Gypsy Heiress (11 page)

I unclenched my teeth enough to say, “I wonder if you’d be this witty if it were you with the thorns in your legs.”

“Tut, tut, sweetheart. Let it be a lesson to you to wear boots next time you leave the house. Here, try this. Close your eyes and count to a hundred. Concentrate very hard! I promise I’ll be finished before you reach the one hundred and first.”

I had reached fifty-three when he said, “That’s all I can find. Have I missed anything?”

I sat up slowly. “Yes,” I said, “you have. If you would be kind enough to turn your back to me for a couple of seconds, I will endeavor to rid myself of them.”

“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” Giving me a last satirical grin, he stood, scooped up the bucket and, turning his back to me, carried the bucket back to the well.

Pushing my skirts up a little higher, I gingerly plucked three remaining thorns from the inside of my thigh and one from my rump.

“That’s the last of them,” I choked out. Eager and clumsy, I threw my skirt to cover my scratched limbs and rolled forward to my knees. I was pushing up with my palms, taking the weight on my shoulders, and had almost achieved an upright posture when a jackrabbit came whipping through the grass in front of me like a bolt of lightning. I started, stepped backward onto the side of my foot, and fell back hard into the spongy grass.

“I had thought,” said Brockhaven, coming back toward me, “that gypsies were particularly renowned for their sureness of foot. Any bones broken?” He stretched out a hand to help me up.

I was about to assure him that my fall had borne me no ill consequences when Caesar, hot on the rabbit’s trail, came lunging through the grass. I had forgotten about him, and it was obvious that he had forgotten about us as well. Oblivious to everything but the jackrabbit, the mastiff brushed past his master, hitting him just below the knees. Caught off guard, Brockhaven was pitched forward beside me in a nest of grass and butter-colored marsh marigolds.

His fall had so little in common with my conception of an earl’s dignity that I stared and then felt the tickle of laughter begin to rise in my throat. My voice was thick with suppressed mirth as I said, “I was about to tell you, my lord, that in falling I suffered no hurt.”

Brockhaven raised himself on his elbows with some deliberation. “I’m so relieved.”

I was pleased to see that a smile had touched his lips. It was not his usual sort of smile, either, for it was without its faint, ever-present edge of mockery. Instead it was warm and amused as any boy tumbled by his puppy. Small bits of dried leaves and tiny light stems had webbed themselves into his hair and…

“A flower.”

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

“One of the flowers has been caught in your hair, my lord.” My voice quivered with laughter.

He began to brush wordlessly through his dark hair with his fingers, which served to further entangle the golden petals in their glossy bonds.

Perhaps it was the brightness and heat of the spring sun, perhaps some magic drug carried airborne in the glittering pollen, but I began to laugh like a child, made silly and young by the sudden shared ignominity of being hurled earthward by the chase of a bounding mastiff. What unthinking strain it had been to be every moment on guard, and what blessed rest it was to be fleetingly joined in unembarrassed intimacy with this powerful man, this near stranger. Later I wasn’t sure what made me so bold, but truly my intention was only to do him a service. Reaching up my hand to his hair, I plucked the fragile blossom from its inky net. Laughter made me clumsy, and my fingers brushed by accident against his hard cheek, and I felt his skin, smooth and warm beneath my fingertips.

The contact appeared to startle him as much as it did me. His expression became intent and so unfathomable that if I could have captured his image and studied it at length, I would not have been able to guess at his thoughts. He said my name carefully, as though it was an easily misunderstood word in a complex foreign tongue. My laughter fled, and in its place came a fragile calm that hovered like golden ribbons of sunlight streaming through the quiet center of a gale. I was aware of the tongues of warm color that lit his black, tumbling curls, of his eyelashes, thick and dark against the crystal blueness of his eyes, and his lips, well-drawn and firm with their elusive hint of gentleness.

Shame burned in my heart that I could lie and stare so closely at him, and I felt the need to look away. He stopped me with the touch of his hand, his fingers resting lightly on one side of my face, his thumb resting on the other. His hand made no attempt to imprison me, though I felt a bondage as forceful as an iron vise. It would have embarrassed me to pull away like a flirting barmaid. Grasping at indecision, I shut my eyes, hoping that he would stand and walk away.

“Well, that’s something.” There was a quizzical note in his voice. “And I’m not even pulling thorns out. I suppose you know about those giant birds in Africa. The ones with the very long necks…”

“I know. The giraffe.”

“Giraffe isn’t a bird,” he pointed out amicably. “You weren’t listening.”

It was hard to listen and hard to pay attention with him so close to me, with his fingers caressing my skin.

“I was referring,” he said, “to the flightless birds, taller than men, that stick their heads in the sand when they are frightened.”

“Ostriches,” I whispered through dry lips, my eyes beginning to ache behind the squeezed-shut lids. “They don’t really hide their heads. My father had a book by an Italian diarist who said they did not.”

“Lord. Italian diaries,” he said. I felt his thumb trace the outside line of my lips, and the fingers he had rested on my cheek spread out over my face, his fingertips gently touching my closed eyelids. “When I look at you, I wonder…” He stopped, as though he had been thinking aloud and his thoughts were nothing he would have liked to offer me.

I shivered, an involuntary shudder which shook me under his hands; I wished above all else for control, but it did not seem possible.

“Are you cold, little one?” he said. I could tell from his eyes that he knew the trembling came not from an external chill, but from the fire within me that made the air under the willow seem cool by contrast. But to spare me, he lied. “We’d better get up from the ground. Let me help you.”

My body seemed stiff and clumsy as he took me by the arms, bending over me, and the strong upward pull of his grip became the physical manifestation of the heady flow of an attraction. Harmony met motion; I managed to get to my knees, and he was on his knees with me.

His lips took mine tenderly, moving slowly and with languor across my swollen skin, soothing and burning where they touched, tender, yet with brutal effect, for I was ripped from my innocence and thrust, shivering and unprotected, into a new plane of existence. With my senses focusing first on the insistent pressure of his questing kisses, then spreading to encompass his hands at my back, our bodies pressed into each other, the hot brilliant light of the sun, the breeze stirring the grass around us, the birdsong gliding through the trees. And then we were kissing, and I responded as if my life depended on it, as if my body, my mouth, could not get close enough to his.

His arm grew tight around me and held me hard. Sharp, dizzy seconds came and fled, looping together like gold links on a bracelet chain. I couldn’t seem to hold onto who I was, or where I was, or what this meant. I knew only the prickling texture of the air, the drooping green canopy of the willow above me, and the blinding need to be touched and quenched by the man holding me.

My past life seemed like a dream of happy but unknowing solitude, and my blood coursed to the tune of ancient rhythms piped by the Mother of All Things. There was no room in this burning heaven opened to me at his touch for such mundane processes as thought and common sense.

He lifted his lips from me and drew back. Fear began to grow in me as a cool breeze touched my lips, so recently warm beneath his. A cloud passing across the sun dimmed the light, and his face fell into shadow. Slowly my blood cooled, and my brain filled with the underroar of a grotesque, babbling hindsight. Had I gone mad, to kiss with him like that?

It couldn’t have been love that had drawn him to me. Lord Brockhaven was not the man to fall abruptly in love. There had been so many other women before me that he had held and kissed and loved with his body, without his heart; his caresses had not been those of an inexperienced boy.

I bent down my head, afraid of what I might see in his face. Scorn? Indifference? Or that unsettling, unreadable, but intensely powerful expression that I had seen as his lips had raised from mine? The soft whistle of the spring breeze filled in the silence, and the high-pitched call of a green woodpecker came from the woods behind us. And then even the breeze stopped.

Brockhaven made a slight motion, and I tensed, afraid that he was going to force me to look at him. But that wasn’t his intention; he was standing up from the ground and walking a few steps away. I felt cold, ridiculous, and alone, like a lone bookend, and the spring wind dried the moistness from my lips, leaving them parched and sore.

I found my feet somehow, raising from the ground like a jerky wooden puppet.

My voice was a muted whisper. “I shall get Kory…” Any action was better than to stand in his painful scrutiny. On shaky knees I began to walk toward the orchard. I was brought up sharp by the hard grasp of his hand on my arm.

“Don’t panic, child—it won’t happen again,” he said in a strained voice.

“No,” I said hollowly. I had been allowed to visit Heaven, then exiled with the gates permanently locked to me.

“It was my mistake,” he said, on a note of repressed anger. He stood close—too close to me. “A stupid mistake. Put it out of your mind.”

A fierce pebbling of hurt raced through my body at his words. I know it must have shown in my face. How could it not have? But my vision was so paled by tears that I could not see his expression. His hand left my arm and gently brushed my shoulder as if to hold me. Swinging away from him, I ran toward the orchard with Caesar reappearing from nowhere to run after me, yapping playfully at my heels.

As I cantered into the yellow stone courtyard that fronted the stables, I saw Ellen in the corner by the mounting block, handing the reins from her mare to a stable boy. I had hardly time to say, “Ellen, please, I must talk with you,” when a smartly trimmed coach nipped around the drive and passed to where it would stop in front of the columned carriage port.

“My mother!” cried Ellen.

“Do you think she saw us?” I asked.

“No doubt of it,” she returned. “Brace for Trouble.”

Trouble there was, though nothing nearly as bad as I supposed. Lady Gwen called us to her dressing room, poured us both a cup of tea, and favored us with a gentle lecture on why a lady must always take a groom with her when she goes riding. It discourages gentlemen acquaintances from taking liberties, provides protection against wandering vagabonds, aid if she should be thrown from the saddle and—heaven forbid!—take an injury. Our penance would be to dust Lady Gwen’s collection of marble fruit for a month, which was no small chore, since there were one hundred and fifty-seven pieces of it, sixty-two of which were grapes.

When we had achieved the privacy of my bedroom, Ellen confessed to me that she thought we had brushed through it pretty well, considering, and added, “What were you going to talk to me about? I hope that nothing’s happened!”

“That’s just it,” I said, “something has.”

Before I could get out a single word more, there was a knock at my door and Goudette, who is Lady Gwendolyn’s lady’s maid, came into my room, bearing a huge, flower-painted wooden tray that was filled to overflowing with what Goudette identified rather alarmingly as the articles with which she would make my toilet. Ellen kindly explained that Goudette meant that she’d come to furbish me up for tonight. Had I forgotten? This was the first night since I had come to stay that we would dine formally, with Brockhaven and Robert, instead of ladies only in the morning room.

I believe I answered, “Oh.”

Ellen asked if she should leave, and I said no, not knowing what the formidable Goudette had in mind.

With quick, artistic fingers, Goudette pinned my hair on my head and ordered me to strip off my clothing, which was the bare beginning to the painful and embarrassing procedure of having the sun-browned and walnut-stained skin bleached off my body. I had to stand on a thick square of linen holding slabs of cucumber over my eyes while Goudette rubbed caustic creams on my skin and then scraped them off with handfuls of sand. To remove the sand, she scrubbed me with sea sponges and lavender soap in a tub of cold water. It was an unpleasant business, and not one that gave me any kind of atmosphere to tell Ellen about the things that had passed between me and Lord Brockhaven. Instead I told her about the animal that Caesar had chased away from me in the woods. Ellen was lively and fascinated and funny in her remarks, and I slowly began to lose some of the utterly desolate feeling that had preyed on me during the ride back to Edgehill.

As Ellen and I speculated on what animal it might have been, Goudette produced more creams, alcohol-based softeners that stung my rubbed, raw skin. When she was done, I was white and pink, tingling and soft. Goudette was ecstatic at the result, but for myself, I couldn’t see the reason for her eulogies. Really, who cares about having light-colored skin? We gypsies say, “The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

Goudette was not done. With a flourish, she unveiled a selection of shining, silver instruments that looked as though they would have felt quite at home in a medieval torture chamber, and informed me that these were to “do” my nails. Probably that’s what the inquisitioners told their victims when they came to rip out their nails by the root. It took the better part of ten minutes for Ellen and Goudette to convince me that nail trimming, and filing, and buffing weren’t painful. I discovered that they were right; it wasn’t painful, only time-consuming. I could have bitten off the lot in the time it took Goudette to fix one nail. It was not easy to get used to, the habit gorgios have of turning the simplest activity into a ceremony.

Goudette’s final deed was to pluck my eyebrows, which was surely an act of unparalleled savagery. By the time the final piece of excess hair had been torn from my flinching brow, it was clear to me that whatever luxuries the ladies of the gorgio aristocracy may possess are heavily counteracted by miseries that they must endure in the name of fashion. Perhaps it was Moshto’s way of making all things equal.

I was most relieved when it came near to dinnertime, and Goudette was forced to stop her dreadful acts of beautification. I never thought I would be so happy to at last don the strange, revealing gown Lady Gwendolyn’s dressmaker had designed for me. Other than the full-skirted riding habit, it was the first time I was to wear one of the gorgio’s dresses. It was not for me to question the taste of Lady Gwendolyn, but to me it was a poor thing of a dress, not only pale in color, but immodest as well. Gypsy colors are vivid and rich, blues caught from the early dawn sky, green like spring grass after a rain, reds that matched the skin of an apple. The color of the dress I would wear to dinner was a blue as weak and cold as a low moon. The cut of the neckline displayed far more of my breasts than was seemly, and the exquisite drape of the material clung as though someone had damped it, revealing curves I hadn’t known I possessed, and countering the notion that clothing was supposed to cover the body and not expose it. What good is a dress that would show the soil after carrying one load of firewood, or be torn to pieces if worn while helping to push the wheel of a cart out of a rut? As I gazed critically into the mirror at my own reflection, I wasn’t sure why Goudette should stare at me so, and “ohhh” and sigh; or why when Lady Gwendolyn entered the dressing room, she should stop at the door and exclaim, “My dear girl, how proud your father would be of you!” My discomfiture was completed in the hallway when Ellen whispered to me “Liza, you’re a… a… you’re far prettier than Isabella!”

The dining hall was an immense cube of a room, with four pairs of massive crystal chandeliers and wheat-colored walls. The color was picked up again in the upholstery, and the luxurious made-to-order Turkish carpets that spanned the room’s sixty-foot length. Great golden bowls of daffodils added periodic bursts of sunny color throughout, complementing the fires which burned in two of the four fireplaces, driving the chill of rain that had begun to fall outside.

Even without my shocking encounter with Lord Brockhaven this afternoon, I could hardly have felt at my ease in this exquisite chamber.

The lightly carved double doors were so wide that I could enter the room, flanked on either side by Ellen and Lady Gwen, like a pair of gentle sheepdogs herding a bashful lamb. Stepping inside, the first thing I saw, really
saw,
was Lord Brockhaven. An urge swept me to bolt from the room, hide in the stables with Kory, and cover myself with dry straw. Two years would have been too soon to see Lord Brockhaven, after our kiss under the willow, and thinking that made me remember his lips, his hands, the way he had looked at me, and then through me. For the space of a heartbeat, I had the terrible fear that I might begin to cry like an idiot. I tried desperately to suppress the tears, and the hurt, and the agonizing wish to find myself in Lord Brockhaven’s arms again, and regretted that I had not made time to be alone during the afternoon, so that I might have spent my tears and been rid, at least, of those.

Near Lord Brockhaven stood Robert, dressed in a blue coat for evening and holding a delicately etched glass filled with some expensive, hard spirit that I supposed must be brandy. Ellen had told me he had a taste for it.

I focused on Robert, to avoid looking at Lord Brockhaven. To my dismay, I discovered that Robert was studying my face strangely, in the fashion of one who senses a distress and is wondering what could have caused it. It worried me that he might soon be making guesses, so I forced my lips into what I hoped was the semblance of a brisk and cheerful smile.

With a quick, nervous gesture, Robert set his glass on a side table and came to take my hand, though when he spoke it was to Lady Gwen.

“Why is it that the girl looks more exotic now than she did dressed as a gypsy?” he said. “The contrast between her hair and skin… and those enormous brown eyes. We’ll see a lot of hearts breaking over this one.”

“I hope we shall,” said Gwen with a smile. “I think it would do Liza a great deal of good to break a few hearts. Well, Alex, what do you think of your ward?”

It was not my will to look at Brockhaven, yet somehow, my eyes were drawn to him. My heart thumped uncomfortably as his gaze joined mine. For the smallest fraction of a second, I had the odd sensation that it cost him something to meet my gaze, and yet, before that impression had registered in my brain, his blue eyes were calm and unwavering, as much a mystery as always. He ran me over with a disinterested assessment that showed not a flicker of uncertainty, as though he were cataloguing my parts for a ledger sheet as addeds and debits. Finally he gave a rueful, lopsided grin.

“She improves with bathing,” he said, “like the rest of us.”

“An appropriately fatherly accolade,” Robert said, releasing my hand slowly. “Things will be so much calmer now that Alex has reached twenty-five—the age of the elderly immune. Gwen, may I escort you to the table? I’ve had notice from the kitchen that the chef’s trout flambéed faster than thought, and if we don’t sit down and eat it forthwith, we’ll have cold fish and a hot chef.”

Among other things, formal dining for the gorgios means many courses and a great superfluity of table hardware. Lady Gwendolyn had coached me so carefully on its use that if the monster from the forest had leapt into the room, I believe I would have known which fork to use to fend it off, and from which glass I might appropriately take my last sip. I was glad to have the intricacies of etiquette to concentrate on, and surely, since it was my first meal in this room, no one would think it strange if I stared at the glittering reflection of the convex looking glass over the mantel, or the elaborate garland pattern of the plaster ceiling, or even the mirrorlike, hand-rubbed surface of the dining table. I wanted to look anywhere and everywhere, except at Lord Brockhaven.

A footman set a bowl before me of brown soup made with foie gras and swimming with mushrooms as Lady Gwen began to talk to Lord Brockhaven about dressing the third best guest chamber.

“We must have
new
paper on the walls, my dear,” she said, taking a silent sip from her spoon, “though I know it’s an expense. We shall be receiving company, you know, as soon as the season’s out in London, and we cannot put anyone in a room with water-damaged paper! If only Lord Monck had not gone to sleep with the window open during his March visit! Though how he slept through that thunderstorm is more than I can imagine.”

Ellen looked at her mother with innocent surprise. “Why, Mama, d-didn’t you know? Robert and Lord Monck had gone out cocking and returned quite drunk, so Betty told me, and…”

“That will do, Ellen!” said Lady Gwen with unruffled finality. “I wish you will not continue to gossip so with the servants! We shall return to the subject of the paper. Alex, if you will come to the morning room after we finish the meal, I can show you the paper samples I’ve selected as most appropriate. We
could
use the blue mohair flock, which can be had at nine shillings a yard but if we plan to use the Norwich crimson damask, then we will have to pay twelve shillings. Either color will do with the carpet, though I own a slight preference for the crimson. You, of course, must have the final say.”

It was clear from Brockhaven’s face that he little relished the prospect of having to spend time poring over sheets of wallpaper samples.

“Use the red, Gwen,” he said.

“But you haven’t seen it, my dear,” she pointed out, “and the blue
is
more of an economy. For all I know, you may prefer it to the crimson, and if so…”

With a grin, Robert said, “Gwen, Alex wouldn’t care if you’d paper the walls in raw cowhide, as you very well know. You can go ahead and deck the bedroom’s walls in crimson with a clear conscience. If I know you, you’ve ordered it already!”

Lady Gwen denied it with just enough guilt in her voice to lend credence to Robert’s claim.

The footman brought in the fish in Madeira sauce with green peas, artichoke soup, two quail, a custard, miniature potato soufflés, and cucumbers in white sauce, the last of which had the misfortune to remind me of Goudette’s bleaching applications of the afternoon. I stared with melancholy down at my plate while Robert and Brockhaven began to talk about how the plowing was going on the forty acres in the marsh.

There was a sudden shift in the wind and big drops of water began to splash noisily against the dining room window, so the conversation turned to the weather and when that subject had been summarily exhausted, Ellen said to her mother, “Do you know, Mama, that this afternoon on her r-ride, Liza had an experience that was
too
exciting!”

I knew, of course, that she was talking about the animal by the ruin, but Brockhaven, of course, did not. He had been affording the dinner table conversation an interest that even the generous would have been forced to label as tepid, but which changed like quicksilver at Ellen’s words. Seeing his expression made me take in a breath rather quickly and, since my mouth also contained a swallow of lemonade, I began to cough and choke. The room erupted into a flurry of concern, while Ellen tried to make me take a sip of water, Robert and one of the footmen patting me energetically on the back, and Gwen standing by to cluck sympathetically.

Brockhaven’s voice cut through the chatter of my rescuers, telling them to leave the girl alone, for God’s sake, and when I emerged watery eyed from behind the handkerchief Ellen had thrust into my hand, Brockhaven said tartly that in all probability I had been more afflicted by Robert’s vigorous backpounding than by the choking.

When everyone had returned to their seats, Lady Gwen said, “Liza, my dear, tell us, please, what happened?”