Elisabeth Fairchild (3 page)

A mounted guard called out, “I must ask you to leave, sir. No one is allowed inside.”

Her savior faced the guard, raising eyebrows and quizzing glass.

The sternly implacable expression beneath the bicorne faltered. “Mr. Ramsay, sir? I do beg pardon. This way, sir.”

Like moths, singed and tattered by circling too close the royal flame, the bruised and battered gathered inside the gates. Dulcie was not the only lady to have been mauled, not the only female to have lost articles of clothing. Dirtied, bedraggled, most of them shoeless, like molting pigeons, they trailed the feathers of former finery, moaning and cooing, forlornly wrapped in borrowed shawls and the little-girl-dress-up of scarlet cuffed, gold trimmed, Royal Horse Guard blues.

Wilted tulips, women languished in the lawn, disarrayed heads cradled in the laps of attentive jackbooted officers, heated faces fanned with cockaded blue bicornes.

One woman suffered a broken leg. Another her arm. A third had been savagely kicked by a horse. Several ribs had been crushed. They moaned and wailed and fainted with the pain. A few grew hysterical. Dulcie looked for Miss Wendle among them.

“A physician,” it was announced, “has been summoned.”

Dulcie was tossed on the waves of emotion that surrounded her, and yet cocooned in the calm of her savior, protected from stares by his jacket, safe from the world on his arm.

The mounted Guard dispersed the mob outside the gates, despite outraged cries of “I have a ticket.”

“My name is Ramsay, Roger Ramsay,” her companion said with the straying gaze of a gentleman who took stock of all that went on around him.

The name suited him, suited her tongue.

“I am Dulcie Selwyn,” she said.

He gazed at her intently for the merest moment, the cloud of his light swimming beneath his chin and about his shoulders, as if stirred by her voice.

“You need not stay on my account, Mr. Ramsay,” she said softly. “My father’s coachman--my governess, Miss Wendle--will doubtless soon find me.”

“Where might they be in this mess?” He raised quizzing glass to examine more closely the havoc on all sides, looking more the part of a young dandy who required rescuing than the courageous hero she knew him to be.

The gruff cries of the Horse Guard carried bleakly through the gates.  “Move on!”

“Disperse!”

“No loitering now!”

“They will wait for me unless the guards insist they go.”

“I shall send a message to your home that you are safe.” He left her to arrange it.

Fear tossed her stomach as she watched him walk away. Her legs lacked all bone--her head floated, bobbing in his wake--as if he anchored her with his very proximity. It would be a comfort to fold up like a fan on the grass. But she would not. She was not a swooning ninny.

Mournful keening diverted her attention. A woman crouched in the drive, the rags of her dress clutched about her like wings. Her light gathered in an uneven, opaque, grayish ball beneath her chin.

Dulcie crouched beside the poor creature, to rock along with her, gravel crunching beneath her feet. “Hush, hush! Dear lady.” She pulled from her pocket a glass ball on a string, and dangled it just above the woman’s line of vision, the ball rocking like a pendulum--just as Puysegur had taught her. “Watch the bauble. See how the light plays through it.”

The woman rocked in time with the ball.

Dulice crooned softly, “The ash grove, how graceful, how plainly ‘tis speaking. The harp through it playing, has language for me. Whenever the light through its branches is breaking-”

Mr. Ramsay’s gentle baritone joined hers, singing, “--a host of kind faces--”

She looked up, ball swaying wildly, his voice as unnerving as his touch.

No matter. The woman had already gone heavy, her breath deep and even. Her eyelids drooped.

He finished the verse. Dulcie palmed the glass ball, rendered tuneless by his glow.

He smiled, mouth tight, uneven, tilted up on the left side, slightly down on the right, while he studied the world, with an unusual, watchful, questing keenness. Odd, in one so young. His gaze drew her in while holding her firmly, like the glass ball, at arm’s length.

Dulcie whispered in the woman’s ear, drawing words from her childhood, from the mouth of the Count Maxime de Puysegur, the French physician who had crooned to her as she stared into the flame of a candle.

“Peace, my dear. Peace. You are safe now, nothing to harm you. You are tired, so very tired. Close your eyes and breath deep. Slow, calming breaths. With every breath you feel more relaxed, less troubled by worry or pain. Your spirit mends. Your bruises fade.”

For the first time, in the care of a physician, she had relaxed, fearless. The man had no design to cup her, bleed her, force potions upon her. He seemed disinterested in purging her soul of evil humors.

To the smell of beeswax, and the sound of strange, vibrating music, she had fallen into what he called a somnambulistic trance--like the woman before her.

Dulcie encouraged her. “Your body feels heavier and heavier. More and more relaxed. Rest, my dear. When you wake you will feel refreshed and calm.”

The physician, badger-faced, smelling faintly sulphurous, leather pouch of lancets and vials clinking at his hip, knelt beside the slack-jawed woman. “Opiates?” he asked.

“Mesmerism,” Dulcie said.

Ramsay offered a hand to help her to her feet, the tingling heat of his clasp and the curiosity in his gaze lifting her spirits.

“I have never seen the like,” he said.

His awe buoyed her. She rode like a blown glass ball on the current of his fascination.

“A Monsieur Puysegur taught me the technique,” she said, unsure why she felt compelled to tell him.

“Mesmer’s pupil,” the doctor murmured.

Roger Ramsay’s gray-blue eyes narrowed, as if committing the name to memory.

Dulcie addressed the physician. “She is highly suggestible in this somnambulistic state. Tell her she will get well soon. In all likelihood, it will speed her recovery.”

“As easy as that?” Skeptically, he rifled through his powders and nostrums.

She felt the chill of his disbelief, the greater chill as Ramsay abandoned her side.

“Are you a witch then?” One of the guards asked lightly.

Dulcie shook her head, pressed finger to lips and stepped back from doctor and patient.

The guard circled, hand to heart, tone soulful, his gaze full of mischief. “You’ve bewitched me.”

She blushed and ducked her head. Nervously, she pulled the lapels of Ramsay’s coat more closely about her bosom. She was unaccustomed to flirtation, unaccustomed to standing about with little more to cover her than borrowed coat and torn petticoat.

“Your witch already has a familiar,” Ramsay drawled. The fullness of his presence occupied the space behind her, pressing upon her shoulders like a touch. She turned.

An unconscious female dangled in his arms like a dead thing. With understated nonchalance he played the role of hero again.

“Come.” He beckoned with a tilt of his radiant head. “The wounded are to be taken to the Conservatory garden.” He led the way.

Light-headed and useless, she followed up the steps and through a cool, marbled entry hall lined in rich red porphyry columns, the sway of his coat tails mesmerizing. He fell into step with the tattered, limping parade at the heels of the Yeoman of the Guard, their scarlet-coated Pied Piper.

Ramsay slowed, slid a glance in her direction, and adjusted his burden. “We do become more and more familiar by the moment, do we not?”

It pleased her he should say so.

“I have yet to thank you for rescuing me.”

“Any gentleman would have done the same.” His tone, cool, and light--distanced him. It disturbed her.

“No one else lifted a finger.”

“Perhaps you keep the wrong company,” he suggested.

A changeable man. Mercurial. His responses were not at all what she expected of someone with such an intensely cobalt glow.

They passed through a thickly carpeted room, all blue gray velvet, with a painted ceiling. Dulcie craned her neck. A three tiered, crystal chandelier dangled like an enormous diamond necklet from the ceiling.

Ramsay strode the length of the room without a glance. She hurried to catch up through red brocade, gilded Corinthian columns and Romanesque bay windows. But on entering the round room beyond, she paused. She could not help it.

Silver walls were hung with a dazzling array of mirrors, and in them, multiplied, over and over, the startling image of her dejected state. Ramsay did not wait as her steps slowed, as her hand rose to the rat’s nest of her hair. She was reminded of Buzancy’s long distant room of mirrors, endless reflections on reflections, sun gilded dust motes dancing on air. The ghost harp hummed in her memory-- mysterious and haunting.

Dulcie squeezed her eyes shut on the past--opened her eyes to the Prince’s mirrored room, and in the mirror a scarecrow of a girl cloaked in Roger Ramsay’s fine gray coat. She dipped her nose to the lapel. The coat smelled of sandlewood and soap.

She frowned at the mirror, freed the two tortoiseshell combs that held her hair in place, the dark weight of it tumbling down about her shoulders like a great untidy rat’s nest. She tackled the tangles with relentless vigor.

A second scarecrow joined her in the mirror. A woman whose chignon had slid decidedly south.

“Have you a comb I might borrow?” she asked.

The question struck Dulcie funny. She laughed. “I haven’t a dress, but I do have a comb.” She handed the woman her spare.

Chapter Four

Carlton House, London

Their hair tidied, Lydia--she insisted Dulcie call her Lydia, after all, Fate had brought them together in a situation that discouraged formality--linked arms with another of the day’s casualties, a Mrs. Cooper. Together they staggered away from mirrors, in the direction Ramsay had taken, into a vast, echoing, sun-washed Gothic confection of carved arches, stained glass windows, huge, carved Chinese lanterns and an arching ceiling that resembled half spread fans. The traceried shafts and sticks were made up of slender glass panes.  Potted palms added a tropical greenness to the room. The Prince’s Conservatory.

“Oh my!” Dulcie exclaimed. “The light!”

“Amazing!” Lydia agreed, her voice as awed as Dulcie’s. “My husband did not do justice in describing it.”

 Mrs. Cooper exclaimed faintly. “It gives me the headache. I feel wretched.”

Forgetting for the moment the room, Dulcie sympathetically summoned one of the Prince’s footmen. Cots had been set up in the garden. Mrs. Cooper begged his arm, claiming she would very much like to have a lie down.

Neither Mrs. Cooper nor the cots interested Lydia. The enormous dining table, which stretched the length of the room, drew her. Dulcie joined her once Mrs. Cooper was settled, once she had searched the garden for Roger Ramsay and could not find him. The dining table was, after all, what everyone had fought to see.

The Royal china and silver looked ready for a feast. Between the settings, a miniature, serpentine streambed flowed the table’s length, winding between flowered banks, under hump-backed bridges and around a treed island centered in a miniature pool. An intricately carved temple peeped through the trees.

Entranced, Dulcie yet felt his approach. Anticipated it. His presence bumped up against hers with a physical intensity that made her forget everything but him. All senses focused, her heart skipped a beat, cheeks flushed, breath loud in her ears.

“There were live fish,” Ramsay said.

She watched his mouth, wide, generous and tragic, it turned up only faintly when he smiled, unlike the sound of his amusement which rose full blown from his chest as he chuckled. “Dace, roach, gudgeons--little flashes of silver and gold. Royal fish for a royal meal. Very pretty, until halfway through the main course they turned belly up.”

“Oh, no!” She managed to respond. “How dreadful.”

His eyes sparkled with the memory, blue flecked with gold, ringed in deeper blue. A glittering strand of hair, golden-red, fell across his forehead, drifted into eyebrows of identical color. She longed to smooth it back into place.

“Not at all the intended effect. Quite took the edge off a number of appetites.”

“Mr. Ramsay!” Lydia exclaimed, tone chill, a pale tangerine glow clinging to her flesh. “I had no idea you and Miss Selwyn were acquainted.”

The two faced one another like stiff-legged mastiffs.  Ramsay’s drawl grew more pronounced. “No cause for alarm, madame. We have only just met.”

“Mr. Ramsay saved me, Lydia,” Dulcie interjected, distressed by the animosity to be read in her new acquaintance’s gaze. “I would have been trampled, but for him.”

“Saved her, did you?” Mrs. Oswald made the words ugly. “A turnabout, young man, from the behavior generally associated with your name.”

Ramsay’s eyes narrowed. The blue corona around his head and shoulders dimmed. “Truth is not always to be found in idle gossip, Mrs. Oswald.”

She bristled like a hedgehog. “Nor from the mouths of idle young men.”

The mouth in question pinched tight. He rose not to her bait, turning instead to Dulcie. “I hope you will not mind, Miss Selwyn, if I abandon you to the more than capable care of this very good woman. I have urgent business to attend to.”

“You may depend upon it,” Mrs. Oswald snapped.

He ignored Lydia. “I do hope your head mends swiftly.”

Dulcie felt bereft that he meant to leave so abruptly. “Of course. You must go.”

He sketched a bow and would have walked away, had she not begun to unbutton the borrowed coat, saying, “Wait! Sir!”

“My dear!” Lydia gasped.

Ramsay turned, took in the intent of her fingers and smoothly reached out to halt them.

“Keep it,” he said.

The future touched her by way of his fingertips, the image fleeting. She saw these hands, square boned, faintly freckled, unbuttoning--as urgently as he now rebuttoned his coat. Her cheeks burned. Heat rose in her chest and neck. The tightness of his mouth eased. She could not take her gaze from lips she pictured on hers.