Elisabeth Fairchild (20 page)

“And now, you three-legged fool,” Val boisterously interrupted as they stood sipping. “Do you mean to join us in the shooting match?” He waved the carbine he held too negligibly at the hunting cronies who followed him like a Greek chorus. “So that you might have a larger vessel for the downing?”

The vessel he referred to was the pewter tankard that stood as prize for the shooting match.

“I leave the prize to you,” Alexander downed the last of his champagne, and handed the glass to Oscar. “Hold that, will you?”

One of the well-muscled lads asked in amazement. “You do not mean to compete?”

Alexander leaned down to untie the ribbons that bound him to Penny, another chance to acquaint himself intimately with the enticing sight of black stockings amidst a froth of white petticoat, a leg he would like to know even better. Blood rushed to his head.

“Cannot be as good as he claims.” The tallest lad addressed his fellows.

Alexander paid them no mind, his attention on the loosing of the knot, on the delectable twitch of flesh beneath thin stocking every time he accidentally touched Penny Foster.

The third lad said, “Made it all up then did you? Ha! I’ll wager no one’s that good.”

Oscar, dear Oscar, drawled in his defense. “You’d lose, lad.”

Val’s laugh rang flat and humorless.

The black ribbon fell away, loosing their knees, black satin snake against his hands. He almost wished he might have left it there, for her knee moved in its freedom, away from his. Her skirts smelled of lavender, and something else, something intriguing and subtle.

He glanced up, feeling flushed--heated. Wanting to leave this argument. Wanting her. She looked not at him, but at Val--a disappointment.

He glanced at Val himself, surprised to find a sad little smile on his lips,  a knowing smile, as if Val read his mind.

“Would you not prove yourself, Cupid? Display your prowess?”

Alexander looked down, at their shoes, side by side. There were still ankles to untie. “I told you, Val. I’ve lost all taste for shooting.” A hand braced against her hip, he dropped to one knee.

Val  loomed over him, swaying. “But you must, old friend. Prove me an honest man. I have boasted that there is no steadier hand, no keener eye.”

This knot was smaller, tighter, the ribbon crushed. It would not easily come undone. Her skirts brushed the side of his head, petticoats rustling. He did not look up. “Kind of you to say so, Val, but I’ve no intention of competing.”

“Lacks courage,” someone murmured.

He set his teeth, struggling. The ribbon seemed to slide a little. Did he imagine it?

“What do you know of courage, lad?” Val snapped. “I did not see you in uniform, now, did I?”

Alexander closed his eyes, and wondered if he ought to cut the ribbon.

“Through the heart, every time, our Cupid,” Val persisted. “Never missed a shot.”

“Except this one,” Alexander said firmly, agitated. Still the knot would not budge.

Her hand brushed his hair. He glanced up, into eyes that understood.

“Let it go, Val,” Oscar murmured.

“Enough of this,” one of the lads said. “We must sign in if we mean to win that tankard.”

Their voices grew distant. The knot gave, slid free, allowing their separation when he would have liked their union better.

She did not move at once, though she must have felt the ribbon fall. She stood, looking down into his eyes, while his hand slid from the back of her knee to the fullness of smoothly stockinged calf. “There,” he said.

She stepped aside, and as she moved, skirts wafting lavender, he identified the subtle, musky smell. She wanted him.

“I did not think you serious, Cupid,” Val said, unexpected in his return.

Alexander rose, clutching black ribbons, his eyes for her, and her alone. “I am serious,” he said. “Quite serious.”

She met his gaze but briefly, lashes falling to hide the desire in her eyes, cheeks flushed.

“Fine words,” Val drawled, circling the pair of them. “Noble words. We have, all of us, on occasion, noble intentions, but given the right prize I daresay, even you would change your tune.”

Alexander gave him a cursory glance as he wound the black ribbons about the palm of his hand, smoothing wrinkles, wishing Val would go join his hunting cronies. “You’ve nothing to offer that would so tempt me.”

“No?” Val watched him wind the ribbon, then cast a suggestive look Penny’s way. “Do not be so sure, my friend. I have the notion that you would quite happily join our competition . . .”
“Never.”

“Not even if I were to offer, say for instance, the return of a certain young person . . .”

Penny went very still.

“From boarding school.”

How pale her face. How solemn the expression with which she regarded Val.

“For what purpose, this return?” Alexander asked.

Val shrugged. “Oh, let us say, to escape an outbreak of the smallpox.”

A gasp from Penny. She turned, fear in her eyes.

Val was not yet done. “Said child would, of course, need to be placed in the care of some local woman, someone trustworthy, someone of unblemished reputation.”

Alexander frowned.

Val thrust forward the carbine, hand shaking in the holding of it, and yet he wore the confident look of a conqueror.

Alexander could not look at Penny. He knew what she wanted. Instead, he stared at the carbine, forbidden fruit in this Eden, and Val the snake.

“No,” he said, and heard the sudden, startled intake of her breath, and still he could not look at her, even when she turned and fled. He faced Val instead, and asked him flatly, “What game do you play at, Val?”

“Game?” his one time friend repeated sarcastically, mouth twisting. “Why, hearts, of course. At what else would Valentine and his Cupid play?”

He came after her, of course, to try to explain, and she did not want to hear, could not imagine anything he might say that would soothe the hurt of his refusal. The ghost of his touch still clung to her knee, her ankle,  and she did not know what to do with her feeling for him, did not know what she should say, or think, or feel. She did not want to care again, for the wrong man--to find her judgment terribly flawed.

Why would he refuse to help Felicity? It made no sense to her.

“Penny!”

She ignored him, continuing to stride away, the apple trees reaching gnarled arms above her head--tortured looking trees, to bear such wondrous  bounty.

“Penny, please!” He ran. She could hear the thump of his boots, the shortness of his breath.

Lady Anne, Lady Anne
, she thought, and leaned into the gnarled trunk of one of the older trees, and waited for him to catch up to her.

“How could you?” she whirled on him as he drew close.

He stopped, several strides distant, evidencing concern, and yet he was suddenly such a stranger to her she could not begin to guess what for.

 “You know how much she means to me!” she said.

He nodded, sadness in his eyes. “Yes.”

“As much as a daughter.”

“Perhaps too much,” he said.

She felt as if he had slapped her. Her thoughts seemed torn from her throat. “Have you never loved anyone so much?”

His lips parted, but no words came.

“A sibling? Your nephew?”

He closed his eyes, opened them again filled with sadness and something else, was it pity? For her? It made her angry.

“Yes.” The word was no more than a whisper.

Her voice rose. “And yet you would risk her life? The life of a child? I do not understand.”

“No.” Again the sadness.
“How can you say no, to such a simple thing?”

“Not simple at all.”
She stared at him, baffled.

“You would ask me to surrender my very soul.” Voice low, he bent to pick up a bit of dead branch, and on it a withered apple.

He shocked her to silence.

“On my soul . . .” he cradled the apple a moment, thinking, then held the branch as if it were a carbine, sighting along its length. “I made sacred vow that I would never take up arms again.” The apple dropped to the ground with a dull thud.  “Never take another life.” He cast aside the stick.

“What about saving a life?”

“The child’s?” He toed the fallen fruit, and shook his head. “Val would never risk his own daughter. He has sunk low, but not that low.”

She stood gazing at him, unconvinced, still fearing for Felicity. “You would not do it for me?”

He  sighed, turned away, shook his head.

Tears burned her eyes. She pressed her hand to her mouth to stop them, to stop more words, hurtful words, from tumbling free.
Oh, Lady Anne,
she thought.
What can I say to convince him?

“You must realize that I care for you, Penny.” He stared up into the trees. “But do not ask me to forsake a sacred promise. Not even for love’s sake,”

Love’s sake?

All joy was taken from the idea in his saying, “I am not given to self-sacrifice, as you are.”

Like blows the words hit her.
I am not given to self-sacrifice, as you are.

Pained, she set off again, wanting nothing more at the moment than to be gone from his company, from the potential of more hurtful words. But then the perfect question came to her. She could not let it go unasked. Breath catching on a sob, tears streaming unheeded, she turned to him and said, “Do you really think God gave you an extraordinary talent for no better reason than the killing of Frenchmen?”

He frowned at her. “You assume my talent is God given. What if you are wrong?”

She had no reply for such a question, and so she merely turned her back on him, on the promise of happiness she had once read in his eyes, and weeping, heart broken, ran away.

Chapter Twenty-Two

He was right, of course.

Oscar won the shooting match. Val’s aim was off.  Master Wharton threw down his gun with an oath, and later had to be carried home, so drunk did he get.

 Penny went home, heart aching, feeling betrayed by the man she had come to trust above all others, turning Alexander Shelbourne’s condemnation over and over again in her mind.
I am not given to self-sacrifice, as you are.

He said it as if self-sacrifice were a bad thing. Was it? Was it not worse to be selfish,  as he had proven, in refusing to shoot at a target for the sake of a child’s safety?

For two days, whatever she was doing, she thought of him with rancor, pained regret and yearning. On the third day, her anger vanished. She was left with nothing but pain and yearning.  She wondered when they two might meet again, and mend fences.

He set out on foot that morning, from the King’s Head, under a clouded sky, bird song like laughter on the air. The Eden chuckled beneath the old bridge. The air smelled of fresh turned earth,  of new beginnings, and Alexander was ready to begin again, to put regret, guilt, and unfulfilled longing behind him. Where he would go, he was not certain, but he had booked passage out of the valley with the coming week. Today, a nice long walk would clear his head, and make him forget his awful parting with Penny Foster, with Val. If not peace, he might  at the very least, gain fresh perspective.

His mind turned in one direction, his feet in another. Striding over a rise before noon, he was met by the bark of a dog, a flash of black and white streaking toward him. The man-eater, who came, not to eat him, but to laugh and thrust his head under Alexander’s hand for a nosing. Then, ears pricked, he raced away again, toward the road.

Before him stretched the Foster holdings, sheep dotted on greening pastures, the garden patch, rich and dark against the white stone wall of the lambing barn where more sheep milled, and the familiar figure of a woman wend her way among the woolies. With a wry chuckle , and new purpose, he set off toward the house. He must speak to her, must try to set things right, or if not right, at least he would bid this woman he had thought to love for the rest of his life, farewell.

The dog, ever alert, was barking again, this time at a man on a horse--a familiar, battle hardened bay who trotted past the dog without a sideways glance.

What was Val doing here?

The bay clattered into the courtyard, scattering sheep, Artemis at his heels--stopping near the house, which stood empty to his insistent knock.

“In here,” Penny called from the lambing barn where she, her father, and two of the shepherds stood ankle deep in straw and the cry of the ewes, their hands bloodied by sheep who lambed early, sheep who bleated and cried with such mutual discomfort she must concentrate all of her empathy and energies in trying to save those she could, least she fall into an ineffectual despair of weeping.

He strode across the farmyard, not at all the figure she had hoped to see. Not Val  she longed for--Val, who threatened Felicity’s well-being, who had wedged himself, and his evil intent between she and the man she had given heart to. She steeled herself against his intrusion, no time for a wastrel today.

“I found this in the bottom of the watering trough.”

One of the shepherds knelt beside her, beside the struggling ewe she thought to lose within the hour if it followed the pattern of the last. In his hand, a soggy bit of browned plant, a distinctive seed pod still clinging to its leggy stem.