Love on a Midsummer Night (Shakespeare in Love #2) (11 page)

Though Arabella had not been on horseback in years, she could not stand to be confined to a carriage on that beautiful day. So she rode a gentle mare to her father’s house, as Pembroke rode his warhorse, Triton. The spring seemed to rise up out of the ground to greet her, the air so much gentler than the staid, closed air of London. She had been trapped in the city too long. She was happy to be free of it.

Before breakfast, she had walked in the rose garden. The warmth of the day had come upon her like a blessing as she took in deep breaths of the fresh air rising on the breeze from the river. Pembroke’s mother was many years dead, but her roses still bloomed red, white, and gold, all different shapes and types, another form of immortality. Pembroke was another of that good lady’s contributions to the world. To leave the world a garden and a child was no small thing.

Arabella found herself longing for her own mother as she stood among those blooms, thinking of the one time she had gone with her to meet Lady Pembroke. Arabella had been a child of five and her mother had brought her along on an afternoon call. The lady had been gracious, as her own mother was, and she had been kind. Arabella wondered if she might take a cutting of those roses for her own garden someday. She would ask Pembroke, once she knew where her cottage would be.

Her mount, a white mare named Blossom, moved slow and sedate over the long, worn paths between her father’s house and Pembroke’s. During the summer they had spent together, they had walked those paths a hundred times. They had eaten picnics by the river and strolled beneath the spreading oaks.

Pembroke and Arabella spoke little on their journey for he seemed lost in his thoughts. She hoped he was not still embarrassed about that morning or about the kiss they had shared the night before.

Never in her life had she thrown herself at a man. She never thought to do so again, though the experience had been intoxicating. Pembroke had responded to her kiss and had even kissed her back, just as he had in her dreams. But he was used to women with far more wiles and experience than she would ever possess.

She drew her mind away from such thoughts and looked at the verdant beauty all around her, the shades of green of the summer trees. If she never saw another city again, it would be too soon. Those ten years trapped in her husband’s townhouse had been all of any city she would need for a lifetime. She was contemplating the beauty of the country all around her when they crossed the gate onto her father’s land.

Of course, it was not his land anymore. Her father was five years dead, and his estate had passed into her dower portion, which was a part of the larger Hawthorne duchy. Under normal circumstances, as far as she was concerned, Hawthorne might have kept her father’s estates and welcome. But he had forced her hand with his threats to marry her, by bringing a knife into her bed.

Arabella had had her fill of those who would take from her, giving nothing back but grief. She would build a new life. Finding her father’s cache of gold was only her first step into a larger world, the world of her freedom.

“Are you sure this gold even exists?” Pembroke asked.

Arabella looked at him, raising one brow. He had spoken her thoughts aloud, as if they were in conversation already. He had done that many times when they were younger, but she did not like it that he could still do it now.

“I am sure,” she said, keeping her eyes turned front. Her father was many things, one of which was cagey. He had never trusted another man in all his life. He had never trusted her. He had sold her to the duke, hoping for entry into the world of the
ton
, which would have no part of him, but as soon as the duke’s debts were paid with Swanson slave trade money, her husband had cut her father off completely, as if he had never existed, as if she had come from her mother alone.

Her father had been bitter about that, no doubt, for he had always been a bitter man. After her wedding, she had never seen him again. But she had known him well, as any victim knows her master. She knew his ways and the workings of his mind. What once had been a matter of survival now would serve her well. She had watched him in secret and knew the combination of his hidden safe. Her father would never have told another living soul about it. If the house was still standing, that money was there.

When they approached her father’s house, she stopped Blossom in her tracks and took a moment to catch her breath. Swanson House gleamed in the morning sun, its red brick warm and inviting. That facade was a deception, as it always had been throughout her childhood. Before her mother passed away, there had been love and laughter between those walls. Her mother had died the year Arabella turned six, and the sun had not entered those walls again.

As she looked at the house that had been her prison until her seventeenth year, her scars throbbed against the soft linen of her chemise. She shifted her shoulders, but the pressure still lay on her back like the lash of her father’s riding crop.

So be it. She was here. She could accept that her freedom must come at a price. The visitation of old demons was a small price to pay, though she was sure that it would not be the last.

Pembroke had drawn his horse close to hers, placing himself between her and the house. He watched her face, and Triton stood still beneath him.

The stallion’s stillness was not one of idleness but a deadly readiness that came before battle. He had picked up on his master’s mood and now stood ready to charge into the thick of an enemy’s lines. Arabella wondered what Pembroke had seen on the Continent, what he and Triton had lived through in their shared quest to set Europe free from the marauding armies of Bonaparte.

“Are you well?” he asked, the smiling lines around his mouth suddenly grim. His blue eyes surveyed her as if looking for weakness, as if delving for answers to other questions he could not ask.

“I am well,” she said. “It has been a long time.”

“You did not come back after you married?”

“Never.”

That one word held more truth than she had ever meant to speak. She turned her gaze from the seeking blue of Pembroke’s eyes to the house behind him. The grouping of maples and hawthorns was simply a park, the graveled drive that led through the gate to the mansion simply a road. She squared her shoulders and kept her gaze on the redbrick house before her. She waited in silence until her demons fell silent.

“I am ready,” she said.

Pembroke nodded once then urged Triton forward. The stallion did not leap ahead but kept a slow pace in front of Blossom as if he meant to keep himself and his master between Arabella and danger.

Perhaps she had grown too fanciful in the last week as she fled Hawthorne’s threats on her virtue and on her life. Whatever was true, she felt infinitely better that Pembroke was with her. No matter what else lay between them, he would protect her as much as he could. There was something solid and vibrant about him that drove away the darkness of this place. She was grateful for his strength as she stepped into her past.

They rode to the stables and found them empty. No horses filled the many stalls, and no groom waited to greet them. Pembroke frowned, displeased, but Arabella was not surprised. Her husband had ignored this estate since it had come into his hands. The Duke of Hawthorne had no use for a smallish country house in the wilds of Derbyshire.

“Follow me,” Arabella said. “If there is anyone still here, they will be in the kitchen building.”

Pembroke seemed to disagree but said nothing as she took the lead. Triton did not like following Blossom but calmed at once when Pembroke murmured to him. Arabella ignored both the males in her company and rode on.

She came to the kitchen behind the house. The small building with its garden was hidden from the mansion by a row of high hedges. The scent of boxwood filled her nostrils, taking her back to the carefree days of her early childhood, when her young mother had chased her among those shrubs on the way to find some bread and honey in the kitchen. It seemed that she might find her mother waiting for her around the next turn of the path. It occurred to her that the mother she remembered had been years younger than Arabella was now.

She stopped outside the garden’s picket fence. The fence had once been white, but now the paint had peeled away, leaving the gray, weathered wood beneath. The garden still bloomed with thyme, rosemary, and marjoram. Arabella could hear the hum of bees from the hive just beyond the next rise. She waited as Pembroke got off his horse, tying Triton to a fence post. He looped the leading rein casually, as if he truly did not expect his horse to leave him behind. No doubt Triton never would.

Pembroke reached for her and drew her down from the sidesaddle. Blossom stood as still as a post until Arabella was safely on the ground, then she lowered her head to munch the sweet green grass at her feet. Pembroke looped her reins over the fence as well, though she would not wander off as long as Triton was there.

Arabella opened the kitchen gate and walked through the garden, careful to keep to the paths between the neatly laid squares of vegetables and flowering herbs. The scent of that garden gave her pause, covering her with the breath of the past.

Mrs. Fielding came out of the kitchen then, still neat as a pin in spite of the pure white of her hair. The last ten years had aged her considerably, but the cook of Swanson House walked without a stoop, her slight, spry frame still wrapped in an apron that was too large for her. She bent down to pick a bit of rosemary, but one horse whinnied at the other, and Mrs. Fielding looked up, shielding her eyes from the morning sun.

“Miss Arabella? Is that you?”

Arabella did not speak but crossed the distance to the woman who had been her only haven in the years after her mother died. She meant to offer her hand, to press the elderly lady’s free palm between her own. Instead she wrapped her arms around Mrs. Fielding as tears coursed down her cheeks.

Mrs. Fielding dropped the herbs she had picked onto the ground. She held Arabella close, pressing her hands against her back, stroking and soothing her as if she were a child still and had run to her after a beating. Mrs. Fielding said not a word but offered her strength as she always had to a girl who had nothing in the world, and no one.

Arabella was the first to pull away. “I am very happy to see you.”

Mrs. Fielding smiled, wiping her own eyes with the edge of her too-large apron. “We thought you dead or worse,” she said, “gone off to London with that old devil.”

“Better than the devil I knew,” Arabella quipped.

At first, Mrs. Fielding looked frightened, as if old Mr. Swanson might hear the girl’s words and beat her for them. But when she remembered that the old man was dead and buried, she laughed a little. “The old duke wasn’t bad to you, was he?”

“No, Mrs. Fielding, he was kind. As kind as his nature would allow.”

Mrs. Fielding harrumphed at that. She had seen enough of what passed for the occasional, halfhearted kindness of the cruel in her time. She wrapped one arm around Arabella’s slender waist and drew her toward the kitchen. “And who is this fine young man you bring us?” Her brown eyes gleamed with mischief and with pleasure. “Might this be the young lord from over the way? The young man I had picked out for you to marry?”

Arabella blushed and Pembroke stepped forward, smiling. Charming old women was one of his many talents. Arabella’s heart ached to see it, a deep pain that was harder to bear than any other, a pain so broad that she thought she would collapse beneath it.

“I would have married her, too, if the duke hadn’t carried her off,” Pembroke said, the lilt of his tone so like his voice when he was a boy.

Mrs. Fielding smiled up at him as if she were a girl of fifteen. “And you still might,” she said.

Pembroke’s laughter boomed as they entered into the whitewashed walls of the kitchen. Arabella’s blush grew deeper, her embarrassment overwhelming her pain. Seeing her blush, Mrs. Fielding finally let that fruitless subject go.

“Sit here and drink some tea. What brings you here, Miss Arabella? Or ought I to call you Your Worship now, or some such?”

Arabella laughed. “Just Arabella, please, Mrs. Fielding. My days as a duchess are behind me.”

“And good riddance,” Mrs. Fielding said. “Now you can come home and live among decent people, God be praised.”

Arabella did not contradict her but drank her tea. That was indeed what she hoped for, if she could elude Hawthorne and his schemes for her future.

Pembroke sat at the old oak table in the kitchen as well. The sunlight streamed through the open doorway and lit his hair with gold. His blue eyes smiled at her over the mug he drank from. Earl or not, he seemed not to care that he drank from earthenware.

Ten years had fallen from his shoulders at the sight of her old cook. He looked light and at ease, though that might just have been his joy in the spring day and happiness at the thought of finally being rid of her.

Mrs. Fielding sliced off hunks of her fresh white bread, covering it with newly churned butter before handing a slice each to Pembroke and to Arabella.

“You still need fattening up, Miss Arabella. Have they no decent food in London either?”

Pembroke laughed again, but this time he silenced himself by taking a great bite of the bread. Arabella savored her own, the butter melting on her tongue, covering the soft white crust with inexplicable sweetness. She blinked back tears. She could not be overcome by her love for her old savior or by memories. She had come back to Swanson House for only one reason, and she must see it through. Now that she was there she had only one fear, that by some strange mischance, her husband had found the cache of gold first.

“Mrs. Fielding, after my father died, did you ever see the old duke come to Swanson House?”

Mrs. Fielding’s eyes ceased to sparkle, and she sat down heavily on the other side of the table across from Pembroke. “Aye, we saw him indeed. Just twice. Once after the old master died, and once again three months ago.”

Arabella almost could not hear herself think over the sound of the pounding of her heart. She took a fortifying sip of tea and another bite of bread under the watchful eyes of her old cook. She thought to ask another question, but Mrs. Fielding spoke on, as if a dam had broken. Her words flowed out in a torrent, and Arabella found that she could only listen.