Laura Kinsale (37 page)

He turned his head, allowing one eye to show above his elbow. Beth’s face was full of anticipation, her dark eyes round and her lips parted.

“Gah-on,” she said, pushing at his arm.

As he rose onto his elbows, she laughed and squealed, and made his whole life worth living for that one moment. But he remembered that last night she had turned away from him, and he did not try to reach out and pull her into his arms as he wanted to do.

“Miss Elizabeth!” a voice whispered urgently from the crack of the door. “Come here this moment!”

It was the nurse. Arden stiffened, waiting to hear Zenia, but when the door opened a little wider, it was only Mrs. Lamb who peeked in.

“Oh, sir!” she said, still in a whisper. “Beg pardon! Come, Miss Elizabeth!”

“No need,” Arden said, his voice hoarse with sleep and drink. “No—she can stay.” He groped for his shirt, which lay on the floor beside the cot, and managed some degree of modesty.

Beth ran to her white-painted toy wardrobe and banged on the door. Arden rose, took a deep breath to conquer the dizzy lurch of his stomach, and opened it for her. Within a moment, she had blocks and balls and a rag doll out on the floor.

The nurse was still hovering just the other side of the door—he could see her fingers holding it cracked open. “Is Lady Winter there?” he asked tentatively.

“No, sir,” the disembodied voice said. “She’s gone to Oxford with her ladyship. If you please, I’m to keep Miss Elizabeth today, sir.”

He had not really thought she was there. And yet to know that she was not—to know that she had gone away, deliberately, as she had shut the door between them last night... he felt his throat tighten in a painful mixture of rage and rejection.

He made a stack of clean clothing for himself, threw his razor and kit on top and pulled open the door, almost dragging a startled Mrs. Lamb off her feet. “I’ll dress in the bedroom. Please put Beth in whatever it is she’s to wear outside and bring her downstairs in an hour,” he said. “Then you may see to other things, or take the afternoon free, if you like. I’ll look after her today.”

“Oh, sir!”

He walked past her. “And we’ll want a basket of food. Lots of sweet biscuits for Beth. Mrs. Patterson knows what I like.”

The nurse was staring at him in dismay as he dumped his things on the bed. “Sir, I believe Lady Winter would be most displeased.”

He smiled at her. “I am a truant by nature, Mrs. Lamb. And as the cat has elected to leave the mousehole unguarded—” He shrugged. “We shall have one day of freedom, anyway. When do their ladyships propose to return?”

“I’m sorry, sir—Lady Winter did not say.”

“Perhaps you will keep a close eye on the drive, and send up a flare when their carriage appears.”

“It is very bad, sir,” Mrs. Lamb said with a severity that did not quite reach her eyes. “I do not like to deceive ma’am.”

“Mrs. Lamb,” he said, “you would not peach on us?”

She was a sweet-faced woman; the strict purse of her lips could hardly make her look rigid, besides the fact that she kept her eyes carefully averted from his half-dressed state. “I’ll have you know, sir, that I raised three little brothers all quite on my own, besides two boys with the Hastings and four with the Thorpes. I know all about boys.”

“Beth is a girl,” he pointed out mildly.

“Yes, sir,” she said with a curtsy, “but you and she together will be as bad.”

There was a crash from the playroom. Mrs. Lamb nodded, exclaiming, ‘There, you see!” and darted after her charge.

By the afternoon, Zenia was anxious to start home. She had never left Elizabeth so long before, and Lady Belmaine sat at length with her elderly cousins, holding the hand of the bedridden lady who could no longer speak above a whisper, talking to the lady’s anxious sister, sending Zenia out for a particular physic from a particular apothecary so that the sister might sleep better, instructing the cook on precisely how to prepare the larder of special foods they had brought from Swanmere.

In spite of her apprehension about Elizabeth, Zenia was glad to help as she could; indeed she was surprised to see this new side of Lady Belmaine, the calm efficiency with which she put a house that had fallen to shambles back into order. She was not openly affectionate or sentimental—she cut short the sister’s weeping with a brisk admonition—but by the time they took leave, the ladies were as comfortable as they could be made, and even smiling.

“We shall return next week,” Lady Belmaine said to Zenia as the carriage rolled past the gray spires and towers of the university. “I shall arrange for game to be sent in the meantime, and some of our own eggs. It is not possible to obtain truly wholesome eggs in town.”

The bells were tolling, and a few young men in flapping robes ran down the street in the clear winter sun, still at their studies even during the Christmas holiday. Lady Belmaine made a comment on the noise, and regretted that her cousins could not be removed to a quieter place, or even to Swanmere.

“But they will not hear of it,” she said, a little impatiently. “They have lived in that house since they were born, and their parents before them. I must say that I have never understood the appeal of such a limpetlike existence, but it is the widespread disposition.”

“I can understand it, ma’am,” Zenia said quietly. “To have a home, and not wish to leave it.”

Lady Belmaine looked straight ahead at the elegant gray satin of the forward seat. “You are not very like your mother, then.”

Zenia lowered her face to her lap. It was the first time Lady Belmaine had ever mentioned her mother. “No. Not very.”

“At one time, I was a great admirer of Lady Hester.”

Zenia looked toward her, surprised again. The countess kept her chin erect, her white skin glowing pure, only slightly wrinkled in the harsh winter light.

“She carried her independence far to excess, however,” Lady Belmaine said. “Did you know that we are related?”

“No,” Zenia said, shocked.

“At a considerable distance. We share a maternal grandfather at some four or five removes. Robert Pitt. The son of Diamond Pitt. My descent is through the Camelford line—yours through both the Chathams and the Stanhopes.”

Zenia was well aware of her own lineage—her mother had spoken of her ancestry with endless arrogance and pleasure. Lady Hester had been the granddaughter of one prime minister and the niece of another; she had reveled in telling stories of the ruthlessness of the family patriarch, Diamond Pitt, that turbulent, reckless Indian trader who had defied law and the East India Company for his fortune, and of her proud, murderous cousin Lord Camelford: the most accomplished duelist of his day, champion of the poor against swindlers and extortioners with methods more suited to a bloodthirsty pasha than an English gentleman; a peer who had handed out a hundred guineas in the street to vagrants and whipped turnpike keepers for passing bad halfpennies, and died in a challenge at dawn before he was thirty. When Lady Hester had ordered a flock of goats shot because the shepherd was cheating her, or bastinadoed a servant for insubordination, or defied some emir’s tyranny, she had cited Lord Camelford’s example as her guide.

“I did not know that, ma’am,” Zenia said.

“The blood of Diamond Pitt,” Lady Belmaine mused. “The flame from the East. It is a difficult inheritance. Dangerous, some might say. There has been genius—I would not say your grandfather and great-grandfather were anything less—but there is a dark side. It is not to be trifled with. Your mother was inclined to go too far with her passions.”

Zenia could not deny that. She stared away from Lady Belmaine, out the window.

“Would you say that your mother was imbalanced in her mind?” the countess asked calmly.

“No,” Zenia said. “I know that to Frankish—that is, I know people here have thought so—but it is different in the East, ma’am. It is more fierce. She was made to fit that life.”

“I see,” the countess said. “But you are not.”

“No, ma’am. Not at all. I hated it.”

Lady Belmaine was silent for a moment. Then she said, with no change in her impersonal voice, “Are you very much attached to my son?”

Zenia felt a strange confusion flood her. She turned her face away, unable to think of what to say.

“I will be blunt,” the countess said. “I would prefer that you were not his wife.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Zenia said. “I have known that.”

“You will of course believe it is because of your objectionable birth and upbringing. If I had not come to know you, I should indeed be appalled by such a marriage in my family, but that is no longer so. I do not dislike you, Zenobia, in yourself.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Zenia replied in a small, confounded voice.

“While we thought my son dead, I was quite willing to accept you as my daughter-in-law. You are quiet and tractable, and really, there was no alternative, was there? But now I am constrained to say that this tripling of dangerous blood, this uniting of the most wayward strains of the Pitt inheritance—I have listened to your daughter’s fits in the past weeks, and it has made me fearful.”

“Elizabeth is very good,” Zenia said quickly. “It is only that Lord Winter allows her too much license.”

Lady Belmaine’s face was utterly expressionless. “I think that you have no understanding of your daughter, Zenobia. I think you have no understanding of my son. My husband has never understood, either.” She took her hand from inside her muff and stuffed the handkerchief she had been holding into her reticule, but not before Zenia saw that the lacy edge had been shredded into oblivion.

“What am I to understand, ma’am?” Zenia asked uneasily.

“Why, if you cannot see it for yourself, I do not suppose I can describe it. But neither of them will be content with a home, Zenobia. Neither of them will be caged. I lost my son because my husband would not see that. I might have had him for a little while, in his boyhood. At least until his passions came upon him naturally, but that was not to be. I was deceived by my own upbringing; I supposed that he could be disciplined and curbed as I was. But it was a very great mistake. I knew him as my husband never could. I knew him as myself.”

“My daughter is perfectly happy,” Zenia said sharply.

The countess turned, looked aside at Zenia with a lift of her eyebrows. “I do not say that every spoiled child is possessed of a demon—”

“She has no demon!” Zenia cried hotly.

“—but the fact that your volatile blood does not appear to manifest itself in your character does not cleanse you of it. And it runs entirely true in my son.”

Zenia stared at her, breathing unevenly.

“Can you say that it does not?” the countess asked. “That he will not do any outrageous thing that he wills, with no care for the cost?”

Zenia dropped her eyes. She twisted the tasseled ends of her reticule so tightly around her fingers that they began to throb.

“If you had been brought up under the most respectable roof in England, I should have opposed any marriage between you and my son,” Lady Belmaine said. “There is no sense in courting disaster by compounding again the bloodline that produced your mother’s unstable nature. You have a daughter already. We may pray that she escapes the danger. But if you were willing to set my son—and yourself—free of this blighted connection, I would be anxious to aid you, and see to your welfare and my granddaughter’s.”

Zenia watched the silken checkstrap sway in rhythm with the motion of the carriage. She thought of Elizabeth’s wild tantrums, and Lord Winter’s exultation in danger and liberty and solitude. Of her mother’s screaming rages. Zenia had said to herself that he would never, could never stay, and yet to hear Lady Belmaine tell her so, in such certain, unflinching words, and assert that Elizabeth was the same—Zenia felt sick with fear.

“The earl said that if I did not do as he advised,” she said tightly, “Elizabeth would be—” She could not say the word. “What I am.”

“Your father and his wife spend a great deal of time in France, do they not? I think that you would find yourself quite comfortable in a neat house near Paris. Or perhaps at that Swiss spa where Mrs. Bruce plans to take the water cure. You may be certain that I would see that my granddaughter is brought up in proper circumstances, wanting for nothing. There will be money for a school, or a governess as you prefer, and whatever you may wish in the way of clothing and an establishment. You need not fear any social rebuffs; I shall see to that myself. These things are taken as a matter of course on the Continent.”