When the Splendor Falls (24 page)

“I’d better meet them,” Althea said, pleased with Leigh’s appearance as she started to turn away, then glanced back, for her sister was standing in her stockinged feet. “Your shoes, dear, don’t forget them,” she reminded her as she left the room, intent now upon her hostessing duties.

“Hurry up, Leigh,” Blythe called again from the doorway where she was impatiently waiting while Leigh struggled to put on a pair of fine kid slippers.

“Wait! Blythe! I’m coming!” Leigh cried out, lifting her skirts high as she raced after Blythe’s long-legged figure disappearing down the hall.

Blythe stopped abruptly at the head of the stairs, and Leigh, hardly a step or two behind her, bumped her slightly, nearly sending her tumbling down the flight of steps.

“Leigh!” Blythe whispered, glancing around warningly. But Leigh needed no cautionary hush, and remained carefully hidden behind Blythe, risking only a quick glance over her shoulder as she sought the stranger’s figure below.

He seemed taller than ever in their foyer, his muscular figure dwarfing Althea’s as he nodded politely to her, her slender hand engulfed by his as he was introduced to her by a widely grinning Adam Braedon. Leigh frowned as she heard Althea’s tinkling laugh, then a low-voiced reply from the stranger, which must have been very complimentary, because her sister inclined her blond head as if graciously accepting a compliment from an admirer.

“Come on,” Blythe urged, grabbing hold of Leigh’s hand and refusing to let go when Leigh tried to tug her hand loose, suddenly feeling an attack of shyness, or perhaps cowardliness, now that she must come face-to-face with the stranger again.

Taking a deep breath, Leigh began to follow Blythe down the stairs, her eyes downcast as she watched her step, determined not to miss her footing and land in an undignified heap of muslin and petticoat at the stranger’s feet. After all, she was Leigh Alexandra Travers of Travers Hill, and she would now show the stranger how mistaken he had been.

She and Blythe had gotten halfway down the stairs when their entrance was ruined by a shrill screaming coming from a small figure running into the house from just behind Adam Braedon and the stranger.

“Mama! Mama!” a tearful Noelle Braedon cried, flinging herself against Althea’s figure. “She pinched me and pulled my hair!” Noelle told her mother between watery gulps.

“Well, look what she did to me!” Julia cried indignantly, pushing her way past the two startled men, and holding out a limp hand for all to see, although the drop of blood was hardly more than a pinprick. “She stuck me with her needle! She said she’d sew my fingers together.”

“That was only after you pinched me!” Noelle charged, moving quickly behind her mother’s comforting figure, which was safely between her and her wicked aunt.

“And that was because you stole my favorite length of pink thread. It is all I have left from Charleston!”

“If you would sew your stitches more neatly, and much closer together, then you would not have so little thread left. You waste half of it, and ‘waste not, want not,’ I always say,” Noelle returned, her comically adult logic causing Adam to raise an impressed eyebrow.

“Pity she’s a girl, or we’d have another lawyer in the family. Certainly takes after Nathan,” he said, shaking his head in mock despair.

Althea looked properly put out, for Julia was short-tempered and easily provoked, and responded with childish revenge. Both Leigh and Blythe had suffered their share of bruised flesh over the years from her punishing pinches and bites.

“Welcome to Travers Hill,” Adam said, laughing as he grabbed hold of his sister as she would have lunged behind Althea and grabbed another handful of her niece’s hair when she saw Noelle sticking her tongue out at her.

“Adam, let loose!”

“You should have been here earlier,” Althea said. “This is calm indeed.”

“Ouch!” Adam said, jerking loose his hand. “You bit me!”

“Not as hard as I could have,” Julia said, smiling sweetly at him, then she blushed as she met the cold, pale-eyed stare of the tall stranger standing next to her brother. He was quite handsome, she thought, wondering who he was as she eyed him from her slightly lowered lashes and practiced her best coquetry on him.

“She should have been turned over to you years ago and taught proper manners,” Adam said, rubbing the reddened spot on his hand that showed the perfect imprint of where her teeth had clamped down on him.

“Having the raw flesh scraped from that pretty blond hair before it was hung on a scalp pole might be lesson enough,” the stranger murmured thoughtfully.

Julia paled. Never had she been spoken to in so rude a manner, but even more disturbing, the man hadn’t seemed in the least enamored of her beauty. “Well, really, how dare you speak to me, sir,” she said, raising a haughty shoulder as she turned up her nose at him and took a delicate step away from his offensive proximity.

“We have not been properly introduced, nor do I intend to be,” she added witheringly.

Althea couldn’t control her smile, thinking it was a pity that Neil Braedon hadn’t had a hand in raising his spoiled cousin. Noelle, peering from behind her mother, stared up at the stranger in fascination, wondering who he was. He seemed a god in her impressionable eyes, for no one had ever treated her aunt so cavalierly before. Her brown eyes met his, and opened even wider when he smiled down at her. Young as she was, her heart was captured by its masculine charm.

Althea pulled her around in front of her and gently pushed her forward. “This is Nathan’s and my daughter, Noelle.”

Neil’s smile widened with genuine pleasure. “Hello, little one,” he greeted her, bending down from his great height to take her tiny hand, which she held out unhesitatingly to him.

“Hello. Who are you?”

“I’m—” he began, then glanced up as he caught a slight movement on the stairs, his gaze pinning the two figures and halting their descent as they became aware of his perusal.

“Please! Allow
me
to make the introductions now that we are all here,” Adam said as he caught sight of the two Travers sisters standing in the middle of the stairway, staring down at them.

“First, we have my dear little sister, Julia, but then you have already had the pleasure of her acquaintance,” Adam began, laughing softly as she glared at the stranger, her expression very odious indeed. But her pride was somewhat soothed by the fact that the stranger seemed quite dismayed to discover her identity.

“And this,” Adam said, walking over to take Blythe’s hand as she reached the bottom step, “is Blythe Travers, and the youngest of the family,” he added unnecessarily as she hopped down the last step, her expression looking as if she were holding her breath in anticipation of some surprise that was to follow. “And, last, but hardly least,” Adam said, managing to capture Leigh’s hand as she glided gracefully down the last few steps, “is one of the fairest
roses
of Travers Hill, dearest little Leigh, the spoiled owner of the colt you found wandering along the lane.”

Leigh met the stranger’s start of surprise with a satisfied smile lurking at the corners of her lips, turning them up slightly as Adam brought her close to him. Her smile faded, however, when he held out her hand for the stranger to take as he concluded his introductions with a dramatic intoning of his voice.

“Leigh Alexandra Travers, meet Neil Darcy Braedon. My onetime, long-lost cousin from the territories, who is also known to a select few as Sun Dagger, once a feared Comanche brave.”

Nine

That most knowing of persons—gossip.

Seneca

Royal Bay, birthplace of his father, and his father before him. Neil glanced around the elegant library with its fine eighteenth-century furnishings that had been brought upriver by ship, the precious cargos unloaded at Royal Bay’s Landing. There, wharves and warehouses had been built by Royal Bay’s first master a century earlier to handle the docking of ships arriving from as far away as Europe and the West Indies with the luxuries only the Old Country and exotic lands could provide in the colonial wilderness. The mahogany of the silk-upholstered settees and chairs, rubbed to a rich patina over the years by constant use and care, glowed warmly beneath a sixteen-light crystal chandelier that had been imported from England by his grandmother. One of a matched set, the other chandelier graced the dining room and hung from a plaster rosette above the great banqueting table, which on special occasions was still set with his grandmother’s finest English porcelain dinner service. A pair of globes, one terrestrial, the other celestial, sat at either end of the wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The Aubusson carpet showed remarkably little wear, and the ornate plasterwork ceiling rising high above his head was as startling white as the first time he’d seen it years earlier. Gilded girandoles, each surmounted by rising phoenix birds, reflected the wealth and old world charm of Royal Bay in the jewel-toned hues of a Chinese export hunt bowl, the glint of sterling silver in a teapot and a candelabra, the warmth of gold-leaf framed family portraits, and the carved ivory of chessmen positioned on a board near the fireplace, where the blue and white of delftware filled the mantelpiece.

Euphemia Braedon was sitting on the settee, engaged in conversation with Althea, while Noelle occupied the place of honor between mother and grandmother. Euphemia’s hair, more gray than brown now, was confined and neatly netted at the nape of her neck. A gold locket, suspended from a gold chain, was the only jewelry adorning her plain day dress of sprig muslin. She had never been an acclaimed beauty, but as an heiress in her own right, with the house and lands inherited from her father, she had come to Royal Bay a strong-willed, independent woman who spoke her mind. Some less kind than others had said Effie Merton had been lucky not to have been left on the shelf, being over twenty years of age, sharp-tongued, and homely, and the only reason the handsome and eligible Noble Braedon had taken her hand in marriage had been because of the Merton lands she would bring with her as part of her dowry. Paralleling Royal Bay on the far side of the river, River Oaks Farm, now a part of Royal Bay, had made the Braedons the most influential family in the county.

In an upholstered wingback chair near one of the opened French windows, Noble Braedon sat, the faded gold of his hair liberally streaked with silver. Every so often, his proud head fell slightly forward as he nodded off, oblivious to the conversation around him as the warm afternoon air wafted in from the terraced gardens and lulled him into drowsiness.

“Oh, Grandmama, I want to pour the tea today! Let me do it! I can! Truly I can!” Noelle cried out, sliding off the settee and, in her haste, bumping the tea table set up in front of her grandmother. The sound of china clattering noisily together startled her grandfather from his peaceful doze, his head jerking up as he awakened. He choked slightly as he cleared his throat, the cigar he’d been chewing rather than smoking, out of deference to the ladies present, dropping from his fingers as he tried to catch his breath.

Adam, who had been pouring brandy from a crystal decanter on the sideboard, moved quickly to his father’s side, slapping him gently yet firmly between his shoulder blades, his other hand patting the old gentleman’s shoulder comfortingly.

“There you are, sir,” Adam said softly, showing a gentleness that few people knew he possessed beneath the careless facade of the devil-may-care gentleman he enjoyed playing with such finesse.

“Swallowed a piece of cigar! Don’t make these cigars like they used to. Not like ol’ James Palmer, now he knew how to grow tobacco, yes sir,” Noble said gruffly, glaring over at Althea as if she were somehow at fault. “Your great-grandpappy knew how to grow tobacco, yes, sirree, not like these young upstarts just out of short pants. Hope Stuart James has at least a drop or two of good planter’s blood in his veins, or he’ll be losing Willow Creek Landing before harvestin’ enough leaf for even one cigar. His great-grandpappy, God rest him, would turn over in his grave knowing strangers were planting on Palmer land if that brother of yours ain’ sharper than the auctioneer come sale time.”

“Well, I think it was a fine thing indeed, Althea Louise, your grandmother leaving Willow Creek to Stuart James. He and that wife of his need a place of their own. I declare, but I’ve never heard such arguing when your papa and Stuart James get together. Both so hardheaded, I’m afraid they’ll come to blows one of these days. Can’t tell them anything. And Stuart James’s wife doesn’t help matters any with her brusque Northern ways, well, I just never have taken a liking to her. I am sorry, and I know it’s not Christian of me, but I can’t change the way I feel, Althea,” Euphemia told her. “Always feel she’s looking down her nose at me. And you know your own mama feels much the same way, and Beatrice Amelia is quite citified coming from Charleston. There has to be something wrong with someone who doesn’t like grits, I declare, child, I’ve never seen such a pained look on a body’s face when that Thisbe Anne was served boiled hominy grits the first time she came visiting at Travers Hill. You’d have thought from the way she was carrying on that your poor mama was serving up something rotting out of the cornfields to her. Not that I don’t still believe your mama uses far too much cayenne pepper in her cooking,” Euphemia added. “I’ll give her my new recipe for ham when I go visitin’ midweek. You make several deep cuts in the ham and stuff them with sweet pickles, corn bread, and brown sugar. Maribel Lu should be at Travers Hill by now, and you know how we do like to sit a spell together and catch up on all the goings-on. I told your mama I wanted them all here for supper tomorrow evening, especially if young Palmer William has arrived home. We’re expecting Justin tomorrow too. She’s got enough to do preparing for Lucy’s birthday celebration and the weekend festivities. Now, I am not being unkind, Althea, but I declare, she did look haggard the last time I saw her. You talk sense to your mama, and get them to sup with us tomorrow. You’ll be riding over with me, won’t you, dear?”

Althea smiled and nodded, but inwardly she sighed, knowing it would be far more tiring and vexing for her mother trying to gather together the whole family, and the newly arrived guests, for a carriage ride to Royal Bay.