Beauty and the Spy (12 page)

The day's heat gave way to a cool evening, and Susannah watched as her aunt swiftly and capably stacked wood in the fireplace, as competent and unself-conscious as a chambermaid. Susannah recalled the years of mornings she'd awakened to the familiar sound of a maid lighting the fires, of rolling over to see a white mobcap bobbing atop a girl busy with the coals, of waiting until the heat filled the room before she left the cocoon of whatever soft bed in whatever great house she'd been visiting.

As Aunt Frances stooped lower to arrange the logs, her knees against the hearth, she reached a hand behind her to touch the small of her back. An increasingly familiar dual shame swept through Susannah. Shame that no servant was about to do something as simple as light a fire for the two of them.

Shame that she didn't know the first
thing
about lighting a fire.

She felt… useless. This was another new sensation; it had never been necessary to be strictly useful before.

"I'll do it," she faltered. "I'll… I'll take care of the fire."

Her aunt turned around, surprised. "Well, it's done, my dear. But you can do it tomorrow night, if that would make you happy."

Aunt Frances was a wry one.

"Ecstatic," Susannah confirmed. They laughed a little together, less shy then they had been.

"Perhaps we can divide up the chores. I'll do the budget…"

There was a budget?

"… And you can light the fires. Your back is better for it, no doubt, Susannah." Her aunt was teasing, she could tell, but…
was
her back better for it? What sort of back would she have if she knelt to stack wood morning and night, and cleaned, and cooked? Broad as a horse's? What sort of hands would she have? She'd always been so careful with hers, keeping them smooth and white, her nails tidy and pink and even. And yet she supposed hands were
meant
to be used. To lift and carry and build. Knit things. Wield firearms, steer plows.

A basket of knitting and mending sat next to a chair near the fire; the beginnings of a scarf spilled out of it. Aunt Frances clearly made thorough use of her hands. Susannah discreetly looked down at her own. At least she
could
sketch with here—well enough to bring extra sausages and beef into the house.

The evening yawned, intimidating as a chasm, and they couldn't very well go to bed right after supper… or could they? She wondered what the Carstairs sisters and the rest of Barnstable's denizens were doing this evening. No one had come to call or sent an invitation since the evening of the assembly.

"They won't be able to stay away forever," her aunt had said, "as you are the most interesting tiling to arrive in Barnstable in ages." Until they
did
come calling, what did one
do
with an aging aunt before one went to bed?

She could stitch a sampler, she supposed. Her needlework was better than passable. What would the sampler say? I'm bored! Perhaps, or: save me, please! The thought amused her darkly. She could create a whole gallery of frustration, hang it in frames across these bare walls to cover the fading wallpaper.

She watched Aunt Frances moving about the little room, lighting a lamp here and there, and together with the fire the lamps conspired to fill the room with a comforting glow, casting the shabby furnishings into a more flattering light.

Douglas had always admired her hair by firelight.

That thought would get her
nowhere
.

Still, her mind began to worry the image of Douglas like a tongue searching out the space once occupied by a tooth. Oddly, Douglas drifted out of focus; a more vivid, more complicated man usurped him tonight And even though Douglas had betrayed her, Susannah felt a bit of a traitor for this.

"There you are my dear—now we can see each other, and we shan't freeze," Aunt Frances said as she settled her comfortable girth on the settee. "Do you sew? Or perhaps you'd like to read to me while I do finish my scarf?"

"What do you enjoy reading, Aunt Frances?"

"Oh, novels, my dear. And nothing but All sorts, but I particularly like horrid novels."

"Do you?" Susannah had always been too busy socializing and sleeping off the effects of the socializing to do very much reading, but
horrid
novels sounded intriguing. "What are they like?"

"They all have a ghost, and include dark and stormy nights, and secrets and the like. They're delicious, actually. Oh, and I'm a great admirer of Miss Austen, too. Very funny and romantic, Miss Austen is. All about lost love, and found love, and betrayal, and unrequited love, and such. And everyone lives happily ever after." She pronounced those last three words weightily, and gave Susannah a meaningful look.

Aunt Frances wasn't terribly subtle.

Odd to think of her as a romantic, this stout matron with the long face and merry eyes.

"Were you ever married, Aunt Frances?" Susannah broached tentatively. She hoped it wasn't a sensitive question. Perhaps Aunt Frances knew firsthand of unrequited love, which was how she'd guessed Susannah's own circumstances.

"Was I ever married?" Aunt Frances gave her thigh a gleeful little slap. "Good heavens, look at your sympathetic face, my dear. Of course I've been married. I've been
thoroughly
married. Wore three good husbands out, Susannah. Put the last one in the ground a year or so ago. Rather liked having this little place all to myself for a time, but then it does get to feeling a bit lonely come the winter evenings. I suppose I could acquire another husband, but in truth, Miss Austen's stories are all I need in the way of romance these days. And I suppose
you'll
have to do for company."

She winked at Susannah, and plucked up her knitting. "Will you sew and chat with me, or will you read aloud?"

"Perhaps we can do both. Chat
and
read."

"We've many dozens of evenings ahead of us in which to do both, Susannah. I think you might enjoy a little tale to take your mind off of things, for just this evening."

Those "many dozens of evenings" ahead of her sounded a bit like an advancing enemy army. Then again, her aunt had spoken of acquiring husbands as though one bought them at the milliner's shop. It should take at least a few of those evenings to discuss all of those husbands.

"Very well. Do you have a favorite novel?"

"Oh… let's start with
Pride and Prejudice
, shall we? If Mr. Darcy doesn't make you forget all about that young fool you left behind, my dear, I'll eat my knitting."

Miss Austen was funny and romantic, her aunt said. Why did the viscount suddenly spring to mind? He was funny, perhaps. Irritating, certainly. But romantic? Not in the way Douglas had been, all charm and compliments and calculated grace. Though his
gaze
had been somehow more intimate, more physical, than the one kiss she'd shared with Douglas. That was certainly romantic in another way.

And men there was the heart carved into the tree. That heart was virtually branded upon her imagination now.

Susannah opened
Pride and Prejudice
a little tentatively, and read the first sentence to herself. " 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'"

Susannah blinked. Those words were fairly
embossed
in irony.

She thoroughly approved.

So she read that sentence aloud, and the one that followed it, and the one that followed that, while her aunt's clicking knitting needles and chuckles marked off the time. Aunt Frances had a way of kicking her ankles a bit when she heard something she enjoyed. Susannah would see them flying up out of the corner of her eye each time she read a particularly acerbic line.

And before she knew it, she'd turned more man a dozen pages, the lamps had burned low, and an entire evening had passed.

She couldn't truthfully say she'd been bored.

Only dozens and dozens and dozens more evenings to go.

Two diffident stable boys, gangly with youth, cast furtive glances up at Susannah from beneath their caps when she arrived at the stables, then quickly turned and pretended to be busy pitchforking straw into stalls. The viscount, towering and impatience in his shirtsleeves, turned, saw her… and slowly took in her willow green riding habit and the hat with the plume in it. Beginning at the top, with the hat.

All right: She knew she was a little late this morning, but the riding habit she'd finally chosen brought out the green in her eyes, made them
glow
, in fact, subduing the golds and blues in them. And she knew the plume of her hat was a little worse for wear ever since the carriage had tipped over in the yard of the coaching inn, taking her trunk down with it, but it was still pert enough. And she was virtually certain the lunch basket she'd hooked over her arm was a fetching addition to her ensemble.

Why, then, did the man look so bloody
amused
?

He turned away from her again. "We had a choice of four geldings or a stallion, Miss Makepeace, and I've saddled a fine gelding for you, because I'm afraid the mare is ready to burst. She should be foaling any day now." He outlined the star between the horse's eyes with his finger; his voice, and the gesture, gruffly tender. For some reason it made Susannah's breath catch.

"She's lovely." Susannah tugged off one of her gloves to touch the mare's velvety nose. She'd left her own mare behind.

Thank goodness, then, she'd threatened a man with a vase, in part to rescue her riding habits.

It occurred to her that evenings full of Jane Austen were only going to encourage her predilection for irony.

"Come," the viscount said, and cupped his hands for her boot and boosted her up on to the saddled gray gelding as if she weighed no more than the plume in her hat. Happiness surged; Susannah intended to enjoy this ride even if it
was
the name of employment, and she did ride beautifully. He swept his eyes over her posture and apparently approved, because he swung himself swiftly into the saddle of his gelding and kneed it into a slow trot out of the stableyard. Susannah adjusted her basket over her arm and urged her own mount to follow.

The gelding lurched forward for a few bizarre little hopping steps, then gave its head a dramatic toss and stopped so abruptly she nearly toppled from the saddle. Susannah was thrown forward; she pulled the reins tight in her fists, balanced herself by gripping the saddle.

She was mortified. Any casual observer would have thought she'd never before sat a horse. She murmured to the gelding and soothed him with little pats, and though its ears switched wildly too and fro, and its haunches twitched, she managed, through the sheer force of her charm, to persuade him to break into some semblance of a trot.

Dear God, it was as though an invisible rope was tugging him forward.

What on earth was troubling the poor creature?

The viscount glanced over his shoulder; Susannah saw the quick bright flash of his blue eyes as he took in her scarlet face—Susannah suspected her face was destined to be scarlet anytime she was in the vicinity of the viscount�and his fair brows leaping upward in a question. She gave him a winning unconcerned smile. The gelding danced sideways like a drunk staggering out of a pub and nearly bounced her from the saddle again.

The viscount was out of his own saddle and next to her in just a few long strides, and his hand went to her horse's bridle. Good lord, but the man was quick.

"I'd like you to dismount, Miss Makepeace."

Disappointment roiling sickly in the pit of her stomach, her face hot, Susannah swung her leg around the calf block, and the viscount lifted her down from the gelding as swiftly and matter-of-factly as if she were a stack of plates on a high shelf and set her aside.

"Lord Grantham, I assure you I—"

He put up a hand. His face was distant; he was as tense as a cocked pistol.

The gelding, on the other hand, was considerably calmer now. Its ears continued to switch forward and back like a weathervane in a breeze; it rolled its eyes at Susannah one more time, then hastily ambled over to join Kit's horse, its gait perfectly smooth, as if it couldn't
wait
to get away from her. As if she were a bloody
wolf
, for heaven's sake.

Puzzled, Kit took Susannah in: chin up, fair cheeks flushed in embarrassment, the very fetching riding habit�he did like the green—the plume, the basket on her arm, the—

He could have sworn that the lid of the basket had just… bumped up. Just a little.

He hadn't been drinking the night before, he'd had a decent night's sleep… there was nothing, really, he could point to that might cause him to hallucinate.

It happened again: the lid… bumped up. As though something alive was inside it… and trying to escape. A leather loop loosely latched the basket.

"Put the basket down, Susannah." He said it quietly.

"I thought we were going to—"

"Put the basket
down
. Do it very carefully. But do it now."

What she saw in his face made the high color leave her own. She did it: she lowered the basket to the ground; he could see her hands trembling now.

"Now come stand next to me. Quickly."

She took a tentative step forward, clearly not eager to get closer to his stern expression. His arm shot out impatiently curled her swiftly the rest of the way into his side, and he held her fast. To her credit, she didn't even gasp.