Elisabeth Fairchild (25 page)

“Yes,” he said. “There is that small matter to get out of the way. I need to talk to you about that when you’ve a moment. May I crave the honor of another dance before the evening is out? Perhaps then we will have a moment to discuss the business.”

She agreed as he bowed over her hand. Walsh claimed her then, and she was gone.

Miles wondered if she might be slipping away from him forever.

Grace had watched his exchanges with Aurora with signs of confusion. “I am puzzled, Miles.” Her voice was low when she linked arms with him. “How can you go on pushing Miss Aurora Ramsay into Lord Walsh’s way when you are in love with her? Is it for Walsh’s sake you taught her to dance? Is it all for Walsh and this stupid promise to Uncle Lester? How can you fall out of love as nimbly as you fall in?”

Miles stood quiet a moment watching the young woman he wished to marry step confidently onto the dance floor, moving gracefully through the dance in the beautiful gown he had picked out for her, on the arm of a gentleman whose face he would like to pound. “I have not fallen out of love, Grace.”

Grace had drawn breath to begin on him again, but this quiet remark stopped her, mouth open. “You love her then? But, Miles, I do not understand. You continue to help her to throw herself in the arms of another man. It makes no sense.”

He sighed. “I do so in the hopes that she will sooner come to the realization they do not suit.”

She blinked in disbelief. “I have never heard more foolish nonsense. Why not press your own suit if you really care for her?”

Was he foolish? Miles wondered.

“I have never been more seriously in earnest in all of my life, Grace. I will win her in my own way. You must not interfere. She has set her mind on Walsh. I would not be the one to convince her he is not the man for her.”

“No? And who better?”

“She must convince herself,” he said firmly.

“My dear brother,” Gracie said, shaking her head. “You are a fool not to use your considerable talents of seduction if she is indeed the one you would have. Do you comprehend the noteworthy power of your smile? Of this dimple?” She pinched his cheek. “You have only to crook your finger at the girl and she is yours. You have only to promise her the land her brother so foolishly gambled away.”

He smiled a careful smile as he watched Aurora skim around the room on the arm of the man she had told him plainly she meant to marry. “I am determined, Gracie, that she should not be looking always over her shoulder, wondering if she would not have been happier as Lady Walsh. I am determined, too, that I shall not win her with nothing more than a handful of dirt.”

Gracie sighed. “Your intentions are honorable. I sincerely hope you do not lose the love of your life to them. I would certainly not let opportunity slip so easily through my fingertips.” Her eyes lit up with a fire Miles was unused to seeing. “When love claims me, I will run away with it,” she said.

Aurora
had got what she wanted. She was dancing with Lord Walsh, with grace and confidence. There was no chance of landing on the floor this time.

“You look marvelous,” he said. “You have done something different with your hair.”

Aurora almost laughed, so greatly did his remark understate the matter. She was transformed, top to bottom. Time and effort had gone into her every word, move, every stitch of clothing on her person. All was exactly as she had hoped, dreamed and planned. Even Lord Walsh was exactly as she had imagined: proud and handsome and well-versed in all the matters that had once seemed so very important to her happiness.

They conversed with complete compatibility, discussing the value of root crops and the latest improvements in plows and cultivators. Walsh held forth on the value of walled gardens, greenhouses and the hemming of open fields with shrubbery. As he spoke his eyes warmed. Aurora could not recall inspiring such a glow in their morning gallops.

“You really do look lovely this evening, Miss Ramsay,” he said.

How ironic that she should be regarded with admiration by Walsh when she could not remember a time when she felt less deserving. Her contrived beauty this evening became a tortuous sort of misery.
Why was this man not drawn to me without my turning myself inside out?
she wondered and as she wondered her gaze cast about the gallery looking for Miles Fletcher. The happiest moments of the evening seemed past--flown in Miles’s company so quickly that she had been unaware of their value until it was spent.

From the periphery of her vision she was struck by an awareness that Miles Fletcher stood across the room from her, his attention fixed on the face of a gold pocket watch he had just flicked open with his thumb. Aurora turned to look at him. In the instant that she did so, his gaze rose from the face of the watch to hers, as though he too had consciousness of her presence despite the distance that separated them. In the moment that their gazes met time seemed to freeze. Watch in hand, he stared at her, a trace of longing in his gaze, a hint of sadness in the set of his mouth. She felt as if he must be able to hear the quickening of her pulse from across the room so loudly did it pound in her ears.

The moment slid by with an exquisite languor.

Aurora’s lips lifted in the beginning of a smile, but before it could dimple her cheek, Miles Fletcher closed the gold watch and looked away. Time thawed in a rush. He tucked the watch into its pocket.

Aurora reminded herself oll the reasons why it had been so important to win Walsh’s attention. She thought of his land, of her land, of any land. She reminded herself of her brother’s expenses, of the stock she must sell because of them. Was any of this as important as she had imagined? Did the weight of any of it compare to that of a pair of gill flower eyes meeting hers across a crowded room?

Perhaps it was the dance made her peevish. She and Walsh did well enough, but there was not the special, gliding rhythm that she felt in her dances with Miles Fletcher. There was not the humming vibrancy between their hands, nor the strange connection of thought that had them moving as one. She looked for such a connection in Lord Walsh. She had expected that much and more. She wanted it to be there--but the feeling was undeniably absent. She felt awkward in the arms of the gentleman she meant to marry.

“You have been practicing, Miss Fletcher,” her partner observed with a look of approval. “I am most impressed.”

Aurora admitted she had indeed been practicing. She should have been pleased Walsh noticed the changes in her, but with every indication of his increasing favor, she felt as though a great weight crushed inexorably down on her. With each passing minute, she felt stretched and flattened, a victim at the rack of her own misjudgment.

The music stopped. Walsh offered to fetch refreshments.

Aurora thanked him, her gaze drawn to one after another of the fine marbles that lined the walls of the gallery. These exquisite nudes, gods and goddesses in polished marble, reminded her of Fletcher. They reminded her too, of the paintings in the attic. Fletcher’s words echoed in her mind. “Such passion should not be shut away in the attic-ignored.”

Aurora focused on the letter she had received from Jack.

“Are you in the market for some sheep, my lord?” she asked Walsh when he returned to her side, glasses of sherbet in hand.

“Not at the moment,” he said without hesitation.

“Cattle then?” she sipped at her drink and tried not to rush the matter. “This would seem the be a superb setting in which to locate excellent stock. Do you not agree?”

“Oh, indeed. It has been. I have filled all of my requirements quite nicely. Are you in the market for stock? I can recommend several excellent fellows to you who still have prime animals available.”

Aurora’s heart sank. The sherbet seemed suddenly wincingly sweet. “I do appreciate your kind offer, but I am interested in locating buyers rather than sellers. I have some excellent creatures for sale.”

“Ah! That is another matter entirely. Have you asked Fletcher if he will not take them off your hands? It would seem the most logical solution.”

Miles Fletcher was the last man on earth Aurora wanted to ask favors of. She thanked Walsh for his suggestion and made a promise to herself that she would ask every other man in the room before she asked Fletcher to buy her stock.

She kept that promise. Her dance partners, and there were many, were each of them asked the same question. “Are you in the market for some fine livestock?”

Berney Brampstone, youngest son of the earl of Brampstone, complimented her on her grace in dancing, but claimed he had no use for her animals and suggested, “James Gant was looking for cattle and Miles Fletcher would seem the man to ask about your sheep.”

The baronet, Gant, was interested both in buying bulls and in examining intently the low cut of Aurora’s neckline. His eyes rarely lifted to the level of her face as he spoke. He had no interest in her sheep whsoever. “Not a sheep man, my dear. You must chase after Lester Fletcher’s nevie for that. He’s just come into Lester’s properties you know.” Having said as much, he froze a moment, open-mouthed, before with an explosive laugh he said, “But of course, you of all people would know that better than anyone.”

Aurora blushed. Had she been so indiscreet in her interaction with Miles Fletcher that everyone guessed her true feelings of affection for him? Did this man think her so deep in Fletcher’s pocket that she was informed of his financial circumstances? Fletcher had said no more to her than that he was due to come into a patch of land. Who was this Lester Fletcher on everyone’s tongue? Had he died to leave Miles an inheritance? Could this be the bad news Miles had received from London this morning--the news that had brought such sadness to his deep blue eyes?

“Shame about Lester popping off suddenly the way he did,” Tom Coke said when she tried to find out more. “I suppose his funeral will send Miles and Grace scurrying back to London.”

Aurora made sympathetic noises, reminded of how little she really knew about Miles Fletcher. She had had no idea Fletcher stood to inherit riches and land.

“Quite an upset to his elder brother,” Lord Montgomerie informed her. “But no surprise to those who knew the old gent. Miles indulged his every whim. I am told he outfitted Loughdon Hall with several exceptional friezes from Greece.”

“I believe his uncle collected Flemish tapestries,” someone else confided. “I have heard that the dining hall at Loughdon is lined with them.”

Yet another informed her, “The gardens at Loughdon, though small, are said to be quite magnificent due to the addition of a number of exotics Miles imported from overseas.”

Everyone seemed prepared to extoll the virtues of Miles Fletcher and his inheritance of Loughdon Hall. Few were interested in making purchases of her livestock, but as the evening dragged on and her throat went dry praising the value and quality of her bulls and rams, Aurora managed to wring commitments from first one and then another for of all her cattle, two flocks of geese and any number of pigs. The sheep however, none would have, at any price, and it was in her flocks that Aurora saw the greatest potential for profit.

Still she hesitated to ask Miles Fletcher if he cared to have them though his name had been recommended to her a dozen times and more. He had already done so much for her, too much perhaps. It was awkward too, that he had asked for her hand and she had refused him. Surely she need not rely on him for anything more.

Lord Walsh hung at her elbow when she was not trotting around the dance floor. She fluttered her fan and batted her eyelashes, valiantly trying to stir some spark between them. Their conversations became an ordeal, something vital missing in their exchanges. She could not immediately put her finger on what it was but in the end she decided their discussions lacked passion. There was no conflict to fire them, no impassioned exchange of heartfelt beliefs. They agreed too completely. Her very head grew weary of nodding. Such agreement, unlike the interesting opposition to be expected in her every encounter with Mr. Fletcher, tested no boundaries, challenged no ingrained belief system, it began instead to stagnate her thoughts. In short, the two of them together were unutterably boring.

The essence of what was missing between them was suddenly crystal clear to her. There was no spark, no sense of surprise or adventure to this evening -- a sense she had grown to anticipate in her exchanges with Miles Fletcher. In Walsh she found a mirror image of herself. There was little new and vital and different to discover between thetwo of them. They were too much alike! Their very souls seemed cut from the same cloth, and there was no real potential for growth in such a relationship. No hope of happiness. She could not imagine sharing kisses with this man in the inflammatory manner in which she and Miles Fletcher kissed.

Aurora had vowed to herself that she must forget Miles Fletcher, that she must concentrate on Walsh, and yet the more she ignored him, the more aware she became of his every movement. That she had to ask him if he was interested in her flocks became more and more apparent. Her pride would have to suffer.