My Dearest Enemy (29 page)

He bent his head nearer. Her lashes were no more than mayfly antennae, mere suggestions feathering a dusky rounded cheek. He closed his eyes and inhaled the warm, human scent of absolute newness, and touched her cheek. Downy warmth.

Her uniqueness, her singularity, the life he cupped in his hands staggered him with awe, suffused him with a primal need to shelter and protect. How much more urgent would that need be if this were his own child?

The door opened once more. Lily stood on the other side of the door, her face relaxed into a triumphant smile. In her arms she held another tiny infant.

He looked down at his charge. "If she were mine," he said, "I'd do whatever necessary to protect her and keep her safe. No one would take her from me. Ever. I swear it."

The smile died on Lily's face. Her dark eyes went flat. Their truce had ended, the hostility and longing that were the cornerstones of their relationship obvious once more.

"As would I," she said.

By next morning the storm had ended. A fresh wind chased the tattered remnants of clouds, leaving behind a fresh washed sky. Lily took breakfast in the library with the door closed. She'd revealed things to Avery Thorne that she'd never told another. She'd entrusted him with her reasons for her commitment to the women's rights movement and her difficult decision not to marry. She'd been unprepared for his passionate reaction, his accusation that her decision was reckless and irresponsible and selfish—and by extension, so was her mother's. He'd been so self-righteous, so immune to the meaning of a mother's loss, and yet… she understood.

She stayed in the library through lunch.

She needn't have bothered. Avery left the house well before dawn, arriving at Drummond's door and offering his services in whatever capacity Drummond saw fit to use him—as long as it was strenuous, ex-hausting, and kept him away from the manor until after dark. Drummond gleefully obliged.

He sent Avery to work on a haying crew in the meadow behind the stables where he climbed the huge piles of hay, called rucks, and caught the hay tossed up to him from below, heaping it into an ever higher mountain.

For the next week Mill House was singularly quiet. Francesca took to her bedroom without offering any excuse or apology. Teresa kept Kathy and a tearfully penitent Merry busy admiring her babies. Evelyn, feeling obliged to keep Polly Makepeace company while her leg slowly mended, played hostess. Surprisingly, the two ladies began to look forward to their hours together. Their interest in promoting Lily Bede and Avery Thorne's relationship for the moment was on hiatus as it was hard to orchestrate encounters between people who were rarely even in the house at the same time. Bernard kept to his own devices.

When Avery finally mastered his emotions he realized that in fleeing Lily's presence he'd abandoned his young cousin to the company of women.

That being so, on the day before the Camfields' party, Avery went in search of Bernard. The boy wasn't in his room or in the library—his polite query through the closed door had been met with Lily's terse, clipped reply—nor was he in the drawing room. Mrs. Kettle finally steered him to the attic above the second floor servants' wing.

As he walked down the narrow servants' hall he re-alized he would have to pass Teresa's open door on his way to the pull-down ladder that ascended to the attic at the end of the hall. He approached warily, half-expecting Teresa to start flinging wet rags or something a fair deal sharper at his person.

From within her room he heard a trio of women cooing. Eyes riveted ahead, he strode by.

"Mr. Thorne!" Teresa's voice snagged him a few feet from the ladder. She didn't sound crazed. Still, one couldn't be too careful. "Mr. Thorne, do come see the babies! After all, you as much as birthed them yerself!"

He could not let this rumor go unchecked. He retraced his steps and poked his head through the door. Teresa sat propped up by at least a half dozen pillows, an incongruous and matronly lace bonnet covering her hair, and a fluffy pink yarn caplet around her shoulders. Merry and Kathy, holding a baby apiece, sat on either side of her bed. All three ladies beamed at him.

He cleared his throat. "How are you, Teresa?"

"Oh, I'm fine, Mr. Thorne!" Teresa enthused, her fingers playing flirtatiously with the ribbon of her cap. "Come look at the babies. You all but delivered—"

"No," he said firmly, taking a step into the room. "I did not almost do anything. Miss Bede delivered your babies. I sat outside."

Teresa waggled her forefinger playfully. "Now, that's not how I remember it, sir. You're just being modest, is all. You were my pillar, you were. My tower of strength in my time of need. I'd only to look at you to know that I would be all right, that you wouldn't let nuthin' 'orrible 'appen to me." Her eyelashes fluttered adoringly.

The woman was delusional. She'd been planning on filleting his private parts the last time she'd seen him. Obviously, there was no reason to continue the conversation.

"Lookit the babies, sir!" Merry chirruped brightly and thrust a little creature out at arm's length for his approval. Kathy, giggling loudly, followed suit. He leaned over and gave each of the babes a cursory glance. They looked like tiny, animated turnips.

"Very nice," he said.

"Would you like to hold one, sir?" Kathy asked.

The baby opened its little maw and wailed, a long, reverberating howl of dissatisfaction. He stared at her in bemusement, stunned that anything that little could be that loud. And red—her scrunched-up face was rapidly becoming aubergine colored. And mad—she let loose another howl of discontent. Obviously, she'd inherited her mother's lungs.

Amazingly, Kathy didn't appear to notice that the baby she held had turned into a banshee.

"Here." She pushed the baby further into his face.

"No." He lowered his voice. "No. I… I… my hands." He pointed at one blameless member with the other and grimaced apologetically. "Dirty. Disgusting. Unfit to touch babies."

All three of the maids' faces fell. "Oh," Teresa said disappointedly and then shrugged. "Well, later then."

"Yes," he agreed, "later. Nice, er, nice babies." He nodded in Teresa's direction and promptly escaped, being halfway up the stairs before they could recall him.

He heard Bernard before he saw him. Grunting, the boy was dragging an enormous yacht's telescope toward one of the windows beneath Mill House's deep eaves.

Avery looked around. The attic was surprisingly free of clutter containing only a few well rummaged steamer trunks; an armoire missing a front door panel; a battered sideboard; and a great, musty-looking four-poster improbably set up in the center of the room.

Bernard, oblivious to his presence, had by now situated the telescope in front of the window and was absorbed in adjusting the eyepiece.

"Hallo, Bernard," Avery greeted mildly, approaching the nook the boy had created for himself. An upturned butter churn acted as an end table, stacks of books banked a battered armchair, and a ceramic jar— from which arose a steam redolent of chicken soup— stood by Bernard's feet.

The boy looked up, caught back a start of surprise, and grinned his welcome. "Cousin Avery! I say, I thought you were out with Drummond's men again. I was just going to try to find you with this." He patted the monstrous old telescope affectionately.

"Come here often, do you?" Avery indicated the evidence of dozens of sandwiches in the gnawed over crusts and crumpled oiled paper wrappings littering the area around his chair.

"Yes. I 'spect I do," Bernard said. "Seems silly, doesn't it? I mean, I so look forward to being with my family and then once I'm here it's so different from what I'm used to that I have to take myself off sometimes."

Avery understood. He'd felt the same way when he was a child, craving the days at Mill House and yet needing the hours of solitude in which to absorb the deeds of the day: every detail, every aroma, every inch of the place. It hadn't been until his adulthood that he'd learned to be comfortable with others, and then only a few, boon companions. Friendships had never come easily for him, and the few he had he'd treasured. Karl's somber face flickered through his memory.

He wished he could have saved him. Sometimes late at night he would replay the day of his death, rechart their course over the Greenland snowfields, question why Karl had been on his right rather than his left, whether he should have insisted they go in single file.

Guilt came then, an insidious visitor poisoning his thoughts, denying him sleep, mutating his affection for Karl into a painful encumbrance. Then he would read Lily's letter, a zenith of cool compassion and unerring wisdom.

Only all her letters, including the one that had meant so much, had misrepresented the woman.

She wasn't infallibly wise, after all. She was far too human in her failings. She'd chained herself to a dead woman's grievances and made a crusade of her mother's pain. There was no room in her heart for him. He'd never hold the place of importance in her life that she'd come to hold in his.

"Of course,
you're
always welcome," Bernard said. "I mean, it's not really mine to welcome you to but—" Avery gazed at the boy uncomprehendingly before realizing that Bernard had misread his silence.

"Does that prick?" Avery asked, knowing that as Horatio's heir, the boy had more right to Mill House than either Lily or himself.

"Oh!" Bernard blinked in surprise. "No!"

Relief washed through Avery. He'd have had to convince Lily to give the boy the place should he want it, but then, should he want it, as Horatio's primary heir he could afford to buy it from Lily.

"I mean," Bernard went on, "it's a jolly pleasant sort of place but if truth be told, I fancy a more urban setting myself. No rough and tumble existence for me."

"Really?" Avery considered his cousin. He'd assumed the lad to be like him at that age: eager for adventure, a chance to prove himself, test his physical courage. "You might find you enjoy the 'rough and tumble existence' given the opportunity."

"Definitely not. Not that I don't admire you profoundly. Your adventures are all the crack and terribly bully, but not the sort of thing I'd fancy. A dip in the old mill pond is one thing but wrestling crocodiles in the Nile is another."