Season For Desire (14 page)

When Beatrix had agreed to marry him thirty-five years before, she had left behind the glittering court of King George; her sisters, brothers, parents, dowry. She and Richard had taken one another with nothing but health and hope and humor, making their way across an ocean. There he had assumed control of his family’s paper mill in Philadelphia; they had built a comfortable fortune, had raised children and lost children, too.

Beatrix had still been young when the pains began; sharp in her hands at first, and only in the mornings. But then they spread to more of her joints, to more of the day, until she never had a moment in which her body didn’t feel wracked and torn.

Though her health slipped away, she had never lost that wry edge. At the end, she had even laughed at death. “My love for you is not such a paltry thing that it can be dissolved,” she whispered. Though their six surviving children surrounded her, Giles alone ducked close enough to hear along with Richard. “I could not bring a fortune to the New World, so I left it behind. Perhaps enough time has passed that you can reclaim it. My puzzle box . . .”

Giles had found the item to which he believed she referred: a neat creation of wood that he and his younger brother Alfred had fitted together with bated breath and careful hands. Puzzle boxes had been a tradition with her family, Beatrix had told them, ever since her Dutch ancestor had traded with Japan and brought back treasures never before seen.

“No,” she’d breathed. “In England. You must find it in England.”

Giles had thought it madness. A fool’s quest to cross an ocean. But what was foolish about believing in Beatrix’s last words? At that moment, she’d told them the most important thing on her mind: She had wanted to see to it they didn’t lack for anything.

The loss of Beatrix had faded over the past three years, a wound knit and scarred over. A happy marriage left a permanent mark on a man. Richard was glad Giles had come with him, no matter the reason. Being apart from all of his children at once, he would miss them as though part of his world had gone silent.

Richard was determined to see Beatrix’s wish granted, to give their children a fortune beyond paper-mill dreams. Paper was as nothing, flat and dull, compared to the luster of the unknown. A mystery. A puzzle. An adventure!

One diamond parure wasn’t enough to change all their lives—but it was enough to begin with.

And he and Giles were two-thirds of the way to finding it.

A smile slipped over his features, comfortable as being wrapped in a blanket before a fire, and he rose to join the others in the drawing room.

For the next four days, Audrina had nothing to do but wait.

Oh, she actually had much more to do than wait. Now that the puzzle boxes had been opened, there were also codes to play about with. Audrina wrote the letters on slips of paper, and she and Giles arranged and rearranged them atop their familiar table in the drawing room. There were far too many
Q
’s to make any sense of the message, which they both realized almost at once, but it was pleasant to sit together, to talk and not kiss and to talk about not kissing.

She also had many things to try not to think of, such as whether Llewellyn was threatening her father or her sister, or whether Walpole might have called off the wedding entirely. She knew nothing, nothing at all, of what was passing in London.

It was an agony and a relief at once—and with relief came guilt. The feelings warred, with relief being defeated day by day as the wedding grew closer. Four days before Christmas, and Audrina’s every emotion was heightened.

Lady Irving wandered into the drawing room, intercepting Lord Alleyneham’s footman as she did. “Ah, Jory. Is that the post you’ve got there? Glad to see the mail’s getting through again. I know we’re at the end of the earth here, but the Royal Mail shouldn’t be stopped by a little thing like that.”

After handing over his fistful of letters, Jory straightened his wig. “Yes, my lady. Right you are.”

Lady Irving meandered over to Giles and Audrina, who had just spelled D-O-G with her letter slips in a vain attempt to feel some sense of progress.

“How sweet, Rutherford. Are you teaching each other to read?” Lady Irving flipped through the letters with narrowed eyes.

“
Au contraire
, my lady. We’ve put together this little primer for you. Since it seems you can’t read ‘Lord Dudley’ on a letter that’s clearly not for you.” Giles’s smile was a predatory affair of bared teeth.

Audrina had to smile at what was an undeniably amusing—if rude—reply, her feet fidgeting in their slippers at his quick defense of her. She could like him far, far too much.

Or was this kindness at all? Did he see her, again or still, as weak? How could one tell? She had few examples on which to base a guess.

“Aha!” Ignoring Giles’s response, Lady Irving pulled free one sealed paper and dropped the rest of the post on the floor. “This one’s for Miss Corning. How about that, Rutherford? News at last.”

She shoved the paper in Giles’s face. A twitch in his jaw was the only sign that he did not enjoy this experience. “Yes. I see that clearly. Thank you. Shall we notify her?”

“If I don’t find her in three minutes, I will open this letter myself.” And in a cloud of scarlet and blue, she whirled and left them.

“A letter for Miss Corning.” Audrina met Giles’s eyes. Her heart picked up its pace; somehow, she had become invested in this hunt she had joined only as a happenstance. “Shall we go see it read?”

“We certainly cannot let my father and Lady Irving read exciting news without our steadying presence.” He held out a hand. “Princess.”

This was only a game, which made it safe. And therefore it was safe for her to lace her fingers in his as they followed Lady Irving from the room.

After scooping up the fallen post for Lord Dudley, of course.

They found Miss Corning in the library, where she was paging through a novel. Sophy was, as usual, jotting something at her secretary desk. Both women regarded the arrival of the letter as unexpected, though as Miss Corning noted, “A York postmark. This one had not far to go.”

She slit the seal and skimmed the lines in a few seconds. Then, with a trembling smile, she extended the letter to Sophy. “We’ve found our Maria—or actually, her daughter.”

It took seventy-five years, or so it felt, before the letter made its way from Sophy to Lady Irving and Richard Rutherford, through the Dudleys, and finally to Audrina and Giles.

The note was brief, dashed off in a hasty clotted hand with many abbreviations. The paper was so cheap and thin as to be brittle.

The last name was an illegible thread.

“‘Should you wish to buy it?’” Richard Rutherford said. “Of course I’d like to buy it, but how could she sell such a treasure?”

“Is that what caught your attention?” Giles folded up the paper. “I’m more startled by her reference to the Goat and Gauntlet. It’s not as though I’ve had fantasies about returning there. Is it the
only
inn in all of York?”

“No, but it is the northernmost one. Perhaps she wanted to pick a place convenient for us.”

“But—the twenty-third?” Lord Dudley shuffled to a chair near the library fireplace; Sophy hopped up to ease him into the seat. “No, you had much better tell her to wait a few more days. The box has waited all these years. Could it not wait until after Christmas?” His voice was plaintive; his heavily veined hands gripped the arms of his chair tightly.

The Rutherfords looked at one another: father and son, so different in appearance, but with identical expressions on their faces.
I hadn’t thought—well, maybe—if it’s all right with you . . .

“No, my lord.” Audrina spoke into the fraught pause. “I am sorry, but it cannot wait even a single day more.”

She said this not for their sake, but her own. Each day that fluttered by left her more distant from Charissa, her chance of returning to London more impossible. From a post-house, she could make her way back to London somehow: either with the Rutherfords, or Lady Irving, or even a hired maid.

Sophy was the first to reply. Her pince-nez hid her eyes, but her mouth was an understanding curve. “Well, then, we shall have to celebrate while you are all still here.”

 

 

The contrast between Audrina’s most recent London ball and her last evening at Castle Parr was so extreme that they seemed almost on different planets. This was Saturn, maybe; soft and beringed as she had seen through Sophy’s telescope.

Her favorite part of a ball was mixing, dancing, laughing, making it seem as though she was everything proper and delighted—and then slipping away for her own secret purpose. Once upon a time, with Llewellyn. More recently, she had fallen into the habit of leaving alone, just to see if anyone would notice and come looking for her.

No one ever passed this test.

Tonight, she felt no urge to slip away. She sank into the moment, this warm evening gathering in the drawing room where she had spent so much time. It stabbed at her with pain and spice and sweetness, knowing that it would soon end. That she needed it to end. And yet while it lasted, it was good.

Giles had said pleasure that ended in loss was not worth the having, but he was wrong. If that was the only sort of pleasure one could have, it was worth whatever price must be paid.

A day had passed since the arrival of Mrs. B’s letter, as they had taken to calling it. In the morning, the Rutherfords, Lady Irving, and Audrina would follow the road south that had led them north so recently. Miss Corning, invited to accompany them, declined with a sideways smile at the trio of Sophy and Lord and Lady Dudley.

“I have been invited to stop here for a while,” she said. “And I am glad to do so. Now that the hunt is in your hands, I feel much more reasonable about the matter. I shall never get over the embarrassment of arriving here unexpectedly, though everyone was so kind.”

With Sophy taking notes on the movements required, she opened a puzzle box. “Good to have a record,” said Lady Irving. “You seem to be the only one who knows how to work these things.”

Giles rolled his eyes, but made no reply as he finished copying out the writings inside the gold and rosewood boxes. “If we find the third, we shall send word at once.”

“I would miss you all very much,” quavered Lord Dudley from his seat near the hearth, “save for the fact that you’re still on the same adventure.” Giles made a choking sound, which the viscount seemed not to hear. “And so it’s not really like you’re going, is it?”

“Not at all, my lord,” said Audrina. “We shall think of you with great fondness.” How different his eagerness was from her own father’s impatience. But perhaps if Lord Alleyneham spent years in York with little or no company, he would manage a smile or two at the sight of a new face.

“Who will play this game with me?” Lady Dudley held forth a chessboard.

“Chess?” Lady Irving lifted her brows. “Not I. Can’t wager on it.”

“You could,” said Rutherford, “but it would take a great deal of time to finish one wager. Unless—you could wager on which piece was to be taken next. Or the first to take some number of the opponent’s pieces!”

Lady Irving looked approving. “That’s not bad at all, Richard. Are you sure you aren’t a member of White’s? You have a more devious mind than I gave you credit for.”

“No,
I
will play chess. No one else can play.” Lady Dudley clutched the chessboard close, her expression confused.

“Now, Lady D, I’ll be glad to play chess with you.” Her husband’s voice was gentle. “You just pick out the pieces you’d like to use.”

The viscountess took from her pocket several crumbled biscuits. Once the viscount had set out the chessboard on a loo table, she set a crumb on each of the sixty-four squares.

“Very good, Lady D. You make the first move.”

She handed a bit of biscuit to her husband. “Shall we ring for tea?”

Lord Dudley’s shoulders sagged; his back seemed to stoop. Such loneliness as Audrina had never seen, made all the more palpable by being in the middle of a bright group. In his twilight years, his wife was slipping away, and the best way to keep her comfortable—her pack of devoted hounds—drove his daughter-in-law into stuffy-headed isolation.

A wild urge seized Audrina, to offer,
I’ll stay; I will stay with you all
. But a life lived entirely for someone else was no lingering solution.

She did what she could for the moment. “Please allow me to ring for it, Lady Dudley,” she said. “And if you’ll permit it, I would be glad to pour out.”

When the tea tray arrived, Audrina arranged cups according to each person’s preference. It was a familiar ritual, with a sleek economy of movement and manners that soothed even before the first sip of tea was tasted.

Audrina extended a cup of tea to Richard Rutherford. He was gazing into the fire, and it took him a moment to blink back to the present.

“Thank you, my lady.” His smile was as warm as the tea she had just poured out for him. Much more polite than his son, who had scrutinized the tray for a long minute before declaring he would prefer coffee, after all.

The fact that he’d done so with a wink made no difference.

In some little-used chamber of the house, Sophy had located a guitar, and Miss Corning seated herself near the tea things and began tuning the old strings one tentative twist at a time.

Her modishness surpassed even Audrina’s, who wore whatever Lady Irving’s maid had deemed acceptable for—as she presumed—a wild young lass trying to run off to Scotland. This included punishingly thin muslins and plain cottons, along with a few velvets for much-welcome warmth. Miss Corning was garbed in a dull-gold bodice trimmed in shocking white ermine, over a round gown patterned in lustrous browns and reds. Pearls clutched her neck and ears, and as she plucked at the strings of the guitar, bringing it into tune, she could have stepped into or out of any London ballroom.

“There, I think we’ll be able to make a song of it now.” Her thumb brushed each string in turn, setting them to humming. “What shall we sing first? ‘Coventry Carol,’ or ‘The First Nowell’? Or ‘Here We Come A-Wassailing,’ while we’re all full of hot beverages.”

Lady Irving turned to Rutherford, all false innocence. “Do you know those songs in the heathen reaches of the world, Richard?”

“I can’t answer for the heathen reaches of the world, but we know them quite well in Philadelphia.”

And so one after another, they sang the old carols. Their voices lifted, more well-meaning than musical. Lord Dudley’s voice was a rasp, and Lady Irving merely spoke the words. The Rutherfords both had pleasant warm baritones, though, and Audrina had a serviceable alto. Miss Corning and Sophy had the only truly good voices: Miss Corning, a contralto, and Sophy’s a dark soprano that threaded harmonies about the others.

It felt like home, like family of a sort that Audrina had never had. To take a moment to pluck at vibrant gut strings, to sing together a fond wish:
love and joy come to you . . .

Had anyone ever bothered to wish that for her before? Had she paused to wish that for anyone, even herself?

When her gaze wandered to Giles, his hair gleaming like a new penny in the candlelit room, her heart gave a heavy thump.

She hadn’t left all her chaos behind in London after all. There was a fair bit within her soul, and every time she looked at that wry, rough-hewn face, the chaos gave a tumble and a heave, longing to reach out.

Lady Dudley bobbed her head to the music, enjoying its lilt with sleepy-lidded eyes. When the final strum of the guitar vibrated into silence, she opened them wide. “Lovely.” The word sounded odd on her lips, as though she hadn’t pronounced it for some time and wasn’t sure if she had said it correctly. “That was—lovely.”

Rutherford beamed. “I do believe this is the first time we’ve all been in harmony with one another.”

Lady Irving folded her arms. “I hate puns.”