Games of Pleasure (31 page)

Men sighed. Women began to weep quietly into their handkerchiefs. Sam seemed to blossom in her presence, until Hamlet became stunningly real. When he cursed Ophelia, farm workers leaped up to shout and shake their fists, as if the Prince of Denmark had spurned one of their own sisters.

When Miracle walked on again later in the play, the white dress had disappeared beneath a fantasy of flowing rags. Strings of flowers wrapped around and around her body and up into her hair, piled now like a magpie's nest on top of her head. Yet she was still achingly beautiful, as if light shimmered from a pure, bright soul to illuminate the shredded muslin with brilliance.

Ryder stared at the floor, afraid of what his face might show to the other members of the troupe. His blood coursed too warmly in his veins. His body ached with desire. The memory of making love to her—her soft breasts, the long, sweet curves of her flank—haunted him far more deeply than any ghost ever haunted a prince of Denmark.

He must never allow her out of his life. He must somehow clear her of Hanley's persecution and set her up in London. Long evenings in her company. Long nights in her bed.

Her voice enthralled:
“There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember!”

Listening, entranced, he almost missed the first sign of trouble: a faint reek, sharper than the pipe smoke rising from the audience.

The audience sighed, spellbound. Yet a faint bleating began to murmur outside, followed by the low rumble of a bull and the nervous whickering of horses. Ryder wrenched his mind back to reality. Tossing aside his helmet, he swung hand over hand into the high loft of the barn, where he could see clearly into the rick yard. It was already too late.

“Fire!” someone shouted outside. “T' hayricks're on fire!”

Screams echoed as men surged back from the stage, then began to shove and elbow toward the doors. Women shrieked as they tried to grab their children.

Miracle dropped the dry stalks that had served her as Ophelia's herbs and flowers. There was no way out for the players, except through the crowd, and several hundred people were about to pile up against a door that was closed, trampling each other in their terror. Two more seconds would produce full-fledged panic.

But from somewhere above her head, Ryder leaped down onto the stage.

His clear voice carried absolute command. Everyone froze in place. Heads turned to stare up as Ryder strode forward into the lights.

“You will each remain exactly where you are.” The certainty and reassurance of natural authority spread into the sudden silence. “This barn is in no danger. The ricks are far enough away and the ground is damp. Now! Each man will help the woman nearest to him to secure her children. The four men who are closest to the doors will open them. Once that is done, every man who is sufficiently able-bodied will make his way quietly through the crowd to join me outside. Then we'll put the fire out.”

He jumped down into the audience and strode through its center as if he were—Ah! Miracle swallowed hard. This was exactly who he really was, of course: Lord Ryderbourne.

The crowd split before him. Ryder picked out the tallest, strongest men and beckoned them to follow him. The door was now creaking open.

“You, sir! You will choose and direct a bucket brigade to fetch water from the stream. Buckets hang on the west side of this barn and in the milking shed on the south side of the yard. And you, sir, will take five men to fetch hooks from the shed at the north end of the yard to pull down any brands that threaten to spread the fire. You, and you, and you, will take charge of this crowd, delegating as necessary, to make sure that anyone who wishes to leave does so in an orderly fashion. You, sir, will make sure that no spectators get in the way of those putting out the fire.”

The crowd stirred itself into new patterns. Younger men moved quickly but calmly out to the rick yard. Some of the women followed. Others settled down to wait with their children clinging to their skirts. Mrs. Faber, dressed in a blond wig and paper crown, marched up onto the stage and waved both arms.

“Come!” she cried. “Let's tell the little ones a pretty tale!”

As the women and children gathered around to listen, Miracle slipped outside. She found a vantage point at the top of the stone stairs that led up to the loft of an apple store. Ryder was easy to pick out. He was a head taller than most, and the glare of the blaze flamed on his fake breastplate. She bit her lip and laughed at her wretched new vulnerability, but she could not bear not to watch him.

In the same unruffled tones, he was issuing more orders: for some of the wagons to be moved; to make sure that a second chain of buckets flung water onto the ricks that weren't yet burning—as well as the two that were—so the fire could not spread. In spite of the bellowing of the livestock and the natural threat of any feral fire, a determined efficiency dominated the scene. Men ran, but they did so without panic, almost like a well-disciplined army.

The flames began to recede, then die away into smoke. Runnels of water traced among blackened trusses of hay, tossed here and there on the ground, then thoroughly doused. The frantic pace of passing bucket after bucket slowed, then stopped. The fire was out.

“The job's done, gentlemen.” Ryder smiled at two of the men who had headed up the bucket brigade. “If you, sir, and you, will stay here to watch for any stray embers, the play may resume. And perhaps Mr. Hodgkin will allow every man who tossed a bucket a free draft of ale for his trouble?”

A cheer went up as the farmer staggered forward. He stared at the smoldering ruins of two of his hayricks, then walked up to lay his hand on the untouched bulk of one of the three that remained. Tears ran openly down his face. Miracle couldn't hear what was said, but another cheer resounded around the yard. Ale flowed down thirsty throats, then the crowd began to stream back into the barn.

Ruthlessly reining in her confusion of emotions, she ran down the steps to go inside to finish the play.

Ryder suffered the farmer's bleary, effusive thanks with as much good nature as he could muster.

“I remember as how you warned me tha' there was too many folks about with pipes and such, sir,” Mr. Hodgkin said, “and as how I ought to set some men to keep'em out of my ricks. It were lucky there were a clear shot w'out wagons in t' road from t' stream.'Appen tha'll be expecting a reward, sir?”

“No.” Ryder glanced past the man's head to the stone stairs that led up to the apple loft. “No reward.”

“Nay? Then I willna' fret mysen about it—”

In her floating costume of flowers and rags, Miracle was flitting down the steps. She seemed so free of all constraints, free to take every moment of every day and make it into something dazzling. He knew that he craved that freedom and grace, as much as he craved the oblivion he could find in her body.

With a last quick comment to the farmer, Ryder strode across the yard to intercept her.

She stopped and turned to face him while he was still several paces away, as if she knew in her bones when he approached.

“Your foresight paid off,” she said gravely, her eyes huge in the darkness. “You saved the people in the barn, as well as that drunkard's hayricks. A stampede for the doors would have caused trampling, even deaths. You'd already made sure that there was a way left clear to the stream and knew where to find buckets.”

“The threat was obvious. I did no more than any man would, once I discovered that Mr. Hodgkin was blind to his own peril.”

She twisted a floating scrap of her skirt in her fingers. “But you're not any man. Evidently it occurred to no one to disobey you.”

“I suppose not.” His natural satisfaction in successfully putting out the fire and saving the audience began to fade. “Does it matter?”

A wry smile lurked at the corners of her mouth. “Of course it matters. I think you're missing Wyldshay more than you know. I think you're craving the realities of your life and realizing that you can't reconcile all of your desires, and never will. Though you've paid that dilemma little attention up till now, it's going to eat you alive. But there's no real choice, Lord Ryderbourne, and there never was. So perhaps you should accept it and go home.”

The young man playing Laertes ran out to collect Miracle to finish their scene. She seized the boy's proffered fingers and smiled at him with dazzling gaiety, before they ran back inside together.

Pain lacerated Ryder's heart. Wyldshay was the center of his life: his very soul. He could never give it up, not even for love. Miracle was right: If he was foolish enough to think that he was truly in love with a bird of paradise—with a woman who sold herself to whichever man promised her the most in jewels and security—he would be making the biggest mistake of his life.

Yet his craving for her burned through his bones, as deep and immediate as any passion for duty and inheritance.

Ryder walked back to the barn. Just as he reached the door, a tingle of premonition made him glance over one shoulder.

A carriage had pulled into the yard, a gentleman's carriage drawn by two horses. It stopped by the farmhouse. A tall, dark-haired man stepped down and glanced about at the multiplicity of wagons and carts. He said something to his coachman, before he turned and began to stride toward the barn.

Ryder made his way to the stage. Miracle's part was done, but Fortinbras was critical to the last scene. The Prince of Norway was one of the few left standing after the general slaughter at the end. The final speech was his.

The play must go on, of course, even when stark reality had just caught up with him.

 

 

THE cast took their bows. The audience finally began to stream away. Thanks to the orderly ranking of the carts and wagons that Ryder had arranged earlier, the exodus proceeded without incident. Miracle disappeared to change out of her costume. Ryder stripped off his fake armor in seconds, but the cast crowded around him, wanting to shake his hand and congratulate him on his performance, both on-and offstage.

At last Mr. Faber shooed them all away, so he could express his own gratitude in a speech worthy of a great thespian. Ryder listened as long as necessary, but in the end he cut the actor off in mid-sentence.

“You've been most kind, sir. The pleasure was all ours. However, my cousin and I must be leaving now.”

“Now, sir? In the dark of night?”

Ryder gestured over one shoulder. “A friend has come to collect us.”

He joked and smiled with Mr. Faber for a few more moments, but somewhere deep inside, the pain had begun to burn. While he had still been trapped onstage by the cast, Miracle had walked out across the empty threshing floor to greet the newcomer, who was now lounging casually in the doorway.

Guy Devoran, Ryder's cousin, held out both hands. Miracle slipped into his embrace, then stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the mouth. From the intimacy of the greeting, it was plain to any observer that he and Miracle must have been lovers once—and perhaps still were.

Ryder knew with crushing and immediate intimacy why jealousy was known as a monster.

Guy glanced up as Ryder approached. Miracle stepped back, her expression guarded. She sat down on the ledge beside the door and stared off into the distance.

“Good God!” Guy said in mock horror as he held out his hand. “Swords or pistols? Or do you wish merely to punch me in the jaw?”

Ryder shook hands, because to do otherwise would be petty, but he could not keep the bite from his voice. “Is there any good reason why my fist should connect so unpleasantly with your face, Guy?”

Without waiting for a reply, he stalked outside. He must move, before his words became a deadly reality. Without further comment, his cousin fell in beside him. The two men crossed the yard in silence until they reached the animal pens.

Guy propped his hip on the wall of a pigsty. His expression was noncommittal as he met Ryder's gaze.

“Obviously this meeting's no coincidence,” Ryder said. “So what the hell brought you to Hulme Down?”

“Concern at Wyldshay.”

“For God's sake!” In spite of his distress, Ryder laughed. “Mother?”

“Apparently Lord Hanley paid the duchess a visit, and now ducal uneasiness haunts the towers and whispers about the Great Hall. Hanley was unctuous, but Her Grace believes that he wishes you no good. I received her request to find you and deliver that message.”

“Then I must apologize for my mother's indifference that you might have a life of your own.”

A sow snuffled up to the other side of the wall. Guy leaned down to scratch her ears. “Fortunately I'd already planned to come north, so it was no real inconvenience. Also, of course, I caught the intriguing scent of a mystery—always hard to resist.”

“Did the duchess wish to convey anything else?”

“Only that the earl's visit left quite a stink in Her Grace's nostrils—something like this pigpen, I imagine. However, it's pure chance that I found you. I saw the glow and smoke from the fire. It was out by the time I arrived, but I noticed how impressively well-organized everything was.”

“At which point you entered the barn and were slain with astonishment to see my strutting about onstage dressed in fake armor?”

Guy glanced up and grinned. “Having known my older cousin all my life as a model of ducal rectitude—yes!”

Ryder leaned his forearms on the top of the wall. Though he and Guy had never been very close, Ryder knew his cousin to be honorable to the core. Guy was the same age as Jack. They had always been like brothers—closer perhaps than Ryder and Jack had ever been—a friendship that had only grown more profound when Guy and Jack had blazed a riotous path together through London society some years earlier.