Gypsy Heiress (8 page)

There was a certain genius in Brockhaven for manipulating the mood of those around him as he willed. “Knowing me as you do, Vincent, why would you think that I might
not
want the girl?” he said in a tone fine-tuned to the faintly suggestive.

“No!” Isabella cried out through pinched lips. “Take your hands off her, Alex! I can’t bear it, I told you that I can’t!” I think she might have flown at Brockhaven had her husband not caught her forcefully to his side. Neither Vincent nor Brockhaven was the kind of man who allows anger to letter his features, but I didn’t need that to know Vincent was very angry. The fire in his eyes met the ice in Brockhaven’s, and I wondered what subtle barb had been concealed in Lord Brockhaven’s words to provoke such feeling. Surely something more than concern for my welfare had brought Isabella to the point of tears.

“Your insinuations don’t amuse me, Alex,” snapped Vincent.

“I live to amuse you, Vince,” said Brockhaven, lifting his hand from my shoulder. The back of his hand brushed my cheek and I felt the cold of his diamond as it passed over my skin. “Didn’t I just play one of your favorite tunes—so that you could dance?”

Isabella flung herself from her husband’s arms in a gesture of nervous irritation. “Yes, yes! There you have it, Vincent! Alex has got the better of you again, hasn’t he? You
promised
when you married me that you’d take care of my property, and it’s come to this! What good have you done me? When Grandfather turned senile, I wanted to have him declared incompetent, do you remember? I knew he was dangerous, the way he didn’t trust a soul and blithering on and on about his runaway son. But would you let me have him put away? Oh, no, not
you.
You were too afraid of what people would say. Look what’s come of it! That dreadful codicil to the will, a nasty gypsy brat to shame us all, and Brockhaven in control of my land.” She looked away from her husband’s stony face in disgust and rounded passionately on Lord Brockhaven. “Oh, Alex, why did you let me marry Vincent? I wish you’d kidnapped me, carried me away, ravished me! My father would have had to give in then! You’re the only man I know who would have had the stomach to help me get rid of Grandfather before it was too late.”

“Very possibly,” said Brockhaven, “but don’t cast yourself on my chest again, because only one of us enjoys it.”

Vincent’s firm lips had become a grim line set like a sea wall against the bitter tide of his wife’s intemperance. Unlike Lord Brockhaven, Vincent hadn’t elevated the mastering of self to a high art, but as I had guessed, he was well able to shed an inconvenient emotion had he reason. Another man might have been distracted from the thread of his interest. The only attention Vincent dealt his wife was a glance that seemed to file her as unfinished business and might have hid anything from compassion to disgust. Then, as though her outburst had never been, he readdressed Brockhaven. “You’ve carried this far enough. You know, I know, and God knows that with the girl’s breeding it’s going to be hard enough,
hard enough
to have her accepted into her rightful place in society.”

“Vincent, in his unfledged innocence,” Brockhaven said mockingly. “When we publish her bank balance, the ton will swarm around her like worms after buckthorn.”

“Perhaps,” said Vincent, his temper at last beginning to shred, “but even
you
will admit, Alex, that with Gwen away, there’s no female here to chaperon her, and if it becomes known that she’s been living here unchaperoned with you and Robert, there’s not one respectable household in this county or any other that will allow her to set one foot past the door, regardless of whether or not you’re her legal guardian. You might as well put a sign on the girl saying ‘whore’ and march her down Bond Street.”

The door opened with an emphatic click and Robert sauntered in to catch the tail of Vincent’s angry comment. Robert smiled around the room with ludicrously exaggerated good humor and chirped, “I wish someone had told me you four were in here talking smutty. I’d have come back much sooner. Why are we going to parade Liza around like a whore?”

Since Vincent was standing so much as my friend, I am ashamed to admit some feeling of gratitude toward Robert as my avenger.

Eight bullocks in stampede couldn’t have trampled Robert’s youthful insolence, but Vincent saw fit to give it a try nonetheless.

“You ought to knock, child,” he observed, in a tone that would have made most self-respecting adolescents long to
knock
the door off its hinges. It was a worthy thrust, well-delivered, but the ordinance was much too light to pierce Robert’s case-hardened armor. Without troubling himself to shut the door behind him, Robert strolled over to perch on my chair arm and smiled down at me seraphically.

“When I was sixteen, I would have made an elaborate show of leaving the room, tapping on the door and reentering the chamber with farcical propriety. I’ve grown out of the game years ago, but Vincent still wants to play.” He glanced at Vincent. “All this severity, Vince, and I’ve come to do you a good turn. I thought you’d like to be warned of Aunt Gwen’s imminent arrival so you’d have time to straighten your neckcloth.”

There was a swift change in Vincent’s expression. “What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t Alex have time to tell you then, my dear?” asked Robert. “Our redoubtable great aunt has arrived to countenance little Liza.”

Vincent’s gaze flashed to Brockhaven.

“Checkmate!” observed Robert and there was a crisp rap on the open door.

“Lady Gwendolyn Cleaver,” announced the footman.

The woman who entered was small and trim, and carried herself with the dignity of fifty-seven years. Her nose was sharp and bony, her eyes prettily shaped and long-lashed, and her mouth as dainty as a pansy. A starched lace cap held tidy her soft brown hair, and she wore old-fashioned turquoise earbobs that precisely matched her charmingly designed gown. In all, she was a spruce lady with a soothing air of well-bred calm about her. She stopped a few feet beyond the door and subjected the occupants of the room to a frank examination that indeed
did
cause Vincent’s hand to stray instinctively to his neckcloth.

Then she came right to me, taking my hands and drawing me to my feet.

“Liza! Have I said your name right?” she said. “Imagine, after all these years we are blessed to discover you. It’s like having a piece of your father with us all over again. We were good friends, you know, your father and I. Our families were quite close. How proud he must have been of you! You’re his image, my dear, his very image! Such glossy hair! Such speaking eyes! Brockhaven said in his note that your father’s passed away—how sorry I am. We’ll sit together and talk, shall we? I’ll tell you about his life as a gentleman and you must tell me of his life as a gentleman gypsy. What a joy it is to have you with us.”

“It’s not a joy to me,” muttered Isabella, sorely tried.

Lady Gwendolyn gave my hand a meaningful squeeze and released me to stand on tiptoes to touch cheeks with the lovely blond girl.

“There, there, Bella,” murmured Aunt Gwen comfortingly. “This hasn’t been welcome news to you, but you must forbear.”

“There is nothing I loathe more in this world,” Isabella pointed out, with absolute sincerity, “than forbearance.”

“I understand, dear,” replied Gwendolyn. “You know, though, how the world loves to gossip about you. If you don’t mind yourself, we’ll be having them say that you’re a shrew and a trial to Vincent and why must you always conduct yourself like a Billingsgate fishmum. You
know
what people can be! When anyone asks you about Liza, you must muster a sad little smile and say that your new cousin is a very sweet girl and you’re sure you wish her well.”

“I don’t wish her well! I wish she was in a pit, a dark pit, with adders and spiders and rats and—”

“Quite,” interrupted Gwen hastily. “That is what you
really
wish, that is
not
what you must say you wish. If you are charming and cheerful, though of course a bit downcast, then it will be said you are brave and
such
a lady! Do remember, my dear. I’ll make a visit to you tomorrow and we’ll talk of it more, shall we? You must excuse me if I take a moment to kiss your handsome husband.”

Vincent stepped forward quickly to kiss his great aunt’s offered cheek, and said to her, “I’m happy to see you, Aunt, though I confess, I’m surprised. I had thought you were to be another month staying with the duchess.”

“
Your
surprise at finding me here in no way rivals
mine
at being here, I assure you. I was dragged from my guest bed yester eve at midnight by Brockhaven’s whippity-snippet of a footman.”

“Banbury tales, Aunt,” retorted Robert. “I’ve just come from talking with Will the footman. He said he found you in the midst of a card game with your hostess and her lady’s maid.”

“Perhaps!” she allowed tranquilly, “but we
were
in my boudoir.”

“Fully clothed. In your dinner gowns,” teased Robert.

“Impertinent boy! It was as you say but”—she held up a triumphant finger—“we had on our nightcaps.” She fondly patted her nephew’s dark curls. “Lud, boy, you’re surely growing prettier every time I see you. You may catch up to your brother yet. Well! Let me see, where was I? Ah, yes. The long and short of it is, Alex fired off a message for me to come and chaperon his ward. And as soon as I read who she was, why, I couldn’t wait to rush back and see her. What a time there’ll be, and what a to-do!” She smiled ruefully. “I confess that I was beginning to pine a bit for home, despite the duchess’s hospitality, and I had begun to miss Ellen dreadfully, so on every score I’m happy to be home. Make yourself easy, Vincent. Alex is
not
taking mean advantage of me, whatever you may be thinking.”

A faint flush appeared under the tight skin across Vincent’s cheeks. “I beg your pardon, Aunt Gwen, I intended no criticism. Only I cannot help but feel that it’s the outside of enough for Alex to drag you away from a visit with your dearest friend to chaperon a young girl with no conceivable claim on you. I’ve been trying to let Alex give Liza into my care, if only he would listen to an appeal to that most underused of his organs—”

“My word! What organ is that?” inquired Gwen with some alarm.

“Don’t be coy, Aunt. Obviously Vincent is referring to my brother’s heart,” said Robert with a grin.

“Well, I wish he wouldn’t,” replied Gwendolyn. “Brockhaven’s anatomy is much too stimulating a topic for the sunroom. I’m sorry, but I shall have to make you all go. Yes, yes, you and Isabella, too, Vincent. I know it’s been a great shock to you both, but really, we must give ourselves time to reflect so we won’t start behaving in ways that don’t become us. Isn’t that so, my little Bella?” She ignored the needle-sharp glance she received from Isabella and continued. “Liza’s had quite enough excitement, and the kindest thing we could do for her would be to provide a few very dull days.”

We gypsies have a saying: In fog, the wildcat walks with wakeful paws. In our language, of course, it sounds a bit different, but I think my translation gives you the sense. The gorgios have a proverb that’s much the same if more efficient than ours. They say: Watch your step! I’ve been told, since the first time I heard that proverb, that I tend to read more than is there in gorgio admonitions and “watch your step” is nothing more meaningful than a friendly warning to anyone going for a walk in a meadow where cows have been grazing. Nevertheless, my first days at Edgehill were days in which I watched my step. Ellen, I might add, was a great help.

After Vincent and Isabella took their leave, Lady Gwendolyn dispensed a carriage straightway to the Perscough home, where Ellen had been staying, and had her brought back to Edgehill. Ellen’s arrival considerably brightened that day and the days ahead. It’s not that Lady Gwen was not everything to me that was kind, for she was that, truly, but I was altogether conscious of the differences in our customs and, if I were to inadvertently do a thing that to the gorgios is an act of hopeless barbarity, I would rather learn about it from Ellen, who would
never
consider me a barbarian.

In Ellen, there beats one of the most romantic hearts in the west of England. She loves gypsies, and pirates, and good fairies, and tales about princesses turned into cats. Her heroines were Lady Godiva and St. Dymphna, who was beheaded by her mad father for refusing to become his wife. Ellen can talk by the hour about legends that the robin’s breast became red when it was singed as she carried water to the poor sinners in hell, and that honeysuckle will give you erotic dreams should you sleep with it by your bedside.

I was happy to know gypsy lore enough to set Ellen marveling to her heart’s content, and for her part Ellen began to help me unravel the mysteries of my new environment. Take the aprons, for instance. I had noticed that wealthy gorgio women never wore aprons to cover their gowns. Where was it that they wiped the grease of cooking and eating from their hands? From Ellen I learned that they (and the menfolk, as well!) used square, tieless aprons of linen which were set out for them at mealtimes and either laid on their laps, or, if they were prone to sloppiness, knotted by the corners around their necks like a scarf. They are called napkins, a full set of which are stored in special cupboards and known as “the napery.” That the gorgios would have so elaborate and ceremonial a procedure for dealing with the grease rubbed from their hands and faces was an amazement to me, and I was to discover stranger customs yet! On my second day at Edgehill, Lady Gwendolyn took a slight chill, and as I sat with her and Ellen in the drawing room, I saw Lady Gwen take a piece of material from her day bag, blow her nose on it and return it to her bag! I was so embarrassed that I could barely bring myself to ask Ellen about it later. When I did mention it, Ellen treated it as though it was the most commonplace occurrence in the world.

“Oh that?” she said. “That was a handkerchief. Just a handkerchief. Haven’t you any? Never mind, you can have some of mine. My Great Aunt Anne is forever giving them to me as gifts.”

I puzzled for a long time that evening on why the gorgios would want to preserve the blowings from their noses. As for the gypsy men, I could imagine what they would say if their womenfolk tried to make them do anything so effete as to set a linen napkin on their laps!

In the main, I tried to live each moment as it came. Thoughts of what future would be for me here, I put from me. Grief for my grandmother was fresh and undimmed, despite the things that had happened to me here, and I suffered still from malaise and a feeling that if I couldn’t be with her, then I might as well be here, or anywhere. Flashes of fear came to me at times, some so strong that I would feel as though I should hitch my team and wagon and run far away. Then, before there was time to translate my thoughts to purpose, and that purpose to action, the fear would fade to dullness, and I would be again like the wildcat walking in the fog.

Everything changed when the household heard of my new identity. The servants fairly glowed with kindness toward me, and Betty, who had been nothing so much as my gaoler the night before, went so far as to say that she would never have allowed me to help her polish the silver had she known that I was a lady, and in all her born days, never had she seen the like. A poor gypsy might be an object of scorn and suspicion, but a rich one was the pure embodiment of romance.

I was reassigned from the attic to a bedchamber beside Ellen. It was a pretty room with the walls hung in printed damask with yellow, stencillike camellias. The curtains were real lace, and Ellen found a series of pictures of a family picnic in one of the wardrobes on the third floor and nailed them onto my walls. She brought porcelain pots with forced tulips and crocus from the hothouse and with her paints she colored on my windowsill, “Light and shade by turn, but love always.” From my wagon, she helped me carry my books and feather quilt. When all was arranged, things looked very snug, and while it was not like the home I was used to, I’ll confess it was a good deal warmer than our wagon had ever been.

I spent more time than was good for me worrying about Lord Brockhaven and his cousin, Vincent, about Isabella and Brockhaven, about Isabella and Vincent. My isolated childhood had given me few instances to observe the married state. Be my experience ever so limited, I was sure that the relationship shared by Vincent and Isabella was a trap and a heartache to both parties. Underneath her wheedling, her dramatics, and her artificiality, one could sense that Isabella was deeply in love with Lord Brockhaven. It might be a selfish love, and a possessive one, but it was nonetheless strong enough to have torn to tatters the fabric of her marriage. Though she had not been kind to me, I pitied her. Only misery could come of giving one’s love in keeping to Lord Brockhaven, for surely few men were more alienated from their own emotions. I knew what drew her to him, though, and held her with so tight a bond. Even if he were not stunningly attractive, even if he had only a tenth of his self-assurance, Brockhaven still would have been able to draw people to him with as little effort as a falcon gliding toward heaven on the wind. It was too fascinating, that hint of gentleness in him, long-drowned in the shadows of his life. Everyone around him wanted to touch it, I could see that. Everyone wanted to be the one to come close to that lost sweetness where none was allowed. Robert came the closest. They might never have said much to express the bond between them—certainly they never did so in public—but it was there, nonetheless.

Lord Brockhaven’s relationship with Lady Gwendolyn was simple, superficial, and direct, which seemed to suit both parties very well.

“What it really is,” Ellen explained to me one afternoon, “is a standoff.”

We had been sitting together in the stable, in the boxstall that Brockhaven’s groom had allocated to my stallion, Kory. It was a lovely place with shiny brass tackle and fresh paint and sunny windows. The stall itself could have housed, in comfort, an elephant and her young.

Kory was lying on a pile of clean, dry straw, with my head against his withers. Once in a while, he would take my forearm between his teeth with a great show of fire and nibble gently for a joke, and I would dig into the bag I had brought with me from the kitchen and pull out another carrot for the old moocher. At first, our antics terrified the grooms, but as I had been here more than a week now, and Kory hadn’t killed me yet, the grooms only shook their heads, grinned, and said that I had
something
on that stallion, all right.

Ellen was sitting on the blacksmith’s pull around and munching, with an endearing lack of elegance, on one of the raw carrots from Kory’s sack.

“The thing about Mama and Brockhaven,” she said, chatting energetically, “is that they’ve got nothing in common. Nothing! Politics: Mama’s as staunch as a sitting cat and Brockhaven’s a liberal. Society: Mama loves people and Brockhaven hates them. Economic development: She likes the way things used to be and Brockhaven’s a progressive. She’s a moralist and Brockhaven’s… well, the opposite. I’ll tell you, Liza, the secret to harmony between a lady like Mama and a rakehell like Brockhaven is for them both to shut their mouths around each other. ’Sides, if he wasn’t so austere, I suppose she’d try to coddle him. Can you imagine Brockhaven putting up with that? We’d both be out on our ear in the time it takes to say—Liza! Here comes Robert!”

I hadn’t been at Edgehill above three nights before I discovered that Ellen was more than fond of Robert, a fact known and treated with charming delicacy by everyone from the lowest to the most elevated of the domestic staff. It was quite a humble devotion. Ellen never did more than dream, in a remote way, that Robert would ever take any special notice of her. I think she admired him because he was the closest thing to a pirate that she had ever met.

For his part, Robert remained mercifully in ignorance of Ellen’s feelings, partly, I’m sure, because she was rather shy around him and Brockhaven. Ellen was in the unique position of being treated by them with some kindness, which Ellen said Robert did because she stuttered like a bullfrog around him and it touched him with a casual pity for such a majestic lack of self-confidence. She claimed Lord Brockhaven did so from a natural disinclination to expose such a poorly defended individual to his acerbic tongue.

Kory put back his ears as Robert came up the boxstall.

“By God,” said Robert, “your beast hates me.”

“Oh, no,” I said quickly. Kory had so frightened the stable boys on his first days there that Brockhaven had warned me that he’d get rid of that “wild nag” if he didn’t calm down, and I still hadn’t recovered from my fear that Brockhaven would make good his threat. “Kory’s only making a warning. He’d never attack anyone unless I told him to. My grandmother trained him that way, because she worried that someone might try to molest me.”

“Then I’ll remember to molest you in places far removed from the stables.” He gave me a wink. “Stand up. Lord, this is the first time I’ve seen you in… what’s that word you have for us?”

“G-gorgio,” Ellen supplied.

“In the guttural, yet, Ellie. Soon we’ll have you hopping around with a hoop in your ear.” He grinned. “Gorgio. This is the first time I’ve seen Liza dressed like one of us decadent gorgios. Where’d you get the toggery? I thought Lady G. said that your dressmaker outfits wouldn’t be done until Thursday.”

“They won’t be,” I said. “Isabella sent this riding habit for me with a note that said she thought I might like to ride.”

His grin broadened. “And break your neck, with her compliments. Stand up.”

With Robert, that’s that. I was supposed to jump to my feet and stand heedless as a marble statue as he examined me at his leisure, unknowing or uncaring about the mortification it caused me. I’d learned by now that it was less than useless to say no to Robert. There’s no man better at getting his way. If there was nothing else that I blessed Lord Brockhaven for, I blessed him for interrupting Robert and me that first day in the library, because the better I knew Robert, the more sure I was that he would have had what he wanted of me, by fair means or foul.
That
had been before he learned that I was a “lady,” and now he would no more ravish me than his own sister, so he had told me, to my embarrassment. The gorgios have a very bewildering code of honor.

At any rate, I stood up, and Ellen knelt beside me to brush the straw off my skirt, saying, “It is pretty, d-don’t you think? R-red velvet! Mama felt it was a touch risqué for Liza, but the c-color is so b-becoming, is it not?”

“
Very
becoming,” Robert agreed, his gaze sparing no part of me, until I thought to distract him.

“Would you like to see the bonnet?” I asked, grabbing up the matching hat and squashing it down on my head with the scarlet and black feathers every which way, to make Ellen laugh. I think she looks very pretty when she laughs. You couldn’t tell if Robert thought so because he was laughing about the hat, too, and it’s hard to tell what people are thinking of when they laugh.

“Marvelous. The Unattainable in Red, they’ll call you,” he said.

“Will they? Who are they?”

“Oh, the hoi polloi who hang around the Park in London to watch the gentry on their afternoon trot. I don’t doubt the crowds will double to see the gypsy heiress on her half-tamed stallion,” Robert said. “I suppose Vincent put Bella up to sending you the dress, as usual, sparing no pains…”

As lightly as I could, I said, “You don’t like him, do you?”

“Vincent?” He put his hand through his dark hair, shrugging his shoulders in a loose, nervous motion as though my question were a cage that might trap him. “Old wounds, Liza. Bad associations. Alex and I lived with Vincent’s family after my parents died, did Gwen tell you? An uplifting story! My mother was shot by one of her lovers in a jealous fit and… what’s the matter, Ellie?”

“It’s only th-that my mother said sh-she had died of influenza.”

Robert’s grin differed little from a grimace. “Wishful thinking on the part of the relatives who felt disgraced. My father was dead before the year was out, another admirable mortality. That story even Ellen has heard.”

“Yes. H-he had drunk to excess in a g-gin shop, in d-despair over the death of your mother…”

“In anger that her parents had stuck him with her funeral bill,” corrected Robert, leaning forward with his elbows resting on the stall door. “On the walk home, he espied an elderly watchman and decided it might afford him a moment or two of amusement if he beat the old fellow to death with his cane. All was going just as dear Papa had planned when a good Samaritan passing by thought to object. My father was so enraged at the Samaritan’s ungentlemanly attempt to interfere with his pleasure that my father challenged the man to a duel. Right won the day, as they say, and my father died with a bullet in his heart.”

“L-like your mother!” said Ellen softly, struck by the irony of it.

Robert smiled, not pleasantly. “Not quite. My mother died with a bullet in the head. Alex told me. He ought to know. He saw it.”