Juliana (31 page)

Feeling like she was still spinning, Juliana wormed her way through the crowd and gripped the platform’s rail. All around her, above and below, a battlefield stretched miles into the distance.

“Amazing,” James breathed behind her.

It was overwhelming. She knew the panorama was only a gigantic painting, but everything in the rotunda was designed to trick the eyes. Indirect illumination, provided by narrow skylights beneath the edge of the domed ceiling, made it look like outdoors at dusk. Far below, a three-dimensional terrain stretched from under the platform up to the walls, filled with lifelike vegetation, objects, and figures that blended into the picture, making everything seem real.

And all around, the Battle of Waterloo raged.

Chaos reigned. Cavalrymen charged on horses with bayoneted infantry at their backs. Officers gave orders, soldiers aided the fallen, smoke rose from cannons in a stand of trees. The ground was low in places, muddy in others, fenced and open, brown and green, flat and rough and everything in between. Fields that should have been smooth were littered with the fallen and wounded, the contents of their knapsacks strewn all over. As far as the eye could see, men scrambled and fought, their guns and swords flashing in the glistening haze made by spent artillery.

When Juliana finally felt steady enough to release the rail, she edged sideways around the platform, working her way through the other milling spectators. It seemed they were all standing in a pavilion on the top of a small hill in the center of the battle. The soldiers looked wet, dirty, and blue with cold. She could have sworn she saw a mounted officer raise a hat to signal an attack. A shiver ran down her spine.

“I feel seasick,” Aunt Frances said from somewhere close on the platform.

“Hold on to me,” Lord Malmsey said. “You have delicate nerves, my love.”

His love?
Blinking in the twilight, Juliana tore her gaze from the panorama and turned toward the voices.

But the couple had disappeared.

“WHERE’S MY
aunt?” Juliana cried. “And Lord Malmsey?”

James curved an arm around her, pulling her close. “We’ll find them later,” he said, his low voice seeming to vibrate right through her.

“Where are the duke and Lady Amanda?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes!” Amanda was supposed to be the one here with James in the dark, not Juliana. Especially since having his arm around her made her stomach feel queerer than ever.

She swayed.

“Are you seasick, too?” he asked.

“No.” She was just dizzy. From listening to his resonant, chocolatey voice. And thinking about kissing him. She couldn’t kiss him again. If she was going to kiss anyone, it should be the duke.

But the duke didn’t want to kiss her until they were married, and in any case, he was with Amanda. In fact, Amanda had probably latched on to him knowing he wouldn’t kiss her.

If a girl feared being kissed, the duke was a much safer bet than James.

“Do you see them?” she asked James, trying to peer around him.

He drew her toward the staircase. “Maybe they’ve gone downstairs. I think we should go and see.”

They walked all the way down, around and around, which hardly helped her dizziness. But the others were nowhere to be found. At the bottom it was darker, and they retraced their steps down the corridor, laughingly feeling their way along the walls again. James, Juliana could tell even in the darkness, was definitely limping more than usual. Reaching the end, they opened the door and looked out into Leicester Square.

She blinked in the bright sunshine. There was no sign of her aunt or Amanda or the other gentlemen. “They must still be upstairs,” she said.

“They must.” A family was approaching the door, so James drew her back inside to let them pass.

The children giggled when the door closed behind them and the corridor plunged into darkness. “Don’t run!” the parents cautioned as they all made their way toward the staircase.

The little ones’ yelps and giggles as they bumped each other and the walls echoed around the corridor, but still, when James took Juliana’s hand and began to follow them, she could
hear
his uneven gait.

“Your leg is hurting you, isn’t it?”

She felt rather than saw him shrug. “It was a tall staircase. I’m fine.”

The scores of steps hadn’t occurred to her when she’d suggested today’s outing. Unlike Amanda, she never really thought about James’s limp at all. He never mentioned it, and it was usually so slight. “Does it hurt very often?”

“Only when it’s cold and rainy.”

“Faith.” She gripped his arm with her other hand, dragging him to a stop. “It must hurt
all
the time this year.”

He laughed. “It’s not that painful. The limb is stiffer than I’d like, but the sensation is just a dull ache. Nothing to merit your concern. In an odd way I actually appreciate the discomfort—it reminds me how fortunate I am to still have the leg.”

“When did it happen? And how?”

“Peninsular War. Took a ball right below the knee.” The giggles grew fainter as, at the other end of the corridor, the family started up the staircase. “The army surgeons wanted to amputate, but one managed to save it instead.”

“I’m glad,” Juliana murmured, thinking he was stoic and brave.

Amanda had no idea how lucky she was.

The family’s footsteps faded away, and James continued down the corridor. “I felt incredibly grateful to the man. Since I could no longer march with the army, I needed another profession, and—”

“
That’s
why you became a doctor,” she interrupted softly.

“Have you still been puzzling over that?” he wondered with a low laugh as they neared the steps. “Yes, that’s why I entered medical school. Eventually, though, I chose to become a physician instead of a surgeon. I decided I’d rather work with stethoscopes than saws.”

Distracted by a horrifying vision of a bloody surgeon’s saw, Juliana took a while to notice that instead of starting up the staircase, he’d drawn her around and underneath it.

“What are you doing?” she asked, rubbing her stomach.

“People will bump into us if we wait in the corridor. We’ll wait here instead.”

It was very dark under the steps, and James would take advantage of the dark. She’d told Amanda as much, hadn’t she, because she knew his ways firsthand. “I think we should go back upstairs,” she said before he could claim he needed more kissing practice.

“If we wait here,” he argued, “your aunt and the others will surely come down.”

“Aunt Frances won’t be able to see us under here.” Especially considering she was probably busy kissing Lord Malmsey. Bold men had a tendency to take advantage of the dark, and while Lord Malmsey might have started out rather shy, he was obviously getting bolder by the minute. Already today he’d been bold enough to kiss Aunt Frances in James’s carriage and call her
my love
.

Juliana hadn’t understood the queer feeling in her stomach—but all of a sudden, she did.

Lord Malmsey had called Aunt Frances
my love
.

Juliana wanted someone to call
her
his love.

She wanted
James
to call her his love.

Because she loved James, and she wanted him to love her back.

But that would never happen.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

And then clamped her mouth shut, because she had no idea what to say next. She didn’t
want
to love him. She wanted to love the duke. But she loved James instead, because James was warm and affectionate and charitable and everything else the duke wasn’t. It didn’t matter anymore that James was too tall and had dark hair and a profession. He was brave and stoic. They fit perfectly together, and he was gorgeous, and as for his profession, well, he was trying to rid the world of the horror of smallpox, and whatever could be wrong with that?

But she couldn’t marry James, because he would never love her. She’d be unhappy all her days, just like her poor mother.

And the duke needed her, and he was very kind, and he was sending her flowers and falling in love with her. James belonged with Amanda. They shared interests that Juliana didn’t. They filled each other’s needs.

Juliana’s stomach didn’t just feel queer anymore—it
hurt
. And she wished she’d never opened her mouth, because she couldn’t possibly tell any of this to James.

Fortunately, he interpreted
I don’t know what to do
in an entirely different context. “It doesn’t make much sense to walk all the way up again only to turn around and come back down.” Edging her even deeper under the steps, he traced his finger in a shivery line down her jaw. “Don’t worry about whether your aunt will see us. I’ll watch for her and the others. And while we’re waiting, we can practice kissing.”

She’d known he would say that, hadn’t she? And she knew she should refuse. But she also knew she shouldn’t make him walk up all those stairs again when his leg was already paining him.

“You don’t need to practice kissing,” she told him with no small amount of conviction. James had been married before, after all—not that he’d bothered to mention that fact when she’d first suggested the wooing lessons. He’d
had
practice. The way he kissed, a girl would have to be daft to think he needed practice.

His finger lingered at her chin, tracing shivery little circles. At the far end of the corridor, the door opened, admitting more people and light, enough light that Juliana could see the gold flecks in James’s chocolate eyes.

The door shut, plunging the corridor back into darkness as the people made their way to the stairwell. The light had dazzled Juliana’s eyes, and now she couldn’t see a thing.

”It’s been a long time since I’ve kissed anyone,” said James’s disembodied voice.

“It’s been less than twenty-four hours.”

“But before that, it was a long time.”

His finger trailed down her throat, slowly. She hoped he couldn’t feel her shaking. At least he couldn’t see it. ”You’re not going to unbutton, are you?”

His laugh was quick, low, and pleased. “No, not here.” His finger traced her collarbones, lightly. “Practice with me, will you?” he murmured.

She couldn’t breathe. And she could hear people coming down the staircase.

“They cannot see us,” he whispered, the words coming from just overhead. He’d moved even closer, and now his finger trailed its way back to her chin and tilted it up. “Will you?”

She whispered, “Yes.” She couldn’t help it. She’d allow just one kiss. Or maybe two.

She lost count.

The kisses were soft at first, trailing over her lips and jaw and throat, just as his finger had. She shivered and held on to him, lack of sight making her even more aware of sensations and sounds. Footsteps went up and down the stairs overhead while he slowly, lightly, retraced his path, each little spot of heat making her insides coil tighter in anticipation. And when his lips finally returned to hers, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him as deeply as she knew how, wanting to kiss him forever, wanting him to make her forget that she shouldn’t be wanting him at all.

“Juliana, are you down here?”

James pulled away. “Is that you, Lady Frances?” He whirled around and started down the corridor, while Juliana tried to catch her breath. Her pulse was racing, her head swimming. And she was suddenly cold. She hadn’t even realized she was warm.

More footsteps sounded on the stairs, growing closer. Juliana stepped into the corridor just as four dark forms made it to the bottom. “There you all are!” she said.

At the other end, James opened the door, admitting a shaft of light. “We were looking for you.”

“
We
were looking for
you
,” Frances said, blinking madly. Well, it was dim, and she wasn’t wearing her spectacles. “Lady Amanda wishes to return home.”

“I was dizzy up there,” Amanda said.

Juliana had felt a little dizzy up there, too, but she felt much more dizzy now. Dizzy and confused. She followed the others out into Leicester Square. Her knees felt shaky.

Her stomach was hurting again.

James would never love her. He needed to kiss Amanda and marry her, or everything would be ruined.

“Where should we go now?” she asked.

“Parliament,” the duke said.

James pulled out his pocket watch, opened it, and snapped it shut. “Good gracious, it’s nearly four o’clock.” Indeed, people were starting to stream out of the Panorama. “The two of us should definitely go to Parliament.”

How in heaven’s name was she supposed to get James to kiss Amanda and decide to marry her if he was always in Parliament? “I’ve a sewing party from one o’clock until three tomorrow, but how about if we go somewhere in the late afternoon or the evening? The House of Lords doesn’t meet on Wednesdays.”

“We can go to Almack’s,” Amanda suggested.

“No,” James said at the same time Juliana said, “I think not.”

She wondered why he didn’t want to attend Almack’s, but it didn’t really signify, because Almack’s was a bad idea. Aunt Frances might be rather blind these days, but the lady patronesses who ran the gathering had vision sharper than tacks. It was too risky for James to kiss Amanda there. “How about Vauxhall Gardens?” she suggested instead.