A Soul of Steel (10 page)

“I cannot tell you how many times I thought about Berkeley Square when I was abroad,” he said fiercely. “It came to symbolize the innocence of England in a world vastly more dangerous. Once I found myself captivated by that crueler, older world. Once I thought I could be at home in that landscape of clashing opposites and raw gemstones and crude hopes. Yet I always came back to dreaming of England, particularly of Berkeley Square. Remember a day when I surprised you and the girls and their friends—little wren-haired Mary Forsythe, remember her? You were barely taller and older than they, playing blindman’s buff. I joined in for a few moments. Do you recall such a day?”

“I—I may,” said I, brushing the black cat hair from my cream wool skirt. I could not quite look at him, so my eye focused on Lucifer, disapprovingly. “That animal is most inconsiderate of his leavings! Perhaps I could spin these wasted quantities of his hair into yam and put some part of him to good use in my crochet work. Did they spin cat hair in Afghanistan, Mr. Stanhope?”

He was regarding me strangely. Indeed, my face had blossomed with sudden warmth. I was again that speechless girl of two-and-twenty, not a woman of the world who could regard a corpse without blanching and had resisted the overtures of such scandalous persons as Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt. Now a virtual stranger was unraveling me simply because he had seen me as I was and would not be again, and had not forgotten.

“You do remember?” he pressed so eagerly that I had not the heart to deny him.

“Yes, I do. You were... amused by me.”

“Not amused. Surprised. You always seemed so grave and stern in company, like a little tin soldier sent out from your father’s parsonage in Shropshire. Huxleigh, the prim and proper governess. Then there you were blindfolded, stumbling about the schoolroom like a schoolgirl yourself. How shocked you were to find me suddenly in the game.”

“Yes, I was. You played a rather... startling trick on me. I had not meant for any of the family to see me in such an undignified state.”

“But it was charming! I knew, of course, your circumstances. How your father’s death had left you orphaned; how well suited you were to teach my dear nieces. Yet it must have been difficult for one so young and strictly reared to shepherd girls so near to her own age.”

“Not difficult at all! The girls were delightful, the situation most pleasant. I often... recall those days, that day, myself. We were all so innocent then.”

“Yes.” His hazel, searching eyes turned inward again, much to my relief. “We were all so innocent then,” he parroted in an astringent tone.

The silence grew so long and awkward that I cast desperately about for some safe topic of conversation, for a matter not rooted in the past, but the present.

“But you must tell me about yourself!” I blurted with forced brightness.

Those pale, piercing hazel eyes penetrated me as a knitting needle transfixes a ball of yarn. “Why must I?”

“It is what... old acquaintances do: they recall former times by revealing more recent ones. I merely wish to make conversation.”

He frowned at me with suspicion. “Why should you wish to make mere conversation now? You had no time for such frivolities years ago.”

“Obviously, I have consorted with the frivolous since then.”

“Indeed.” Amusement crimped his mouth. “I can see that you are vastly changed. As am I. There is no point in conducting a Cook’s tour of my alterations; they are visible enough in my appearance and my circumstances.”

I leaned forward in my eagerness to convince him. “But you left England a young officer on the brink of a brave military adventure! Your family was well connected, your future promising—er, not to say that it is no longer so, of course. What I mean is....”

“What you mean is that Miss Huxleigh desires to know the full extent of my fall from what this world calls position and what some might call ‘grace.’ You wish to satisfy your curiosity about how I have come to such a low state.”

“No! Not I! I wish to know nothing of a sordid nature. Though your... er, circumstances, of course, are not sordid. I merely wish to offer the solicitude of one who knew you when, when—”

My blathering discomfort finally stirred him to response. His brown hand, surprisingly warm, clasped mine as he confessed, “My dear Miss Huxleigh! You must forgive a man who has led a hardened life among a foreign people for failing to realize that only Christian concern motivates your questions. Of course I see that it is your duty to learn as much of me as possible, so that you may better minister to my depraved soul. But, I warn you, my confidences may be shocking in the extreme. There are certain episodes involving the harem of the emir of Bereidah and various social practices of the Kafir tribesmen in regard to manhood rituals—”

“No!” I snatched my hand back though his grip was disconcertingly firm. “I wish to know none of this. It is Irene who has an insatiable appetite for unseemly knowledge, not I.”

“Ignorance is bliss,” he quoted. I detected an unbecoming slyness in his tone that I chose to ignore.

“Ignorance is peace of mind,” I returned.

“But you shock me,” he went on.

“I? How could I shock anyone?”

“You underestimate yourself. For one thing, you seem utterly in the control of this American woman.”

“That is untrue.”

“Yet you spy for her.”

“I only inquire into matters that are for your own good. How can you expect anyone to help you unless you reveal yourself?”         

“I expect no help.” His uncompromising tone sent chills through my veins. Gone was the merry youth who had stooped to play a schoolgirls’ game. The man who spoke now could kill, I think, and he was no longer amused by me.

“I did not ask to be taken to this pleasant cottage,” he went on, “to be charitably tended and uncharitably interrogated. I suspect you have no personal interest in me at all.”

I blushed, this time from an all-too familiar emotion, shame. “I didn’t wish to pry, but Irene is determined to help you. She insists on aiding anyone caught in the skeins of a puzzle that is beyond their ken. There is no arguing with such an impulse.”

“Irene, Irene! You quote her as the vicar cites Scripture on Sunday. Can you not speak for yourself, Miss Huxleigh?”

I straightened. “You misunderstand our relationship. Although I have at times... assisted Irene in her good works, shall we say, I have never hesitated to give her the frankest benefit of my advice and opinions on any subject.”

“I am sure that she is much the better for that,” he murmured. “So you admit, then, that although you seek the secrets of my past on your friend’s suggestion, your own curiosity—your own sense of duty, I should say—requires you to ferret out the truth.”

“Of course. It is clear that you have led an adventuresome and possibly irregular life. Any decently helpful person would wish to understand the difficulties you have faced so as better to encourage you to... to put the past behind you and resume the life you left.”

“And you always try to be a decently helpful person?”

“I do hope so.”

He reached again for my hand, and indeed he was an invalid of sorts. A charitable woman can hardly withhold comfort from such a person, no matter his state of grace, or lack of it. Yet my heart began to beat most unevenly as his lean brown fingers brushed my palm and his eyes burned into mine with a mélange of amusement and keen insight and an odd flicker of challenge.

I was appalled to find that during our conversation I had unthinkingly leaned nearer and nearer the bed, until we seemed to be in conspiratorial closeness, something resembling what the confessional must be for the Papists. The thought crossed my mind that whatever poor Mr. Stanhope might confide in me, I would be the judge of whether it was fitting or proper to pass on to Irene or not... and he had leaned toward me, as well, as the moment stretched into a strangely unsettling silence.

I scarcely knew what to think, could scarcely think at all, gazing into his hazel eyes....

Then Lucifer, finding his luxurious position pinched as Mr. Stanhope shifted upon the bed, leaped down between us. We both started with surprise, and bent simultaneously to prevent the cat from landing askew when a sound like a sharp clap of hands exploded in my ear.

My heart spurted into a racing rhythm not at all pleasant as Mr. Stanhope seized my arms and conveyed me to the floor, falling atop me. The cat screamed like a banshee and writhed away between us. Before I could catch my breath to protest this indignity as loudly and more articulately than Lucifer, the door of the chamber sprung open so violently that it clapped back against the wall like thunder. My heart pounded even harder in the charged silence.

Godfrey and Irene stood on the bedchamber threshold, the small revolver so familiar from Irene’s early adventures poised in her hand. I lay smothered and speechless in the tight clasp of Mr. Stanhope, unable to stir if my life had depended on it.

“When I asked you to entwine yourself in Mr. Stanhope’s affairs, my dear Nell,” Irene drawled in odious amusement, “I did not expect you to take my suggestion so literally.”

While I sputtered without the breath to defend myself, Godfrey went swiftly to the window and from the side, flung the shutters closed. I cannot recall whether Mr. Stanhope helped me to rise, or I him, but we at least struggled halfway up before Irene raised a hand (not the one bearing the revolver, I am happy to report).

“Pray do not be overambitious of rising in the world just yet, my friends. At least come nearer the door.”

And so I was herded like some two-legged sheep to the threshold, where Mr. Stanhope and I were at last permitted to stand upright. I put my hand through Irene’s arm for support—Mr. Stanhope had offered himself in that role quite enough for one morning—and kept my eyes averted, not knowing what kind of foreign bedclothes our guest might be wearing—or not.

A whistle from the garden below caused Irene to tighten her grasp on the pistol. Godfrey cocked his head to listen intently beside one window. Then the amiable French of our coachman André shouted up the all-clear from below:
“Pare, Monsieur, Madame
—
pare.”

Godfrey released a breath and strode for the bed, where he began flinging the pillows about.

Lucifer, on the floor, shook himself in royal outrage and strutted before us as if to demonstrate his valor, pausing only to swagger against each of us in turn and leave a swath of black hair glistening like a decorative horsehair band on our skirts and—I risked a glance—on Mr. Stanhope’s quite respectable white linen nightshirt, no doubt borrowed from the coachman or Godfrey.

As Godfrey wreaked ruin on the pillows, feathers drifted over the disrupted bed’s pale linen landscape like the winter’s last and fleeciest snowflakes. I wondered why they had sprung a leak.

“Nothing here,” Godfrey muttered. “So far.”

Mr. Stanhope joined him in pillaging the pillows.

“I do not understand,” I quavered to Irene.

She patted my hand where it curled around her forearm. “Someone has shot at you, Nell, or at Mr. Stanhope, rather. Or perhaps—” the stimulation of a new thought gave her face a look of radiant delight “—at you both! Most interesting.”

I found myself unwilling to cling to such a cold-blooded defender and moved my hand to my heart, which pumped feebly but evenly beneath my basque.

“Here.” Mr. Stanhope’s hand blended with the walnut finish of the left rear bedpost over which it hovered. “The bullet hit here.”

Godfrey went over to look, then whistled softly again, a most vulgar habit he had acquired since meeting Irene. Certainly I had never heard him whistle when engaged upon the practice of the law in the Inner Temple off Fleet Street.

“Went clear through,” Godfrey said. “The power must have been tremendous.”

Mr. Stanhope’s forefinger filled the path the murderous bullet had ploughed through the wood. “An air rifle,” he declared.

“Air rifle?” For once Irene sounded at a loss.

Mr. Stanhope eyed the revolver in her rock-steady hand with passing respect, then answered briskly. “A modern weapon, Madame, and deadly. The bullet is propelled by a burst of compressed air, and in the hands of a master marksman... Such weapons are sometimes used for shooting tigers in India.”

“We are not tigers,” I protested.

Mr. Stanhope regarded me—dare I say?—fondly.

“No, Miss Huxleigh, we are not.” His expression darkened. “Though I was once, in Afghanistan, called ‘Cobra.’ “

Irene lowered her weapon but not the stern regard of her magnificent eyes. “I believe, Mr. Stanhope, it is high time for you to enlighten us all about what you have done since leaving England a decade ago.”

Stillness—both of sound and motion—swelled in the small bedchamber as the tension does at the climactic moment in an opera. Then the cat Lucifer bounded across the rough floorboards, his claws skittering. Something clicked against something (I fear the chamber pot). Godfrey bent to retrieve what Lucifer had found for a plaything: a large misshapen blot of lead that even I recognized for a spent bullet of awesome and lethal size.

Chapter Nine