Dark Season (40 page)

“Clouds and trees and maybe a gorse mill,” he’d said. “That sort of thing.”

“Sounds dull,” Isidore had responded. “What would Goya say?”

“Exactly,” said St. Aubyn, and both men had laughed.

She heard a rustle and glanced at the tree branches overhead, and in that moment, she tripped again. Isidore let her arm go, and she tumbled onto her knees. Stunned, she looked up at him. He grinned and stubbed his toe into the earth, pitching over, his arms windmilling in an exaggeratedly graceless display. He caught himself, of course, with his hands, when his face was a few inches from the ground, lowering himself soundlessly to the damp ground. The man couldn’t even playact clumsy.

“We fell down,” he whispered, crawling over to her. He rose to his knees and pressed against her, his mouth moving over hers, hot and slow. Ah, this kiss, with the scent of the woods all around them, newborn shoots, decaying leaves, rich and dark with life and death, this kiss was everything.

“Fall down then,” she whispered against his mouth and pushed him, hard, on the chest. He obliged her by tipping over, landing flat on his back in the moss. She sat astride him, skirts bunching, staring down at his broad body pinned beneath her.
Mine,
she thought. And then, as he wiggled suggestively beneath her, situating himself more firmly between her thighs, so that the heat flickered between them:
Ours.
She leaned over to devour him, but he devoured
her,
sucking in her tongue, taking her lips between his teeth, until she gasped and rocked on his lean hips. The wind blew lightly through the trees, and the whole world seemed to stir. She had to straighten, to stretch into it, the shifting light, the cool air growing even more fragrant. His hips were still between her thighs, but he lifted his torso, curled himself up so he could unbutton the bodice of her black day dress, pushing it down from her shoulders, sliding the laces from her linens beneath, baring her. His roughened hands closed on her breasts, making her arch, making her want to roll backwards and pull him on top of her, opening her legs so he could plunge between them, driving her into the ground. But there was something so delicious about the idea of remaining upright, as though she sprouted from him and from the earth beneath him. She slapped his hands away.

“Fall. Down,” she said and threw her weight against him, driving
him
into the ground, dragging her breasts up his chest, the buttons on his shirt catching at her nipples. Oh God, she loved the way it stung, the half notes of pain that made the pleasure sing. She reached for his face, but he caught her wrists and pulled her forward, so her breasts hung above his mouth. She shuddered, twisting her spine as his tongue laved her, gravity and his suckling working together to torture her. The pulling ache was beyond her capacity for endurance. She had to press her breasts against his mouth. She jerked her wrists free and worked herself down his body, ripping the buttons from his shirt.

“Ella,” he said, lifting his head. She kept prowling down and down. She yanked the shirt from the waistband of his trousers and reached for the buttons of his trousers. She could feel him straining beneath the fabric, his cock hard and thick, humped like a tree root, and she tugged at the buttons, reaching through the flap. She pulled it out, roughly, with her hand. His eyes were glazed, stunned. She moved her hand along the length of him, looking at his face, her lip caught between her teeth. His chin jerked up; his throat tensed. The crown of his head pressed into the leaves. She leaned to kiss the flat of his lower belly, felt the muscles clenching against her lips. His cock stood up from his trousers, and she brushed it with her lips, licking the salty skin, and he bucked with his hips, groaning, and then his hands were fumbling in her skirts, pushing them up her legs. He tore at the ribbons that laced the slit in her undergarment, his fingers finding her slick flesh, sliding into her, pressing deep up inside her, and now she groaned, pulsing around him, and her need condensed, became the hot, wet energy that bursts the green shoot through the seed. A germinating violence. She reared, lifting herself, and he slid his fingers free and took himself in his hand, guiding his cock into her folds as she worked her hips down. She gasped as she sank onto him, lowering until he filled her completely, a hot, hard core around which she shivered, quaked.

“Look at me,” he demanded, the cords in his neck standing out as he held himself up to watch her, the muscles bunching in his arms as his hands gripped her, jerking her hips, forcing her to roll her pelvis against him.

“Moan,” he said, the musculature in his abdomen gleaming, each tiny muscle standing out, limned with shadow. He thrust upward, and she moaned, the moan issuing from the plucked center of her being, vibrating out of her throat and into the wind that surged again through the trees, stroking against her fevered skin. Her head fell forward, torso curving over him, until her lips were on his, their moans mingling, tongues twined together, and the heat at the base of her belly flowed up through her, filling her everywhere. The fullness expanded until she was
too
full, and as he pushed up from the forest floor, she went rigid over him, fused with him, stock-still and then shuddering, a thousand tendrils tickling through her, flickering into her fingers, her toes, lifting through the top her skull. He surged a final time, the flats of his hands pushing the moss as he lifted his buttocks off the ground, crying aloud as he dropped back, arms closing around her shoulders, pulling her down with him.

She lay against his chest, breathing into his neck, and finally, she unfitted her body from his, sliding off to curl up against him on her side. Her dress was twisted around her waist; her bare upper body absorbed the soft, prickling damp of the earth. She slid her arm across his chest, and he pulled up her leg so it rested on his thighs.

She heard a rustle again, above them, and gazed sleepily into the treetops.

“It’s an eagle,” she whispered. “Do you think? An eagle flying to the pharaoh to tell him that his love is waiting by the river.”

His voice was deep, rumbling with a note of suppressed laughter. “I kept your boots,” he said, almost guiltily. A sheepish confession. “I made sure they weren’t thrown away.”

“The ones with the laces you cut?” She pressed her face into his shoulder to keep her smile from flying off into the clouds. “The ruined boots?”

Dark, whimsical Isidore.
Her
Isidore.

“Wouldn’t one suffice?” She laughed, imagining it, Isidore stowing her fouled, stinking leather boots in his study among his carvings and violins. As though they were precious. Fairy slippers. Her smile was too big. Her cheeks hurt.

“I didn’t want to take any chances,” he whispered. “What if you disappeared one midnight and I needed to find you?”

It was ridiculous, and she laughed again, rolling onto her knees and standing. The light fell all around, and she tipped her head up and lifted her arms, relishing her nakedness in the hidden glade. Then she sighed, buttoning her dress. It would be teatime soon, and Isidore had meetings with tenants and farm specialists, and she had promised Mrs. Trombly that she would write and tell her if the woodbine was flowering and if the graveyard wanted roses and whether the brook beneath the stone bridge was full or dry. She would tell her too how Castle Blackwood struck her and what songs Isidore had played their first night, standing on the terrace under the moon with the violin pressed to his shoulder. She would tell her that she’d heard eerie sounds in the dead of night but that she’d fallen back asleep and dreamed the sweetest dreams.

She looked down at herself. One of the buttons on her dress had popped off. The skirt was stained and wrinkled about the knees. It would take considerable imagination to suppose that she
hadn’t
just tumbled Isidore in the moss.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Does Castle Blackwood have a secret entrance?” Mrs. Potts had come with them from London to oversee the newly hired staff. There wouldn’t be much dignity in scurrying past them all holding together her gaping bodice.

“If you wait in the trees, I’ll dig a tunnel.” Isidore grinned his crooked grin as he offered his arm. She supposed then that dignity was a small price to pay for delight. They meandered on, their footfalls swallowed by the forgiving ground.

Suddenly a flutter of black and white broke from the green canopy and settled before them. Hopped. A black eye fixed them with a beady stare.

“A magpie,” said Ella. She tried to smile. “Not an eagle after all.” She glanced at Isidore, disheveled as a satyr, twigs in his hair. “You know the nursery rhyme about magpies.”

Silly superstition. Silly to let it bother her. But her heart knocked queerly against her ribs.

“One for sorrow,” she whispered.

Isidore lifted an eyebrow, glancing at the magpie, unperturbed. “I do know the nursery rhyme,” he said. There was a light in his eye. “But you’re not looking hard enough,” he added, bending so his cheek pressed hers. He turned her head and pointed.

“There’s two,” he said, his lips making the words a kiss against her ear, and she saw the other, the two birds together flapping back into the trees. “Two for joy.”

London, England

June 16, 1813

One young lady, going astray, will subject her relations to such discredit and distress as the united good conduct of all her brothers and sisters.

—
Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women

It was a miserable day by anyone’s measure, unseasonably cold, with rain just beginning to fall and thunder rolling across a darkening sky. As Jane burrowed deeper into her black, woolen cloak, a sigh escaping the tight line of her lips, she decided the weather was well-suited to the occasion. That was her father, after all, boxed up in a casket and being lowered into the ground. At least her veil hid the fact that she wasn’t crying.

Not that anyone was there to notice. Despite having passed only two days ago, Lord Reginald Fitzsimmons had been dead to the world these past nine months, an outcast in Society, a scandal. The wages of sin and all of that. When you maligned a war hero and tried to compromise the girl he loved in the process, you were not well-liked. And his passing had made him all the more shameful. He’d died in a pool of his own blood outside London’s most hardened gaming hell, either murdered for his winnings or set upon for sport. The Bow Street Runners hadn’t even mounted an investigation. As if she’d needed a reminder he would not be missed.

Nor would she be, if some unfortunate accident happened to befall her. She was all but invisible now, just like her father, a pariah in the Society that had once prized her. Such a paragon she’d been, no less than the founding patron of The Ladies Auxiliary to Improve Manners and Morals. How amusing to remember a time when friends did not cross to the opposite side of a street as she neared.

She shook her head to clear it. She was not only being maudlin, but also unfair. Not all of them crossed the street. Nor was she entirely alone. Sir Aldus Rempley, Father’s only remaining friend, was here at the graveyard too, a small act of kindness, even if he was a good distance away. Beside another grave entirely, as a matter of fact. Far enough away that no one would see him offering his last respects to a rogue.

Just yesterday, he’d sent a note promising to call, along with a bank draft to settle the burial’s expenses. She should have refused it, of course, but she could no longer afford her pride. The reading of Father’s will had made that abundantly clear. He’d gambled away almost everything in the long, final months of his disgrace.

A cough sounded, recalling her attention to the two men waiting with shovels nearby, the grave diggers, clearly restless. Waiting for the minister to finish, so they too could finish, covering Father’s casket with the dirt piled beside it. Returning him to the earth, and ultimately to dust.

She wished the cleric would get on with it. What was the point of praying for absolution when there was none to be had? Besides, the rain was starting to come down in earnest now, pooling in the dirt, sending streams of muddy water into the pit where Father lay. She could feel it seeping into her cloak and through the leather of her serviceable boots. How she envied the enclosed carriage that had just stopped at the edge of the graveyard. The walk home would be interminable. Perhaps the loneliest she’d ever undertaken.

With a dull sense of detachment, she watched as a postilion jumped down, umbrella in hand, to open the carriage door. A man with a multi-tiered greatcoat stepped out, though she couldn’t make out his features at this distance. He took the umbrella and turned towards her, coming forward with long strides, moving like a shadow through the descending darkness.

Was he here for someone else? She looked behind her, but even Sir Aldus had departed now. Turning back, she lifted her veil, the better to see the stranger’s approach, and her breath caught. How quickly he had come upon her. Benjamin Alden, the Viscount Marworth. It made no sense he was here.

“I am sorry I did not arrive for the start, Miss Fitzsimmons,” he said, his voice hushed. “Please accept my sympathies for your loss.”

For a moment, she didn’t know what to say. He had come here, in the pouring rain, to pay his respects when they were only acquaintances. She ought to be touched—moved even—but instead, she was suspicious. Because Marworth was one of those other people, the kind who’d been born under a perfect alignment of the stars. Parties in Society weren’t counted a success until his arrival. When he wore a new style of waistcoat, men raced to their tailors for the same. And he was almost painfully handsome—blond, with the bluest of eyes and classically sculpted, symmetrical features. The man moved seamlessly through life, encased in a nimbus of perfection. Even the minister had stopped his droning, struck no doubt by the appearance of a seemingly celestial being.

“Thank you for coming, Lord Marworth, and for the protection of your umbrella. A moment later, and I would have turned my back on this whole sorry affair and swum my way home.”