Susan Carroll (32 page)

She was startled from her melancholy
reflection when Sawyer clapped his hands together. He rubbed them
almost as though the brisk gesture could cleanse him of the tender
emotion he had not liked to reveal.

"You'd best hie yourself off to an early bed.
We shall have a busy day on the morrow, with all the young lads
frisking about." "Aye, the apprentices' fete," she said without
much enthusiasm.

But Weylin's eyes sparkled with boyish
eagerness. "I vow the boys will be in high spirits, glad of a
holiday. I would have myself all those years I slaved beneath old
Master Hutchin's lash."

Her grandfather was a man of so many odd
contrasts. Phaedra wondered if she would ever understand him. "It
was a most hard road, was it not, Grandfather?" she asked. "The
road that led you to all of this."

"Indeed it was, girl."

"Then I don't understand why you bear so
little sympathy for other unfortunate men-men such as that Tom
Wilkins."

Weylin gave a disdainful sniff. "I've no pity
for any paupers, save perhaps the children. If I could make my way
alone, so can other men. I daresay you think me a ruthless old man,
but I always worked hard, never begged, never did aught I'd
regret."

He scowled, a shade of uneasiness clouding
his eyes. "Except once-" He broke off and shuffled away from her,
snatching up the branch of candles.

"We can't be talking here all night. My
guests will be arriving.

Come along, girl, and don't forget your
pearls."

Phaedra would as soon have left the pearls,
grieved as she was by the feeling that she accepted them under
false pretenses. She knew quite well she would never be the
Marchioness de Varnais. But at Weylin's insistence, she tucked the
box under her arm. At the foot of the stairs stretching above them,
her grandfather bid her a curt good night.

Too hard to feel sympathy for others, Weylin
might have been astonished to realize how much pity Phaedra felt
for him, as he watched her retreat up the steps. Despite his
satin-clad bulk, he appeared quite small, swallowed up in the
vastness of his great hall, a lonely old man clutching his silver
candlestick.

Phaedra returned to her chamber, where Lucy
helped her undress for bed. When the girl had gone, Phaedra
sprawled out on her mattress, leaving the silken bed-curtains flung
wide. For what seemed like hours, she tensed, listening for any
sound that Armande had returned to the room next to hers.

Exhausted by the events of the day, she felt
more tired than she would admit, her eyes stinging beneath her
stubborn determination to keep them open. The chamber felt overly
warm, despite the fact her windows were flung wide. She kicked away
the clingy satin sheet and tossed fretfully upon her pillow. In an
effort to stay awake, she tried staring out the window at the moon,
a golden disk set amidst a diamond scattering of stars. It was a
beautiful summer night.

"Far too beautiful to waste in such a foolish
misunderstanding, Armande,” she spoke aloud, wanting to be angry.
But her words, as they echoed in the empty bedchamber, sounded
unbearably sad. A melancholy thought washed over her; this was all
her relationship with Armande had ever been, one long, wretched
misunderstanding.

She drifted away, not into a peaceful
slumber, but a twilight land of tormenting dreams, haunting night
visions. She was skating, wearing a gown that shimmered about her
like spun silver, gliding upon endless reaches of a lake layered
with crystalline ice set beneath a steel-gray sky. She was soaring
in the arms of a stranger garbed for a masquerade.

Again and again, she tried to draw away from
him, the ice beneath her feet so thin. But she could not resist the
warm strength of the hand closing over hers. Then she heard a far
away voice calling her name,

"Phaedra."

She could see Gilly on the edge of the lake
shore, struggling to reach her. No! No, go back, she wanted to cry.
The ice would never bear his weight. But try as she would to shout,
when her lips parted, no sound would come. Gilly loomed closer and
closer to where she linked hands with the stranger. He swirled
between them, breaking their hands apart, trying to rip the
stranger's mask away.

The mask tore, coming away in his hands, and
she found she was gazing at Armande, his eyes clouded with despair,
his arms stretching out to her. She tried to run to him, but the
ice was breaking beneath her feet. As she plunged downward into the
dark, chilling waters, she saw shards of the ice driving into the
depths of Armande's eyes, leaving a crimson trickle of blood.

"No!" Phaedra whimpered, flailing her arms,
forcing herself awake. The dream clung to her while she stared into
the darkness of her bedchamber, still feeling herself lost beneath
the icy waters of the lake. She lay panting for a few moments, her
body covered with a fine sheen of cold sweat. With a low groan, she
sat up, rubbing her temples as though to chase away the last
fragments of the nightmare. The clock upon her mantel chimed twice.
Was it really two o'clock? She didn't think she could have slept
that long, had not wanted to. Feeling groggy, she staggered toward
the connecting door and placed her ear to the panel. All was silent
within Armande's room. She turned the handle and pushed, but the
door did not yield. She tried again, but she realized Armande had
bolted it from his side.

Had he returned? She raised her fist to risk
a light knock when she was startled by the sound of a high-pitched
laugh that raised the hairs along the back of her neck. Her heart
racing, she glanced fearfully over her shoulder, half-dreading to
find some mocking specter risen up behind her.

That laugh, though, had been far too real,
far too like one she had heard before, Hester Searle's
laughter.

Phaedra froze, waiting for the sound to be
repeated, but she heard nothing but the distant hum of voices
drifting through her bedchamber window. She stole over to the open
casement, keeping well back into the shelter of the sheer white
curtains.

Peering toward the ground below, she saw no
one in the moonlit stretch of lawn or the graveled walk that led to
the rose gardens behind the kitchen. The gardens themselves were a
shadowy outline of rustling shrubs, but above the whispers of the
leaves, Hester's voice cut through the night again.

Her words carried up to Phaedra in
indistinguishable snippets. “Handsomely, sir ... wouldn't want to
... "

Someone answered her, the second voice, a
man’s, low and deep. Abandoning caution, Phaedra leaned out the
window, straining to hear, but she could not decipher a word being
said.

Hester spoke again. "Won’t wait longer.
Tomorrow, ye hear me?"

Her companion rumbled a reply, but was cut
off by Hester's shriek. "Tomorrow!"

Phaedra heard the crunch of a boot, then the
rustling of the garden hedges. She craned her neck, but minutes
ticked by and no one emerged from the opening between the shrubs.
The night resumed its silence, and Phaedra could only assume that
Hester and her companion had gone out by the other side.

Frustrated, she drew back from the window.
What mischief was that woman up to now, conversing so late with a
man in the gardens? Phaedra stifled a yawn, turning what few words
she had caught over in her mind, but could make little sense of
them. She could not even be sure from the tone of Hester's
voice-never genteel-whether the woman had been threatening someone
or simply passing along information. Only one word had stood out
with undisputed clarity-tomorrow.

Phaedra dragged herself to her bed. Her mind
was far too unfocused for her to sort the matter out tonight. As
she stretched out upon the sheets, her gaze traveled wistfully
toward the connecting door.

It was obvious she would have to wait until
the morning's light before she found the solution to the worries
besetting her. Tomorrow, she would take care of everything,
Armande, Gilly, Hester ... tomorrow.

Phaedra closed her eyes, but as she drifted
off to sleep, the thought kept nagging at her.

Tomorrow might be too late.

“Voices in the garden last night?” Hester’s
mouth set in a prim line, but the morning light streaming through
the kitchen window betrayed the furtive look in her eyes. "Why, I'm
sure I don't know what yer ladyship would be meaning."

"And I am perfectly sure that you do."

Phaedra whisked past the spit boy turning a
haunch of beef over the kitchen's massive hearth. She followed
Hester round the broad oak table heaped with biscuits, cakes, and
enough hunks of gingerbread to feed an army of hungry boys. Hester
reached for a straw basket, affecting to count the currant
cakes.

"I heard you talking to someone. A man,"
Phaedra persisted, her temper fraying. She'd had too little sleep,
and was oppressed by the heat rolling from the cook's fires. "It
must have been past two o'clock in the morning."

"I am not the sort of woman to be found
entertaining gentlemen in the gardens after midnight." Hester
sniffed. "It must’ve been one of the parlor maids.”

"I know your voice quite well," Phaedra said.
"It was you, although I could not tell who the man was."

"Couldn't you?" Hester's smile was smug. She
shrugged. "Yer ladyship must have been dreaming, 'tis all that I
can say."

"I was not dreaming!" Phaedra slammed the
palm of her hand upon the table with a force that nearly toppled a
stack of cakes. Hester bustled past, issuing commands to the
kitchen girls to look sharp and see that all the pastries were
packed into the baskets.

"I've got to make sure the master gets his
breakfast afore all those young devils of his descend upon us."
Reaching for the silver coffee tray, Hester shot a sly glance at
Phaedra as she addressed one of the footmen. "John, there'll be no
need fer ye to set a place for his lordship the marquess. I'll
doubt he'll be bearing much appetite for his breakfast. Proper done
in, he looked when he returned."

Phaedra,feeling on the verge of seizing
Hester and shaking the truth from her, paused, thrown off-balance
by the reference to Armande.

"You saw his lordship return?" she asked.

"Late last night. If ye had truly been awake,
as yer ladyship claims, I don't doubt but what ye would have heard
him, yer rooms being so close and all." Balancing the coffee tray,
Hester disappeared through the kitchen door, a smirk upon her
face.

Phaedra let her go. Hester's moonlit tryst in
the garden dwindled to insignificance when set beside the news of
Armande's return. She had tried his door first thing this morning,
even risking a light knock. But the room had responded with the
same grim silence as it had known in the days after Ewan’s death.
Phaedra had despaired, fearing that Armande would never return.
Perhaps he thought she and Gilly had been about to expose him.

She was therefore filled with great relief at
Hester's seemingly casual information. But she was not about to
humble herself to Hester by asking after Armande's whereabouts.
Leaving the kitchen, she obtained the information she wanted from
Peter.

Aye, the footman informed her, his lordship
was indeed up and about. In the music gallery, so Peter believed.
Phaedra ran toward the back of the house and quietly opened the
door to the salon. The gallery was as still and empty as the nave
of some great church on a working day. The discordant notes being
sounded upon the spinet were all the more jarring, almost a mockery
of the chamber's solemn aura of stateliness.

Half-turned away from her, Armande stood over
the instrument, his features beclouded despite the sunshine pouring
in through the tall French windows, his fingers plucking listlessly
at the keys. One look at him was enough to send Phaedra's heart
sinking to her toes. He was garbed in a blue embroidered frock coat
and cream-colored breeches, all traces of his dark hair hidden by
his powdered wig. Gone was the bronzed sun god whose loving had
warmed her yesterday in the meadow's sweet grass. Resurrected in
his place was the lord of winter, come to chill her heart.

Phaedra sighed, pulling the door shut behind
her. Armande's head snapped up at the sound. She braced herself for
his most frozen stare, but the expression on his face was one she'd
never seen there before. His eyes were frighteningly empty.

"I have been looking everywhere for you," she
said. "I knew you were fond of music, but I didn't know you
played."

"I don't," he said, moving away from the
instrument. He swept her a mechanical bow. Her ears, fine-tuned to
every nuance of his voice, caught the edge of sarcasm as he said.
"
Bonjour
, madame. I trust you-"

"Don't!" she said sharply. She had to
suppress a strong urge to fly to him, wrench the wig from his head
and, kiss away the jaded weariness that marred his features. "You
know I hate that pretense."

"I thought it was only in bed that the
performance didn't amuse you." He tried to hold her at a distance,
but Phaedra refused to let him. She flung her arms about him,
pressing her face against his waistcoat. The satin felt too cool,
too slick beneath her cheek, his chest as unyielding as iron. He
made no move to thrust her away, but his arms did not close about
her, either.

"Please, Armande. I know you are feeling
hurt, betrayed. But you will not give me a chance to explain. You
were gone nearly all night. I feared that you were never coming
back."

"I almost didn't. Then I remembered why I had
come to London. I've taken too many risks to be undone by you now.
I simply never realized how much his granddaughter you are."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

He didn't answer her, waiting with studied
patience for her to release him. But she clung to him more tightly,
fearing that if she let him go now, it might be the last time she
ever touched him.