Only a Kiss (21 page)

“And what was it tonight?” he asked as he straightened up.

“Just one poem, though a longish one,” she said. “William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.’ Have you read it? One of my friends, one of my fellow Survivors, lives in Wales, though his home is on the western side of it rather than in the Wye valley in the east. I went there with George last year for his wedding.”

“George?” That was not
jealousy
flaring in him, was it?

“Duke of Stanbrook, owner of Penderris Hall,” she explained. “A sort of cousin though a closer relationship than yours and mine. He is another of the Survivors.”

“The one whose wife jumped off a cliff?”

“Yes,” she said.

He wished he had not remembered that particular detail. The man had also lost a son to the wars and must be as old as the hills. Percy tried to remember him from the House of Lords but without any success. Perhaps he would recognize him if he saw him.

He eyed the empty chair beside the fire and went to sit on the love seat. He turned and scooped her up and set her on his lap with her feet on the seat beside them. She was on the tall side, but she wriggled downward—heaven help him—until she was snuggled against him, the side of her head on his shoulder. She inhaled audibly.

“I love the way you smell,” she said. “It is always the same.”

“Mingled liberally with sweat on two recent occasions,” he said.

“Yes.” She laughed softly.

“And I love the sound of your laughter,” he said. And if he had met her for the first time today, he realized, or even yesterday, it would not even have occurred to him to think of her as the marble lady. He wondered if she was falling in love with him, or if it was just the sex.

It was
not
just the sex, though, was it? If it were, then they would be upstairs now, naked on her bed, going at it.

For a moment he felt almost dizzy with alarm. That was what they really ought to be doing.

“I am not much given to laughing,” she said.

“And that,” he said, “is why your laughter is so precious. No, correct that. It would be just as precious if you laughed frequently. You used to?”

She inhaled and exhaled, but she had not tensed up, he noticed.

“In another lifetime,” she said. “I like your friends.”

“They do not have two brain cells between them to rub together,” he said fondly.

“Oh, but of course they do,” she said. “I might have said that of you if I had seen you only with them. Sometimes we need friends with whom we can simply be silly. Silliness can be . . . healing.”

“Are you ever silly with your friends?” he asked her.

“Yes, sometimes.” He could feel her smiling against the side of his neck. “Friendship is a very, very precious thing, Percy.”

“Are we friends?” Now where the devil had that infantile question come from? He felt foolish.

She raised her head and looked into his face. She was not smiling.

“Oh, I believe we could be.” She sounded almost surprised. “We will not be, though. We will not know each other long enough. It will be enough that we are lovers, will it not? Just for a brief spell. That is all either of us wants. I shall not try to cling to you when it is over, and that is a very firm promise.”

He felt as though someone had dropped a very large iceberg down the chimney and doused the fire and all memory of it.

Yes, that was all either of them wanted. That was all
he
wanted—a vigorous and pleasurable sexual liaison while he was living out here in a social desert.

Why, then, were they sitting in her sitting room?

He drew her head back to his shoulder. “Would you be surprised to know,” he said, “that smuggling is still active in this area? Even on this land?”

There was a lengthy silence. “I would not be terribly
shocked,
” she said eventually, “though I know nothing of it.”

“Nothing of the involvement of any of the servants here?” he asked her. “Or whether their involvement is voluntary or forced? Nothing of the use of the cellar at the hall for the stowing of contraband?”

“Oh.” She paused. “
Definitely
not that. With Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Adelaide in the house? Is it
true
?”

“Both the inside and the outside doors leading into one half of the cellar are locked, and both keys are missing,” he told her. “No one is trying hard to find them, for apparently that area was shut off to keep the damp from the rest of the cellar.”

“Oh,” she said again. “I thought—I hoped—it had all ended with my father-in-law’s passing and even before that when I moved here.”

“I have been advised,” he said, “by everyone to whom I have spoken, to leave well enough alone, to turn a blind eye, to let sleeping dogs lie and so on. The trade will go on, I am told, and no one is really hurt by it.”

She was silent. What the devil had induced him to raise this topic of conversation to a lady, and at something close to one in the morning? He glanced at the clock. It was five to.

“Who
is
harmed by it, Imogen?”

“Colin Bains was,” she said.

“Yes.”

“He was
such
a bright, eager boy,” she told him. “He worshiped Dicky. He
so
much wanted to come to the Peninsula with us.”

“Your husband was quite vocally opposed to the smuggling?” he asked.

“He was,” she said. “But he could not persuade his father that there was anything so very wrong with it. On the surface there was not and
is
not. There is a little loss of revenue to the government and a lot of enjoyment of superior luxury goods—particularly brandy by the gentlemen, of course. But I think what we see and know is the veriest tip of the iceberg, and what we do
not
see is ugly and vicious. Even the visible tip can be nasty. He received threats before we went away.”

“Bains?”

“No, Dicky,” she said. “There were two letters, one threatening his life, one mine. They were written in a childish, nearly illiterate hand, and his father laughed at them. But Dicky was already in the process of purchasing his commission. We never knew if the threats were serious or not.”

Good God. What if they had been? What if they had been very serious indeed?

Good God.

“Oh,” she said, “I have been
such
a coward. I have known nothing lately because I have chosen to ask no questions and not to look out my windows late on dark nights.”

He lifted her chin with the hand that was about her shoulders. “I beg your pardon, Imogen,” he said. “I
do
beg your pardon for raising this topic with you. Forget I did. Keep on knowing nothing. Promise me?
Promise.
”

She nodded after a moment. “I promise,” she said, and he kissed her.

“I am feeling too lazy even to come upstairs with you tonight,” he said, laying his head back against a cushion. “Have you ever made love on a love seat? It sounds like a logical place to do it, does it not?”

“It would not be long enough,” she said, “unless we were uncommonly short.”

“Shall I show you?”

“It sounds . . . uncomfortable,” she said, but she was half smiling back at him.

“Not at all,” he said. “What are you wearing beneath your dressing gown and nightgown?”

“Nothing.” Her cheeks turned a little pink.

“Perfect,” he said. “I, on the other hand, need to make a few adjustments. I could hardly leave the main hall clad only in my nightshirt.”

He lifted her off his lap and set her down beside him while he undid the buttons at his waist and lowered the flap of his breeches and parted the folds of his drawers. And he reached for her again, his hands going beneath her garments to lift them out of the way. She came astride him, braced herself on her knees, and set her hands on his shoulders while she leaned slightly back and looked down. She watched—they both did—while he put himself inside her and drew her downward with his hands on her hips until he was fully embedded. Her muscles slowly clenched about him.

“Oh,” she said.

Oh, indeed. He was enveloped in wet heat and the agony of full desire.

He kept a firm grasp on her hips and lifted her partly away from him so that he could work her with firm upward strokes. And she rode him with a bold rhythm that matched his own, and he wanted it never to end, and he needed to end it
now,
and he would continue with it forever because it was the most exquisite feeling in the world and she felt it too and they must end
now
but they must prolong the pleasure just a little longer.

He did not know for how many minutes they made love. He did not know which of them broke rhythm first. It did not matter. They finished together, and it was like—ah, that old cliché, though it had never had any meaning for him before now—it was like a little death.

It was . . . exquisite. He was going to have to invent a vocabulary all his own, since the English language was often totally inadequate to his needs.

When he came more or less to himself, she was relaxed on him, her knees hugging his sides, her head on his shoulder, her face turned away from his, and she was sleeping. He was still buried in her, still slightly throbbing. The cat was on the love seat beside them. Hector was draped across one of his shoes.

He had never felt more relaxed in his life, Percy thought.

And never so happy.

He was too relaxed even to be alarmed at the thought.

“A
ll
the servants?” Paul Knorr said. “Inside and out?”

“The butler, the head steward, the cook, the bootboy, the head groom, and lowliest gardener and stable hand, Lady Lavinia’s maid, the scullery maids,” Percy said. “All except those brought by my visitors.”

“The cook is sure to have something in the oven at ten o’clock in the morning,” Knorr said with a cheerful grin. “And she is a tyrant. I quake and tremble.”

“If she comes at you with a rolling pin,” Percy said, “run fast.”

“Has Mr. Ratchett ever ventured beyond the steward’s room?” Knorr asked.

“He will today,” Percy told him. “You will see to it, Knorr, by being your usual deeply deferential self. You do it very well. Go.”

Knorr departed to fulfill his task of rounding up everyone who worked within the boundaries of the park, even Imogen’s housekeeper, even Watkins and Mimms and Percy’s coachman.

Everyone had dispersed after breakfast, except Mrs. Ferby, who kept guard over the fire in the drawing room. Percy’s mother had gone with Aunt Nora, Lady Lavinia, and Imogen the Lord knew where to make arrangements about flowers and music for the ball. Aunt Edna and Beth and the twins were out in the stables with Geoffrey, kitten gazing. Meredith had gone off in Percy’s own curricle, driven by Sidney, to call upon Miss Wenzel and her brother—Percy thought there had been a bit of mutual attraction between his widowed cousin and Imogen’s would-be suitor last evening. Arnold was exploring the cliff walk with Uncle Ernest and his two boys—they intended to take a look at the fishing village too. Uncles Roderick and Ted had gone riding up the valley in the opposite direction. Everyone was accounted for.

“You are staying home on
estate business,
Perce?” Arnie had asked with a look of incredulity when Percy had explained why he would not join in the cliff walk. “That is more than a bit alarming, I must say.”

“You are staying in order to confer with
your steward,
Percy?” Uncle Ted had said when his nephew declined the request to go riding. “I am impressed, my boy. Turning thirty has done wonders for you. Your father would be proud.”

“I hope so,” Percy had said meekly.

He had steeled every nerve. He was probably about to do
entirely
the wrong thing. But for once he was determined to
do
something that needed doing, even if like an idiot he must stand alone against the whole world and even if nothing of any significance could possibly be accomplished. Even if he was going to be merely tilting at windmills.

He had been raised, after all, to stand alone and always to do what he believed to be right. He had not fully realized that before now. He had not gone away to school, where, at an impressionable age, he would have learned to become just like every other boy of his social class. He had remained at home to be educated and trained—and loved—by a number of straight-thinking adults. He had remained under the influence of that upbringing through his university years and had stuck out from his fellows like a sore thumb while acquiring an excellent education in his chosen field. He had spent the past ten years more or less repudiating his past and making up for lost time—with interest. He was now like every other idle gentleman of his generation, but even more so.

But one’s upbringing could never be quite erased. If his could be, he would cheerfully do it, for then perhaps he would not be feeling this sudden dissatisfaction with his life, this onslaught of conscience, this urge to go crusading.

It
was
idiotic. It
was
nonsensical. He might—and probably would—regret it. But it was perhaps better to act from conscience and be sorry than to bury his head in the sand and sidle by his own life because he could not be bothered to live it.

Someone had
organized
the staff, Percy saw as soon as he entered the seldom-used visitors’ salon on the ground floor. They were standing to rigid attention in such straight lines that someone had surely used a long ruler. And they were arranged strictly according to rank. All eyes faced forward. Percy felt a bit like a general about to inspect his troops—the Duke of Wellington, perhaps.

“At ease,” he said, standing just inside the door with his hands clasped behind him.

There was an infinitesimal relaxing of posture.
Very
infinitesimal.

“I am declaring war,” he said, and at least twenty pairs of eyes swiveled his way though the heads belonging to the eyes did not follow suit, “against smuggling.”

The eyes went forward again. Every face remained blank. Ratchett, Percy saw, was having a hard time keeping his spine straight. In fact, he looked like a bow just waiting to be strung.

“Mr. Knorr,” Percy said, “will you set a chair for your superior, if you please. You may sit, Mr. Ratchett.”

The head steward’s head turned and he squinted at Percy’s left ear, but he made no protest when Paul Knorr set a chair behind him. He sat.

“I am
not
intending to gather together an army to sally forth for a fight against the forces of evil, you will no doubt be relieved to know,” Percy continued. “What goes on beyond the borders of my own land is, at least for the present, not my concern. And I am aware that it would take a very large army indeed to rid the land entirely of smuggling. But it
will
end within the borders of what is mine. That includes the house, the park, and the farm, and even the beach below my land, since the only landward route away from the beach is the path up the cliff face and across the park. Anyone who takes exception to my decision is welcome to collect what wages he is owed from Mr. Ratchett or Mr. Knorr, without any penalty, and leave here with his belongings. Everyone who stays is my employee and will live and work here according to my rules, whether he or she is on duty or off. Are there any questions?”

The pause that followed reminded Percy of the one in the nuptial service when the members of the congregation were invited to report any impediment to the marriage of which they were aware. He did not expect the silence to be broken, and it was not.

“If,” he said, “there are any smuggled goods anywhere on my land at present—in the cellar of this house, for example—I will allow two days, today and tomorrow, for them to be removed. After that, there will be no more, and I will expect Mr. Ratchett or Mr. Crutchley or Mrs. Attlee to be in possession of both keys to the locked room in the cellar—the inside and the outside keys. If they remain lost after the two days, then the locks will be forced and new locks installed—and I will myself retain one set of the new keys.”

One maid—the deaf-mute—had her head slightly turned and her eyes fixed to his lips, Percy noticed for the first time. He strolled down the center of the lines, looking first one way and then the other. He felt more martial than ever.

“Anyone who fears reprisal,” he said, stopping and looking steadily into the face of the stable hand beside Colin Bains, a ginger-haired lad with freckles half the size of farthings, “will speak either to Mr. Knorr or to me.”

That was a tricky point, actually. Anyone who feared how the gang would react to his—or her—withdrawal from the trade would hardly make a public complaint and draw even more attention to him – or herself. Would they
all
be in danger of reprisal? It was a risk he had chosen to take.

“I will speak openly of this wherever I go over the next few days,” Percy said, returning to his place by the door and letting his eyes move from face to face along the rows. There was absolutely nothing to be read in any of them. “I will make sure it is clearly understood that this is
my
rule and that everyone in my employ is required to live by it or lose his or her position. Are there any questions?”

“Mr. Crutchley,” he said when no one spoke up, “you will send the servants about their business, if you please. James Mawgan, I will see you in the library as soon as you have been dismissed.”

The head gardener’s face turned in sharp surprise and became almost instantly blank again.

The morning room that seemed more like a library to him was unoccupied by any human, Percy was happy to discover. It was, however, occupied by the remnants of the menagerie. The bulldog—Bruce?—had claimed the hearth, and was flanked by his usual cohorts, two of the cats. The new one was beside the coal scuttle, cleaning his paws with his tongue. Hector sat erect and alert beside the chair Percy usually occupied. He was neither cowering nor hiding, an interesting development. The other two dogs—the long and the short—had been taken yesterday to the Kramer house, where apparently they had been given an effusive welcome and a large bowl of tasty tidbits apiece. All of Fluff’s kittens had now been spoken for, though they were not to leave their mother for a while yet.

Percy wondered if he had just set the cat among the pigeons, or stepped on a hornet’s nest, or awakened a sleeping dog, or otherwise done what it would have been altogether better for him
not
to do. Time would tell.

“Come,” he called when someone tapped on the door.

Mawgan stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and stood with his arms hanging at his sides and his gaze fixed on the carpet two feet in front of him.

“You were the late Viscount Barclay’s batman for almost two years, Mawgan?” Percy said.

“Yes, my lord.”

“You did not like the life of a fisherman?” Percy asked.

“I did not mind it,” Mawgan said.

“How did it come about, then? Did Barclay not have a valet?” He surely would have been the obvious choice for the position of batman. He might have been elderly, of course, but it was unlikely when Barclay himself had been a very young man.

“He died, my lord.”

“The valet?”

“He drowned,” Mawgan explained. “He was on a day off and wanted to go out fishing in my father’s boat. He fell in. He couldn’t swim. I jumped in and tried to save him, but he fought me in his panic and we went under the boat and I got knocked on the head. Someone pulled me out, but I didn’t come round for two whole days after. He didn’t make it, poor bugger—begging your pardon, my lord.”

Percy stared at him. Mawgan had not changed posture at all. He was still staring at the carpet.

“Your appointment was in the nature of being a reward, then, for trying to save the valet’s life?” he asked. “You are the great-nephew of Mr. Ratchett, I believe?”

“I think he put in a word for me, my lord,” Mawgan said, “after Bains would not let his boy go. But his lordship called at our house to see me after I came around, and I asked myself.”

“You saw him and the viscountess being captured by a French scouting party?” Percy asked.

“I did, my lord,” Mawgan said. “There were nothing I could do to stop it. There were six of them, and I did not even have my musket with me. It would have been suicide if I had tried. I thought the best thing to do was get back to the regiment as fast as I could and fetch help. But it was a long way and I got lost in the hills in the night. It took me more than a day.”

“You assumed, did you,” Percy asked, “that they had both been killed?”

“They was obviously not French,” Mawgan said, “and his lordship was not in uniform and had nothing on him to prove he was an officer. I thought they were for sure both dead. I would have stayed on in the Peninsula if I had believed there was any hope. But I was not even allowed to go with the party that went looking for them. Like looking for a needle in a haystack, that was, but I wanted to go all the same. It would have been something to do. It is worst of all to have nothing to do.”

And yet, Percy thought, his head gardener seemed to be making a career of doing just that. “And so you came home,” he said.

“I wish I had stayed, my lord,” Mawgan assured him. “I felt that bad when I knew her ladyship was still alive and had been released and brought home all out of her mind like. I might have been some comfort to her, a familiar face.”

... all out of her mind like.

Imogen!

“Thank you,” Percy said briskly. “I wish I had known Viscount Barclay. He was a distant cousin of mine and a brave man. A hero. You were privileged to know and serve him.”

“I was, my lord,” the man agreed.

“What do you know about this smuggling business?” Percy asked.

“Oh, I don’t know nothing,” Mawgan assured him. “And it would not surprise me, my lord, if there isn’t nothing to know. I think someone must of been spinning yarns at you to make you think there is smuggling going on here. Once upon a time maybe, but not now. I know most of the servants don’t tell me nothing because I am head gardener, but I would have caught some whisperings. I haven’t heard nothing.”

Percy knew a great deal about double negatives. Some of his knowledge had entered his person via the cane of one of his tutors across his backside, though most of it had entered through the front door of his brain.
I don’t know nothing
was probably the exact truth. But short of applying hot needles to Mawgan’s fingernails, there was no more information to be gathered, he understood. He had just wanted to be quite clear on the matter. He sighed aloud.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “However, it is as well that everyone here understand just where I stand. You will keep your ear to the ground, Mawgan? And let me know if you hear anything? You have been a loyal servant, I can see.”

“I certainly will, my lord,” Mawgan said, “though I don’t expect there will be nothing to tell. These are good people here. My great-uncle has always said so and I have seen so for myself.”

“Thank you,” Percy said. “I will not keep you from your busy duties any longer.”

Mawgan backed out without once looking up.

Percy was feeling cold even though he stood with his back to the fire. Barclay had received two threatening letters before he went to the Peninsula. His valet, who would surely have accompanied him as his batman, had died accidentally in a boating accident. Bains, who had pleaded to go in his place, had been deemed by his father to be too young, though fourteen was really not
very
young for a boy. Mawgan had been appointed through a combination of heroism in a losing cause and the influence of Ratchett, who was his mother’s uncle. Mawgan had been conveniently out of the way—without his musket—when the French scouting party took Barclay and Imogen. Then he got lost on the way back for help. When he came home here, he was given the post of head gardener.