Elisabeth Fairchild (5 page)

He thought of Miss Foster as he had first seen her, on this road. He had yet to fulfill her Valentine wish.
That eyes should see
.

No--that they should be opened. To what?

The cold bit at his nose, fingertips and ears. He had never felt more alive. And yet he wondered, why had he survived among so many who had fallen?

The night gave him no answers.

He walked on.

He expected to share the darkness with no one, and yet, as he rounded a bend, hair prickled on the nape of his neck, and goose flesh rose on his arms. He was not alone. Something moved ahead of him, a ghostly whiteness in the dark. On either side of him shale rattled. Childlike cries cut the darkness, the voices of the fallen. His pulse quickened, his heartbeat pounded in ears that strained to hear.

Ghostly white faces loomed.

He thought of the men he had killed.

Sheep crowded onto the road, hooves clattering, blats fearful. They skittered away, frightened by his sudden laughter, disappearing on the uphill side, tails twitching.

The dog’s low growl took him completely off guard. An animal cloaked by the night, he caught the quick gleam of its eyes, its teeth, heard unfriendly intent in the deepening rumble from its throat, and feared he would not walk away from their encounter unscathed. 

A stick might save him--a stout stick, and none to be had, though there were rocks aplenty. A rock, well-placed, might chase the beast away. He had only to scoop one up before the animal was upon him.

A whistle cut the darkness, a female voice murmured. “Artemis! Hush.”

Her voice!

“Miss Foster?”

The dog stepped onto the road, a black and white collie, legs stiff, hackles raised, growling again, nose wrinkled, teeth displayed. The man-eater.

“Be still!” she ordered, though whether the direction was meant for him or the dog he could not say.

The dog sat, growls subsiding.

A darkness separated itself from the night, a bundled and hooded shape that seemed neither male nor female. “What business has Cupid here in the middle of the night?”

Her tone was forbidding. The dog muttered an echoing discontent. Not the sound or manner of a woman given to passion and illicit midnight assignations.

“It is not so late as that, is it?” He pulled forth his watch.

The dog rose, teeth showing. Alexander fingered the gold fob. He might use it to throttle the animal if it lunged. “It as not yet gone ten.”

The hood slid from her head. Moonlight made damply curled gossamer of her hair. “All of Westmoreland’s abed at this hour,” she said.

“But for you and I, wanderers of the night.” He tucked away the watch, warmed by the image of that cloud of hair spread upon a pillow. Damn Val. He could not stop thinking of her in unmannerly terms.

The dog faced the way it had come, uttering a throaty sound.

Hobnailed heels clattered on sandstone. A man emerged from the darkness, paused to tip hat to Miss Foster, to stare a moment in his direction before setting off with no more than a grunt.

“Not just you and I, after all,” she corrected him. “My shepherds have good reason to wander the night with fences downed by a careless jumper, and sheep astray. Do you?”

Good reason? Was it not reason enough that he was alive? That he had two sound legs to carry him?

“I like to walk.”

She stepped closer, her face silvered in the moonlight--wary. “So you say.”

“You do not believe me?”

“I know next to nothing of you.”

Was this wariness the manner of a fallen woman? Or did she simply not care for him? He did not want to believe either.

He squatted, holding his hand out that the dog might sniff. “Another archer, are you, lad?”

“He does not take to strangers,” she warned him. “Especially men.”

“Just as you do not?” he asked.

Her chin rose abruptly.

He looked back down at the dog. “An intelligent creature. It does not do to be too trusting of strangers--especially men.”

Head cocked, lips pursed, Penny Foster patted her cloak, thigh level, drawing the dog to her side--drawing Alexander’s attention to an area of her body he had best not think about. How easy would it be to spread the legs Val claimed to have conquered?

The dog leaned into the woolen folds of her cloak, within reach of her hand, bright eyes unwaveringly fixed, animosity unquenched.

She stroked the animal’s head, murmuring low. Affection softened her voice and features, rousing desire within him for just such softness. It had been too long since he had been with a woman. When her gaze rose, blue eyes turned black by the night, her affections faded, swiftly replaced by the same wary watchfulness in the dog’s eyes.

“Have you come to deliver my Valentine?” she asked, head cocked, a hint of vitriol in the question.

“Forgot to bring him,” he said as a test, his tone in jest.

“Him?” she responded sharply.

“You do not care for Val?”

Her nostrils flared. “I have neither feelings, nor use, for him.”

The crisp edge to her voice told him otherwise. She squatted to bury her fingers in the dog’s thick ruff, to hug his neck in a manner most endearing.

“He told me he once held you in great regard.”

She did not look up. “Did he? He has shown me no evidence of it.” She gave the beast a kiss upon its forehead when it looked up. He envied the animal such affection.

“He said he might like to walk with us.”

At that, she rose with alacrity. The dog loosed a low, threatening noise, and turned to glare at him.

“Would he?” Sarcasm laced her words.

“Shall I dissuade him?”

“That is entirely up to you.” She motioned to the dog, sent him after the shepherd, without a word needed. Arms like crossed swords she clutched tight the cloak to the swell of her bosom, face lifted to the moon, profile girlish and soft, the sweet curve of her throat vulnerable. “Clear skies tomorrow.”

His heart leapt at the prospect.

“Will you be in a mood for walking?” he asked.

She said only, “The best time to view the local falls is after a rain.”

“Which of the falls?” he asked.

She shrugged, drew the hood about her head and turned in the direction her shepherd had disappeared, her voice growing smaller as she moved away. “Most are to be found in quiet places.”

He wondered, as he watched her disappear into the darkness, what they might do, left alone together in a quiet place.

Chapter Five

Alexander woke before dawn the following day, anxious to see if Miss Foster’s prediction of clearing skies might be true. He was ready for blue skies, for crisp, fair weather. It was a delight too long missing from his life.

From the breakfast room, where a maid brought him coffee and promised to have cook put together a packet of food, he looked out on a garden just as cold, wet and misty as had met his eyes every other morning in Cumbria. And yet, in opening the window, he thought he smelled a change in the frosted air, and asked the butler, Yarrow, for directions to the most spectacular of the local waterfalls.

“Aira Force,” the elderly gent said without hesitation. “Well worth the ride.”

Alexander woke Oscar, who clutched his coverlet closer, asking, “Is it brown trout you are after?”

“No. A fine prospect. A waterfall.”

His friend groaned and rolled over. “Count me out.”

Alexander went next to his host’s bedchamber.

“What? No warm armful to go with you?” Val croaked from the depths of his pillow.

Was Miss Foster the warm armful Val suggested?

“I go alone if you will not join me,” Alexander said. He would not mind going alone.

Val waved him away. “Go, then. I’ve a splitting head.”

“Too much brandy,” Alexander suggested.

“Not enough,” Val contradicted.

Content to enjoy solitude, and the remote possibility of another encounter with the mysterious Miss Foster, Alexander mounted the gray and set off into the mists. He followed the Eden northwest as instructed, through frosted farm country where sheep bleated, and apple trees and mossy oaks reached gnarled, dripping arms through the thinning mist.

The fells and hilltops, lost in the fog on either side of him yet cast deep shadows in the dale. The promised sun was awhile coming, and when at last it bronzed the clouds above, he was well on his way, committed to the day’s outing whether the skies cleared or not.

The sun warmed the shadows, and burned away the mist, to the tune of the raven and the wren. Light burnished the shadowed flanks of the hillsides either side of him russet and fawn. Red deer skittered from the path as he approached, tails flashing. Red squirrels flit through the treetops chattering. Fog clung to the vales, misting last year’s ferns with watery brilliance. Beneath the horse’s hooves alder cones and acorns crackled.

The bony Pennines, to his right, cast harsh shadows on the fleshier, more feminine Cumbrian mountains to the left. The Eden chuckled wetly all the way to Temple Sowerby, a neat village, many of the houses recently built. There, he crossed the river, the darting shadows of brown trout and salmon below. Not quite fifteen miles to Penrith. At a languid pace, it took him an hour and a half. The sun warmed his back when he paused at the Two Lions for a drink and late breakfast. He was glad to rest the gray before they set off again into rising country.

It proved the morning he had hoped for, solitude largely unbroken, no conversation to be made, only his thoughts, flowing like the river, a never ending stream of the past, and what he had done with it. It was not until he reached Ullswater lake, that he thought again of sharing the day with another.

Miss Foster drifted through his thoughts more than once as he rode, but in seeing the panorama of the lake spread before him, in setting out along its northwestern bank, he wished she were there, to tell him more of what he witnessed, to echo his awe, and most important, that he might discover more of her.

The past did not trouble him here. There was only room in his head for this moment, this beauty, this peace, and daydreams of the woman who brought him here, wherever she might be, whomever. The lake, hook shaped--mirrored steep hillsides, cloaked in leafless, dripping hawthorn, alder, birch and ash. Mosses and lichen faintly greened it. Gorse and heather had been browned by winter’s touch. Frost silvered the venerable heights.

He and the gray took the path along the misted lake shore at a languid pace, watching waterfowl take flight at their approach: ducks, geese, moorhens and coots. Herons stood one-legged in reedy shallows, cormorants lifted dark wings like cloaks to dry, while crested grebes posture, long-legged dandies, heads shaking, crests erect.

The peace he longed for rode the wind here. It soaked its way up through the gray’s legs, into his buttocks and thighs. It warmed his shoulders as the sun rose, dried the moisture that had beaded his overcoat, filled his ears with the gentle lap of water and the sigh of the wind. No shots to cut the silence, no boom of cannon fire. Here was England, and the promise of growth, of life. Here, his nostrils filled with the wet odor of burgeoning earth. No death. No rotting flesh. The knot inside his belly unwound as he rode, the tightness in his shoulders relaxed. No need to throw gun to shoulder here. No taste of powder on his lips.

His thoughts drifted to the peace to be found in a willing woman’s arms. Miss Foster’s? Would she open herself to him, as this country did, unfolding fresh beauties in every valley and dale, passion in her veins like the rushing, white-watered becks feeding the great placid heart of the lake?

One could always hope.

She saw the lone gray tethered in the wooded glen where the path led to the waterfall and knew, heart quickening, that he had followed her suggestion--and that he came alone. She had imagined he would visit the closest of the falls, Rutters, that he would never ride so far for a bit of peaceful scenery. She would not admit that some part of her had hoped he might come to Aira Force instead--hoped and feared.

Now what was she to do? She drew the pony to a halt, thought what Lady Anne might have done, and sat staring at the gray.

Felicity tugged at the back of her cloak. “Is that Sir Egremont’s horse?”

Penny started, twisting to give the child a hand in dismounting. “No, dear. Sir Egremont is but a character in a story.” She unhooked her knee and slid from the saddle.

“Once upon a time?” Felicity smiled up at her, pale hair fluffing from beneath the edges of her bonnet, cheeks like rosy pippins in the cold, reminding her of herself at that age.

“Yes, dear. Once upon a time.”

The child skipped to the signpost. “This way?” She pointed to the path.

“Yes, my dear. That way, but you will wait for me to hobble the pony, won’t you, and stand well back from the beck?”

Felicity nodded, eyes bright with the excitement of their excursion, sturdy little legs carrying her away along the pathway despite her promise to wait. They had been horseback for more than two hours. Felicity had made the journey without complaint. A good child, not at all hesitant or fearful. Like her father. Penny wondered what Cupid would make of her.