so riddled with titles of every degree, being a younger son had always been something just short of an embarrassment. “Being the third son, I have neither title nor name beyond Lord Rivers Fitzroy, and Rivers is what they poured over my forehead when I was baptized, or so goes the old family jest. Hah, here is wounded Juno, and still not mended.”

He stopped before a nearly life-sized marble statue of the Roman goddess, standing on a black pedestal between two tall arched windows. Juno stood with her weight on one foot with the other coyly bent, and it was this foot that had suffered the long-ago loss of a toe to the Fitzroy brothers. And it
was
still broken, awkwardly snapped off where Harry's cricket bat had struck.

Rivers patted the statue familiarly on the knee. “I cannot believe no one has noticed it,” he said. “Nor, apparently, has the lady herself complained over the last decade.”

“She should have kicked you at the very least,” Lucia said, coming to stand on the other side of the statue. “What became of her toe?”

Rivers tried to look solemn. “I regret to admit that I do not know. My dog—a wicked small terrier named Scrap—seized it as a prize and ran off, and for all I know it's now buried beside some prized mutton bone. So while it was Harry's bat that dealt the blow, it was my dog that completed the crime, and so I am every bit as much at fault.”

She laughed, her head tipped to one side and the pale sun from one of the windows lightly gilding her cheek. Her beauty struck him once again, a kind of glorious enchantment that only she possessed, but this time there was something more, something amazing, that took him by stunned surprise.

Standing there with the arch over her head like a kind of halo, her blue flowered gown an extension of the now-blue sky through the window and her profile a twin to the marble goddess's, she looked as if she'd as much a place here as Juno herself. She looked as if she
belonged
here, as if she'd spent her entire life at a house such as this. The realization jolted him, and he swiftly tried to control it with reason: it was the dress, the sunlight, her smile, together conspiring to make the playhouse tiring-girl look at ease in the country house of the Duke of Breconridge.

“And thus I have seen the deity's toe, Rivers, or the absence of it,” she said playfully, unaware of his thoughts. “Show me more of you as a boy, if you please.”

Forcibly he pulled himself back to the present, the way she always wished him to be. He took her hand to lead her down the hall, trying to think of something else to show her in the vast house that was part of him. Absently he glanced at the large painting to his left, and smiled.

“Here's another,” he said. “This is a portrait of me with my brothers, though we're so young that you'd never recognize us from this now.”

Frowning with concentration, she studied the painting. “I wouldn't know them anyway. I don't believe your brothers ever came with you back among the dancers, did they?”

“No, they wouldn't,” he said absently. “They're both too occupied with their wives and children to bother with actresses or dancers now.”

He'd forgotten all about this painting. He and his brothers had been very young, but at least Harry and Geoffrey had been old enough to have been breeched, both of them dressed like little gentlemen in miniature with their dark hair curled and clubbed to resemble wigs. He himself was still in a young child's long gown with a satin sash, and his pale blond hair in wispy ringlets to his shoulders. His brothers had teased him about those ringlets, he remembered that, just as he remembered posing for the artist in a makeshift studio in one of the guest bedchambers, and not beneath the shady tree shown in the finished picture.

“You don't look as if you belong with them,” Lucia said. “You look different.”

“That's because I was added in afterward, by a different artist,” he said. “I suppose I was considered too young when my brothers were first painted.”

It made sense to him, but not to her. “Why are you waving your arms about like that? Are you trying to get their attention?”

“I'm holding my hands out because I was still unsteady on my feet,” he explained patiently, but clearly she wasn't going to believe him. “Here, I'll show you a place where we used to dare one another to go.”

“A dare?” she asked, intrigued and perking up with interest as they turned down another hall. “Is it a frightening place?”

“No, but it was strictly forbidden,” he said, trying to sound mysterious. “We were never to go inside, let alone touch anything. No one was permitted there, yet still we did, and never were caught.”

He threw open the last door with a flourish and she hung back in the doorway, uncertain of what she'd see.

“It's the King's Bedchamber,” he said with family pride. To have a bedchamber reserved for royalty meant that a family was important enough to have the king visit their home. “Only to be used by His Majesty when he comes calling, and never anyone else.”

Tentatively she stepped inside the shadowy room. The curtains were drawn against fading from the sun, and the furniture was shrouded in drop cloths, but still the state bed rose in all its gilded glory, with a towering canopy and carved mahogany unicorns and lions supporting the bedposts.

“Does His Majesty visit often?” she asked in a respectful whisper.

“He has been here three times in my memory,” he said, tugging one of the curtains open to let in a splash of sunlight across the patterned carpet. It also lit the portrait on the wall of his father, sternly imposing in the red velvet and white ermine of his Garter robes.

“That must be your father,” Lucia asked, following his gaze. “You're fair where he is dark, but I can see your face in his.”

“Then you're seeing a resemblance that few others find,” Rivers said, considering the picture beside her. “You see how he's glowering, reminding you that it's treasonous for anyone other than royalty to be in this room. Why, if it were up to him, you'd be locked away in the Tower.”

Her eyes widened even as she laughed. “It is not treason to be here!”

“High treason.” He folded his arms over his chest and scowled ominously, trying to emulate his father. “The highest. Should you care to test me, madam?”

She grinned, then crossed the room and hopped up squarely into the middle of the enormous state bed.

“Test me, my lord,” she said, patting the coverlet beside her in invitation. “I dare you.”

Her audacity shocked him. Not even his brothers would have taken that dare as boys. For all his teasing, the state bed was sacrosanct and untouchable, and always had been.

Until now. Until Lucia.

“Dare accepted,” he said, jumping onto the bed beside her. Delighted, she turned her head and kissed him, and he thought of how this was the best possible dare in his entire life.

“Before, with the footman, you called me your friend,” she said, her voice a husky whisper. “Your dear friend. You didn't have to do that, but you did.”

“Because it was the truth,” he said, brushing a stray curl back from her forehead. “I said the same to McGraw today, before you joined us.”

Her smiled tightened, and she glanced down. “He believes I'm your whore.”

“I told him you were my dearest friend,” he said firmly, “and that I hold you in the highest respect and regard.”

Her eyes fluttered up. “You did?”

“I did,” he said, leaving no doubt, “because it is God's own truth. I also informed him that if he ever dares treat you in any fashion unworthy of you, he shall answer to me.”

“Oh, Rivers,” she murmured, the slight catch in her voice betraying her emotion. “That is why you were so—so short with Mr. McGraw this morning, wasn't it? You were challenging him on my behalf?”

“I was defending you, sweetheart,” he said, leaning closer to kiss her again. “Because you deserve defending. Because—”

“Rivers?” said a woman behind him. “Heavens, Rivers, that is you.”

Instantly he whipped about, shielding Lucia with his body. The woman behind him wasn't just a woman, but a duchess: Her Grace the Duchess of Breconridge, his stepmother, Celia.

Nor was she alone. In the doorway with her were not only Mr. Maitland the butler and Tomlin the callow footman, but his two sisters-in-law, Harry's wife, Gus, Countess of Hargreave, and Geoffrey's wife, Serena, Lady Geoffrey Fitzroy. They were staring with various reactions—dismay, horror, amusement, and most of all, surprise—but none of that could match the mortification he felt there with Lucia beside him. Damnation, why hadn't anyone
told
him the ladies were here?

But all his ever-gracious stepmother did was smile warmly, a smile that included Lucia as well.

“How happy we are to see you, Rivers,” she said. “Will you and your friend join us for tea?”

When this day had begun, Lucia had expected to play her part for Mr. McGraw. She'd never thought her performance would continue in the late afternoon, sitting on the edge of a silk-covered gold chair in a parrot-green parlor in Breconridge Hall, before an audience that consisted of a duchess, a countess, another lady, and, of course, Rivers.

Rivers had assured her she'd been prepared for that earlier performance, but he'd said nothing of this one, and since they'd been discovered, they'd had no time alone together to discuss it. She had no lines to recite, no well-practiced and considered gestures to fall back upon—especially not after having made her entrance and first impression tumbled like the lowest, most wanton chambermaid on the forbidden state bed. Now she'd only herself to rely upon, and she'd never been more unsettled or uncertain in her life.

She didn't know anything about ladies like these, the true versions of what Rivers had been trying to teach her to be. She'd seen plenty of gentlemen in the tiring room, but never ladies. And these women awed her: their grace, their jewels, their gentle voices, the way they smiled and held their teacups and laughed together.

Thanks to Rivers, she would not shame herself entirely, knowing important small things like how to curtsey when introduced and not to wipe her fingers on the tablecloth. Thanks to him, too, her flowered silk gown and blue short cape were entirely appropriate. But among these ladies, her accent sounded like a third-rate echo, her posture wrong, and her laughter strained and anxious. She felt ungainly and clumsy, as if she were back in
corps de ballet
rehearsal with her uncle Lorenzo critically noting every misstep and awkwardness. It was one thing for her to play at being Mrs. Willow before Mr. McGraw or Mrs. Currie, the mantua-maker, but another entirely to do so with these ladies.

“How long have you known Rivers, Mrs. Willow?” the duchess asked as soon as all the niceties of serving the tea had been accomplished. “I cannot recall Rivers bringing any other lady here to us at Breconridge Hall, so you must be a very fond friend indeed.”

Her Grace smiled pleasantly, full of encouragement as any good hostess would do. The pale late sun caught the diamonds that she wore in her hair, around her throat, and at her wrists; given the rest of the house, Lucia was certain they were real, and not paste, and of a value inconceivable to her. The duchess was an exceptionally beautiful older lady, with masses of pale gold hair and a serene smile, and while Lucia believed her question was intended to show genteel interest and not to pry, it still terrified her, and she took another sip of her tea to stall, and think.