At Your Pleasure (29 page)

“I do admire that song,” he said.

Deliberately she let her hand slip, drawing out an ugly, discordant sound.

This subtle message went ignored. Looking right and left, Lord John stepped inside. When he drew shut the door, she grew wary, and set aside the lute to rise.

He sketched her an ornate bow, the formality ludicrous. “My dear lady,” he said. “Are you well?”

The concern in his voice seemed so unlikely, and therefore nearly alarming, that she looked down at herself to find the cause for it—a wound she had not noticed, perhaps, or a snake at her feet.

“I am well,” she replied, looking up with a frown. “Are
you
well, sir?” For if he had discovered a better nature, surely it had required a very hard knock to his head.

“Well? No! In truth, my mind is very uneasy. Such untoward happenings!” He took a step toward her, his
hands outstretched as though to grasp hers. Startled into stepping backward, she locked her own hands behind her back, and breathed a sigh of relief when his fell.

“I feel responsible,” he said. He flashed her a significant look—his lower lip plumping to produce a peculiar expression that struck her as something between anger and petulance. But when he spoke again, she realized she had misread it: he was trying to manufacture a look of guilt. “I cannot but feel that the blame is mine.” Turning away, he tucked his hand into his waistcoat, striking a solemn pose for his ruminative gaze out the window. “I, no less than Lord Rivenham, was given charge of this mission. Thus, though I took no hand in it nor knew aught of it till it was done, I must bear part of the blame for your misfortune.”

She realized then that he spoke of her new marriage. Her surprise was short-lived; on its heels chased suspicion.

“You must not trouble yourself,” she said. This sham was to some purpose, though she could not imagine what. Indeed, she wasn’t certain there was any use to knowing the answer. That the boy imagined himself Adrian’s equal in command bespoke a powerful imagination. Whatever aim he had in mind, chances were it was equally fantastical.

“You bear it with dignity!” His voice dropped. “But I wish you to know, dear lady, that you have my support.”

Support for what? The remark cast a lure that she had no intention of taking. She waited until the silence forced him to turn around in search of her reply.

She offered up a smile. “How kind,” she said. “I will bid you good day.”

“But you need not put on a brave face with me!” Now he approached again, and because she would not be driven to sidle away like a frightened mouse, she had no choice but to let him take her hands. “I understand, you see. I know that you share an uncommon closeness with your brother.”

The prickle down her spine felt like a warning. Whence had David entered this game? “I do not recall that you have met my brother, Lord John.”

“No, alas! I have not had that pleasure.” His solicitous expression betrayed no awareness of how unlikely it was that he might describe the man he hunted as an acquaintance worth knowing. He squeezed her hands. “But I had it from your cousin that you are most devoted to him.”

She did not recall such matters being raised at the table last night. “You spoke with my cousin before he departed?”

Lord John nodded. “Poor soul! How distressed he was to leave without a farewell to you. In anguish he guessed you would think it a betrayal—”

“No,” she said. “I never saw it so.”

His cornflower-blue eyes widened. “But of course! I told him just the same. ‘How now betrayal,’ I said, ‘when she will understand precisely the tyranny that was wielded to expel you!’ But he could not be calm, my lady! He begged of me—and I gladly gave him”—here he paused long enough to lend a peculiar emphasis to his next words—“my promise. I vowed to look after your best interests in his absence as I might for my own sister: as tenderly, as solicitously.”

He still grasped her hands, but such was her amazement that she barely noted the awkwardness of it. If only she were in London now, she might have told a tale that set the court on its ear. Nobody who knew him would cast Lord John in the role of protector—least of all his sister, a wealthy widow of thirty, who when not in one man’s bed was being directed by her family to the next one, the better to whisper their messages into ears gentled by her caress.

Double-tongued speeches and deceitful friendships were the court’s stock-in-trade. Lord John shone in that setting, but she never had. Her next words were too wooden to match their message.

“That is generous,” she said.

He hesitated, visibly cautious now. “But perhaps I misunderstand your situation?”

She felt increasingly dizzy. “I begin to think I do not understand the situation so well myself. How do you see it, sir?”

“Why, that this marriage was not to your liking,” he said slowly. “How could it be, when your first loyalty must be to your dear brother?”

His question pointed toward too many traps to count.

Her smile felt stiff on her mouth. “You have considered my brother a criminal, Lord John. To ask me if I am loyal to him seems a question with teeth.”

He studied her intently. “Yes, I suppose it does. Will you take it amiss, madam, if I speak plainly? I do not believe you were planning a marriage at supper last night—at least, not to Lord Rivenham. I find this changes my
view of things. I begin to reconsider who be the criminal here, and who be the victim.”

Her foreboding returned, sharper now, drawing her stomach tight. “Oh,” she said softly. Here was plain speaking, indeed. This boy was trying to entice her into some confederation against his master, her new husband.

She would rather treat with a feral boar. At least then she would be able to predict with some certainty when the creature would turn on her.

Gently she pulled her hands from his grasp. “I am grateful for your kindness,” she said. Walking past him, she pulled open the door.

A sound came from down the hall—a laughing exchange, one of the voices Adrian’s.

Lord John paled. “We’ll speak more anon,” he said. “Good day, sweet lady!”

He slipped past her, out the door.

Nora returned to her window seat, taking up the tune once more. She was out of practice, but her fingers remembered the notes well enough to proceed without her direction.

What manner of mischief was that mooncalf designing? She would not trust him for the world. But his talk had sown seeds . . . and now they began to sprout in her mind.

Why had he spoken to Cosmo? Had he recognized in her cousin a common enemy to Adrian? Could it be that the two men had jointly conceived some plan?

If so, could she blame Lord John for hinting it to her? She was David’s sister, Cosmo’s cousin, an unwilling
bride. Where in those roles lay any cause for this uneasiness she felt at the notion of a plot against Adrian?

If even Lord John, who disliked her, thought her a natural ally—then what did it say of her that she worried instead for her husband?

Traitor
: so David might have called her for it.

A footstep came behind her. She did not bother to look but made the tune in her hands run faster, concentration her pretext for failing to speak. The disquiet inside her was swelling; it ached like a bruise. She did not understand herself. Had Lord John intended to broach some private message from Cosmo? What if he meant to come over to her brother’s side, the better to spite Adrian? How would she account to David for her failure to encourage Lord John in such matters?

I could not trust him, David—no, nor Cosmo either!

And how should I have trusted Cosmo? If there was indeed a betrothal between us, you should have informed me of it!

Perhaps there had never been a betrothal, though. Perhaps Cosmo had lied.

Then I was all the more right to suspect him. And of course I could not trust Lord John.

Behind her came a sweet chord. Her fingers stumbled briefly. The music of the mandolin rose like laughter, a light and bright counterpoint to the throaty tune she plucked.

She glanced over her shoulder. Adrian sat on a stool, his attention on his hands, which flowed over the strings with unlikely grace for their size. A lock of
his hair had fallen loose and snaked like a length of sunlight along his cheek.

She turned back to the window, swallowing hard against a sudden feeling of tears. Lack of sleep accounted for this ridiculous reaction. An unwanted marriage undertaken at midnight might overset any woman.

Yet, as she forced herself to continue to play and his tune twined with hers, the music made her throat fill until she could not swallow. It was so easy to play with him. She still understood, after six years, as by instinct, how her fingers must improvise to aid his approaching runs.

And oh, their song! Caution and foreboding faltered before it. It seemed to leap between them, twisting and braiding into something far greater than its parts. The music caught her in its grasp; it lifted away the sorrow and turned her mood; a sense of wonder filled her at the graces Adrian performed on his strings, a feeling of laughter that made her own fingers fly faster.

This
was music: not idle pastime or distraction but a force of its own, exalting. It swept through her and called up her soul, pushing the laugh out from her lips. A part of herself woke and saw hope where minutes ago had appeared only darkness.

She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the melody.

Finally, long minutes later, she strummed the last few bars. As the song ended, so did her joy. Her hand slapped over the courses to stop their vibrations. The lute’s hollow body thumped.

I am no traitor.

It was not for him that I disliked to marry Cosmo. You told me to keep Hodderby safe. I could not do that from afar!

Adrian’s hand covered her. She watched his fingers braid through hers over the fingerboard.

How could she excuse, how could she reconcile to herself, the feelings this touch stirred in her? As though all her old dreams had resurrected, in the moment before she made herself remember why she must loathe it, his touch always felt like a miracle.

“You still have a talent,” he said.

She would not be wise to compliment him. But this was only the truth. “As do you.”

In the long space of his silence, she struggled with herself. To stand up and walk away? To wait here, in a pause that seemed invitation to further folly?

He spoke before her mind decided itself. “I am no scholar of honor. But I would fain find a way to safeguard yours. Yet, when I ask myself how to do it, I find no answer.”

A sigh slipped from her. Of all things he might have said, he had hit on a remark that did not allow for anger or fear. And what other defense did she have?

Gently he removed the lute from her grasp. She watched him return the instrument to its peg. “Why have you come, then?” she asked. “For I cannot cede my honor, Adrian.”

He looked at her over his shoulder, a thoughtful and measuring glance. Then he stepped again behind her, kneeling, putting himself out of her view as his hands found hers again.

“I have come to tell you something,” he said in her ear. “But the road to it is winding. May I beg your indulgence?”

The strange request from this strange posture, spoken with a tentativeness foreign to his character, left her no choice but to nod.

“These lands to your west”—his breath warmed her lobe—“they were ever my home. Because of them, I understand what Hodderby means to you.”

She nodded. She had never doubted that.

“And this place,” he said, “this isle, this kingdom: this is where I felt I belonged. The language I first spake was bred of this soil. The blood of my family is mixed with the blood of English kings.”

“Yes.” The Ferrers were an older family than her own.

She felt him set his forehead to the crown of her head, and heard his inhalation—as though he sought to breathe in the scent of her. “But so long as I kept to my forefathers’ faith—a faith which had been bred of this land no less than its plants and cattle—I found no welcome here,” he said. “In my own home, Nora, I have been a stranger, though I never realized it until I went to France. Only on those foreign shores did I finally feel what it might be to belong.”

This was a view of his time in France that he had not shared with her six years ago. Then, he had spoken of his education, the sights he had seen, the characteristics of continental courts and peoples. And she had been hungry to travel vicariously through his accounts.

To hear him speak now of what he had
felt
then—this was an intimacy that her younger self had not known to
crave. It was like balm to some sore and tired part of her that had been educated by intimacy’s absence. For all the many nights at her late husband’s table and in his bed, when his cold silence had pressed like a fist against her lungs, she now held her breath and waited eagerly for more, though she knew she should not.

“It was a sweet thing,” he said at last. “I will not disguise it. To speak my name and see no black recognition . . . to admit my faith and find a brethren’s greeting instead of suspicion and hatred . . . Perhaps I was softened by this pleasure, corrupted by it, for I grew so accustomed to it that I could not imagine its loss. Spoiled, should I say—”

“No.” It hurt to hear his doubts of himself—especially when they crossed so sharply with the truth. “There is no sin in wishing to find welcome.”

He lifted their joined hands to her breast as his arms tightened around her, making an odd embrace, almost prayer-like. His mouth touched the side of her throat. The most fleeting kiss. By the time she caught her breath, it was already over.

“But to chafe against unwelcome,” he said, “to believe the world should accept me however I formed myself, and to complain when it did not—that is the dream of a child, not a man.”

Had she imagined his lips, a moment ago? Her skin burned at that spot. “No,” she whispered. “Do you not see, Adrian? It was ever a cause for my admiration—how certain you were of yourself; how you never diminished yourself, never altered, to please or suit another. But somehow . . . somehow you pleased all the same.”