Elisabeth Fairchild (16 page)

As she spoke she tried to still the rebellious state of a heart and mind that seemed bent on mourning, today, all that she had once taken for granted for her future. Caxton Castle stirred these feelings. In its wake she felt as inconsequential as painted pasteboard.

Felicity’s attention to the tale of Glendower reminded Elaine of her place, her strengths. Knowledge. Guidance. History. She had these to offer. The child drank it in even as she moved about, pretending to look for interesting leaves, and wildflowers, blossoms twirling in her hands, questions spilling from her lips like the petals that fell at her feet.

Lord Wharton roused from his reverie at precisely the moment Elaine began to think the child’s unending curiosity grew a trifle tiresome. He stilled her bright-eyed, overabundance of energy saying, “In silence you may find more answers than in questions, Felicity. Do not, I beg of you, become one of those tiresome women who enjoy above all else the sound of their own voices.”

Elaine thought at once of the sisters of Caxton castle. Their ceaseless prattle had certainly stirred a longing within her for silence. And yet it pained her to see the child wounded, afraid to speak.

Indeed, Lord Wharton seemed at once to regret his sudden outburst. “Come,” he said, to his crestfallen child, and held out his hand.

When she hesitated and looked uncertainly at Elaine she nodded reassuringly. “Go on, my dear.”

“I am sorry, papa,” she said, her voice gone high-pitched and nervous. “I did not mean to annoy. . .”

He took the child’s hand, and shushed her saying, “Now, close your eyes and listen.”

In closing her own eyes, Elaine found herself remembering the feelings generated the last time he had taken her hands in his. She found herself listening, she knew not what for.

“What do you hear?” he asked, voice gentle, a murmur on the wind.

My heart. I hear my heart. So loudly it beats. To his voice it quickens.

“The wind, the trees,” Felicity said, her voice a thin piping. “The river. A kestrel keening.”

“Good. What else?” he asked, encouraging, “Listen carefully.”

Again they fell still to listen.

“The horses champing. The rattle of their harness. Your breathing.”

“Something else?”

A long silence stretched while they all listened, and then in frustration the child said, “Nothing. What else?”

“Can you not hear your own heart?” he asked softly.

Elaine’s eyes flew open. Her thoughts! Did he hear her very thoughts?

His daughter nodded, curls bobbing.

“The rhythm of your own pulse as it rushes through your veins, like the wind through the trees, like the water on the rocks?” All of his focus was on his daughter.

Elaine, watched him with fresh eyes, fresh appreciation, as he bent to the child’s ear. “Listen!”

“I hear,” Felicity said.

“A good thing to stop and listen to the sound of one’s own living, now and again, in places of profound stillness, such as this. Yes?” He swept his arms wide to encompass the hills.

His words tugged at Elaine’s heart, touched her soul.

“Yes, papa,” Felicity agreed.

Elaine was very quiet for the remainder of their picnic.

“What a kindness, my dear,” she said as she and Felicity repacked the hamper. “That your father speaks to you so, that he would share with you the workings of his mind.”

“Your father did not speak to you of such things?” Felicity slipped her hand into Elaine’s.

Elaine shook her head. “I do not think my father understood the power and beauty of silence.” She turned to find Valentine Wharton listening, though he pretended not to.

“Feeling melancholy?” he asked later as she briskly shook crumbs from a tablecloth.

“Melancholy? Do I appear melancholy?” Snap went the tablecloth.

“Yes, in fact you do.” He caught hold of the flown end of the cloth, helping her to fold it neatly, taking it from her when their hands met for a single, scintillating moment.

She pulled back as if burned. He pretended not to notice, the cloth making a neat square in his hands. “Is it the mountains?”

“Why should mountains make me melancholy?” she asked sharply, immediately regretting her tone.

He stared out across the countryside, at earth that flowed away from them like a giant’s rumpled tablecloth. “I think it is the size,” he said. “It is the same in the Pyrenees. Somehow the unmoving immensity of mountains helped me to place myself in perspective to the battlefield, to the dragons of war.”

“Dragons?”

“Taking lives. Watching friends maimed or killed.”

She flinched, surprised that he admitted as much to her, a trifle shocked that the taking of lives might ever be placed in any perspective other than that of horror.

“It is that way as well, in Cumbria, where I hale from,” he said. “One finds oneself in such a scenery.” How faraway the look in his eyes. How sad. What part of himself had he so lost that it needed finding in mountains?

Elaine shivered as he stepped away from her, toward the hills.

Felicity interrupted her reverie, tugging at her arm, insisting, “Come. We must put more of the road behind us.”

“Why is that?” she asked as she followed the child back to the coach.

“The lake of beauty.”

Her father spoke. “We shall make it by nightfall, never fear.”

“It is a magic lake, isn’t it papa? Tell Miss Deering. Please, papa.”

“When we get to Bala,” he promised, handing her into the coach, hand out again for Elaine.

A magic lake? A palace? Another fairy tale, as make-believe as the effect his touch had on her hand as she stepped inside, as wonderfully touching as the moment in which he had bent to his daughter’s ear and bade her listen to her own heart. She did not want that tingling flash of feeling to end, the firm promise of his touch. And yet she must let go, must remind herself of mountains, of truth’s perspective--of dragons.

Life is not a fairy story. The maiden in distress does not always get her knight in shining armor. Magic lives in a child’s head, not in lakes, or a gentleman’s fleeting grasp.

V
al guided the horse onward, beside the frothing race of the Dee, taking the fork in the road that led south through Glanyrafon. As he rode, he thought of Penny--of the touch of a woman’s hand, of the silence of the fells in Cumbria--of the silence on the battlefields in Belgium in the moment before the guns roared.

Bala nestled at the north end of the lake, long and narrow, Llyn Tegid, the Beautiful Lake, a magical sight gleaming in the golden light of a setting sun. He found himself eager for the motion of the horse beneath him to cease, the chill of the air to be warmed by a blazing fire, a hot cup of tea, the soft promise of a well-aired bed, a woman’s touch.

He found himself thinking of Miss Deering’s hand:  fine boned, firm grasped, skin soft, nails trimmed. He thought of the look in her eyes as he clasped that hand. Such fine, bird-shaped brows flew in the catlike face. Such a depth of seriousness, of searching desire to understand the inner workings of his mind. So watchful she always seemed, wary. Quiet. Depths to her quietness. Like the mountains
,
unmoving and strong. Beautiful. Elemental.

He thought of the graceful turn of her wrist as she plucked magic from a harpsichord, played, straight-backed and sure, not a single note faltering for hours while other women danced, until she was faint with the playing, with hunger. He thought of the warm weight of her in his arms, arms clasping his neck, the soft yield of her breast against his chest. He had not failed to mark her hand’s trembling when he had lowered her into bed. He lingered on the idea of lowering her onto a bed again, of provoking a far more passionate trembling.

He pictured the modest fall of her lashes against alabaster cheek, the strawberry blushes whenever his gaze lingered. Has she alabaster breasts and strawberry nipples? Almond scented kisses? A beautiful lake in the milky valley of her thighs?

He stifled his rising desire, reminding himself that he had vowed not to make a mess of life again. Not like he had with Penny. No. He must remember that dearest Miss Deering created a bridge of words between he and his daughter. She found goodness in him, and kindness. She would find neither in him, if he, a man of worldly cravings, proved successful in tempting desires Palmer had failed to reach.

The sky, the still, mirrored surface of the lake, the mountain doubled, turned on its head in rippled silken reflection, was awash with color as he handed a road-rumpled Mrs. Olive out of the carriage, then lifted his dozing daughter from arms in which he perversely imagined his own head pillowed rather than the child’s.

Miss Deering, dear Miss Deering, had no idea as to his thoughts. Her sun-touched face glowed with a naive and childlike wonder as she took in the view. “Beautiful!” she whispered.

Oh God!
She is beautiful in this light.

He faced the lake, lowered his nose to nuzzle the soap clean warmth of his daughter’s curls. “Beautiful,” he murmured.

The echo of land and sky was stunning, the weight of the child beautiful in his arms, the warmth of her breath against his neck brought peace to his heart, a feeling of purpose, and contentment. He remembered being held thus in his father’s arms, the heat of breath, of body, lulling him to sleep. Beautiful.

“Valentine. Valentine. Wake up my son. You must see the sun on the lake.”
He had roused himself, met with a brilliant panorama of coral, sapphire and bronze haloed mountains mirrored on a similar stillness of lake.

“Did the sun drown?” he had asked his father sleepily. His father had laughed. Beneath his little boy legs his father’s chest and belly had rocked with laughter.

Miss Deering turned, hints of the sunset’s sheen reflected in the pearly translucence of her brow, in the soft curve of his daughter’s cheek.

“It looks as if the sun is swallowed up by the lake,” she said.

So gently she touched upon his childhood. So gently the sun in all its reflected shades of saffron, salmon and blue added color to the moment, to the memory, to the satin curve of her cheek. He had to ask, “Does the sun drown do you think, or is the water set ablaze?”

Miss Deering’s bird-wing-brows rose, as if she found something remarkable in the question.

“Do I surprise you, Miss Deering?” He breathed the question through his daughter’s curls, holding his own sunshine. “Do you think me a gentleman who glories only in ballrooms and battlefields?”

“I do not know what to think of you, my lord.”

“Good. I like to keep people off balance.”

She had nothing to say to that, merely looked at him.

“My father brought me to Llyn Tegid when I was a lad,” he said, quietly, unwilling for her interest to wane, unwilling to wake the child.

“I see.”

“I do not think you do,” he murmured, in a mood for confidences.

She waited, this quiet tabby cat of a governess. Waited rather than prod him to explain. So different from the Biddington sisters. So peaceful to stand watching a brazen sunset with such a demure woman.

She is the lake. Will I drown in her? Or set her ablaze?
“Were you close to your father?” he asked.

Mrs. Olive seemed to appear out of nowhere in that moment, bustlingly efficient. “Shall I take her, my lord? See her tucked safely into bed.”

“Please do.” He transferred the child into the housekeeper’s welcoming arms, catching the look that passed between housekeeper and governess. What’s this? What have I touched upon, all unknowing? This look of understanding from the housekeeper? This fleeting expression of gratitude from the dark-eyed tabby cat?

When Miss Deering might have followed Mrs. Olive indoors he stepped toward the bronzed glitter of the lake, and said, voice mild, “Would you avoid me, Miss Deering? Or is it my question?”

She did not answer at once. He had not thought she would. Before she spoke, before she could offer him platitudes and escape into the inn, he walked into the golden light, into the freshening breeze, casting a long shadow, knowing, that because he employed her, she must follow.

E
laine squinted against the light, drew her cloak more closely about her shoulders, shivered with the chill potential that lurked in the coming darkness, and followed Valentine Wharton toward the gilded sheen of Llyn Tegid.

I must answer
. She knew not what to say--how to begin. Her jaw felt unusually frozen on words in this moment, the same rigidness possessing her limbs in following this man into the deepening shadows, tension filling her body with every step they placed between the golden glow of lamplight from the inn, and the mystery of the lake.

Father. What can I reveal to this man of you?

His voice wafted over his shoulder, his tone gentle, the words unexpected. “You do not think very highly of me as a father, do you?”

She stopped. Stunned. She had not been thinking of him as a father at all in that moment, to own truth. Not here, as night crept up on them. How to reply to such an accusation?

No anger in his voice, so gentle, so even. “I cannot blame you, really.” Like the lapping of the lake against the pebbled shoreline. “I have done little enough with my life to give anyone a glowing impression of me, and yet, neither am I the man my own history paints.”

His silhouette loomed dark against the water’s liquid gold--the lines of him too enticing by far--the curling hair, the broad shoulders, the muscular swell of calf and thigh.

A bird flew above him, a black vee against the brightness, loosing a jittering call as it settled in a tree’s arms. The call was answered by a chorus of twittering, a flutter of wings, a subtle rearrangement in roosting bird’s hierarchy. Like her heart that sudden flight, her fluttering pulse awaiting his every word and gesture, her mind considering what it would be like to settle in a very different pair of arms.

She caught up to him, untangled her tongue, and forced the truth from constricted throat. “My lord. You mistake my impression of you.”