The Proposition (41 page)

Mick blinked for a few seconds, squinting as if he might bring it into more realistic focus.
This
was the home where Winnie had lived? This was what she had lost?

The structures that made up Uelle were as numerous as those of the town where he was born. They took up more space. A massive gatehouse before a high barbican. A huge, central octagonal keep. A high-spired chapel built in the shape of a cross. Square towers set into walls with arching gates, nestled against round towers that extended upward into turrets. Behind all this, a separate, long, flag-flying hall, with high, imposing bay windows down its entire length.

It was a congeries of civilization, like an old medieval village, yet orderly, the buildings—there were corridors of them—arranged in courtyards around gardens, squared, their corners rising in massive, castellated towers. Uelle was larger than Buckingham. It was older, more a fortress, yet grand, beautiful. And more dramatic for sitting on the far side of the river, alone in the midst of darkening English countryside, meadow and hedgerow.

Princess Edwina. How astonishingly accurate. A princess, deposed, her fall from grace the scope of a chasm: come to reclaim her place, Mick hoped. If only for the night. And he would help.

He'd help, that is, if whatever Emile and Jeremy were planning didn't bind him, hand and foot.

He happened to catch glimpses of their perfectly replicated faces as they leaned forward to stare out the carriage window. Neither man had ever been here before. The fact was written all over their gaping awe; they were as impressed as Mick by the small town of a castle toward which they all headed. So how the bloody hell had they gotten invitations? It was the question of the hour.

He hoped it wouldn't be the question of the evening. It was past time to find out.

Chapter 27

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U
elle. Winnie was surprised to know it still moved her to see the old place. It was a large, squared, battlement affair overlooking the river, though to call it so was truthful without conveying the effect.

Tonight, the torches were lit. As the carriage clattered across the river, the air drifted with the smell of rosin burning at regular intervals in small iron baskets along the bridge. They didn't show up well at sunset, but she delighted to glimpse their fire; they would light up the night. She could see more cressets atop the rampart that rose up from the banks of the river, cups of flame that guttered in the wind, extending in both directions, up and down along the whole length of the castle. An architect, a century ago, had turned the rampart into the wall along a wide promenade that, all along the riverside of the castle, looked down into the Thames. The river below was already coming alive with reflections of flickering light.

After the bridge, the carriage plunged into a tunnel lit by torches, then it climbed out again at the first gate, upward into the lower ward. As they went under the gate, she called to Mick, "See the slits overhead?" He angled his gaze to look out and up, and she explained, "They're for pouring boiling oil down onto the castle's enemies." She shivered and laughed.

They passed under the iron and wood grate, a portcullis, that could be raised thirty feet into the air. Its full drop took less than thirty seconds, its iron spikes coming down with the force of two tons—guaranteeing for centuries that no one entered Uelle without invitation.

Up they climbed through a corridor of guardhouses and outbuildings, their crenels and merlons having once hidden legions of archers. It made her skin prickle. Oh, Uelle, she thought, such a lovely, shivery place—and so suitable for the duke's ball. A place built for the sake of intimidation. An elegant, embattled fortress, the home of knights from centuries past who had brought back treasures that had remained.

They pulled into a courtyard, and footmen rushed forward from the shadows to help Winnie descend into an Arabian-tiled coach entrance. Mick came down behind her as more servants scurried toward them from a dark illuminated by tall windows that bent long, bright, paned rectangles of light over bushes and ground. The sound of people and music rang from inside.

Winnie gripped the hand loop of her evening bag, clutching her own squeaky-gloved fingers. The Lamonts walked past, while she remained transfixed.

Mick hung back with her, silent, taking everything in. She wondered what he'd been expecting. Not what stood before them, it was safe to say. Unless he'd ratted Buckingham Palace, he had no reference point, nothing in his experience against which to measure this.

He wasn't silent, she feared, so much as dumbfounded.

She herself felt a stab of faintheartedness, and she
knew
the rooms they were about to enter. Though she didn't know them as they were—not lit, full of people, an orchestra playing, not as an adult admitted to partake. It was so unnerving. Poor Mick, she thought.

She heard her carriage roll away to take its place in the line of carriages that would wait all night, then before her two doormen pulled back heavy double doors.

Light and music and chatter poured out, amplified, dignified, clinking with crystal, humming with sociability. Inside would be people whom Winnie hadn't seen, save her own students, in a dozen years. Why had she chosen to return? Why now?

To see a joke as she'd imagined six weeks ago? The joke of sending—no, bringing, as it turned out—a ratcatcher to dance in her cousin's ballroom? It had seemed like such a good idea then. Now, if it were a joke, it was no longer funny.

Then, worse, when she glanced over her shoulder for reassurance, she got none: for the man she looked at wasn't a ratcatcher.

Instead, she saw a tall gentleman standing beside her, straight-postured, his top hat at an insanely right—rakish—angle, his shoulders wide as the wind off the river billowed his long dark cloak. Mick. He was shadow and light standing there in the nightfall, the back of him only a glow across his shoulders from the torches, the front of him stark, his shirt and vest a snowy contrast to the black of his evening suit.

And his face. Dear Lord, his face. The brim of his hat cast his eyes into perfect obscurity, while the light from the reception room made the rest—the angles of his cheekbones, his straight nose, the wide, masculine set of his jaw—simply and stunningly handsome. At her side was a mysterious gentleman in a cloak blown by the wind, a cloak that cast shadows across him, its lining flapping eerie bursts of vivid, sheening purple.

For a moment, she didn't know who he was, why he stood there, or why she was beside him. To be here felt unreal.

Then he asked, "Shall we?" And a smile she knew, yet didn't, crooked up sideways, devastating.

She was so taken aback, she asked, "Mick?"

The hat turned, looked right at her, responding to the name. In a whisper, she asked a question in her own mind. "Are you sure you wish to go through with it?"

Without hesitation, he said, "Damn right." She felt a strong arm loop about her waist. He whispered, "I wouldn't miss it."

His hand came up, and his head came closer. He was about to remove his hat to kiss her. But she quickly braced herself, holding him back. She felt a tension in his arm, in his chest where she pushed.

And knew: God help them both, he wasn't intimidated. He was excited.

Full of himself, she thought. His confidence panicked her. "Remember the rules—" she murmured.

"Oh, Winnie," he answered softly. "Don't you know by now? There are no rules." Then he pulled back and laughed—at her, she feared.

She was going to lecture him, bring him down to earth. But as their bodies separated, she felt something—a small, soft weight between them that rested in the lining of his cloak.

"Do you have your gloves?" she asked.

"On," he told her.

"What's that then?" She reached for the weight.

He drew back. "Freddie," he said.

"What!" Her heart lurched quite nearly out her throat. Then, with sudden relief, she put her gloved hand against her chest, onto her shoulder cape. She shook her head. He was tormenting her. "Goodness," she said, "I almost thought you were serious. Don't be so unkind. You terrify me."

He said nothing, only staring at her for a moment. Then quite seriously, he murmured, "I don't want to terrify you."

"Then don't tease me."

Nothing again. Until he said quietly, "All right."

"Are you two lovebirds coming?" Emile Lamont called from ahead. With his brother, he stood just inside the doorway.

Mick offered his arm. Winnie linked hers through it, and she marched forward.

They left their wraps with the servant in the cloakroom with only minor incident. Mick hesitated to turn his handsome new cloak over to the attendant till she encouraged him. "It's fine," she whispered. "He'll keep everything sorted and watch over it. You can leave your things. Everyone does."

That was the last of any awkwardness on his part. Shed of their wraps, he took her gloved hand and threaded it through the crook of his arm. All awkwardness became hers: She felt like a cliff-diver as they walked out to be announced. Once, she'd gone with her father to watch a man who dived from cliffs at Dover into a deep shoreline pool of the English Channel. She couldn't understand why the man kept doing it or how he did it at all without dying.

That was how she felt, as if called upon to participate in a free fall that might kill her, when she heard: "Lady Edwina Henrietta Bollash and Lord Michael Frederick Edgerton, the Viscount Bartonreed."

She and Mick walked out onto a huge landing that overlooked a monumental staircase leading down into the ballroom. Winnie drew herself up, having to remind herself to breathe.

Mick, it seemed, had to remind himself to proceed slowly. As they began down the stairs, he murmured under his breath, "Oh, look at the size of this room! Oh, my God. I can't wait to dance you out onto that floor—look at the size of that floor!"

And the number of people. Dear Lord.

And every single one of them seemed to stop and stare up.

As they made their way down, Winnie stole sideways glances at him, looking for a kindred spirit: and not finding one. He held his head up, a faint smile on his face, perfectly calm, as if he walked down a hundred twenty-seven wide marble stairs—she had counted when she rolled jacks and balls down them as a child—every day of his life. Dashing. That was the word for him. Dashing, handsome, perfectly pressed, perfectly tailored, and poised.

The poise was his own. The rest was a complicated overlayer of clothes, speech, and manners, applied to a ratcatcher whom she kept trying to see, yet couldn't. Where was Mick?

Instead, she watched the ghost who had materialized now and then in the course of Mick's instruction. Only now, the ghost had taken over his skin. When she was younger, she would have had difficulty speaking to such a man as walked beside her. Words would have stuck in her throat.

Where was Mick? She couldn't find him.

Could anyone else?

She lifted her pince-nez when she thought she recognized the Baroness of Whitting from the teahouse. Indeed, it was—the woman saw them, too, and began toward them from the far end of the room. The baroness's presence was expected. Less expected, Winnie saw two couples she was fairly certain had been in the same teahouse six weeks before on the day Mick had made his less than graceful entrance into it. Oh, dear, oh, dear. She spotted also several of her former students. One of them, the lovely young duchess, turned the moment she saw Winnie, lifting her skirts in a careful, ladylike hurry, waving as she approached—which she was not supposed to do.

Nonetheless, Winnie felt nothing but relief to see the greeting. She smiled back, trying to appear cheerful.

She wanted to enjoy herself, she really did. But how? She couldn't with so many people watching. And Mick—he was worse than the dress he had brought her. He attracted attention. People stopped to stare at him. New blood. New gossip. A new bachelor for the mamas to look over, for the papas to chat up. And for the young ladies to sigh over. By the hush, it was obvious the entire room was studying him for one reason or another. Him and the tall, freckled woman who came down the stairs on his arm.

The orchestra in its balcony overhead came to the end of one waltz, then without hesitation swirled into the notes of a new one—the opening strains in praise of another river, a beautiful blue one that flowed through Austria.

Then, on the last stair, just before she and Mick touched down into the room itself, a little gathering at the side opened up to reveal at the end of a corridor of stiff, staring people—

An empty chair. A woman came around it toward them. Vivian, if Winnie remembered correctly, Xavier's much-younger wife.

There was a carpet that ran from the stairway to the empty chair, like a pathway to homage. Only the man to whom one usually paid it at this point was nowhere in sight. Mick and Winnie followed the carpet toward the duchess, making the required approach. She met them halfway, as if to make up for, to hide, the insulting, empty chair—an indication of what the duke thought of her arrival, Winnie feared.

She brooded over what to say, how not to whimper out something meek and self-effacing to Xavier's wife. How to respond after so many years, with apparently still so much resentment between Winnie and a cousin who absented himself from his own gathering. Mick, however, solved the problem.