The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet (30 page)

But Cora was still on her hands and knees, observing the grass a few inches from her face. “I want to die,” she muttered.

“I think it would be best if you all left us here,” Lord Francis said, taking one of the blankets and draping it over his wife after first removing the earl’s coat. “We can get out of our wet clothes. And Cora needs a little time to recover.”

He could see at a glance about the group that they all
understood. Cora was huddled under her blanket like a lopsided tent, her bottom elevated higher than her head.

“Come when you are ready, then,” the earl said. “We will have hot drinks ready for both of you and enough water for two baths. Take my hand, Michael. We will stride on ahead. Is Mary too heavy for you, Jennifer?”

“I will help with her,” Samantha said. But before she left with Jennifer and the child, she knelt down and set her hand lightly on Cora’s head. “You were wonderfully brave, Lady Francis,” she said. “How I admire your fearlessness.”

“Bravo!” the marquess added quietly. “It is one thing to look up at a height and think it is nothing at all. It is another to be up there looking down and knowing that there is a very real danger of falling. My congratulations on your courage, ma’am.”

“Oh, Francis,” Samantha said, “your poor coat. And it was so splendid.”

And finally they were gone.

S
HE COULD HEAR
that they were gone. She knew that he had not. She wished he had. She wanted to be alone. She wanted to be a million miles away. Preferably dead.

“Get out of your wet things, Cora,” he said. His teeth were chattering. His voice came from somewhere above her and then she felt a dull thump close beside her. He had thrown down his coat. His poor ruined coat. It was the second coat of his she had caused to be ruined. Something else fell on top of it. He was undressing.

“There is no one here,” he said, “and no one will come back here. You will feel better when you have taken off your wet things and dried yourself and wrapped yourself in a blanket. I will spread our clothes out in the sun. They will dry in no time at all.”

What he said made sense. But there
was
someone
there. He was there. She did not want him to see her. She was so very
ugly
. She wriggled out of her dress under the protective covering of the blanket and then, after a little hesitation, out of her chemise. She hauled off her silk stockings. One shoe had still been attached to her foot. The other was not. It was probably resting on the bottom of the lake. She teased the pins out of her hair and pulled at the matted mess. It was hopeless.

“Here,” he said. “Take a towel.”

“The blanket has dried me,” she said. “Francis, I have never been so mortified in my life.”

He was silent for all of two minutes. She suspected he had walked a little distance away to spread their wet clothes on the grass. Then he was sitting beside her, wrapped in another blanket she saw a few moments later. He somehow knocked her off balance and then caught hold of her and turned her so that she was sitting beside him. It was very deftly done. She clutched the blanket closer and tried to hide her head beneath it—without much success.

“There really is no need to feel embarrassment, dear,” he said, freeing one bare arm and setting it about her shoulders. “What you did really was very brave. I do not know how Gabe would have got Mary down without you.”

“Probably with great speed and dignity,” she said.

“No.” His fingers were combing through her hair, easing their way patiently through the matted knots. But his hand stilled suddenly and he fell silent. Cora could see it coming as if it were a mile away and galloping inexorably toward her. She hunched her shoulders and braced herself. “Cora, you
cannot swim
?”

“I never could learn the trick,” she said. “Edgar tried to convince me that water is heavier than I am, but I have never been able to believe it. I expect to sink like a
stone when I lift my feet from the bottom, and I always do.”

“Then how in thunder,” he asked, “did you save Bridge’s young nephew?”

It was too embarrassing for words. She had tried to
tell
everyone at the time, but no one had been willing to listen.

“I jumped in without thinking,” she said. “And I caught hold of him and tried to save him. But I was only dragging him under with me. Fortunately we were right beside the bank and Edgar reached out and grabbed us both. He told me afterward that it was obvious little Henry
could
swim and that he was in the process of doing so when I dived in. Left to myself, I would have
drowned
him. Edgar said I was brainless—he is forever saying that—and I was. And so I became a great heroine while Edgar was censured for cowardice because he did not jump in. He said it was unnecessary because little Henry was so
close
.”

It was a lengthy, horrible tale. And now Francis too would know just how great a fraud she was.

He threw back his head and shouted with laughter while her stomach contracted with humiliation.

“Cora,” he said when he had finally brought his glee under control, “you are priceless. Only you! You truly are the delight of my life.”

She finally succeeded in burrowing her head beneath the blanket. She set her forehead on her knees and clasped her arms tightly about them.

“I want to go home,” she said.

His hand stilled again on the back of her neck. “No, dear,” he said. “There is no need. Truly there is not. What was embarrassing to you was proof of your great courage to everyone who watched. They will be waiting for you at the house, Cora, to thank you again. Believe
me, they were all overcome with admiration and gratitude for what you did.”

The thought of going back to Chalcote was frankly terrifying. But she had not meant that. “I want to go
home
,” she said.

His voice sounded sad. “We will go then, dear,” he said. “Tomorrow morning. I have been missing Sidley too. We will go home and spend what remains of the summer there.”

“To Bristol, not to Sidley,” she said. “I want to go home to Papa, Francis. Where I belong. You must stay here with your friends. You will be happier when I am gone. We will both be happier.”

She was on her back on the grass then, the blanket stripped right away from her face. And he was looming over her, a frown on his face while his eyes searched hers.

“Cora,” he said, “what is this? I have hurt you? But I did not laugh in derision. I laughed because I was amused by your peculiar form of intrepidity. You act first and think later when you perceive that someone is in danger, do you not? It is a delightful aspect of your character. But I ought not to have laughed. I am so sorry, dear. You needed comfort and I laughed at you. Please forgive me.”

His face blurred before her vision. “I am so
ugly
,” she said. Ugly inside and out. She was so abject and cringing and self-pitying. She had never been like this before
not
rescuing little Henry and before being taken off to London to meet the
ton
. Before meeting Francis and being
stupid
enough to fall in love with him. She had had some dignity once upon a time.

“Ugly.” He repeated the word without expression. “Ugly, Cora? You?”

“I am as tall as a man,” she said. “I have large feet and hands. And I am—I am a
lump
. I have a coarse face and
a bramble bush for hair. I am
ugly
and you must
hate
me.” There. How was that for groveling, sniveling self-flagellation? And she hated herself too at that moment. And hated herself for hating herself.

“Cora.” There was amazement in his eyes. She blinked her own and saw it there. “I can remember your concern about the size of your feet, though they have never looked noticeably large to me. I had no idea that you perceived yourself as ugly. I am amazed. Almost speechless again. How can you not have realized how very beautiful you are?”

“Ha!” She would have been proud of the world of scorn she threw into the single syllable if she had not been feeling quite so wretched.

“Cora.” He wrestled with her for a moment, but he won—of course. Her blanket parted down the middle and she lay fully exposed to his view in bright, sunny daylight. And view her he did, moving his gaze slowly down the full length of her body to her toes. “You are quite out of the common way, dear. I think I would have to agree that your face is not pretty in any accepted way. It has far too much character for bland prettiness. Your hair is—glorious. I have been selfishly glad since our marriage that only I am permitted to see it at its most glorious, when it is down. Your body—well, perhaps I had better bring up the memory of my humiliation on our wedding night. I—ended it all far too fast because I had lost control. Because of your—beauty, Cora. You are truly—magnificent. You see how tongue-tied you always succeed in making me?”

Francis. Always so very gallant. She reached up an arm to touch his face but let it drop to the grass again.

“I wish I could be beautiful for you,” she whispered, “as she is beautiful.”

“She?” His eyes snapped to hers.

“She is so small and dainty and pretty and blond-haired,”
she said. “And so sweet too. I wish I could be those things for you, Francis. Or better still, I wish I had said no when you asked me. I meant to say no, but when I opened my mouth to say it, yes came out instead. She is as lovely as I have always longed to be.”

“My God.” He lowered his head to rest his forehead beneath her chin. “You are talking about Samantha. You know! Ah, Cora, I had no idea you knew.”

She threaded her fingers through his hair. “It is all right,” she said. “You said yourself I was not the woman of your choice. But you have always been good to me, Francis. I think I would like to go home, though. Home to Papa.”

“Ah, Cora,” he said, lifting his head and looking down into her eyes. “I would not have had you know for worlds, dear. If there were someone with whom you had been infatuated not long before our marriage—and indeed, perhaps there is—I would not want to know. I would feel inferior, insecure. I would know that you did not marry me for love and I would imagine that you did love him—that you still do. I wish you did not know about Samantha.”

She smoothed her hands through his hair.

“I must admit,” he said, “that despite the great contentment I have found with you in the month of our marriage, I was a little apprehensive about seeing her again. I need not have been. I walked to the lake with her earlier and all I could see was you—your tall elegance as Samantha described it
with envy in her voice
. All I could think about was you and how I wished we were at home alone together in our own haven of domesticity. All I could think about was being with you and talking with you and laughing with you and loving you. Perhaps for me it is as well I came here. I have discovered just how deep my feelings are for you. But it has been a less pleasant experience for you. Don’t leave me.

Please don’t leave me. Give me a chance to make you as happy as you can possibly be with me. To make you love me as I have come to love you.”

“Francis.” She smoothed her fingers over his temples and through his hair. “I really am brainless. I fell in love with you even when I still thought—oh,
you know
.” She could feel herself flushing.

He smiled slowly at her.

“Besides,” she said with a sigh, “I could not really go back to Papa to stay, Francis. At least I do not think so. I knew it all along but ignored it. I have to stay with you. I think we are going to have a child. Nothing has happened since our marriage and something should have happened more than a week ago.”

He lowered his head again to rest between her breasts. He said nothing. But she could hear him drawing in slow, deep breaths.

“Francis,” she said wistfully after a while, looking up at tree branches and fluffy little clouds and blue sky, “do you really not mind that I am so large? Do you really think me a little bit beautiful?”

He groaned.

“My breas—My bosom is not too large, Francis?” she asked him anxiously. “My hips are not too wide?”

He was grinning when he lifted his head. He was also flushed and there was a certain look in his eyes. “Shall I prove to you just how very beautiful and attractive you are to me, dear?” he asked.

“Here?” Her voice had gone up a few tones in pitch. “Now? But would it not be dreadfully improper, Francis?”

“Dreadfully, dreadfully so,” he said. But one of his thumbs was already feathering over one of her nipples.

“Francis,” she said, “you
never
behave improperly.”

“Shall I stop, then?” he asked into her mouth without removing his own first.

“No,” she said hastily. “No, I will never tell anyone. I promise. Oh, what are you doing now?”

But what he was doing was so very pleasurable that she gave no more thought to daylight or sunshine or impropriety. At least not for a long, long time.

T
HEY WERE LYING
side by side and hand in hand on the grass, gazing up at the sky. He thought he had probably been sleeping for a few minutes. He had never before made love in the outdoors. It was an experience well worth repeating and one he certainly would repeat since he appeared to have a very willing partner in impropriety. He squeezed her hand.

“They will be wondering back at the house where on earth we are,” he said. “Perhaps we should begin to think of going back.”

“I shall die,” she said, but she sounded reasonably cheerful at the prospect of her own demise.

He could not resist. “They probably all know very well what we have been up to,” he said. “They will greet us with rosy faces and shifty eyes.” He had no doubt that it was the truth too.

“I shall die!” she said with considerably more conviction.

“And they will all be purple with envy,” he said. “Doubtless none of them have ever had the courage to do what we have just done.”

“Someone might have
come
, Francis,” she said. “I would have died.”

“Actually,” he said, “while you were panting and mindless with passion, a dozen or so gardeners did emerge from the trees. They did not stay long, though. They were very discreet.”