Laura Kinsale (21 page)

Even to Hester, he had never said a final farewell. Somehow, in his heart, he had always had the illusion that he could go back. He had even made plans to bring her to France, but she had refused to come—somewhat to his relief, he remembered ruefully. He’d had a taste for high tragediennes, he supposed: he was by then deep in love with little Algae, and embroiled in the hopeless effort to save her husband Marshal Ney from execution. After that had come the famous—infamous—escape of Lavallette from a Paris prison—and Michael’s arrest for high treason in France, the trial for his part in aiding the fugitive to flee; then his own imprisonment, six months in the Prison de la Force.

All long ago. So long ago. His daughter must have been two years old then.

He had returned to England something of a hero. For years, he had been “Lavallette Bruce” to the papers. And then Marianne—Marianne the quiet, smiling widow, who had suddenly and abruptly made all of his confused strikes and runs at life seem vain foolery. She had simply refused an affair. She would only see him with the permission of his family and hers. Modest, straightforward Marianne, who merely expected the highest standard of conduct, without explanation or excuse. Michael had been a master of explanations and excuses. He did not know if he would truly have gone back to Lebanon for his daughter, not when he was young and reckless. He hoped he would have—and he thought that Hester must have been sure of it, or she would not have kept her secret so well.

He walked through the rainy night, fingering Winter’s card in his pocket. It was perhaps not so strange to have his past come back to him in the form of a daughter, considering the sort of past it was, but he felt exceedingly peculiar to be calling on a man supposed dead for two years, the father of his granddaughter, who might or might not be willing to admit it, who might or might not acquiesce in the convenient fiction they had built, who might or might not be someone whom Michael, at fifty-four, could possibly knock down for taking advantage of his innocent daughter, whatever the bloody damned extenuating circumstances had been in the bloody damned desert.

When the door to the private parlor in the Clarendon opened, Michael saw that he was not likely to knock down Viscount Winter. Moral principle was not going to outweigh twenty years’ age difference and a fighting weight that looked to be fourteen stone. The man who received him was powerfully built, hard-tanned, with the look of a coiled spring about him.

“Michael Bruce,” Michael said, taking off his damp hat.

“Winter.” The viscount thrust out his hand. He looked straight at Michael with brilliantly deep blue eyes. “Did you come alone, sir?”

Some evil genius made Michael say, “Who would I bring with me?”

The expression on Lord Winter’s face made him repent instantly. “She did not reach you?” the viscount asked in a smothered voice.

In that moment, Michael forgave him. He made him suffer a few moments more, deliberately laying his hat and gloves on a table beside the door.

“Zenia is safe,” he said. “You have a daughter.”

Viscount Winter turned white and then red beneath his tan. Michael thought he was not quite as old as the harsh imprint of his adventures made him appear at first glance. He seemed to have difficulty knowing what to do with his sun-browned hands, staring down at them and then shoving them behind his back, turning away.

“Well,” he said sullenly, “if she will have me, I’m willing to make it right.”

Michael’s lips twitched. He really felt rather sorry for the fellow. “But you already have, have you not?” he said mildly. “Lady Winter is in residence at Swanmere, with Miss Elizabeth Lucinda Mansfield in the nursery.”

Lord Winter looked back in clear astonishment. He seemed for an instant as if he would reject the statement, but then a scowl erased any hint of emotion. He gave Michael a veiled, appraising look. “Of course,” he said.

“I don’t suppose you would part with some of that sherry?” Michael asked. “Forgive me, but you are presumed dead. An old man’s nerves, you know!”

The viscount’s mouth twisted in a smile. “You’ve nerve enough, Mr. Bruce.” He poured the wine out into a sparkling glass. “I nearly was dead. Several times.”

“Good. Not that I wish you ill, particularly, but I should like to think that you did not seduce my daughter and then abandon her without some sufficient reason.”

Lord Winter poured himself a glass. He looked up over it. “No,” he said, and then pointedly: “I wonder if you can say the same?”

“I suppose you have some right to ask. I never knew of her until she came to me. I was told—how ironic it seems now—that Lady Hester caught the plague after I left, and was a long time recovering. You may be sure that I felt a suitable son of a bitch, but by the time I had the word, all was supposedly well.” He tossed down the sherry. “Do you know what I think, Winter? I think Hester was waiting to see if it was a boy. She’d sworn to my father she wouldn’t ruin me by marriage. She was too old; she always said she was too old. She screamed at me until I left her. But I think if it had been a boy—” He set down the glass and damned her. The rise of his own violent emotion took him by surprise. He had not meant to say such things.

Lord Winter stood looking down into the fire. “She was capable of anything, I daresay,” he said neutrally.

“Well, I doubt you wished to see me to speak of that,” Michael said, standing up. “What else can I tell you? Your daughter is a fat, jolly, healthy little charmer. Lady Winter is grown beautiful beyond anything, now that she’s had some proper nourishment. You will be astonished—and pleased, I hope. She was terribly wasted when she arrived. I go up to Swanmere twice a year. They live very retired. Your father does not like them to leave the place. He is a little inclined to be overprotective, perhaps, but then he has thought you lost to him. I’m glad—what an inadequate word!—I’m overjoyed to find that it is not so. Does your father know yet?”

Lord Winter shook his head, still watching the fire.

“I think that you should write to him. Perhaps I should do it for you, to ease the news. He is in health, and your mother also, but it will be a stunning shock.”

The viscount looked up at last. He had a closed expression, giving nothing away.

“Shall I write to your father for you?”

Lord Winter nodded slowly.

“Excellent. I shall say that you will be at Swanmere in—what—a sennight? That will give them time to prepare. Unless of course you wish to go directly. You must naturally wish to rush to jour family. I’m sure there would be no harm done.”

The viscount cast him a sudden vehement look. “There is no rush, Mr. Bruce. Oh, no. I wouldn’t want to bring an apoplexy upon anyone, would I?”

Grimly, Arden packed up his small kit, having bribed the porter to get him a job horse at this late hour. He could not remain here, pacing the stuffy warmth of his hired rooms the way he had all day. He would have preferred violence, but he settled for movement.

A daughter! And
Lady Winter.
Somehow he had thought that she would come to him with her father. Why had he thought that? He could think of a hundred things that might have become of her; they all crowded in now, the possibilities—she might have died, never reached England, been rejected by Bruce, become one of hundreds of unprotected females on the streets; she might have entered a workhouse, gone into a factory, become a whore. Or an actress. Now there would be an outlet for her talents.

He might have looked all his life and never found her again.

The one thing he had never thought, in his wildest inventions, was that he would return to discover her installed at Swanmere as Lady Winter.

He wondered who she was, this Lady Winter. He couldn’t see her in his mind. There was Selim, and then there was—a woman who had said to him,
What difference does it make?

It was all he could remember clearly. He had misplaced the certainty that she was real, or ever had been. But he remembered what she had said before he made love to her. He could not recall her voice or her tone, but the words seemed infinitely cold and languid to him now.

Apparently it had made a difference after all, he thought fiercely.

He avoided Oxford Street, taking quiet back ways out of the city, for he led the Arab mare—Shajar al-Durr, the String of Pearls. She looked even more fairylike and fragile than usual in the bleak setting of narrow coal-blackened streets, all aglow in white next to the stolid liver chestnut hack the stable had provided, exhibiting her fright in twitching ears and soft snorts. And yet, though she trembled, she came with sweet docility, a princess dancing her delicate hooves upon the wet pavement, her whiteness reflected back by the stones.

She was his prize. What he had to show for three years of his life, for the cauterized scar and lingering shafts of pain in his left side, for futility and blood. It was Rashid, not the Saudis, who had shot him down and taken him like raided livestock from the Egyptians. Afterward, for some amount of time that Arden did not know, he had lain in the black Shammar tents, hung between living and dying of the wound in his side, his reason lost in the grip of weird and terrifying dreams.

He recovered, but Rashid had held him like a slave, friendship at knifepoint, until Arden had understood that he was still hostage to the fantastic image of the Queen of the Englezys. Myth and magic and legend was the lifeblood of the desert, and the prince a mixture of keen military pragmatism and romantic foolery. It needed only a figurehead, or some visible representation of it, and listening for hour after hour to Prince Rashid’s bewitching certainties, even Arden had begun to half-believe that they fought for a queen hidden somewhere just beyond reach, a spirit over the desolate mountains and the long coppery sky, and that he was her earthly commander sent to Prince Rashid; a shield and spear and a demon-gun on the hot dirty ground.

Certainly the real woman had come to seem a dream. He could remember Selim; he desperately missed Selim, missed English words and quiet companionship. But that one day and night, when he had looked up and seen a woman—and such a beautiful, desirable, soul-wounding woman—it was too elusive. He lost the sense of it. He could not feel, or remember feeling what it had been like. He had to resist the dreamlike quality of it, to insist in his mind on hard facts, and as time passed he even lost the ability to remember those, or make them more real than the actuality of his life in the desert.

He was Abu Haj Hasan, riding under banners that unfurled like serpents’ tongues with the words of Allah written upon them, shouting a war cry in one voice with the warriors of Shammar and Kheytan, galloping beside Prince Abdullah ibn Rashid as he rode on the mare they called the String of Pearls and took the desert in his hands. The rest of the world was gone, utterly vanished into dim, uneasy memory.

But one night, amid the poems and stories told over coffee and the fire, some Kheytani had spoken of an ancient Frankish stranger who had belonged to his tent when he was a boy. He had once asked his father who this man was, with his red beard and strange speech, and what he did there. And his father had answered that the man was
dakhile;
he had been a protected guest in his grandfather’s tent, and when his grandfather had died, he became a guest in his father’s tent, and if his father and his grandfather had not thought to ask him why he came or why he stayed, then it was surely a graceless discourtesy for his son, a mere boy by Allah’s mercy, to inquire into something that did not concern him.

It was a tale for the children who sat about wide-eyed, a little parable of desert etiquette, not to pry into a guest’s affairs. But sitting in the firelight, all Arden could see in his mind was that solitary old man who had come among strangers and lived a stranger until he died.

The next day, in scouting for a raid on Aden, he had seen British guns and British marines—and suddenly, strangely, his own self had come back to him with a jolt of painful realignment. By then it had been easy—Rashid had trusted him. Arden had caught the mare Shajar al-Durr in the night, released her from her hobbles, walked with her up to the sleeping sentry beneath the walls of Aden and nearly given the redcoat a seizure by addressing him in English.

He supposed that he should have expected these stunned reactions. He supposed that he should have known life would go on without him. It had done so before, and never made a material difference to him. He rode with cold rain dripping down his collar and seeping under his gloves, feeling lost.