Laura Kinsale (27 page)

Arden stepped back. The maid ducked a little curtsy and knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” came the uncertain demand, from closer to the door this time.

“Your bedtime tray and tea, ma’am,” the maid whispered, glancing again at Arden and turning down her eyes.

“Come,” said the voice behind the door.

As it opened, he could see beyond the girl. Zenia stood beside the dictionary. Her eyes widened a little as she saw him still there.

She had not needed his offering—the tray was loaded with food. She did not require any service from him at all. She had made a cozy place for herself; she had respectability and comfort; she had his father’s approval; she’d appropriated Arden’s room and his name—and at the pull of a bell rope, he thought with savage mockery, she could get all the plum pudding she could possibly desire. Arden felt an unutterable fool.

He turned, striding down the hall to the stairs. It was easy enough to leave Swanmere after the doors were locked. He knew all the ways.

Zenia signed the letter to her father. Her hand was still unsteady, and she broke the pen and had to mend it before she could finish. She had been expecting Lord Winter, though she had hoped that he would see the open door of the next room and draw his own conclusions.

Now he had come and upset all her decisions. She had torn up the first letter to her father, the one that said she must return to him directly, that she did not dare remain where this man, this stranger, menaced her and Elizabeth with his threats of taking her daughter away.

Then he had brought her food—he had looked at her with his intense blue eyes and said
eat,
the same way he had said it in the desert. She wanted to forget the desert. She wanted to forget how it felt to be hungry. But she had been hungry, even here, because she felt uncouth and greedy sitting at a table loaded with so much food. She always wanted to stuff as much of it into her as she could, as fast as she could. She wanted to eat like a famished beggar, and so she ate nothing. She was determined to be an English lady.

She had food brought to her in private. No one had ever said anything about it. She didn’t think the earl or countess knew.

But Lord Winter had guessed that she was hungry. He had brought her plum pudding and commanded her to eat. Underneath the diamonds and the silk, he knew she was still a wretched, starving, dirty, barefoot creature.

She gave a small miserable laugh, wrinkling her nose at the plate sitting on the dictionary. He might have asked what she liked, at least.

Oh, but he had remembered how she had longed to taste it. And he had pushed her atop a camel, and she had seen his blood all over the saddle. If he had not delayed his own mounting to lift her and shove her into the Egyptian’s hold, perhaps he would not have been left behind.

Perhaps it was she who would still be there. Or stoned to death long ago. Elizabeth would never have been born. And he would be here. Safe in England, in his home, even married to one of the English girls that Lady Belmaine had selected for him.

Zenia knew she was at Swanmere for a single reason: because they had thought him dead, and Elizabeth was his daughter, to be protected and coveted as the only blood heir to Swanmere. Zenia had understood. And it had not troubled her—at first she had been lonely and intimidated, but after Elizabeth had come, Zenia had felt that it was right for his daughter to have what her father could give her. She had felt that he would have wanted it; that she owed it to him and to Elizabeth. On the nights she had sat in this room and remembered her first English Christmas and longed to be enveloped in laughter and affection with her own father and Marianne in Bentinck Street, she had made the best of it for Elizabeth. The only celebration of Christmas at Swanmere had been a large public dinner for the tenants, which Zenia had not attended. There had been no decorations or popping crackers. Lady Belmaine had said that Zenia would not wish to go out of mourning, and neither had the household done so.

Zenia’s time with her father and family had been so short. As his visits to Swanmere were short. As the one night she had lain with a man’s arms tight about her had been short.

Elizabeth made up for it. Elizabeth made up for everything. Zenia could hold her daughter close, make her laugh and comfort her when she cried. Choose her clothes, her toys. Take her for walks, though she very seldom left these rooms, for Zenia dreaded that she might become ill. Elizabeth was not a sickly child—she was rumbustiously healthy, because Zenia took the greatest caution to keep her safe from chills, infection and dirt. Zenia couldn’t understand how Lord Winter could even jest about taking Elizabeth to Siberia. Besides that, she was just a baby still, not old enough to know what to be afraid of. Once she had escaped a nurse and crawled all the way down the stairs to the next floor. Zenia had found her tottering at the top of the grand staircase, ready to fall. Her heart still contracted at the bare memory of it.

That nurse had been dismissed. The new woman was more vigilant, but Zenia still disliked to abandon Elizabeth with her for long. The new nurse had even been ready to shut the door, leaving Elizabeth alone with Lord Winter when she knew nothing about him, merely taking his word for who he was.

Zenia gazed at her daughter. It was overly severe, she supposed, to blame the nurse for letting in Elizabeth’s father when everyone in the house had known he was coming and it wasn’t very likely that some dangerous escaped convict would be freely roaming the halls of Swanmere in elegant male dress. But the small body curled in the bed seemed so vulnerable, so painfully defenseless, and the world was so huge and full of hazard and pain and loneliness.

Lord Winter brought it with him, the world. All of the memories Zenia had tried to erase. The blue-charged light of his eyes as he turned from defying a
ghrazzu
all alone; his easy grin among the Bedu; he was a madman, and he loved the desert and the danger in the world.

Her tea was cooling in the pot. Under the silver covers, she knew there would be lamb and rice and buttered bread, with Queen cakes and macaroons for dessert, all of which she liked far better than plum pudding.

He had brought it for her, knowing she would be hungry. She rose, picked up the plate and carried it to the desk.

With a grimace for every bite, she ate the pudding. When she had done, she carried it to the door between their rooms.

Her heart was pumping madly as she knocked. There was no answer. After a second knock, she slowly opened the door and saw the room was dark.

Quietly she set the empty plate on the floor so he would find it and pulled the door closed.

Grace was the one who recognized him. Arden walked into the taproom of the Black Swan and sat down. The place was unchanged; smoked windows and beams and a pair of half-sotted carters who stared at him from their place by the fire. Harvey pulled the tap, his big bulk taking up most of the space behind the counter, while Grace sassed him good-naturedly as she shoved one of the carters aside to stoke the coals.

She turned from her task, wiping her hands on her apron, and saw him. An odd change came over her: she lifted her chin, tossing her chestnut head back with a gesture that he recalled very well.

“Is your mother here?” he asked.

“My—” She started to frown.

“You aren’t Grace Herring’s daughter?” He allowed the corner of his mouth to smile.

“Oh!” she said. And then,
“Oh!”
She untied the apron and started toward him, flinging it aside. “If you ain’t the blackest liar in the county. My
mother.
Oh, lordy—just look at you, then!”

Arden stood up. Grace caught his hands, pressing them in her own. Harvey had turned; he was rumbling, “God bless us, my lord! We heard you was come home, and bedamned to them heathens supposed to murder you!”

Arden shook hands across the bar, his fingers enveloped in Harvey’s great red paw. “I survived.”

“Ay, but the good Lord give you as many lives as a cat, I reckon, my lord. What will you take sir?”

“A pint of the homebrewed, if you will.” Grace still had hold of his other hand. Her husband, as always, was oblivious. Arden had never been perfectly sure if this was intentional blindness. “Oh, Harvey don’t mind,” Grace had said to Arden once, “long as I don’t make him bring up another man’s brats.”

Her eyes were pretty yet, with deeper smile lines about them, and her chestnut hair still tumbled a stray curl down beside a cheek that, in the dim light, was softly seductive. Arden’s sexual initiation had been sudden and electrifying. He’d climbed the wall and been wandering through the woods outside Swanmere, prowling with an adolescent’s ferocious aimlessness amid the greenery of high summer, when he had heard her laugh. He had seen her and Harvey through the undergrowth.

She was a few years older than he—perhaps seventeen then. And Harvey was huge; had always been huge, a widower newly remarried to his teasing kitchen maid. He had taken her dress down to her stays, and in the dappled sunlight Grace’s breasts had seemed like dotted cream, her nipples large and brown.

Arden had been riveted. He had stood there, forgetting to breathe, while Harvey put his big palms over them and pulled Grace down on her knees. She was smiling, with a little look of concentration and expectation on her face, her hands braced in a green patch of grass. While Arden stared, Harvey pushed up her dress, holding one hand on her white buttock while he released his breeches.

In his fifteen-year-old innocence, Arden had been awed by Harvey’s immense size. He had watched in hot, desperate fascination as the tapster mounted Grace from behind. She hung her head, her breasts swaying with the quick short thrusts as he entered, her palms digging into the grass. Arden had put his arm about a tree trunk and pressed his fingernails into the bark. The marks were probably there still.

Harvey was a quiet man, in speech and in sex. There had been nothing but the heavy sound of his breath and the slap of his brawny thighs against her. Arden had thought the man was going to burst, he turned so red, but instead he shoved himself forward and curled all about Grace as if he could devour her with his big body, the muscles in his arms standing out as he gripped her about the shoulders. He jerked and quivered, groaning softly, and Arden held onto the tree to keep his knees from buckling under him.

He had stepped quickly behind it as Harvey showed signs of life again. Arden stared at a moth on the bark, hardly even knowing what it was, while the bushes rustled and Grace said, “Let’s stay a bit.”

“Got work,” Harvey said. There was the sound of a slap. “Lazy Gracie.”

“Harvey,” she’d said, in a coaxing voice.

“Work,” he said. “New mouth be along to feed soon enough.”

Grace had audibly sighed. Then rustling, and the sound of them going through the brush.

For a while Arden had not been able to move. He looked blankly at the moth, his nostrils flaring, since he had finally remembered to breathe. He was in a pitch of acute and untutored lust. He hurt with it. He had put his head down against the tree trunk and pressed it until his ears rang.

“I know you’re there.” Grace’s voice had seemed like something imaginary through the bells in his head. He held still, swallowing.

“From the big house,” she said. “You’re the young lord.”

Arden had been far beyond speaking. He closed his eyes, holding onto the tree.

“You want to do it with me?”