A Soul of Steel (14 page)

“No, we could not! That was far too long ago, and he has changed much. He tried to say that I have changed, which is utterly untrue. He even tried to say that I was adventurous, can you imagine? He behaved most... strangely, Irene. I did not know what to make of him. And then... then—”

“Then, Nell? Clearly something of great moment has occurred.”

“No, it is nothing! It would be nothing to most women, I know that. I am being a silly goose, but I don’t know what to think. I—I don’t know what to feel. Except that I have the headache from not knowing anything. Oh, ignorance is not bliss!”

Irene took my hands, which were as cold as ice and knotted around each other, into each of hers. “How true, Nell; ignorance is no virtue, and to feel ignorant is a great indignity. How has this Stanhope man managed to make you feel inferior?”

She sounded dreadfully angry. “What has he said? Has he had the arrogance to denigrate your former place in his sister’s household? Does he dare hold to your supposed difference in stations despite his fallen circumstances? I am weary beyond words of these European notions of ‘place’!

“They are cruel and archaic, whether coming from a so-called king or an ex-officer of Her Majesty the Queen! I will not have such a person in my house, no matter the personal danger he faces, not if he dares to offend you!”

Irene’s grip on my hands had tightened alarmingly, and she made to rise again.

“Irene, no! He has done no such thing. No offense of that sort was given. Quite the contrary. He has... violated the very heart of his heritage. He said that I was the embodiment of England, and then he—he kissed me.”

“He what?” Irene sank back into her billows of nightdress, her features as slack as a drowning person’s.

It was harder to say a second time. “He k-kissed me.”

“Oh my.” Her mouth closed again.

“You knew that something had shifted in the terms of our acquaintanceship since this sudden reunion. That’s why you were always urging me to spend time with him.”

“Yes, but I did not expect him to kiss you.”

“I am relieved.”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“Where did he kiss you?”

I swallowed. “By the window.”

“Not where in the room, my darling ninny!”

“Then where... where?”

“Where upon your person?”

“Really, Irene. That is too... personal an inquiry.”

“It makes all the difference.”

“Truly? How?”

“In analyzing the event.”

“You speak as if we were discussing one of your investigative matters.”

“We are.” Irene sat back, brisk and clinical. Her change of manner relieved me. Suddenly we were dissecting an interesting deviation of remote behavior. I began to believe I could learn something from my bewildering experience and my even more bewildering reaction to it.

“Quentin has been under great emotional stress.” Irene began to enumerate his stresses on her fingers. “He is still ill from fever, and has recently survived an attempted poisoning and a shooting. He has encountered a figure from a past he renounced before it could reject him, at least in his own eyes. He feels he has neglected to right a past wrong that he witnessed, which now may cost a man his life. He has long lived apart from his own kind—and from all the conventions of the society that nourished him—as penance for some perceived failure, of which he will not speak.

“A most thoroughly romantic figure, Nell,” Irene finished with a flourish. “And yet, in the midst of all this peril, he pauses to kiss you. Why?”

“Yes, why me?” I wailed. “I am the most unlikely person for such a man to fasten upon. I have led a sheltered life, despite his misguided admiration for my ‘adventures.’ He must be mad!”

Irene laughed. “No,
you
are. He does admire you, as do I and Godfrey. You are the fiber that holds our flights of fancy to earth. We rely upon you, Nell. For sense. For correction. For innocence. No doubt Quentin sees that in you also. Perhaps he had thought all that lost to him.”

I nodded soberly. “Then you believe that he is sincere.”

“Oh, a man may be sincere, my dear Nell, and still be dangerous. Now where did he kiss you?”

“I thought we had decided why he did. Where should not matter.”

“It always matters, as does how. A man may kiss one’s hand as either a social gesture or a seductive one. He may kiss one’s cheek as a greeting or an invitation. He may kiss one’s lips as an old friend or as a new lover.”

“I see,” said I, and I did.

“And?”

“And I see that such information is none of your affair, Irene.”

This time I struggled upright, not easy to do after hours of crouching on a closet floor. My ankles buckled but I braced myself by grasping a shelf edge. “Your comments have been most enlightening, but I really do not care to discuss the matter further. Good night.” I opened the door into the darkened hall, blinking, then smiled over my shoulder at Irene.

She was still sitting on the floor, her head leaning on her hand, her arm propped on her knee. She looked most unsatisfied.

“Are you coming to bed?” I asked airily.

“No,” she replied. Her tone was almost acid. “I am staying here. To think.”

On that ominous note I closed the door and tripped off to bed with a lighter heart and an unspoken chuckle. I was seldom privileged to know a secret that Irene was mad to learn.

Chapter Eleven

WHEREFORE ART THOU?

A mere
ceiling is seldom praised in song or story as the source of revelation, but when my eyes opened on morning, I knew that my life had changed. At first I only sensed the miracle of daylight filtering through the lace festooning the window and bathing the rough plaster ceiling in sheen and shadow. Then, on that blank parchment, slowly, the memory of my retreat to the linen closet flashed into my mind with the starkness of a daguerreotype—along with the incident that preceded it.

Mortified, I pulled the covers over my head, forming a linen tent. How Irene must be laughing at me! And Mr. Stanhope! Quentin....
Oh!
The early birds’ muffled caroling sounded like titters through my makeshift linen closet. What a fool I must seem—to everyone!

At last I crept out of bed and into my clothes. Ordinarily I arose first, save for Sophie. Neither Irene nor Godfrey was sufficiently industrious in the mornings. Indeed, both of my friends practiced the decidedly un-American and un-English inclination to linger abed well past the breakfast hour. Had they not been models of energy later in the day, I would have been forced to ascribe their habits to slothfulness.

This morning I blessed their tardiness. I had no wish to accost anyone in the passage—oh, dear. I recoiled into my bedchamber after cracking the door to the hallway. A step. Had I heard the creak of one of the ancient floorboards? I had no desire to see a single occupant of the household until I should compose myself.

The door inched ajar at my push. I again peeped out into the murky passage. Someone shoved the door closed. Well! I did not appreciate such games, and would confront whoever played them. I swung the door abruptly open. The passage was empty, not even dust motes danced in the tunnel of light from the far window overlooking the stable yard.

The door wobbled on its hinges again. I looked down.

“Lucifer!” I hissed in annoyance; the name sounds especially sinister when whispered.

The black cat curved around the skirts swaddling my ankles, self-satisfied Shadow Incarnate. I whisked up the surreptitious beast and closed my door, then tiptoed down the hall, pausing at every squeal of the floorboards. The dark and narrow staircase was equally vocal.

My heart was pounding as much as... as much as it had the previous night. At last I stood on the front-hall paving stones. Lucifer billowed down from my arms and shook himself.

How peaceful it was to be up—alone—at dawn. My breathing eased to match the placid tick of the parlor clock, a rococo French porcelain affair much decorated with roses that ill suited this dwelling so humbly called a country cottage. Congratulating myself upon my discreet avoidance of any awkward encounters, I moved toward the music room and froze at a shrill squeak from my first footfall upon the flagstone. Was even mute stone to turn traitor and betray me?

The squeak repeated, though I had not moved, and declared itself:
“Arrrack!”
drifted from the music room. “Cassie want a crumpet. Cassie want a crumpet. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.”

I hastened into the chamber, where the parrot cage sat shrouded in chintz. Such nightclothes were supposed to silence the creature.

“Hush,”
I hissed, lifting the cover to fix the parrot with my most imposing look. “You shall get neither crumpet nor rum from me, or anyone, if you do not keep still!”

Feathers ruffled into upstanding rows of green. The bird’s jet-black pupil shrank to a pinpoint as it sidled away along the wooden perch, squawking: “Cassie want a strumpet. Cassie want a strumpet.”

“Now where did you get that?!” I plucked a leftover grape from the ceramic dish that served as Casanova’s dinner tray and quickly silenced the bird.

He lifted a revolting foot to take the grape into his claws, tilting his head as quizzically as Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick. Then the fierce scimitar of his yellow-gray beak darted at the grape’s ruddy surface.

I backed away, hopeful that Casanova would remain distracted, but an unholy yowl issued from beneath my feet. Lucifer, of course. So much for discreet early rising. So much for gathering my shattered nerves. So much for deciding upon a calm course of meeting the house’s inhabitants.

“You are up even earlier than usual, Mademoiselle Huxleigh.” Sophie stood in the doorway, and spoke with disapproval.

“So I am. I have decided to improve the parrot’s language skills. Such birds are said to learn more easily in the early morning hours.”

“Hmph.”
Sophie gave one of those Gallic shrugs that bundle indifference, skepticism and superiority into one portmanteau gesture serviceable for all occasions. “A pity that men are not parrots. My husband wishes to do all his learning at night—in the bistros.”

Thankfully, she vanished before I could muster an answer to this statement. I did not wish to think of men—and the night—this morning. Lucifer had cast himself down on the carpet in a spot that in several hours would be drenched with sunlight. Evidently he preferred the afternoon.

Casanova was whistling and crooning to himself as he ravaged the grape. I arranged his cage cover over the back of a rush-seated chair and went to the window. Here the interior shutters opened on the garden, which lay under a glistening net of dew, its colors lush in the returning sunlight.

I did not wish to contemplate gardens, either, so I went to the bookshelves and hunted up and down the spines until the graceful gold letters of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
caught my troubled eye. I retreated to an upholstered chair and here I intended to read until the others arose and breakfast was served. If my hunger grew irresistible before then, I could always beg for one of Casanova’s grapes.

Perhaps an hour and a half later the venerable boards overhead began creaking in succession. By then I was deep in
Paradise Lost.
Casanova began croaking in time with the protesting architecture. I steadied myself, preparing to look and behave with perfect calm. After reading Milton for ninety minutes I had no difficulty miming a state of utter ennui.

Hence I was installed at our breakfast table blissfully supervising the brewing of my morning tea when the master and mistress of the house descended.

Irene honored me with her sharpest examination, all under the guise of accommodating her Paris morning gown of sky-blue silk on the rush-seated chair. Godfrey wore a maroon house-jacket over his shirt and tie, along with an air of utter innocence. But then he had been a barrister, and they habitually assume such poses.

Apparently, our guest did not yet feel well enough to join us at table. I breathed a sigh of salvation when I saw Sophie lift a laden tray and clatter into the hall passage.

“Did you have a good night, Nell?” Godfrey inquired in a robust, brotherly tone.

Irene darted him a warning glance. “Do have some sugar in your coffee, darling!” she urged with such unusual domestic solicitude that he was immediately distracted from awkward questions. Godfrey frowned as he stirred the offered sweetener into his bitter brew. I could see the moment when he recalled in whose company and in what room he and Irene had bid me good night. I had never seen Godfrey off balance before, but he gave a passing imitation of it then.

“A... fine morning it is,” he said next. “Would you care for some coffee, Nell?”

“You know that I never drink that vile foreign liquid.”

“No. Of course not.” Godfrey returned the modern aluminum pot to its stand. He resumed stirring sugar with more vigor than called for, the spoon scraping the china with predictable shrillness.

“Tea is a foreign beverage,” Irene observed, sipping smugly, “and some consider it vile, too. If we wanted to honor our ancestors, no doubt we’d have ale for breakfast.”