Lord Harry's Daughter (8 page)

Chapter
12

Sophia was left to ponder this problem on and off for several days as Mark, busy carrying messages to and from the besiegers of San Sebastian, had no thought for anything except accomplishing his mission until General Graham remarked late one evening as he unfolded Wellington's latest instructions, “The duke is fortunate to have you as his messenger, Adair, for there is not a better or faster horseman to be had in the Peninsula."

Even as he thanked the general and turned Caesar around toward Lesaca, Mark pictured a slim figure in a slate-colored riding habit bent over the long slender neck of a swift bay mare. What would the outcome of the race have been if their course had been a few hundred yards longer? Who was the better rider? Sophia's slow start was a natural consequence of her horse's lack of stature, but her catching up to him so quickly was ample proof of her skill. And he had rather churlishly refused to acknowledge that skill. Would he have been such a dog-in-the-manger if he had been competing against a fellow officer? Mark snorted in self-derision as he bent over Caesar's neck and galloped along in the waning twilight. No. He would have scorned to demonstrate such a paltry attitude to another officer, and he would have been punctilious if not genuinely admiring, in expressing his admiration for such superb horsemanship and such skill with firearms. Why then had he not acted that way with a woman?

Now that he had recovered from his annoyance at Sophia's suggestion that he was reckless and unreliable. Mark admitted that he was not proud of the way he had conducted himself, and he resolved to apologize handsomely at the first opportunity.

The opportunity presented itself rather sooner than he expected, for much to his surprise, after having given Graham's dispatch to Wellington, and returning to his own quarters as he mounted the massive stone steps of the ancient stone bastion where the officers had their quarters, who should be coming down them tying the strings of her bonnet, but the young lady herself.

“Miss Featherstonaugh, what on earth are you doing here?"

Sophia looked up, and recognizing the major, raised her eyebrows in some surprise. Most of the men were so accustomed to seeing her about that it would never have occurred to any one of them to question her. Controlling her annoyance, she responded as mildly as she could, “Colonel Taylor appears to have contracted a fever, and as the surgeons are entirely occupied with the wounded just now, Mama and I are nursing him."

Mark bit his lip. “I beg your pardon. I did not mean to speak to you in such a peremptory manner. It was just that I had been thinking of you, and then at that very moment, you appeared."

“Thinking of me?"

“Yes.” He smiled apologetically. “I realize that I behaved rather badly the last time I saw you."

Sophia opened her mouth to reply, but he held up one hand to forestall her. “No, let me apologize. You rode magnificently and you are clearly a superior shot and I failed to congratulate you on either count."

“Why thank you. Major, but you have no need to apologize for failing to compliment me.” But, Sophia thought, even as she accepted the apology, you still have not admitted to the original point of discussion, which was the question of my becoming an exploring officer.

“But I do.” Somewhat disconcerted by her coolly gracious acceptance of his apology. Mark followed her down the steps. “Not only did I not acknowledge your unquestionable skill, but I also was not, er, ah, entirely complimentary."

Sophia turned to look at hm. He was being genuine. The sheepish note in his voice and the awkward way he held himself betrayed his discomfort. Good. A little reflection might have a salutary effect on the boldly confident Major Lord Mark Adair.

“You see,” he continued, “I had not expected to do so poorly. Though it does sound rather puffed up to say so, I am accustomed to winning such contests, even against my fellow officers. To lose a shooting match and nearly lose a race is no small thing, and losing to a young woman is even harder on my self-esteem. I am afraid I wanted to diminish your accomplishments by implying that you were rigid and controlling."

“Think nothing of it. Major. Being told that one is rigid is hardly the incalculable insult you make it out to be. And you may be right; I may very well be rigid and controlling."

“Oh no, you are not. You could not paint half so well if that were true. It is just that I...” He paused, trying to frame his thoughts.

“You?” By now Sophia was truly puzzled. The look in his eyes and the bitter twist of his mouth made her realize that there was more at stake here than a horse race and a shooting match.

“I was thoroughly shown up, and the only way to justify that to myself was to make you out to be the sort of person I would never want to be, the sort of person I would scorn to be. And rigid, controlling people are the sorts of people I scorn the most. In fact, it was to avoid people such as that that I joined the army and left England."

“What people are they?"

Mark grimaced. She was far too astute to be fobbed off by a mere generalization. “My father and my brother. All my life they tried to mold me into something I am not, to make me live by the long list of rules and traditions that form the very core of their existence, but I have always refused. I have seen how blind devotion to duty and propriety can stifle warmth, an enjoyment of life, even humanity, in a man, and I will never let myself become that sort of person."

“Surely you exaggerate. Surely they were not entirely cold and without feeling. What of your mother? Did her presence not soften their attitudes?"

“My mother?” The bitterness in his voice grew even more pronounced. “She was the chief victim of it. All the warmth and love that were so much a part of her passionate nature were frozen by their constant disapproval of her emotional responses to things.
Do not spoil them,
she was always being told whenever she was generous to the servants or when she sympathized with my childish woes. She was forever being criticized for not acting like a duchess, for not being distant enough, and stately enough. In the end, she was slowly forced to withdraw from everyone except the few people my father considered to be worthy of her attention. She lost her health and she died from the loneliness of it all."

“How very sad.” Sophia laid a comforting hand on his sleeve. “I am so sorry."

He covered her hand with his own, marveling at how much sympathy even the lightest touch could convey. Gently he clasped the long slender fingers and raised them to his lips. “Thank you for understanding. No one else seems to. They blamed it on the climate and accused me of dramatizing it all, but..."

“But if that is what you sensed as a loving son, then you are right. Too often people seek out coldly rational explanations for things at the expense of the real truth. We British in particular are guilty of this for we do not like to express or examine our emotions and as a result we miss a great deal."

Again his clasp tightened on hers. “You, however, do not. You see the inner emotional life hidden beneath the physical exterior and you capture it in such a way that it permeates the picture you are creating. You are well aware how powerfully emotions can affect a person's character."

“Only too well.” It was Sophia's turn to sound bitter now. “I have seen how self-indulgence can lead to a selfishness and a reckless abandon that can be as destructive to other people, if not more so, than ignoring them completely.” She gazed unseeingly into the darkness that lay beyond the glow of the windows from the staff quarters, but Mark saw the slight tremor of her lower lip and the flutter of the thick, dark lashes as though she were blinking away unwelcome tears.

How she must have suffered from Lord Harry's thoughtlessness. As a child she must have adored a father whose charm was as legendary as his unreliability, and she must have felt betrayed countless times when he failed to return home or remember a promise. Cold and distant as Mark's father had been, at least he had been predictable, and in that predictability Mark had found security if not love. It was a security so strong that he had confused it with love for years until he had been old enough to recognize the difference. Sophia had not even been given that by her father. “Enjoying life and indulging in it to the fullest degree can make a person so self-centered that he appears even colder and less feeling than someone who sacrifices his humanity to duty, for at least a person such as that pays attention to others out of a sense of noblesse oblige.” Mark felt the fingers on his arm clutch at it involuntarily.

Sophia no longer gazed off in the distance now, but surveyed him curiously, her eyes wide and questioning;

Mark could not help smiling, ever so slightly, at the surprise he read in them. “I am not entirely devoid of the powers of observation, you know."

It was not until she let out a deep sigh that Sophia realized she had been holding her breath for quite some time. “No. I know that. You could not be an exploring officer if you did not possess them. It is just...” She paused and a faint flush, barely visible in the dim light form the windows, rose in her cheeks. “It is just that I did not expect you to be so ... so understanding."

“Believe me, I do understand. And if I could make it up to you, I would.” Again he brushed her hand with his lips, but this time they lingered there a fraction of a moment longer.

She stood, mesmerized by the look in his eyes, the warmth of his lips on her hand, and by a host of feelings, impossible to define or describe. It was almost as though no one had ever understood her before this moment and now this man whom she barely knew saw into and sympathized with the deepest parts of her soul. It was wonderful, but it was frightening to be understood so well. “I ... I must go.” Sophia retrieved her hand. Even to her, her voice sounded breathless and unsure. “Mother will be wondering what has become of me.” She turned and hurried down the steps so fast that it almost appeared as if she were running away from him.

Mark could not help grinning as he continued up the steps. So he had made the coolly self-reliant Sophia Featherstonaugh uneasy at last. The threat of enemy soldiers and Spanish guerrillas left her unmoved, but sympathy, understanding, and the intimacy they led to, were quite another thing.

Over the years Mark had known many women, enough of them to recognize the signs—the widened eyes, slightly trembling fingers, the flushed cheeks—that told him Sophia was not accustomed to being affected by a man in this particular way and she found it disconcerting. Good. He paused on the top step and turned to catch a glimpse of her as she hurried down the street. He was glad that he had been able to get beneath that self-assured exterior, for she had certainly gotten beneath his, and he did not relish being at such a disadvantage with a mere chit of a girl.

It was bad enough that she had bested him at a shooting match and very nearly a horse race as well, but that she should be able to read his innermost feelings was most unnerving, if not completely unacceptable. Or was it? Mark stepped back into the sheltering columns that supported the porch of the staff quarters. Propping his shoulder against a rough stone column, he pulled out a cigar, lit it, and puffed on it thoughtfully for a moment. Actually it had been rather a relief to unburden himself to someone who grasped so quickly all the implications from his sketchy description of his family.

In the few minutes it had taken for him to present a picture of his father and his brother, Sophia had been able to absorb it and interpret to the degree that she could put her finger on the crux of the matter—his mother—the beautiful, passionate, and loving Isabella, Duchess of Cranleigh, who had been slowly, inexorably deprived of every opportunity to express that loving nature until it eventually had killed her.

With a muttered oath Mark tossed the cigar on the ground and crushed it beneath his boot. He had not wanted to remember all those things—the old hurts and sorrows, his own helplessness to change the situation. For years he had forced it out of his consciousness where he had not had to think about it, but now she had made him recall it, examine it, and suffer all over again. But this time he had not suffered alone. There had been someone to share his suffering, someone who had been equally hurt and equally helpless, someone who could sympathize, who, with a single compassionate touch on his arm, and the warmth of understanding in her eyes, could soften the painfully ragged edges of those memories and reduce them to a dull ache. And for the first time he felt he could actually examine those memories without being overwhelmed by them. Giving a final twist to the cigar under his boot, he strode back inside and went in search of a good bottle of Madeira.

Chapter
13

Sophia quietly shut the door behind her and, observing her mother and stepfather in front of the fire in the sitting room, deep in conversation, hurried up the stairs", not even bothering to light a candle. Agitated as she was, she welcomed the darkness and the privacy of her own bedchamber.

Removing her bonnet and the Pomona green cossack mantle she had tossed over her shoulders to protect her from the damp night air, she hung them on a peg on the back of the door and sank onto the chair by the window. The cool breeze felt good on her flushed cheeks and the light from a crescent moon visible from her window made the view across tiled rooftops seem peaceful in contrast to the tumult of her own emotions. The hardworking citizens of Lesaca went to bed early and there were few lights or sounds to break the stillness that had settled over the little town.

Sophia breathed deeply, trying to inhale and absorb the serenity of the scene before her, but it did not the slightest bit of good. Her pulses were pounding, she felt weak in her knees, and there was a strange fluttery sensation in the pit of her stomach. She could not think what was wrong with her. What was it about her encounter with Major Adair that had affected her so strongly? It was not as though she was not used to sharing her thoughts with men, for she was actually more accustomed to male companions than she was to female ones, but no one had ever caused her to feel as she felt now. The way he had looked at her, the way he had seemed to read her thoughts and feelings—feelings that she was only vaguely aware she possessed—was both comforting and frightening. His wryly sympathetic smile had warmed her, but at the same time the depth of his understanding frightened her. Even she had not realized the extent of her anger at her father until the major had pointed it out to her. It was wonderful to have a person know one so well that one hardly had to speak, but it was also unnerving to be known that well.

The sympathy that she had read in the major's eyes and heard in his voice had been as intimate as an embrace. She sighed as she recalled the strength in the comforting hand that had clasped hers and the flood of warmth that the touch of his lips had sent from her fingers, through her arm, through her entire body. It had been infinitely consoling, but at the same time, she acknowledged reluctantly to herself, there had been another feeling that had not been consoling in the least. There had been an ache, a longing that she had never before experienced, a longing that was both delicious and upsetting because she did not know, did not want to guess what would satisfy it.

Sophia rose and slowly began to undress, telling herself that it would be best to put such troubling thoughts completely out of her mind, but in truth she did not really wish to. She wanted to linger on each moment of their interlude, to savor the closeness, to recapture the concern she had read in his eyes and the tenderness she had felt in his touch.

Shaking her head at her own weakness, she crossed over to her washstand, poured water into the basin, and splashed it on her face. It was not just that Major Adair was understanding; after all, she and Andrew Leith Hay had known one another longer and shared more interests in common. They both sketched and painted constantly, everything from the mundane aspects of campaign life to the most sublime landscapes, yet she did not find herself drawn to him as she did to the major. She did not feel breathless in his presence, nor did she suffer from that odd sensation in the pit of her stomach that seemed to overcome her every time Major Lord Mark Adair smiled at her.

Sophia lay down on her bed and pulled the covers over her. It had been a long day. Perhaps she was just tired. Perhaps the trembly feeling that overwhelmed her at the memory of his lips on her skin was purely and simply fatigue and nothing more.

Yes, that was it, she was tired. She would put herself to sleep as she always did by thinking of the pictures she would sketch tomorrow. If she could only fall asleep she would wake up refreshed and her usual cool and competent self.

Sophia was not the only one in General Curtis's household who went to bed with questions on her mind. Though Lady Curtis spoke nothing of it to her husband, she was rather surprised that, upon her return, Sophia went immediately to her bedchamber. Sophia always came to wish her good night and usually stayed to talk over the events of the day or discuss plans for the next one. It was not like her to go to bed without a word, but as Lady Curtis heard the slight creek of the floorboards above them, she decided that was just what her daughter had done.

Lady Curtis respected her daughter's obvious wish for privacy, but she was concerned enough to tap gently on Sophia's door sometime later when she and her husband were retiring for the night. There was no response so she opened it gently to peer in at her daughter. In the faint moonlight she could just make out Sophia's sleeping form, and the steadiness of her breathing reassured her mother that whatever thoughts her daughter had wished to keep to herself, they were not so upsetting as to keep her awake. Softly she closed the door and, returning to her own chamber, undressed and climbed into bed with her husband.

Though Sophia had fallen asleep, her mother lay awake for some time, turning over the day in her mind, trying to come up with some idea of what might have occurred to cause her daughter's unexpected behavior. The only slight variation in their routine had been that Sophia had gone to sit with Colonel Taylor that evening after supper, but there had been nothing so unusual in that, for she and her mother often visited the sick and the wounded, and while they would never become accustomed to the pain and the suffering, there was very little they had not seen. If something particularly upsetting had occurred, Sophia was more likely to share it with her mother than keep it to herself. No, something else must have happened, but Lady Curtis could not imagine what it might be. Sophia had led a life of such constant change and uncomfortable conditions that she adapted quite readily to almost anything. The more she considered it, the more Lady Curtis was certain that whatever had occurred must somehow be connected to Sophia's visit to Colonel Taylor, for all the rest of the day she had gone about her daily routine with her usual calmness, neither seeking nor avoiding conversation with anyone.

Sophia and her mother had lived on their own so long and in such isolated situations, relying on one another for solace and companionship, that there was very little that one did not know about the other, and this made Sophia's avoidance of conversation even more puzzling. As she finally drifted off to sleep. Lady Curtis resolved to keep a closer eye on her daughter.

During the ensuing days it did appear to Lady Curtis that Sophia was more reflective than usual. She would often look over to see her daughter's hand hovering over her sketchbook while she stared at some invisible point in space, her forehead wrinkled in thought. And occasionally Sophia would break off from the task at hand, whatever it was, to gaze out a window or a door, but her mother could see that she remained oblivious to whatever view lay beyond.

At last Lady Curtis could refrain no longer from comment and one morning as they were mending sheets and she had noticed that ten minutes had passed without Sophia's sewing a single stitch, she turned to her daughter. “Sophia?"

Sophia started and plunged her needle into the linen so vigorously that she pricked her finger. “Yes, Mama?"

“Is anything amiss? It seems to me that you have been rather distracted of late."

“Distracted? Me? No, Mama, nothing is amiss.” The delicate pink that tinged her cheeks, however, belied her assertion, and she kept her eyes firmly fixed on the work in front of her.

“I am relieved to hear that.” Lady Curtis was forced to be content with her answer, but it strengthened her resolve to keep an eye on her daughter. In all her life Sophia had never lied; she had never even prevaricated, until now. Her mother could not guess what possibly could cause her to do so now, but she knew that, whatever it was, it was significant.