Judith Ivory (18 page)

The maid hummed faintly, tunelessly off-key, while Emma
hesitated, wondering if she resisted too fiercely, at every inch, if she were simply being difficult herself. “I don’t want to be near your bedroom,” she murmured to him.

He said nothing, only pulling his cravat out of his loose collar, an audible slide of silk against starched fabric—a sound that made the hair on Emma’s arms stand on end. He stood there holding his dark silk cravat in one hand, rubbing his thumb absently on the fabric.

As Emma stared at his long fingers where they played with the neckcloth, her mouth went dry. Her eyes grew hot. Oh, no, she thought, I am not quibbling, not at all. The good Viscount Mount Villiars here was not being nice or even reasonable. He was biding his time. He held all the cards. Why shouldn’t he be generous? What did he have to lose? She wanted to laugh at herself for being so naive as to think otherwise.

She asked, “Do you have a library?”

“Yes.” He let out a snort of disbelief. “You are telling me to meet you in my library? To send our dinner there?”

“I am, I’m afraid.”

His eyes widened on her, but then one of his ambiguous, faint smiles took shape on his mouth.

Neither of them moved. He let his shoulder drop against the doorjamb, while he took her in; he was measuring what her insistence meant. A man standing at the door to his bedroom, his vest hanging open on a snowy white shirt. His shirt had tiny knife pleats down the front, dozens of them in perfect little lines that tucked right down into his trousers; she could glimpse one button of the tab to white trouser braces.

He pushed that front piece of his hair back, the piece that liked to flop onto his forehead, and this brought her gaze—a little embarrassingly—from his trousers back up. To his dark, overlong, unruly hair. At the back of his shirt, it overran his collar in thick, hooking curls that lay independently, this way and that, in stark contrast to starchy white.

She wet her lips, trying to wait out their little stalemate as coolly as possible.

And he laughed at her. He was interested in nothing cool, nothing even polite: He let his gaze run over her—covering her neck, shoulders, breasts, belly, then dropping lower—till she felt it and knew what he was doing, and couldn’t meet his regard at all. The stupid man. He stood there half-undressed, at ease in his own house, laughing at the fact that he held all the power.

Emma took a step back. “Well. In an hour then? In the library?”

His interest lingered up her body, unwillingly finding her face. “What a fine idea,” he murmured. “Why didn’t I think of that? I mean, terrible things could happen in my sitting room, which couldn’t possibly happen in my library. Excellent choice.” He laughed again drily, then added in a murmur, “Whatever you like.”

The liar. As if he were serving her wishes. Still, when their gazes found each other’s again, Emma’s belly contracted. A wave of pure heat washed through her.

Then worse, he gave all her reservations tangible force by smiling faintly as he owned up to the truth. “You have it right,” he said. “One of the things I had wanted to discuss over dinner, under more intimate circumstances, was the option of your sleeping in my bed tonight.”

She blinked, let out a nervous laugh, bowed her head, and stared down at her cold toes.

“I could insist,” he murmured.

“Na—um—you—ah—” A fine lot of sense that made.
No
was the answer, though his boldness rattled her; she couldn’t seem to get a straight
no
out.

He let out a soft, voiceless laugh. “Talk slowly. It will help.”

Making fun of himself again. Yet not a word would come out Emma’s mouth. She felt far too confused: intimidated,
flustered, indignant, while being foolishly flattered, hopelessly attracted.

His hand reached out, and his warm fingertips were suddenly against her chin, tipping her face back to him. He said into her eyes, “I won’t insist, of course. Your decision. I’d just like it. I thought I’d be crystal clear on the subject—I had hoped to do so suavely over a bottle of wine by the fire.” He heaved a huge sigh of his own. “I’d like you to know I can do a bit better than thirty seconds on a chair.” Then he glanced down with another self-rebuking smile. “I think. I’d try.” When he brought his eyes back up, his expression was earnest—in a face that was so strikingly handsome, it made her throat clutch. “I’m quite struck by you.” He immediately took that back with a breath and a frown, as if he hadn’t phrased it right. “By something about you.” He let out a snort, still dissatisfied, then settled for, “I believe it would be a more interesting two weeks if we were lovers.”

“I—uh”—she pressed her lips inward—“don’t.”

“Too bad.” He half turned, reaching behind him for the doorknob. “Dinner in the library then.”

Emma held back more nervous laughter, nodding vigorously. The end. She’d won another round. Or would have, were she not blushing so profusely her cheeks felt on fire.

Struck
indeed, she thought. By a short woman in a plain skirt, tromping around in stockings with holes, her hair a mess from having been smashed by a wig. While the man’s fifty-six pounds still rested in the pockets of a coat she’d watched his housemaid haul down the corridor.

She wanted to say, You’d be better off struck by an adder.

Yet she absorbed his compliment, their whole silly exchange, with enough vanity to wish she were clean, her hair combed, and that her clothes fit better. Whatever he saw in her, it wasn’t anything coiffed or feigned, that much was certain.

He moved back, retreating into his sitting room a step, his hand still holding the knob. He stood there looking at her a
moment, as if she might change her mind, follow him in. Damn him, he’d caught every nuance of her flattered, abashed refusal.

“Till dinner then,” she said belatedly. Her tongue felt thick. When she finally padded away in her bare feet, it was with the absolute certainty that he’d tallied her hemming and hawing accurately. He understood her mixed feelings and would play on them.

As she entered her new rooms, she closed her eyes and thought, What is wrong with you, Emma? With the blasted man standing there, still holding his damned cravat? Do you want more of that insanity in the hotel room?

God help her, the question shot a thrill through her.

You are your own worst enemy, Emma Hotchkiss. You like wicked men. If you don’t keep yourself out of his reach, you deserve what you get, you idiot.

Then on her bed, on the blue counterpane, she saw a white pool of heavy, silky fabric. Picking it up, she let out a sharp laugh of pure release. It was a man’s nightshirt. Stuart’s. Its slippery satin poured through her fingers, more like water than fabric, yards and yards of the stuff. She was supposed to sleep in it. Or freeze to death.

A fine lot of choices she had lately, it seemed. They were sublime; they were the devil incarnate.

Ten minutes later, his “ward,” Aminah, brought a pair of soft, embroidered slippers for Emma to wear. They fit nicely. Though Aminah herself did not: She was a pleasant, very pretty, dark-eyed woman whose age appeared to be somewhere near thirty: far too old to be in anyone’s charge but her own. And though she wore English clothes and her hair in the English style, her accent said immediately that, like her name, she was not native to England.

S
TUART
was already in the library when Emma found the room. It had to be he, yet the man standing over the large desk, reading papers that lay on it, looked so different that she stepped back momentarily. His hair was damp and combed away from his face, his profile stark. His angular jaw and cheeks had the damp, faintly vulnerable look of a fresh shave. Even more unfamiliar were his clothes: a heavy, knit jersey the color of wheat, roomy and athletic, as if he might dash off at any moment for a quick game of polo. His hands were tucked casually into the pockets of dark, loose trousers—till he absently licked his thumb and turned a page on the desk. So absorbed was he in his reading, he didn’t hear Emma enter.

The room was cold, though a crackling fire promised it would warm up. Dinner sat, absolutely fragrant, on a library table, its reading lamp pushed to the side to make room for two place settings of little hens of some sort.

Stuart startled when she cleared her throat. “Oh, there you are,” he said. “They just brought dinner.” He pointed to a table set for two. “Take a seat. Please. Start without me. I’ll be right there.” He waved his hand in cursory offer, then returned to whatever was so interesting on his desktop.

Even in her own clothes that fit (and borrowed slippers), Emma felt disheveled and out of place as she sat in a large, tufted leather chair. The table linens were damask, the plates china, the service silver, and the glasses cut crystal. Not her usual fare.

Dinner, though, was a fine distraction from self-consciousness: After waiting a minute or two, she did as suggested, beginning on the leg of the most delicious little Cornish hen, peppers and squash swimming in its roasting juices, onions, spices. The more she tasted, the more the liked it, though it was nothing she’d ever had before—she spotted caraway and tasted honey, this laced with a strange and wonderful combination of…what? Ginger, spicy-hot cayenne, cinnamon…and mint? Was there mint? It was an “English” combination she’d have never put together, yet so tasty; it all but sang in her mouth. She was half-finished when the chair opposite hers scooted back and her host sat.

“I’m sorry. I still haven’t finished half my reading for a vote coming up in four days. God, but my fellow members of the house can go on.” He lifted the silver lid of a compote—there was crème anglaise with sliced, baked apples she’d missed. “Mmm,” he said, approving, then raised his eyebrow toward her. “English enough for you?”

She laughed. “It’s not very English, but it’s lovely, thank you.”

He stared at her a moment, then nodded. “Good.”

Stuart was continually surprised by the ways Emma arrested him. She had possibly the most beautiful laughter he had ever heard. Like chimes. Wind chimes. Light, tinkling tuneless melodies on a breezy summer day. No pattern, no rhythm, only the randomness of wind: of a happiness he couldn’t grasp in any context of what he knew as reality.

He looked at a dinner that was as English as he ate—they were Cornish hens, after all. Well, never mind, he’d made her laugh at least—any man who could make a woman laugh,
whom he’d more or less kidnaped, well, he had to hold some sort of special favor, didn’t he? Even if she wouldn’t admit it?

They said nothing further for several minutes. At first it seemed they were both simply hungry, which was at least partly true. Silver tapped and clinked on china, glass on crystal—Stuart poured wine Emma hadn’t seen either. Still, though she could eat with gusto, she couldn’t look at her dinner companion with the same directness.

As the silence stretched out, it seemed, he, too, was having to find his bearings. She could only be glad they weren’t eating just outside his bedroom, for despite her best efforts to make their dinner as unromantic as possible, they were still dining alone together. It felt strange. She hadn’t eaten a meal with a man alone in a long while, not across the table from a healthy man at least.

In a library, she reminded herself. Which was large and varied enough to absorb anyone’s interest. Huge, in fact. She looked about her.

Even by the standards of England’s grandest of houses, Stuart’s library was vast. Its length was the most unusual—so long that at night the fireplace and desk light at one end didn’t illuminate the far end. The walls of books simply grew dim and disappeared; she couldn’t calculate how long the library might be for not clearly seeing its farthest reaches.

Beyond its gallery-like length, however, Stuart’s library was wonderfully predictable: walls of dark wood bookcases lined with colorful spine after spine. Books and books and books. They ran from wall to wall, from floor to the high, coffered ceiling. Tall, wheeled ladders, at least four of them, hung on runners to guarantee access to the very high shelves. Reading tables with lamps…well-padded chairs…a settee in leather with nailhead trim. Just off to her right, the carved mantel sat huge over a stone fireplace. She liked the reassurance of the room: its pure, almost stereotypical Britishness, right down to a bust of a man’s head by a dark
window and half a dozen dim, old paintings in nooks between the shelving—portraits of well-dressed gentry at leisure.

Paintings of none other than the Viscounts Mount Villiars, she was fairly certain; them, their wives, dogs, horses, families. “Are you related to all these people in the paintings?” she asked as, with a thick crust of bread, she sopped up sauce from her plate. If dinner was an example of his chefs’ talents, she wouldn’t want to dismiss any of them either.

“So they tell me. I don’t pay much attention.” He cut apart the thigh of a bird, his fork down, his knife efficient, like any Englishman. The Arabs and Russians ate with their fingers, she’d heard. She’d half waited to see if he’d do something savage with his food. He didn’t, a mild disappointment.

They went another minute in silence. “You don’t volunteer much about yourself,” she said finally. Then added, smiling, “It takes a long spoon to eat supper with you.”

“Pardon?”

“A Yorkshire expression. Or perhaps Scottish—my mother used to say it. It means, you’re hard to get to know.”

“What is it you’d like to know that’s so difficult to discover?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. All right, the portraits. Why aren’t you interested in them?”

“I prefer landscapes. Or photographs of people I know, places I’ve been.”

“To your own family?”

“My family was no prize. I’ve sold off a good number of their pictures and intend to sell every last one, if anyone will have them.”

“And your parents? Are you selling them, too?”

He paused, looked over the top of his wineglass at her. “No.” He left a space, as if he’d say nothing more, then tilted his head and offered, “My mother wouldn’t allow a picture of herself to be painted; she considered herself too unsightly. My father had one done just before their marriage, which,
oddly enough, my mother kept. It was the first I took down: I burned it.”

“Ah.” She felt suddenly awkward. The rumors of his father should have kept her quiet about family. Still, if his mother had kept the portrait, how bad could the fellow have been? “Oddly enough,” she repeated. Had his mother loved his father? How? Why would a woman look daily upon the picture of a man who had publicly, disgracefully abandoned her?

As if reading her mind, Stuart said, “My father was handsome. My mother enjoyed that. Though his handsomeness, the contradiction of it, also drove her crazy.” He set his napkin on the table, sat back, and smiled not unkindly. “Literally: My mother was a loon, and my father was a criminal whom no one could catch. What a heritage, hmm? It’s enough to make you stutter.”

Emma blinked. He was making a joke on himself again. She hardly noticed his stutter anymore, truth be known. “A criminal? I didn’t realize. I’m sorry your father was as bad as rumor said. I had hoped not.”

“Oh, he was much worse,” he said casually. “And good at keeping secrets, while the family abetted him by not wanting to know.”

She waited, morbidly curious.

Stuart watched her, seemed to hesitate, then offered, “My father hurt women. He had a sexual proclivity toward it.”

Emma dropped her knife. It clinked on her plate, all but taking a chip from the china. When she picked the utensil up and cut something on her plate, she couldn’t focus on whatever it was; she was carving up her napkin for all she knew.

“You had no idea?” he asked.

She shook her head, unable to avoid a grimace.

“It’s true. He hurt my mother.”

At first she couldn’t grasp it. His father had hurt his mother’s feelings, deeply, she thought. A rift had separated them.

Perhaps her mild reaction cued him; whatever it was, Stu
art knew instantly what she was thinking. “Not her feelings,” he said. “Everyone hurt her feelings; she was so inured to it, it didn’t matter. No.” He broke off a second, then stammered, really, truly stammered, “He found her r-re-repulsive.” He closed his eyes a moment, slowed himself down. “He loathed her.”

Loathed
. The word came out long and slow and with emphasis. The pace of it calmed Stuart. He continued, though something like air had risen into his chest, his throat, like a bubble of horror.

“To conceive me,” he said to the woman across from him, “the only way he could was to—” He broke off again. Then almost belligerently—since a woman of the unforgiving, un-compassionate village down the hill wanted to know—he said, “My father hurt women.” He leaned back. “Sadder still, my mother was so lonely—and wanted a child so badly—she endured him.”

He’d told this story exactly once before, when he was eleven, to the headmaster of his school. Happily, adulthood made a difference. He could get it out without sobbing. Stoically, he recited facts from his life. Amazing that all this had somehow passed into a place in his memory, where it was nothing more than that. An old tale, as grim as ogres and trolls, but nothing more. “The rumor that my father left her, it isn’t true. The servants drove him away. Then they tended to her. I don’t know what he did exactly that finally sent them over the edge, except she had a place on her cheek that nothing and no one could hide: teeth marks; he bit her.

“She wouldn’t say, because she was ashamed. But others did eventually. He was being charged in five different cases when he died, a free man, but not for long. I’ve tried to help the women and families involved, done what I could. Selfishly, I suspect. To assuage the guilt of leaving behind a father I knew would wreak havoc on the innocent.”

Emma’s blue eyes were wide. She said nothing for long seconds, staring at him. What could one say, after all? But then she did find voice. She murmured, “Was he horrible to you?”

He shrugged and leaned forward to pour them both more wine. It gurgled into one glass, then the other, sparkling in the firelight as he said, “When I was six, he broke my nose, though more or less by accident.” He sat back and drank some wine, before he finished. “It turned out to be a blessing: Broken noses bleed, which frightened him. I was the heir, you see. He considered the blood his. After that, he was careful with me, even kind.” He looked down into the wineglass. “To be quite honest, though, the privilege of being his favorite person was hard to absorb, especially when I was young. For a long time, it made me feel”—he paused—“awful.”

“There was no love—”

“None. Never. Not even as a child did I enjoy the idea of my father. I knew the stories. The servants and townspeople spared me nothing; people hated him. I’d never even met him till that afternoon he broke my nose. When he showed up, come to ‘claim’ me, they said, I fully thought I’d go downstairs and have to face a monster. But the horror of it was, the man I went down to face didn’t look like a monster at all: He looked like me.”

Emma shuddered once; she couldn’t help it. Then she furrowed her brow, shaking her head in wonder. “How horrible for you,” she murmured. Instinctively, she reached out. “What a lonely, frightening childhood.” She touched his hand, where his fingers lay relaxed around the stem of the wineglass, resting on the table.

He jerked slightly, looked at her outstretched hand, frowned. Then, very gently, he extricated his own. He withdrew physically from her sympathy and put his hand down to lean back in his chair. He shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m quite used to it.
I’m
sorry if the facts of my parentage startle
you.” He set his wineglass down, pushing away entirely. “Would you like coffee, tea, sherry? I can ring for anything you’d prefer.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “No, thank you.” He didn’t want sympathy. Where the next came from, she didn’t know, but she knew she said it, meaning well, trying to cheer him perhaps with a little confession of her own. “I, ah—” She laughed at herself. “I used to see you sometimes when I was a little girl. The boy on the hill. There was an area where you played in your kitchen garden, I think. I could see it from our north pasture.” She rambled on, not getting any response at all from him; his face looked stony. “I used to pretend you were the prince in the castle, and that one day—” She bit her lip. She was only embarrassing herself. This was of no use to him. “Oh, never mind. It was silly.” That was graceful, Emma. A pathetic, little fairy-tale story that was supposed to counteract his recounted nightmare. More silly still: “I assumed your life was perfect.”

If he thought her silly, he didn’t show it. His dark, heavy-lidded eyes only stared in their unblinking way, unreadable.

Then he ignored the whole business. “May I?” he asked. Hands braced on the chair arms, he leaned forward. He was requesting permission to rise. “I’d prefer to sit by the fire.” Then he didn’t wait for permission and simply stood. “Feel free to join me.”

He turned his back and went the other direction—to a cabinet by the window, a dark, brass-fitted kind of chest on which the stone bust sat. Its drawers were tricks, doors carved to look like drawers. Inside were glasses and a decanter.

“Brandy?” he asked without looking at her.

“No, thank you.”

At the window, white flakes whirled out of the dark to settle softly against the mullions in crescents. Heavy snow blew toward Stuart’s reflection in the glass. His face was stiff as he poured himself three fingers of brandy and returned, walking past her to the fire. There, he tossed pillows about, creating
an expert pile that said he’d stacked these same pillows before just to his liking, then bent down onto one knee before he completely stretched out. He laid himself onto his pillows a few feet away from her, between her and the fireplace, indeed looking warm and comfortable.