Elisabeth Fairchild (7 page)

Chapter Seven

Patience braced her heart for a mortal blow.

Pip laughed, a deep-throated, explosive laughter that turned heads and stirred answering smiles on the faces of those who heard it. Pip’s laughter had always had that effect on people. She must smile as well, though she was unsure just what it was she had said to stir such a boisterous reaction.

“You assume I marry for love, my dear Patience,” he teased, his voice low, his brows waggling.

But of course she had. A most provocative remark. What did he mean by it?

“Mistakenly so?” she asked with a deep thrill of curiosity, wings of hope lifting her heart.

In a flash of colored satin the lad, Mr. Trumps, dragged Richard into the light of one of the lamps. “Here they are!” he cried.

Their intimate conversation came to an end.

“What did you think of Madame Saqui?” Richard asked.

Before Pip could reply, trumpet fanfare and the patter of gloved applause marked the end of the tightrope walker’s performance.

“We paid her no mind,” Pip said, and, leaning closer to Patience, added with a conspiratorial smile, “Did we, my dear?”

Patience knew Pip meant to make Richard feel he had missed out on something. He had used the same ploy as a child. She had always considered it a cruelty in him.

“Pip was just about to tell me—”

“A lesson in love,” Pip said with a wink.

Richard hid all expression behind cover of his mask.

The cockatoo screeched in Pip’s ear again, as if in protest.

“I asked Pip to tell me what it is like to be in love,” Patience clarified.

“Did you indeed?” The dark, winged brows rose. “And how did Pip answer?”

“I didn’t,” Pip said. “You interrupted us.”

The bird squawked.

“Like this bird interrupts us,” Pip complained. “Tiresome thing.”

“Forgive me,” Richard said evenly. “Please proceed.”

“What? Looking for lessons in love, yourself, Dickey-boy?”

“No. Wondering if you have any real understanding of such a state.”

Pip laughed. “Far more than you, I should think. Certainly far more experience.”

Pippet threw out his chest, feathers fluffed, ruffling Pip’s hair in the process.

Pip handed the bird to the boy. “Here, take him away. He grows restive.”

Patience found herself staring at Richard rather than the transfer of the bird. “Have you fallen in love, too?” she could not resist asking. She could not imagine Richard in love. She could not imagine what he was thinking with his eyes overshadowed by his mask.

Richard stood motionless, a blackbird, wings folded. He took so long to respond that Pip gave him a shove on the arm and blurted, “Gammon. Not even a bout of puppy love?”

At exactly the same moment Richard croaked, “I am in love now.”

Patience gasped.

“With whom?” Pip demanded.

Richard turned his back on them, domino swaying, dark as a crow’s tail, as he set off, away from the lights and music.

“I would rather not say,” he called back over his shoulder.

Pip looked at Patience wide-eyed. “Who?” he mouthed.

Patience shrugged, as surprised as he.

“Oh, tell us,” she implored, following him, Pip at her heels. “If there is anyone you might tell, it must be us.”

Richard kept walking, gravel spurting from beneath his heels. The treed enclosures closed in on either side of them, gone gray now as dusk fell, and the lighting was not so good in this part of the gardens. Oak and ash swayed in the breeze, leaves whispering. She thought of legs beneath these trees, and tried to imagine Richard in such a position, not beneath trees, of course, but somewhere, anywhere, with the woman he loved. Shocking thought! A hoydenish thought if ever there was one.

“Does she not reciprocate your feelings?” Pip guessed.

Patience wondered if he might be right. She had seen a flicker of emotion in Richard’s eyes when he had blurted out his secret. Was it pain? Or embarrassment?

He stopped, allowing them to catch up to him, though he did not look at her as she fell into step beside him. The stars above drew his gaze. Starlight silvered the black satin of his mask.

“I have yet to reveal my feelings,” he said quietly, dark wings folded, hands clasped in the small of his back, as he had as a boy, the image of his father.

“Surely she has some sense of your affections?” Pip scoffed.

Richard shook his head. His voice came to them quiet but certain. “I do not think so. I have been careful.”

“Why?” Patience tried to imagine who among the women she had met at the half dozen or so balls and routs Richard had escorted her to might be the one he cared for.

Richard studied his shoes a moment before he looked into her eyes, starlight captured there. The silhouette his jaw cut against the stars seemed more rigid than usual. “I’ve little to offer a woman when it comes to marriage.”

Of course
, Patience thought, sorry she had asked.

“Nonsense,” Pip said.

Richard sighed and, bending, picked up a handful of gravel. As he spoke he tossed a pebble hard at the sky, as if he might in that fashion touch the stars. “You do not understand, Pip, what it is to be second-born.” A pebble arced ahead of them into the darkness, found earth again with a distant clatter. “No title.” Another pebble followed the first two. It made the stars wink. “No inheritance to speak of. Only one’s good name and connections to rely upon.”

And his name and connections were currently threatened by his brother’s wildness. The truth of it hung between them, unsaid.

Pip frowned, then shrugged. He had always taken for granted his station in life, the ease with which things came to him.

Richard turned his hand so that the remaining pebbles rained onto the path at his feet.

Patience raised her face to the night sky, unsettled by Richard’s defeated tone, by the idea that she, too, took her position, her family’s riches, for granted. She did not want to think of such things. It spoiled the evening.

“Is love wonderful?” She changed the subject abruptly, surprised at the wistfulness in her own voice.

Richard’s head jerked in her direction.

Pip laughed. “My dearest Patience!” His voice fell soft upon the darkness. “Have you never been in love?”

His dearest Patience!
She liked the sound of that. It fit the dream she had long carried of him in her heart.

And yet, he was promised to another. To Sophie Defoe.

“I do not think I have ever been in love,” she murmured. “Not really. Infatuated, yes.” She yearned to cry out to him how long that infatuation had lasted, and for whom. “But love? I do not think so.”

They stepped closer, these two, her dearest friends—the better to hear her—and she felt a moment’s embarrassment to ask them such a thing, but this place, the darkness, invited confidences.

“I know what it is like to long for a young man’s attention.” She stole a furtive glance at Pip. Shadows blurred his expression. Richard was staring at his shoes again. Both stood motionless, listening.

“I know what it is like to yearn for a gentleman’s good opinion, to feel a clumsy fool in his presence, all thumbs or left feet.” Her lips went dry, her mouth all cotton. She cleared her throat. In this small way, if in no other, she might reveal herself to Pip. “I know what it is like to think about a gentleman every day, wondering if he ever thinks of me. To imagine his smile, his kiss, sweet words.”

Richard moved, gravel shifting. She glanced in his direction.

“Is this love?”

Pip turned his face to the lights behind them. He was smiling. His eyes, his teeth, caught the light. “Sounds like love to me,” he said.

She smiled back at him, wondering if he had any notion she spoke of him.

Richard’s voice exploded from the darkness. “I disagree. You speak of desire. Not love.”

“Oh?” Pip’s response was caustic. “What then is love, Dickey-lad?”

Richard took his time in answering, but when he spoke, the words seemed to well up from the heart of him, moving in their intensity. “Love follows desire. If one is lucky.”

Patience looked away, shaken. Was that all she had ever felt? Desire? Without love? Richard sounded as if he understood deeply what she had yet to fathom.

“Are you sure you do not mean lust, Dickey-boy?” Pip was ever skeptical.

“No. You mistake love and passion. There is a difference.” Such certainty in Richard’s tone. His black-masked, black-cloaked figure had become one with the darkness, so that the words seemed to float, disembodied, in a void.

Pip bowed toward the speaking darkness, in the Turkish fashion, grinning now. She could hear it in his voice, saw the glint of his teeth. “Tell us, then, o wise one. What is this difference?”

“Passion is overwhelming,” the shadow within the shadows said.

Patience could not imagine Richard overwhelmed by anything, and yet the darkness had swallowed him whole.

“It crashes over one,” he said. “Blinds one. Consumes one. Instills jealousy, defensiveness, a clutching possessiveness. It can be blissful and destructive in the same moment.”

“And love?” Patience was most interested in his diatribe, even if Pip yawned with feigned indifference, and called to them, “Come on, you two. Enough of the maudlin. Time to eat.”

Darkness loosed its grip on Richard. Starlight found his nose, the flat of his forehead. It fingered his hair as he stepped forward. Stars were trapped in the eyes he fixed on her, a steady gleam behind the mask. He ignored Pip entirely.

“Love is patient, kind, respectful, even dispassionate,” he said with equal dispassion. “It is a warmth of feeling, not an onslaught. It creates, and heals, and binds without clinging.” So calmly he spoke, his voice low and even, and yet there was that unexpected glimmer in his eyes.

He reached for her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm, never pausing in his diatribe. “One is filled with a strong sense of knowing love is worth waiting for, fighting for, perhaps even dying for.”

Pip snorted his disdain.

Richard went on, unfazed by his friend’s contempt, starlight and lamplight reaching for him now with greedy hands, caressing him with their combined glow, a mingling of silver and gold. “One cannot imagine living a lifetime without true love, while passion, which burns so very brightly, may be snuffed as quickly as a candle in the wind.”

They met his outburst with a moment’s contemplative silence.

Then Pip blurted, his heels spurting gravel as he turned to walk away, “Goodness, Dickey-boy! Preach us a sermon.”

Patience ignored this ill-mannered outburst. She had never heard Richard address another topic with such intensity and conviction. It was as if the darkness had taken away the Richard she knew and given them back an intriguing stranger. The black sleeve beneath her gloved hand, the brush of his domino upon her own, seemed suddenly more interesting than usual.

Pip sighed and set off without them. “Come along,” he coaxed impatiently.

“Yes. Enough of love.” Richard straightened, his face returning to its customary calm, the mask hiding his emotions almost as much as the darkness had.

Patience fell into step without demur. And as they walked she stole furtive glances at her friend, observing as if for the first time the way the lamplight touched upon Richard’s chin and throat, gilding jawline and lips. He had a rather attractive mouth, Richard did, in any light. She could not help wondering what lucky female had captured those lips, to stir such passion.

Chapter Eight

Patience listened to the raspy voice of the gravel beneath their feet. She listened to her heartbeat. And she thought about what Richard had said about love.

Pip walked ahead of them, broad shoulders, bright coattails, and the shapely curve of his calves catching her eyes. His breeches stretched provocatively tight. Legs. She found herself completely distracted by the sight of, the memory of, legs. Pip’s legs. A stranger’s legs, buttocks pumping. She glanced down at Richard’s legs, then looked away. Was she no better than the hoyden beneath the trees, stockings rumpled, skirt shoved high?

She shook her head, shook away the thought.

They walked the length of the gardens along the crunching gravel pathways, through four evenly spaced stone arches. Angels and scrollwork hovered above their heads.

Heaven help her. She was looking at legs again! Richard’s thighs, and he would be mortified if he knew.

Dinner boxes. She would look at the dinner boxes. That was safe. They yawned linen-tongued emptiness at her, except for the mythical creatures, the gods and goddesses cavorting along their painted backs. More legs. Painted legs, scantily clad. Some of them naked. Was there no getting away from them?

The lead statue of Handel watched them pass, blank-eyed. Even his hefty sculpted legs fed her fascination.

She must forget legs, especially gentlemen’s legs, and focus on what Pip was saying, darling Pip, clever Pip, regaling them with tales of dignitaries and royalty, musicians and macaronis, prizefighters and pranksters, drunken ruffians and daring rogues. All had walked these paths—a long line of legs. She could not help but laugh at the idea.

Richard seemed entertained. He nodded and made just the right noises to encourage such storytelling. Dear Richard. Dependable Richard.

And yet there was more to him than that, more to both young men than she had ever imagined. As she watched one speak and the other listen, she realized she did not know either of them. Not really. Not as well as she had thought.

Pip was in his element. His tales were well voiced, articulately presented, and limited to only that which was sure to amaze or amuse. His enthusiasm for gentlemen long dead with nicknames like “Fighting” Fitzgerald, “Tinman” Hooper, and “Hell-gate” Barrymore fired her imagination.

Such history added luster to the evening—and to the storyteller—a fresh perspective. She had never realized Pip had such a ready tongue, such a knack for the well-turned phrase, the colorful image, and clever quips that had them all laughing until their sides ached. He won her heart all over again.

The cascade, for which practically everyone in the gardens gathered, so that the well-lit site buzzed with voices loud enough to drown out the splashing of the water, was a bit of a disappointment following hard on the heels of such stirring entertainment.

“What think you of our trifling waterfall full of goldfish?” Pip asked sarcastically.

Patience was still thinking about heroes and fighters and troublemakers, and in Pip she saw all three. She thought, too, of what Richard had said, his uncharacteristic show of emotion, the idea that he was in love. It startled her. She had expected Pip to be in love, and he was not, and she had never dreamed Richard’s heart might be taken, and it was.

Her world was upside down, as if she had stepped into the reflection in the waters of the cascade.

“The spot where we used to go angling at Hartington Hall is much prettier,” she said absently.

“Mmm.” Pip laughed. “Do you remember the day Richard thought he had hooked a really big one?”

“We all thought so,” Patience reminded Richard with an affectionate shove on the arm. “Before it was done we were all tugging on the line trying to reel the monster in. I remember being sandwiched between the two of you, the line all wet and slippery, stretched taut. We were sure you had a fat brown trout gone under a rock.”

“Gudgeoned. The lot of us.” Richard smiled.

Pip laughed again, leaning into it, slapping his thigh. “I shall never forget how your stinking fish came flying up out of the water.”

“Oh, the smell!” Patience remembered.

“Faugh!” Pip held his nose, which drew the attention of several masked and draped young women, who lifted powdered noses to the wind as if to smell the past.

Pip laughed and winked at them, which set them all to clapping hands to well-rouged cheeks and giggling, an act that proved most unfortunate to their looks, for two of them had missing teeth; the third had more than enough, and all of them crooked.

Patience shook her head.
Hoydens
, she thought.
Professional hoydens.
“Such a horrible reek.”

Pip’s dimples quivered. His eyes sparkled merrily. And Patience could not tell if it was the attention of three giggling females that brought such brightness to his face—or memory.

“Ah, Dickey-lad.” He sighed. “You wore the scent of it for several days, as I recall. I must say I cannot understand why, when you saw the dreadful thing coming straight for your face, you did not think to duck.”

Richard chuckled good-naturedly. Dear Richard.

Patience was pleased to see that he could look back on the moment and laugh. He had found no humor in it at all at the time. A great gob of mud and moss-caked leather had hit him smack in the face, and when he had flung it away from him, back into the stream, his line and pole had gone with it.

Scarlet with embarrassment, and then quite green with the smell, Richard had frantically scooped mud from his face with the side of his hand while Patience pinched her nose and told him he had caught a fish after all. A silvery dace wriggled about in his dripping mop of hair. She had squealed and batted it back into the water. Pip, no help at all, had whooped and snorted and fallen into the grass laughing so hard he lost his breath.

He laughed now, almost as hard. They all did.

“I did think to duck.” Richard’s protest drew a fresh snort from Pip.

“S-s-s-l-l-low thought?” He set them laughing again—the three masked hoydens as well, who seemed to be repeating among themselves every word overheard.

“Have pity on me now,” Richard objected, trying to look serious, trying to frown, failing miserably at both. “I had very good reason for what I did. If you will recall we were arranged thus.” As he spoke he turned Pip, nudging him into a spot in front of him, and stepped in front of Patience. “Do you remember exactly what we were doing? How we stood?”

“I had just run up with the net,” Pip said, and assumed a running stance, hand out, as if he were holding the net.

The hoydens clapped with glee at his odd pose, and proceeded to imitate him.

Patience watched, a bit perturbed by the attention Pip gave the women.

“I was on one knee, holding the rod like so.” Richard took the remembered posture, the weight of his body supported by the kneeling leg, his other bent to brace him away from the pull of the current. His thighs, indeed the entire length of his legs, looked much shapelier now than they had then, when he had seemed so very tall and gangly and a bit knobby-kneed.

Coltish
, her mother had called him, and like a colt he had outgrown all awkwardness.

The hoydens found nothing to object to in him, indeed they gave him as many come-hither looks as they bestowed upon Pip. Strange how she had never stopped to consider how other women might regard her friend. Pip had been such a pretty child. He had grown into an extraordinarily handsome young man, but in seeing them side by side, Richard did not suffer by the comparison as much as he once had.

“The line was stretched taut.” Richard prodded her arm with his elbow as he pulled back on the imaginary line.

The hoydens were giggling again, but she paid them no mind. She remembered now exactly what had happened, what she had done.

“It bent the pole,” Richard said.

She nodded. “It looked as if it might break. I stepped in behind you, like this, and reached around”—her voice dropped—“like this.” Well, it had not been exactly like this. He had been so much more the boy then. His neck had smelled of sun and sweat and the worms he had hooked, not of lime soap and cedar-scented cologne and the musky oil of hair pomade. She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek almost to his, and stood a moment swaying, trying to separate past and present. “I braced the upper part of the pole.”

He fell perfectly still as she leaned her chin over his shoulder, and stretched her arm beside his, the bulge of his muscle grazing the inner curve of her left arm, her right hand resting gently on his shoulder. Her chest met with the flat solidity of his shoulder blade, just as it had as a girl. Well, not quite the same. She had more bosom than she had then, and it reacted most strangely, as if he were north and she the trembling compass pin. The rise and fall of his back made her breath race like the throb of his pulse in the vein at the base of his neck, a throbbing echoed elsewhere, lower, in a manner she had never before experienced.

She did not remember feeling so very aware of how close they were, of every little move he made. She dared look over his shoulder at Pip, who had abandoned his awkward pose to look back at them.

She wondered for a moment how thrilling it might be to stand thus with Pip’s pulse beneath her hand. And in that moment her precious Pip looked her in the eyes and smiled the smile that always took her breath away, and a shudder coursed the length of her spine, lifting the hair at the base of her neck.

Richard’s hand rose, sweeping an arc between her and Pip, breaking the spell of that smile, the movement of his shoulder blade so provocative, she felt for a moment as if she engaged in an illicit activity. She shivered again when Richard spoke, his words rumbling from his chest to hers.

“I saw that slimy piece of rotted leather coming straight at my head, and considered for the briefest moment the idea of ducking, and realized I could not, in good conscience.”

He ducked and turned, his gloved hand continuing its arc, catching her lightly on the chin, kidskin glancing along her jaw. His fingertips grazed her throat. His hip rotated.

Such an odd sensation—pleasant and dreadful at the same time, as she realized the implication, as it hit her, as it were, full in the face.

Pip no longer netted imaginary fish. He bent over laughing until the air wheezed from his throat like an old set of bagpipes, everyone within hearing distance turning to see what caused such a commotion. “Oh, God!” Pip wheezed. “Patience might have had the face full of rotten leather instead. Oh, lord! That would have been a sight to see.”

Richard no longer laughed. His lips pinched down into a tight little smile as he tilted his head to watch from the corner of his eye her frozen reaction.

Her arms were still about him, clutching the imaginary line.

“Thought you might not forgive me,” he whispered.

She stepped back suddenly, the truth of his gallantry astounding her.

Pip was lost in the humor of the past, slapping his thigh and chortling. “You saved her such a humiliation, and as I recall she spent the rest of the day pinching her nose whenever you came near.”

Humiliating him!

“I remember.” The tight smile faded.

“Oh, Richard!” Patience cried, her hand flying out, as if of its own accord, to touch his shoulder. “I am sorry. That was not at all kind of me.”

He shrugged. “At the time I wished I might stand back from myself and pinch my nose. Do you know it took three baths to rid me of the smell?”

Patience nodded, while Pip broke into fresh gales of laughter.

“Three baths and rose-scented bath salts!” he shouted, turning heads again. “Which brought fresh humiliation down on your head.”

“Oh, dear!” Patience suffered fresh pangs of regret. “How cruel I was to tease you unmercifully for smelling like a garden.”

“Like a girl!” Pip crowed. “And so you did. You must admit it was true, Rosy Richard, Dandy Dickey.” He was dancing around them now, chanting, turning heads, always the center of attention.

Richard the lad would have flushed scarlet.

Richard, the gentleman grown, laughed. He did not color with embarrassment at all, just threw back his head and let the sound roll up out of his chest. A deep laugh. A contagious laugh. Women’s heads turned to see what caused such an openhearted expression of amusement.

Dear Richard was handsome when he laughed, Patience decided. Very handsome indeed.