Love's a Stage (19 page)

“We’ve cleared the manor!” Landry called to her encouragingly. “I’m going to toss out the grapnel and see if we can anchor.”

“What’s down there?” she asked, not daring to look.

“An overgrown garden.” There was a loud, brittle crash from below. “
That
was a statue of a nymph holding twin bear cubs. We’ve just lopped off her head. I think we’ll catch on this dusty wreck of a fountain. It has a sea serpent in the middle and we may grip on the coils. The force of the snag will bring us to earth in a hurry! So—Frances, what are you doing? Stay down!”

The blind suspense was too much for Frances, and she had braced herself against the side of the gondola for a look at their circumstances. Landry caught her in a steel arm precisely the moment the grapnel caught with a spine-jarring jolt. She surely would have been thrown from the gondola had he not had the presence of mind to grab her. The violent arrest of the balloon’s rapid forward motion caused the balloon and gondola to come whipping to the ground through a white wood arbor festooned with dead vines. The gondola made matchsticks of the delicate woodwork, and Frances had a quick impression of splinters of white wood flying everywhere and the mad, flashing colors of red, blue, and gold silk leaping wildly around them. The breath was sucked from her lungs as the gondola collided with the ground, and the rope suspension cables became a thrashing prison. The sheep abandoned the gondola immediately, their little sharp hooves running painfully over Frances’ compressed stomach as she lay half on her back; then she was half lifted, half dragged by Lord Landry over a bed of crushed rock, away from the fretting, bounding balloon.

Fighting for breath, Frances collapsed, still wound in his arms, into the sharp, grassy scent of an aged planting of March-come marigolds. Landry was laughing; Frances could feel his hard chest shudder.

“That wasn’t bad for practice,” he managed between choked bursts of mirth. “We’ll try the real thing tomorrow.”

“How can you laugh? How can you?” The words bit as they struggled through her flayed throat. “I’ve never been so afraid in all my life!” Her heart was banging painfully against her strained lungs, chastising Frances for squandering her drained energy on speech. The jolt she had received from the balloon’s landing came cresting over her in a stunning aftershock; she lay for a long time as she had fallen, unable to order movement to her limbs or more than a pittance of breath into her lungs. Landry had cushioned her fall neatly with the warm length of his body, while chance had tucked her cheek into his soft linen shirt and thrown one of her legs across his lean thighs. One of her fragile white arms was curled near his shoulder, with her hand resting beside his head. Frances could see the sky above her, pearl-gray and rolling with black-tipped clouds, forever shed of its mysteries. With the lark and the sparrow, she had sailed there.

The hammering of her excited heart began gradually to lessen, though not slowing to its normal pace. And as her shock wore away, a new and even more powerful weakness came to take its place. Some nagging hum tucked into her mind warned her that she ought to stand up, to move off. Without quite realizing that she was doing so, Frances quieted that wary voice, pleading for just one more minute, I’ll only stay one more minute like this, then I shall get up and it will be over.

Landry hadn’t spoken since her words, and she wondered what he was thinking and if it might be possible to guess, were she to tilt her head a little and look into his eyes. Her bonnet had fallen loose on its ribbons during their escape from the gondola, so the slight motion of her head brought her deep-brown hair shimmering out to ripple across the upper part of his body.

Landry had recovered much more quickly than Frances. He was able to smile with luxurious charm into her upturned face. She noticed how the brightness of his hair dulled the marigolds and the green of his eyes outshone the leaves framing his countenance. A spray of pollen had flown into the air as they had fallen on the marigolds, and he saw that it had given a fine dusting to her tawny cheeks and dark eyelashes. He put up his little finger, took some of the clinging pollen onto the side of it, and gently brushed it onto the swell of her lower lip, where it lay, a speckled gold luster against the dusky redness.

“Marigold mated,” he whispered. She felt a tensing of his arm as he reached out to behead, between his thumb and forefinger, three of the marigold flowers nearest, and her captive gaze followed his hand through the air as he brought them, to slide them ever so gently into the thick wavy hair behind her ear, where they were trapped and firmly held. He shifted her on his arm, turned on his side, and held her close; and reached a hand to arrange her hair in its proper fall across her forehead; then lightly brushed the pollen from her lips with his own.

Frances knew that she ought not to close her eyes, but she did it anyway. She could feel his deft fingers as they sought and loosened the first of four large fabric-covered buttons that held closed her cloak. He spread the collar to bare her throat, saying huskily that she was anointed. She felt petals softly dropping to touch and lie across her throat and his breath skimming her skin as he blew them off. A thrill of enticing fright shook her as he opened the second button; her soul learned the shy rapture, the feared wonder, of a butterfly emerging for the first time into a fresh and freer world. It was as though the balloon had carried her to a magic isle where old rules and problems no longer existed and she was tied not to the rigid standards that had governed all her life before, but to discovery and joy. Her past became a pale, fading mirage against the insistent reality of Landry’s warm, vibrant presence. Color, scent, texture, and sound were vivid and exaggerated; she could experience them in a way that she had never done before. No, she had been so once before, on the carriage ride when he had brought her home from Chez la Princesse. With the memory, her conscience weakly threw up the attendant self-censure and regret, jogging her vanishing sense of responsibility, reminding her that she ought to stop him. One more minute. Please. Please. She made a compromise and turned her face away from him, knowing as she did it that it was not enough.

“I wish you would not,” she said in a curiously forceless voice.

“Do you?” His tone hadn’t changed. She turned her head, opening her eyes to look at him, and saw with a prick of shame that he knew she was lying.

“We should—I think we ought to”—she spoke to distract herself as much as him—“to look for someone to help us.” How lame her words sounded. “The big house looked as though it had been burnt. Do you think it has been deserted?”

He gave a light laugh in response, and she felt the thickly bunched head of a marigold as he brushed it against her cheek.

“I can give you all the help you need,” he said peacefully. The flower slid around to her chin, and was left to rest on her throat as he slipped the third button of her cloak from its nest. “I know where we are. This is Wrenleigh’s estate in southern Suffolk. It’s been deserted since the fire seven years ago. When the Earl was forced to the Continent to escape his creditors, he put a torch to the place to keep it out of their hands. The grand gesture. It was the kind of thing that appealed to him.”

“What a tragic story! Did you know him?” Her heart still fluttered alarmingly.

“He was a school friend. I spent a month here the summer I was fourteen.” His hand had moved to her side, where he laid it broadly, fingers spread, stroking underneath her breast. “The story’s not as tragic as you think. Wrenleigh won a fortune at hazard in Naples, and when I visited him last year he was set up in a villa at the edge of town, better fixed than he’d ever been.” He freed the last button of her cloak, and she felt cool air on the base of her neck as he parted the heavy garment and tucked it by her sides. Under the cloak was her blossom-pink robe
à l’anglaise,
flaring slightly under the high bodice that had been cut on the cross to cling to her full, soft breasts. It was a perfectly respectable garment, but was made to be worn while standing and the material was such that, in her present position, it fiercely accented the lush contours of her body.

She made a fretful, shaky motion to pull the cloak about her again, but he caught her hand and carried it to his lips.

“Frances. You worry too much,” he whispered, gazing steadily into her eyes.

“It would be well for you if I didn’t,” Frances answered him. Her tone was defensive but she was quaking inside, knowing she was too close to the flame. Frances was reminded once more of the kiss he had given her in the carriage after they had left Chez la Princesse. If he had wanted her then, could she have resisted him? Could she resist him now?

He kissed her fingertips one by one and gently took the tip of her middle finger between his teeth. “It would be well for
you
if you didn’t. All this self-denial will give you a migraine.”

“What you want is sinful.” Her voice shook slightly.

He gently opened the palm of her captured hand and moved his fingernails from her wrist upward, lazily but firmly, leaving white trails on her flesh that changed to red as the blood rushed to the surface once his nails had passed. His fingers seemed to be reaching a destination as they pushed smoothly through her tightly clasped hand and wound them, tendrillike, through. He carried their entwined hands to his lips and gently nibbled her knuckles. His head was tilted to the side, his golden hair falling over her outspread brown curls.

“Does it feel like sin when I kiss you?” he asked.

She was visibly discomposed. “Yes! Yes, it does! It feels too good not to be!”

“And pleasure is wrong?” He dipped their paired hands to her mouth and moved them round the curvature of her lips, which relaxed and parted involuntarily, then snapped closed as she caught herself, biting her lower lip in her small white teeth. “Why do you think you have those feelings? Only to gauge how well you can resist temptation? To punish yourself?”

Her cheeks heated; Frances drooped her long, pretty eyelashes and turned her head. In a voice ruffled with shame, she said, “I shouldn’t have those feelings for you.”

He was amused again. “It’s pitiful what they teach women in this country. Frances, poor child, what do you think it means? Young girls sighing over lending-library romances, or giggling when the squire’s handsome son waves at them on the village green? Why do you think men and women dance together, and write love letters, and stand half-naked statues in their gardens? It’s a part of the same appetite—of course you should feel it, too; that’s the way we’re all made.”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing one would expect a rake to say.” Frances tried to prevent her voice from trembling.

Landry grinned. “At least I’ve taught you something.” He trailed a finger down her cheek. “I’ve never seduced an innocent girl. And I’m glad you’re so clever. It keeps me from feeling guilty. But I think I’ve told you that before.”

“Something like that,” she agreed, torn with anger, fright, and desire.

A blue-white flash of lightning split the sky to shatter against a high corner of the hulking manor, joined by the crackling scream of a thunderclap. Frances jumped as though she’d been shot.

“It was only lightning,” he said, holding her close, his hand straying comfortingly through her curls. Three fat raindrops fell heavily nearby, and a cool wind swept the hills, bringing with it a deluge. He pulled her from the rapidly soddening ground and held her while he peered through the enveloping sheet of water for shelter. There was a path of gray stone nearby, and he led her to it, covering her head with her bonnet. A second lightning bolt struck an elm on the slope behind the manor.

“It’s God’s reproach for your want of principle,” she said with the wavery trace of a smile. Raindrops lay like crystal beads on her skin, leaving her cheeks fresh and dewy.

“How do you know it’s a reproach? Perhaps it’s an endorsement,” he answered.

“Of all the base, impious . . .” Doubtless he couldn’t hear her words over the drone of the splashing rain and the smack of their feet on the graveled walk. Landry propelled Frances up the lichen-covered steps of broken stone that led to a wide upper terrace collaring the great house. More than a century had passed since the second Countess of Wrenleigh had extravagantly caused the terrace to be bedded in chips of snow-white marble and hired a small army of youngsters from neighboring farms to combat the subversive encroachment of weeds. The democratic hand of time had overthrown the tyranny of the terrace’s chaste whiteness; a plebeian assault of scrubby dandelions and groundsel had surged through the stones like a smug family of ragged squatters.

The mansion hung over them, dead and heavy, as they rounded the corner of one charred wing. Landry turned away from the house. Leaving the stones and pulling Frances behind him by one hand, he crossed a rectangle of scraggling, sick greenery to a high brickwork wall. Frances felt her feet sinking into the rich loam of what must once have been an exquisite plantation of expensive annuals. Her toe came up unexpectedly under a sinewy stone arm grotesquely severed from a nearby Heracles, and she cried out and stumbled. There was no slackening of Landry’s long strides, and Frances reflected with some umbrage that she would probably be pulled face first in the mud.

“Are we running toward somewhere?” Frances yelled to be heard over the rain. “Or are we just running?”

Through a speech-obliterating clap of thunder, she heard him say something about “the old stable” and “might still have a roof on it.” They reached a wicket gate bare of paint and welded shut by rust. Lord Landry tried it unsuccessfully, then drew up his knee and kicked the gate from its hinges. The gate fell hard, nearly disappearing in a thick mat of dried grass.

“You’re certainly devil-may-care with other people’s property,” shouted Frances as they passed through.

He gave her a look of mock reproach. “And I thought you would be so impressed with my swashbuckling heroics.” They entered a wide eroded yard, crisscrossed with deep wheel ruts filling with water. Frances saw an old stable mushrooming ahead through a steamy mist thrown into the air by the collision of rain and earth. It was barnlike and timbered, with a sturdy stone-tile roof. Spouts of muddy water sprang from beneath their feet as they headed for the black square of the open doorway.