A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (5 page)

Were all countesses difficult? He wondered.

“He’s not a proper earl, though, is he? He’s part savage or some such. American,” she sniffed.

“The Earl of Ardmay is truly an earl according to the King, Lady Fennimore.”

“The king,” she snorted, as if the King had a questionable birth, too. “But as I was saying, Reverend, it’s marriage, and the marriage bed that will open any milksop’s eyes and turn her into a woman.”

Given the events of the day so far, and of his life in general, he was somehow unsurprised to be discussing the marriage bed with Lady Fennimore.

“Oh, they’re all milksops. So tediously easy to frighten. I’d like challenge, now and again! Then again, every well-bred young woman ought to be a milksop if her mother does her job right,” she said authoritatively. “My own Jenny, she’s a milksop.”

He thought of Jenny and her softness and seeming pliancy. But another woman had embedded herself in his awareness like a splinter. He thought of that accent with the “r’s” rolled tight and round and the “bloody” and knew definitively she’d never been a milksop. Though he hadn’t the faintest idea who might have raised her. Or what precisely she was, if she wasn’t a milksop.

“And now I will tell you something, young man, and it has been preying upon me. I’m not long for this world, as you know.”

“So you tell me,” he said lightly.

Her fingers wandered the counterpane and found his hand. He gripped hers. Her hand felt like a scrap of silk stretched over hard ivory; no flesh remained. But it was still strong.

“Mind you, I’ve attended church for as long as I was able. I read my Bible and abide by God’s word as much as anyone can. I was a good wife and I loved my husband very much. But … Jenny’s father wasn’t Lord Fennimore. I loved another man, too, while I was married.”

He hoped she wouldn’t feel the sudden tension in his hand.

Because as sins went, it was an impressive one.

Everything he knew and assumed to be true about Lady Fennimore jostled and shifted in a struggle to accommodate it. He yanked back a rearing reflexive sense of judgment (“Good God, Lady Fennimore!”) they both knew what she’d done was wrong. He did her the favor of assuming she hadn’t done it lightly. All he truly needed to know was what she needed from him now.

And once again, he would need to feel his way through.

Still, it took a moment to recover his equilibrium.

“And you regret this?” he began, carefully.

“Oh dear me, no. I most certainly do not,” she said with relish. “And therein lies the trouble.”

“But you wish to be absolved of the sin.”

She sighed. “I wish I’d the courage to say no, I do not care whether or not I sinned, and take that risk when I get up to Heaven for the final judgment. But I’m about to meet my Maker, and if God saw fit to appoint you my heavenly escort, as it were, then I would like to know how to … ensure a place. I shouldn’t like to debate St. Peter when I arrive or meet with any nasty surprises. I haven’t the wardrobe for Hell.”

“Were you married to Lord Fennimore when you met Jenny’s father?”

“Yes.”

So if she was looking for the name of the sin, it was “adultery,” but they both knew that.

“You see, Reverend, you may never know this, but love, real love, the kind that you fall in, isn’t like Corinthians. The “suffereth long” and “is kind” nonsense. It’s like the Song of Solomon. It’s jealousy and fire and floods. It’s everything that consumes. I defy even you to resist it should it visit you in this lifetime, no matter the circumstances, and I don’t know whether I would wish it upon you. It’s a … beautiful suffering. We have our God and our laws and so forth to tell us how to live, but God made us flesh, didn’t he? And your handsome flesh, my dear boy, seems rather an amusing test of a vicar. Good luck controlling those urges, I say, should the right temptation present itself.”

Heat started up at the back of his neck and the tops of his hands, and he prayed he wouldn’t flush like a bloody schoolboy because Lady Fennimore of a certainty would notice and enjoy it. He wasn’t about to say to her, “For God’s sake, I’m hardly an innocent, Lady Fennimore.” Because he wasn’t. Nor was he about to say, “I have every faith I can control my urges when I’m married,” to a woman who had just confessed abandoning herself to her own.

He just hadn’t lost himself to the pleasures of a woman’s body in … so long. He’d been stripped down nearly to mind and spirit only; his parish owned his body. He worked so ceaselessly the dawn seemed to arrive mere seconds after he fell into bed at night. Desire came in sudden, fleeting, sweet jolts these days—the curve of a woman’s hip as she walked away from him, or the laugh of a woman who reminded him of a certain lusty widow at Oxford who could do extraordinary things with her mouth. Things of that sort.

His thoughts worried over that splinter again. Freckles. Green eyes. A soft, full blur of a mouth.

Lingering with these kinds of impressions was an indulgence he couldn’t afford.

Beautiful suffering. Indeed.

“Temptation assails all of us at some point,” he decided to say, entirely innocuously.

Lady Fennimore studied him. Then smiled at what she recognized as his skillful dodge.

“You’ll forgive me if I torment you a little, Reverend. You see, it assuages a little of my own guilt. Do you think God will forgive me? I cannot regret it, you see. I can only think God is responsible for passion, for God gives us bodies with which to express it and hearts in which to hold it. And he gave me Jenny to remember him by, and surely babies are blessings. My husband never knew, and he loved Jenny.”

She looked up at him hopefully.

Vicars, he often thought, are essentially God’s lawyers on the earth. Interpreters of the law, the finders of nuance, sifters through rationalizations to get at the truth or the need of the moment.

Guessers, in other words.

And once again, he would need to fight his way through the darkness. For he could talk of God’s love, and brotherly love, but the love of the sort she described … it occurred to him suddenly that he’d never had time to mull what it meant to him. The women in the village thought it meant embroidery and jam. He thought of how his cousin Colin, perhaps the most infamous sower of wild oats in all of England, who’d once plummeted from a trellis leading up to a married countess’s balcony, had settled down with his wife Madeline, and how everything he felt about her was in the way he said her name. Or about his cousin Olivia …

He suspected whatever had happened between Olivia Eversea and Lyon Redmond, who had infamously disappeared after she allegedly broke his heart, was a fire and flame and flood kind of love.

Olivia was hardly an advertisement for it.

Still, love of the kind Lady Fennimore described, the kind that owned you, gave you no choice but to surrender, surely wasn’t so common that it should be renounced. No matter the course it ran.

For he’d never known it.

One of the Deadly Sins paid him a fleeting visit: Envy. He was susceptible because a beautiful woman had just embedded herself like a splinter in his consciousness. Suddenly, he wanted to feel again.

“I think there is no question of the sin, Lady Fennimore,” he told her gently. “But you can repent the sin and not the love.”

He hoped she wouldn’t decide it was a heretical notion.

Lady Fennimore blinked. Her head tipped in birdlike consideration; her eyes fastened on him fiercely. He hadn’t been lying; her eyes were lovely, a pale, crystalline blue, enormous and vivid in her sunken face. He imagined her suddenly as a lush young woman in the arms of a lover, at the mercy of a passion stronger than everything she’d grown up believing to be right.

“Why, if that isn’t a clever solution, Mr. Sylvaine,” she allowed almost reluctantly, eyes narrowed now. “I shall do just that.” She sounded pleased, as though he’d given her an alternate route to London, one in which the roads were less rutted, and the coaching inns served fresher beef. She settled back into her pillows with satisfaction.

He was tempted to pantomime mopping his brow. Instead, he said:

“Would you like me to pray with you?”

“If you would. I do like the sound of your voice,” she conceded drowsily. As though everything else about him was wanting. “Something from Common Prayer. You choose it.”

He bit back a smile and slid his fingers into the old, familiar pages. Reflecting that there was nothing common at all about any of the people he knew.

SHE MIGHT HAVE been born in a dirt-floor cottage warmed by peat, with cattle poking their heads in the windows and noisy siblings heaped up in the bed like so many kittens, but she hadn’t lived in the country since she was a small child.

And Mother of God, it was quiet.

Damask Manor the house was called. It only just escaped being a cottage by virtue two or three rooms (there were ten of them) and the outbuildings, but it possessed a measure of charm: An arbored walkway led up to the house; three gabled windows looked out over Pennyroyal Green; it was made of sandstone and glowed in the afternoon sun, and all the rooms a family would live in faced south and were filled with light. A wide staircase led up from a foyer marbled in squares of black and white. The gardens were simple and small and meticulously groomed (by a gardener, yet another person who needed to be paid) and would be awash with roses, she’d been assured, come June. A small bit of farmland was attached to it and could be worked. It was an eternity away from Grosvenor and St. James’s Square and all the estates the earl had owned, all of which were entailed and in the hands of his heir, a petulant, chinless young man by the name of Percival.

But Damask Manor was hers to keep. Because the earl had won it in a card game.

Much like her.

It was fate, one might say.

At the moment, it felt much too large for her, her glowering maid, and the small staff she could just barely afford to keep. She suspected she could shout, and it would echo the way her voice had today when she’d shrieked like a fishwife at the vicar.

She swiped her hands down her face again at the memory. The shame of it. So few people knew of her origins. She really must go up to bed early tonight and hope the shreds of her composure magically knit themselves back together whilst she slept.

A maid of all work had gone to collect the mail from a shop called Postlethwaite’s in town while she was at church, and while Henny saw to the preparation of lunch, she inspected her letters. No invitations, no flowers, no gifts had arrived. She ought to be accustomed to that now, but more than a decade’s worth of being showered with all of those things didn’t fade from memory overnight.

The letter from her brother Seamus first. His handwriting was swashbuckling, with great fat loops and spiky heights. The fact that he’d managed to send a letter at all meant that he’d at least enough money for a stamp, and this filled her both with hope and dread, for Seamus’s jobs tended to be uncertain, often not entirely legal, affairs. He was charming enough, and handsome enough, to cajole his way into a new one with regularity. Some of his other tendencies—a yearning for variety, a fondness for women—tended to interfere with the keeping of the jobs.

You will be surprised, dear sister of mine, to know I have a Job! You will not be surprised to hear I’ve need of a new suit of clothes and lodging or I shall not be able to keep it, and I haven’t any blunt for that. I feel certain you will pay the cost to avoid having me live with you permanently. But we’d have such fun! Ha ha!

I vow to repay you one day. VOW.

With much love (and you know I do love you),

Seamus

She knew that he did, damn his worthless eyes. She would send him money because she loved him, too, and was fresh out of lectures. And God knows she didn’t want him living with her though she missed him.

There was one from her sister Cora, in Killarney.

When she broke the seal, something spilled into her palm. Silky and fragile as a cobweb, it was a lock of red-gold hair from the newest—the sixth—baby.

She was momentarily breathless with longing. Slammed by thoughts of what could have been. By what she’d dared to hope for. All of which she’d lost much too soon.

Evie took a steadying breath before she read.

Her name is Aoife. She is very pretty but has the colic. Timothy is testier than usual. We walk gently around him. All the other children are alive and send their love.

Dry, brief, affectionate: She heard Cora’s voice plain as day. It was a miracle she wrote at all, with six children.

And clever Cora had named the newest baby for her! No English employer of opera dancers would allow her to keep a name featuring a lot of unpronounceable vowels all crammed together, so she became Eve instead of Eefa. Cora never asked for money; Evie sent it as a matter of course. She would find a gift for baby Aoife that would be shared among six children and likely destroyed within minutes or at least dismantled by the boys for other uses. Ah, but it taught survival, she supposed, and flexibility. Certainly Evie had grown up strong, but she was the oldest, and she hadn’t a choice in the matter.

At least Cora’s husband, Timothy, drank less than their own father had, and hadn’t yet run off like their father did though it was possible he was only a baby or two away from doing so. Eve knew how to read between the lines of her sister’s brief letters.

“Testier”. She suppressed a little clutch of fear and crossed her fingers. A colicky baby could make anyone testier. Hopefully, not testy enough to flee just yet.

She’d saved the third letter for last because she wasn’t entirely certain she wanted to open it. She’d recognized the arrogant script, the heavily inked pen, waxed close with the vehement press of a signet.

A seal that might have been her own but for the turn of a card one night.

Finally, she slid her fingers beneath the wax to break it, and in so doing released a Pandora’s box, the London version: Just the script alone conjured the chink of champagne glasses, chandelier light bouncing off jewels and silk and crystal, clever, brittle conversation, endless laughter. Endless wanting of her.