Barbara Metzger (6 page)

“They are part of the estate,” Lisanne reminded her uncle in the usual composed, reasonable way she had that aggravated the baronet to no end. “How will you explain such wanton destruction to the trustees?”

Thunderation, the blasted chit was too smart for Alfred’s liking. “I’ll go ask St. Sevrin’s permission, then, to go out hunting with him. I’ll shoot down every animal in those cursed woods of his.”

Nigel’s mouth was open, and Lady Cherise was mopping her forehead with lavender water, but Lisanne knew Uncle Alfred wouldn’t dare step an inch into the forest. She asked the footman for more chocolate, effectively showing the baronet what she thought of his tirade.

Findley knew his niece recognized him for a coward and hated her the more. “Then I’ll take my gun and shoot that deuced dog of yours.” He smiled when he finally saw the stricken look on her face. So the chit wasn’t made entirely of ice water after all. “Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”

Lisanne knew her uncle just might, out of meanness alone, if he could find Becka. She got up to take her pet into the woods. Since Aunt Cherise did not allow animals in the house, Becka was used to being out alone. The big dog was used to the woods, too, and would stay there until Lisanne came for her. Before she left the breakfast parlor, Lisanne thought to ask: “Did the squire happen to say what business St. Sevrin has at the Priory?”

“Oh, did I forget to mention it?” Sir Alfred smiled, showing his yellowed teeth. Almost ten years of aggravation were about to be repaid. Satisfaction sat sweetly on his lips. “Why, the duke is here to get bids from various lumber mills. He’s selling off your precious forest.”

The
old ways were dying. No one believed, no one cared. Without that ancient forest, so full of history, so full of mystery, a bit more of the world’s magic would be lost. And a lot more of Lisanne Neville’s world. Wealth and title, fame and social standing, reputation and the respect of those around her—none mattered to Lisanne as much as Sevrin Woods. She didn’t count her personal safety or her personal appearance, only the woods.

Now the forest was threatened, to pay some scapegrace’s gambling debts. It just couldn’t happen. Lisanne couldn’t let it happen. She was the one who understood, the special one, so she had to do something. But what?

She stayed in her room that day, thinking. Uncle Alfred had footmen stationed in the hall outside her room, and groundskeepers working close to the house. Lisanne wondered what they would do if she just strolled past them and kept going. Most of the staff was afraid of her, she knew. They wouldn’t be too anxious to chase her down and bring her back by force, for fear she’d lay a curse on them or contaminate them with her strangeness. Most likely they would simply send for Uncle Alfred.

Becka was safe enough. Lisanne had gone to the stables
after breakfast and taken the animal out for exercise. She managed to “lose” the dog at the edge of the Neville lawns where they met the forest. After that she’d had all day to pace the confines of her room, making plans. If the squire knew of the duke’s intentions, everyone in the countryside knew, so Lisanne didn’t have to hurry to give warning. No harm could be done immediately, anyway, not if the dastard was first sending for lumbermen.

How could he? Such arrant waste and disregard for a place of beauty was appalling. Lisanne knew how the foresters operated, for she’d seen it often enough on Neville property under Sir Alfred’s care. The men would come in with their huge wagons and teams of heavy workhorses, their ropes and saws and axes, and they’d begin chopping away. They wouldn’t take only the fallen, diseased, or overcrowded trees, giving the others more room to grow. No, that took too long, required too many men, didn’t yield enough profit. Instead they’d cut everything in sight, leaving nothing but ugly stumps as a mark of shame and greed on the landscape.

All the animals, the precious wildflowers, the secrets in the soil—those things could never survive, could never be replaced. There wouldn’t even be birdsong if the sparrows had nowhere to nest.

And then there were the trees themselves. Despite his current low tide, the duke was likely some high-nosed blue blood, claiming his family came over with William the Conqueror. But the trees would have been here to greet the invaders, to give them shelter, firewood, and fruit. The trees had blood and life, too, besides nurturing the souls of other ancient races.

The forest would die, and everything with it. Oh, some creatures could find other roosts, other dens, but not those whose very spirits were tied to Sevrin Woods. There was no place else for them to go.

Lisanne couldn’t let it happen. Neither could she buy the woods or offer to pay the dreadful duke’s bills. She didn’t control her own income and wouldn’t until she was five and twenty, if she managed to wrest the guardianship from Uncle Alfred’s grasping fingers then. For the first time Lisanne wished that she’d cared more about worldly matters, that she’d written to her solicitors herself to tell them what was happening. Now it was too late. Her pocket money wouldn’t keep a mare in oats, much less a spendthrift sot in London, where he belonged.

*

Uncle Alfred finally went to sleep. His valet had crept down the silent hall ages ago, but candlelight still shone under the baronet’s door. Lisanne waited another half hour after the light went out.

She knew one of the gardeners still patrolled the grounds, because she could see him and his lantern pass under her room every fifteen minutes or so. That was enough time for Lisanne to lift her window and scurry down the trellis, then scamper across the lawns to the boxwood maze. She could have made her escape in pitch darkness, so many times had she taken the same route, but tonight, when she didn’t need it, the moon lit up her path through the ornamental gardens. Still wearing Esmé’s light-colored muslin, with an old woolen shawl hurriedly tied around her shoulders against the chill night air, she’d stick out like a lighthouse at sea. She pulled the shawl over her blond hair and waited behind a topiary unicorn for the guard to pass by again before entering the maze. Then, racing through its twists and turns past the fountain at the center, she exited at the opposite side, where the maze’s high hedges would block her flight across the lawns and into Sevrin Woods.

Only Becka greeted Lisanne, joyous to see her mistress and the rolls she had stuffed in her pockets. Everything else was hushed except for the mist that dripped steadily off just-budded branches. ’Twas almost as if the trees themselves were weeping.

No one answered Lisanne’s call, or came tumbling out of the mist when she played a tune on her little flute. They knew. She could already feel their pain.

“No!” she shouted into the empty night, and “No!” again. Becka set up a howl that had the Neville Hall groundsman dropping his staff and his lantern and heading for the next county.

*

Sloane Shearingham was drunk. There was nothing unusual in that except for the location. Tonight he was castaway in three barely habitable rooms of St. Sevrin Priory in Devon instead of three barely habitable rooms of St. Sevrin House in London.

He and Kelly had arrived the afternoon before, enough time, thank goodness, for a hasty inspection of the centuries-old building to see if it was liable to fall down around their ears as they slept. While Kelly unpacked and tried to find chimneys that weren’t blocked by squirrel nests and mattresses that weren’t burrowed through by mice, Sloane had made a quick trip to the village to arrange for a delivery of fodder for the horses. If Kelly couldn’t find them reasonably comfortable billets in the house, at least they’d have fresh hay to sleep on in the nearly intact stables. It wouldn’t be the first time Sloane and his batman had bedded down with their mounts.

When Sloane returned, pockets slightly emptier since the liveryman wouldn’t extend credit to any St. Sevrin, he rubbed the tired horses down himself, and discovered where some chickens had taken up housekeeping in one of the stalls. He relieved the hens of a clutch of eggs, helped Kelly fire the antique stove in the kitchen, and sat down to a halfway decent omelette. Theirs was such a hand-to-mouth existence, he thought, that those chickens should be making out their wills.

At least they wouldn’t be cold. There was firewood lying all over the place from fallen trees, broken shutters, wrecked carriages. Better yet, the duke unearthed a case of old brandy in a far corner of the wine cellar that the servants or squatters or his sire had overlooked. ’Twas better to stay drunk, His Grace decided, for St. Sevrin Priory was indeed haunted, if only with the ghosts of the past. A mass of murdered monks would have been good company by comparison.

Asleep Sloane had nightmares of battle, of fallen comrades he couldn’t raise, of devastated Spanish villages after the French had been through. He saw the eyes of the children there, beseeching him, accusing him. By day, he had the shambles of his life to torment him. This morning he’d made inquiries about lumber mills, then he’d ridden across parts of his estate to see firsthand what years of neglect and avarice had wrought. He’d seen the bare fields, the tumbled cottages, the abandoned gristmill. The children of his own tenants—the ones who’d remained at St. Sevrin because they had nowhere else to go—had those same pleading eyes.

When Sloane returned from his inspection, he’d started drinking the brandy. Now it was well after dinner—chicken, as expected—and he wasn’t done yet. No, he was still sober enough to see the damp spots on the ceilings of the Priory, the warped floors where priceless Aubusson carpets used to lie, the empty gallery walls, the boarded windows. Worse, he could hear his mother crying.

Hell and damnation, he’d hated everything his father was. Now he was his father.

*

Two hours later the Duke of St. Sevrin was propped against one of the windows that still had glass in it, in one of the parlors of the Priory’s modern section. This addition was only one century old instead of two or three, and it overlooked the rear of the Priory, toward the home woods. He could just make out the distant trees in the hazy moonlight, spreading as far as he could see in either direction. The next duke, he told himself, Humbert or whoever, would likely be looking out this very window right at Neville Hall. The two estates weren’t all that close, but the land was flat. ’Twould be just like Humbert to purchase a telescope to peek in his neighbor’s bedrooms.

Sloane had long since dispensed with the glass; but the bottle of brandy, the second bottle of brandy, dangled from his right hand. He wouldn’t trust his unreliable left arm with such a fine vintage, such a fine, mind-numbing companion. When he saw the ghost walk from the woods, the bottle slid, unnoticed, to the floor anyway.

St. Sevrin blinked to try to clear his eyes, but the figure didn’t disappear. It was definitely a woman, her light-colored skirts billowing around her in the breeze. She couldn’t be real, of course. Women did not float out of forests in the middle of the night, not even in Devon. The Priory ghosts were all said to be monks, so those old stories of the woods being enchanted must be correct after all. A fairy creature was coming to visit. Either that or he’d finally had too much to drink. Sloane rather hoped it was the brandy.

The woman held neither lantern nor torch, yet she was walking directly toward him across the unscythed lawns. Her hair looked silvery by the moonlight, and his experienced eye told him she must be small-boned and thin, perhaps still a girl.

She kept coming closer until she stood just outside his window. St. Sevrin did the only thing possible, of course, for a gentleman so deep in his cups. He opened the window, not without a struggle with the rusted latch. “‘Well met by moonlight, proud Titania,’” he greeted her.

“That’s ‘ill met,’” she corrected automatically, worried lest the real quote prove true.

Sloane held out his hand. “Won’t you join me anyway, sweet fairy queen? There’s a fire, and wine.”

Lisanne was suddenly undecided. She’d come this far out of necessity, but her courage was failing her at actually facing the rogue. He was large and broad-shouldered, wearing a shirt with an open collar, no neck cloth. With his reddish hair fallen over his forehead, he looked sleepy, unfinished. Mayhaps this was a bad idea after all.

While Lisanne was studying the duke, St. Sevrin was owlishly peering out the window at her. “No, you cannot be Titania, for surely you haven’t enough years in your dish to be queen of the ether. But come in out of the chill, fairy child.”

For a moment Lisanne’s heart soared. He understood! He knew about the woods! But no, she realized, he was only teasing, flirting with her. He was a rake, after all.

St. Sevrin watched the expressions flitter across the beautiful face. That smile lit her whole being, as if the moon rivaled the sun when she was happy. Sloane thought he’d move mountains to bring it back. “Come, sweetings, do.”

Lisanne thought the clunch would fall out of the window if he leaned any farther out. She could smell the spirits on his breath even from where she stood. But she had no choice. Muttering under her breath,
“Ave atque, Caesar, mortituri est te salutamus,”
she raised her arms to be hoisted through the window.

When he lifted her, Sloane was surprised to find that his guest was flesh and blood after all, although she weighed about as much as a moonbeam, and her hand trembled in his like a captured butterfly. But her eyes never wavered from his and that clear blue gaze seemed to sear his very soul, like the eyes of the children of war, the children of poverty. St. Sevrin prayed this angel-child would find what she came for. Lud knew he had little enough to offer.

He kicked the fallen bottle aside and made a fairly creditable bow, for a fellow half seas over. “St. Sevrin, at your service.”

Lisanne bobbed an awkward curtsy, being out of practice since Miss Armbruster had left. She had to stifle a nervous giggle to think of worrying over drawing-room manners at a time like this. Then she took a deep breath and poured forth her prepared speech: “I am Lisanne Neville, and you can have my fortune if you’ll marry me.”