Authors: Laura Kinsale
In the midst of a curse he appeared in the shimmer of candlelight, half naked, a white towel slung over his shoulders and shadows tarnishing his bare chest. He carried the blankets bundled loosely in one hand. His fawn breeches and black boots blurred into the gloom at the top of the steps.
He saw her. He halted. A faint spark of dull gold flashed from a crescent-shaped pendant as it seemed to twist in the light and come to rest against his chest. He closed his fist over the towel on his shoulder, hiding the crescent in shadow. Olympia clutched her gifts tighter, peering through her hat feathers as he stared down at her in abrupt and heavy silence.
He wasn't at all what she had imagined.
Tall, yes—but not plain, not dependable, not kind. Not by any stretch of fancy.
The gray eyes that regarded her were as deep and subtle and light-tricked as smoke from a wildfire. The face belonged to an archangel from the shadows: a cool, sulky mouth and an aquiline profile, and Satan's own intelligence in the assessing look he gave her. The candles behind him lit a smoldering halo of reddish gold around his black hair and turned each faint, frosted breath to a brief glow.
He was not homely, He was utterly and appallingly beautiful, in the way the gleaming steel blossoms of murder and mayhem adorning the walls of the great hall were beautiful.
"Who the dickens are you?" he asked.
Courage
, she said to herself. It didn't help. She straightened her snow-crusted shoulders, attempting at least the image of composure. She dropped a slight curtsy. "Olympia St Leger. One of your new neighbors. I've come to welcome you to Hatheleigh."
He looked down at her from the landing with no sign of concern for his state of undress. "Good God," he said, and raised the towel to scrub at a spot under his chin. "I ain't worth the trouble, I promise you." He flipped the cloth over one shoulder and watched her a moment longer, his head tilted a little to one side, like a sleepy panther mildly intrigued by a mouse. Then he turned and bellowed over his shoulder, "Mustafa!"
"Sheridan Pasha!" the little servant cried. "I was not sleeping!"
"
Yállah!
Brother of vermin, do you see this? Miss…St Leger, was it?…has been soaked. Take her the blankets."
Mustafa appeared, catching the woolen bundle that his master tossed at him. He slid down the banister, his loose white trousers flashing in the dimness. Whispering under his breath, he placed the blankets over her, fussing about and smoothing the corners into place. Olympia noticed for the first time that he, too, wore around his neck a golden ornament shaped like a crescent moon, with a tiny star hung just above the lower point. She peeked up at Sir Sheridan, but could no longer see his pendant in the shadows and the way he held the shaving towel.
Mustafa stepped away when he was satisfied and bowed toward the top of the stairs. "You will have a tête-à-tête, yes? I bring refreshment."
Sir Sheridan made a sound, midway between a word and a groan, which didn't sound promising to Olympia—but Mustafa was already gone into the dark nether regions beneath the stair.
"I don't mean to impose upon you," she said quickly.
"Don't you?" He stepped onto the first stair, but instead of descending, he only sat down where he was, resting one boot on the top step and the other on the next level down. "What exactly do you mean to do?"
She controlled the urge to moisten her lips nervously. It wasn't going at all well. He wasn't dressed. She shouldn't have come. She ought to leave. She wished, rather desperately, that he'd turned out to be plain and freckled and shy after all. And wearing clothes.
She drew the blankets a little closer around her shoulders and disengaged the wrappings from the fuchsia plant. "Well—I've brought you…ah, a gift." Why did it seem like such a silly idea now? "It isn't much. That is—not as much as I would have liked." Unprotected by the muff, her cold fingers were stiff and clumsy. The wrappings fell away to the floor, and the plant drooped forlornly in the freezing air, its bright flowers gone limp and withered. "In honor of your arrival, and your selfless valor on behalf of your country." She bit her lip. "But I'm afraid it's dying."
"Is it?" he murmured. "Most appropriate."
She looked up, and pulled the copy of Rousseau from inside her muff. She lifted her skirt and started to step onto the first stair. "I also wished to give you—"
"
Don't!
" His command froze her in place as if her limbs didn't belong to her. "Don't come farther."
"Forgive me!" She backed up hastily. "I didn't mean—"
"Just stay there." He stood up and descended midway down the staircase. Then he hiked himself over the banister and pushed away, dropping a full six feet off the other side. His boots hit the marble. The great hall sent back a volley of echoes.
He came around the newel-post toward her. There was an efficient grace to his movement, a swing and balance that seemed to assess the ground beneath him, to interpret and exploit terrain instead of merely walk upon it.
"The first ten stairs can't be trusted," he told her. "They're meant to collapse under weight at random moments."
She looked from his impassive face to the stairs and back again. The feathers hanging in front of her face swayed as she turned her head.
"It's a joke," he said.
He was taller than she'd realized. She had seen paintings of red Indians that looked less intimidating.
He lifted his eyebrows. "What's the matter? No sense of humor, Miss St Leger?"
"Pardon me. I didn't realize it was meant to amuse." She paused uncertainly and then added, with more honesty, "I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Sadly overcivilized, I see. You've probably never understood the sport in pulling the wings off flies, either."
She thought of explaining that she was considered a humorless person by most of the residents of Wisbeach because she often failed to laugh at the proper subjects, such as a goat with its horns caught in a hedge, or a drunken tavern girl falling in a wet ditch. However, she decided to omit that particular information, unwilling to expose herself. Sir Sheridan was a stranger, relentlessly disconcerting, not the least because he was not dressed, and she had never before seen a man undressed at close range—or any range at all that she could remember, discounting marble statues. She found it beyond her ability to look only at his face; from behind the protection of the feathers, her glance kept skipping downward, to his shoulders, his chest, the base of his throat.
Observing him from the edge of her vision, she realized with a faint sense of confusion that there was no pendant resting on his chest after all, nothing but a curve of muscle that must have caught the light and created the illusion. His skin was dark and gold and smooth and mysterious. She wanted to touch him.
"My father," he said conversationally, "delighted in maiming flies. Did you know him?"
"Oh, no. Not at all, I'm afraid. He kept quite to himself after he moved here, you see."
She hoped that was a polite way to avoid saying that the elder Mr. Drake had lived in such isolation in this house built for him in the midst of a fog-ridden marsh that he hadn't even shown himself to his steward, but left the man notes of instruction. These missives told the steward precisely where to place each of the paintings, bronzes, medieval manuscripts, weapons and gemstones the reclusive owner ordered his agents to purchase. It had been the chief topic of conversation in Wisbeach for the first five years of Mr. Drake's peculiar residence, but after eight, it had again lost place to Lord Leicester's prize bulls and the weather—only to receive an enthusiastic revival recently at the news of the old man's death and of his famous son's imminent arrival.
"That's just as well," Sir Sheridan said. "He seems to have arranged for several entertaining pitfalls for the unwary when he built this place."
"Did he?" Olympia was trying, with limited success, to keep her eyes decently averted from his body. But she was cheating. As she peeked, he suddenly shuddered: an uncontrolled, startling move.
Sheridan crossed his arms and rubbed himself amid the shivers. "Deuced cold in here," he said between his teeth—which was certainly no lie, though he mentioned it chiefly as bait to draw this implausible creature out into the open about her motives. He had yet to determine what she wanted out of him, coming unchaperoned and uninvited as she had; whether it was money, blackmail, minor sin or complete seduction, or just a tale to boost her backwater status among the local gossips.
She looked up at him through the ridiculous mess of wet feathers on her hat, her face obscured by ostrich plumes except for the plump, winsome curve of her chin and one cheek. With the intense silence that seemed to characterize her conversation, she held out the blankets Mustafa had given her. As they slid from her shoulders, he had an intriguing closer view of her high, generous bosom, nicely adorned by moss-colored satin trimmed in black.
Sheridan had spent a sizable portion of his recent visit to London in observing the current state of feminine fashion—from both inside and out. He judged Miss St Leger's costume to be expensive and strictly in style, not to mention appealingly hourglass in shape. However, his concern with fashion being only a minor extension of his interest in what was underneath, he was well aware that the silhouette had little to do with the figure inside it. In this case, he felt, the initial inspection clearly warranted further investigation.
As a first step toward carrying out his dishonorable intentions, he made a brief, noble issue out of taking the blankets, gently refusing to accept them until she was practically begging him to leave her in the cold. The odd little chit became almost frantic over it, to the extent of offering him her redingote, too, and babbling on about how he must be unused to the climate, having just arrived from the Mediterranean. She actually began to unbutton her collar.
He watched in astonishment as she stripped off the coat. His suspicions heightened. He wondered if this weren't some ploy to get her undressed, in which event he could expect Outraged Papa through the door at any moment.
The awkward disrobing revealed an abundant figure in a stylish green gown, with a large diamond pendant at her throat. Sheridan glanced down at the offered redingote, mentally transforming the pearl buttons and expensive braided trim into shillings. He looked up hopefully. If Papa was this well padded, Sheridan hoped he'd hurry, and he needn't have gone to so much trouble, either.
"Miss St Leger," he said, as amiable as the spider to the fly, "it's far too cold for either of us to stand here. Won't you join me somewhere more comfortable?"
The feathers on her hat bobbled. It was like talking to a sheepdog. He resisted the urge to stoop down and peer up at her from below, instead throwing the blankets around his shoulders and drawing her firmly onto his arm.
He cast about quickly for a place to take her, and settled on the tiny study near the front door as the only suitable option. It had been used recently by the steward, which suggested it was relatively free of his father's vicious pranks. It also contained a sofa of convenient length for criminal conduct.
Mustafa appeared with a tea tray just as they were crossing the hall. While Sheridan settled Miss St Leger on the couch, Mustafa successfully re-created the din of a minor war with the coal scuttle. The skirmish, including full artillery, ended with Sheridan sending him to the devil—in Arabic, so as not to offend delicate feminine ears—and building the fire himself.
He sat down next to his guest. "May I take your hat, Miss St Leger?"
Her fingers curled. Behind her, a bank of tall windows painted with a collection of fictitious heraldry dyed the light gold and green, bringing out deeper colors in her dress. She fiddled with the comer of the leather book in her lap, saying nothing.
"Are you hiding under there?" he asked, careful to keep his tone light.
She hesitated, and then said, "Yes. I suppose I am."
He liked her voice. It made him think of sable pelts, husky and soft. Sheridan reached up and gave the green ribbons a gentle tug, pulling the bow free. "I'm afraid, Miss St Leger, that I must claim the right to actually see whom I'm entertaining. How do I know you aren't one of those
sthaga
fellows, come in disguise to assassinate me?"
A poor topic for levity, that, since it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility and thus no joking matter.
"No," she answered, very serious. "I understand you to mean the thuggee sect of India? Why would you think so?"
He ignored that piece of witlessness and lifted the huge, drooping mass of millinery from her head. She instantly lowered her face, staring at her lap, so that nothing was visible of her beyond the cluster of sunflower curls that framed the netted bun on top of her head. Intrigued by the curve of one plump cheek, he lifted her chin and made her look toward him, ignoring her flinch as he touched her.
His first impression was of green eyes, wide as a baby owl's and just as solemn. Dumpling cheeks, a straight nose, and a firm little mouth—all ordinary, and all in common female proportion. There was nothing notably strange about her features—and yet it was an odd face, the kind of face that looked out of burrows and tree-knots and hedgerows, unblinking, innocent and as old as time. If she'd had whiskers to twitch it wouldn't have surprised him, so strong was the impression of a small, prudent wild creature with dark brows like furry markings.
Strangely, she made him want to smile, as if he'd just pulled aside a branch and discovered a nightingale staring gravely back at him from its nest. He found himself reacting in the same way, consciously containing his moves and his voice, as if he might startle her away.
"Hullo," he said softly, giving her a light, suggestive chuck beneath her plump chin as he let her go. "Honored to meet you, Miss St Leger."
She held out the book. "This is for you."
Sheridan looked down at the small volume. He opened it in the middle, read a line of some French nonsense about the "social compact," and then a phrase asserting that when a prince told a citizen it was expedient he should die for the state, that citizen ought to die.