Come Near Me (6 page)

“Hunting up a broom and a mop?” Sherry
suggested, then smiled as she saw the gloves she’d been looking for
lying on her writing table in front of the window. “Ah,” she
declared, swooping across the room and grabbing them up, “you can
sit back down, Emma, and continue with whatever it was you were
doing. You were doing something, weren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Emma said, already seated once
more. “I was about to do up m’nails, as it were. Wouldn’t want ta
scratch yer pretty head when I washes yer hair, ain’t that so? Snag
at yer hose when I’m turnin’ it back rightways after his lordship
strips it off yer—not that he don’t ruin at least two or more a
week, don’t he, ma’am?”

“That will be enough, Emma,” Sherry said,
avoiding the young maid’s eyes. “You may retire now.”

Once the servant was gone, probably to her
own room, where she would sit and stare into her own mirror—the
hand mirror she’d boldly taken from her mistress—Sherry slumped
onto the side of the bed and put her head in her hands.

She should turn Emma out, sack her, send her
on her way without a character. That’s what she should do. But she
couldn’t. Because Emma
knew.
Emma saw the room in the
mornings, after Adam had gone. Emma had seen the faint bruises
Sherry could never remember receiving as she and Adam loved so
furiously, with such intensity, such burning desire to possess each
other without any betraying tenderness.

Emma didn’t share what she knew with the
other servants. She cleaned up the worst of it, the most betraying
of it, only saying enough to show that she knew what went on in
this room during the dark of the night. And left the rest a
shambles.

Sherry was now, as she had been at home
before her marriage, in charge of her own wardrobe, her own rooms.
Where Mary had been too old, gone beyond doing most work, Emma was
young, and unwilling to work. Sherry hadn’t minded protecting Mary
until the old woman finally realized she was “past it, missy,” and
went to live with her sister in Dorset. She did mind doing Emma’s
work. She did mind the implied threat in Emma’s growing insolence,
her remarks that were much too familiar.

But keeping Emma was easier than letting Emma
go and admitting another servant into the rooms, into the horrible
little secret that had become Sherry’s life. Adam’s life.

“Well, this is getting you precisely
nowhere,” she told herself bracingly as she stood up and walked to
the door. “And the sunshine and Mr. Burnell are waiting.”

~ ~ ~

Sherry tipped back her head, looking up at
the sun through the tracery of leaves above her. How pretty it was,
so close to London, and yet so wonderfully removed from it at the
same time. It wasn’t precisely as if she and Edmund Burnell were
having themselves a private picnic, but he had spied out the small
country tavern sitting just above them, on a slight rise. He had
prevailed upon the tavern keeper’s wife to provide them with a
bottle of wine, two thick, utilitarian glasses, a loaf of bread,
and a fat wedge of cheese, then suggested they dine in the open
air.

The carriage blanket served very well, spread
out across the ground beneath the trio of trees they sat beneath
now and, even if the day was chilly, her fur-lined wrap was warm,
the sun even warmer. The whole thing was just silly enough to
please her, just friendly enough to take her mind, at least
temporarily, away from thoughts of Adam and his barbed remarks, his
disdain, his distaste—even as he made love to her.

And Edmund Burnell was amusing; he made her
laugh. It was so good to laugh again. She needed, almost
desperately, to laugh again.

“... and so I simply raised my nose to a most
superior angle—I have the sort of nose for such maneuvers, I’m sure
you’ll agree—and looked down the length of it as I said, “My dear,
good man. I do believe you’re standing on my foot.”

“You didn’t!” Sherry took another small sip
of wine. “With him being so frighteningly toplofty? I shouldn’t
have dared, even if he was crushing my toes. And what on earth did
Mr. Brummell say to that? Did he deal you the cut direct—look you
up and down, then turn and walk away without a word?”

“On the contrary, my lady.” Burnell smiled, a
mischievous twinkle in his blue eyes. “He paused in his
conversation with the Prince Regent, looked down, saw that, indeed,
he was standing on my foot. Beau—I have his permission to call him
Beau now, so lovely of the man, don’t you think—then leaned toward
me and whispered the recipe for his special boot black into my
anxious, trembling, and eternally grateful ear.”

He emptied his glass and poured himself
another measure. “I can’t tell you of course. I’ve been sworn to
secrecy. A matter of honor between gentlemen, and all that.” He
held up the bottle, measuring its contents. “Would you care for
more wine before it’s gone?”

“You’re fibbing,” Sherry said, holding out
her glass to him. “That never happened, none of it.” She looked at
him over the rim as she raised the glass to her lips, tipped her
head to one side as she examined his face, as if that would help
her to see inside his mind. “Did it?”

“Did it?” Burnell teased, cutting her a small
wedge of cheese, then pointing to the bread, so that she shook her
head, declining that second offer to feed her. “I’m sure I couldn’t
say. It’s that sworn to secrecy thing again, you understand. A
pity, especially when forced to hide something from, a lady, but
there it is. Unavoidable.”

Sherry tucked her skirts more tightly around
her bent legs and leaned back against the tree trunk. “Very well,
then, I have a story for you as well.”

“A
true
story? Or am I about to be
taken in like a green goose?”

“Of course it’s a true story. Now, don’t
interrupt, all right?” She took a deep breath, held it as she bit
her lip, her gaze directed upward as she marshaled her thoughts.
“Where to begin? Ah, I have it! I’ll begin at the beginning, all
right?”

“It seems as good a place as any,” Burnell
agreed, stretching himself out on his side, his legs dangling off
the edge of the blanket, onto the dry, overgrown grass, his head
propped in his hand as he bent his elbow. “Begin, madam, and I
shall stop you if I have any questions.”

Sherry nodded her agreement “Very well, then.
This is a story about my cousin, Little Harry. You’d like Little
Harry, Mr. Burnell, he’s quite silly.”

“Indeed. And I would like him because he’s
silly, or because we have so much in common?”

Sherry felt herself coloring to the roots of
her hair. “Oh, dear. A little of both, I suppose. Now, where was
I?”

“About to begin, as I recall,” Burnell said,
smiling up at her.

“All right. Harry is older than I, by two
years, but we always played together as children whenever Aunt
Louise and Uncle Giddy-up visited. Well, one day—”

“Uncle
Giddy-up?
Oh, dear lady,
please, I beg you. You must draw back from your story about the
estimable Harry, and tell me how your uncle came by that name.”

Shrugging her agreement, as one story was as
good as another, she began, “It was spring, I remember, and I was
four. No. Five. It doesn’t matter, really, as I’m told I was always
disgustingly precocious, even in my cradle.” She took another sip
of wine, as storytelling could be dry work. “At any rate, it was
spring, and I had outrun my nanny and taken off into the woods.
Everyone, including Uncle Harry—he was called Uncle Harry then—went
off to search for me, sure I would have fallen into a pit or been
carried off by Gypsies. Mama was frantic.”

“Mamas tend to be frantic. It’s a part of
their nature,” Burnell said, deftly tipping the last of the wine
into Sherry’s glass.

“If you’re going to interrupt me every two
seconds...”

“A thousand apologies, my dear lady. A
million, should you wish it. Shall I cut out my tongue?” He put out
his free hand and began searching the folds in the blanket. “I know
there’s a knife lying around here somewhere. Just a moment, and the
deed will be done. Although I warn you, you may not want to watch.”
Sherry giggled, quickly locating the knife stuck into the wedge of
cheese and holding both above her head, where he couldn’t reach.
Her nose was growing numb and she put it down to the chill in the
air. Which, of course, did nothing to explain how numb her gums and
teeth were getting as well. Perhaps she should have eaten more
bread, drunk less wine, received more easy affection from her
husband so that Edmund’s kindness didn’t make her desperate heart
so happy.

“Now listen,” she warned, lowering her voice
to heighten the drama of her tale. “I was out there—somewhere. It
was growing dark. My parents, everyone, was growing frantic. Mama
was crying into her handkerchief. Papa had sent someone off to
fetch an article of my clothing, planning to shove it in front of
the hounds’ noses and set them loose to find me. Which launched
Mama into complete hysterics when Uncle Harry said how lovely that
would be, as when the hounds found me and ripped my little body
into shreds Papa could then cut off my ears and tail and present
them to his sobbing sister. My mother, that is. Her hysterics
doubled, then doubled again, and Papa, who never really cared for
Uncle Harry, turned the air blue with his curses. I saw and heard
it all, up there in the branches of the tree where I had climbed
hours earlier, then fallen asleep in the crook of two large
branches. Their voices woke me.”

“You were frightened?”

She shook her head. “I was
angry.
Uncle Harry had made Mama cry. So, seeing as I’d already slept past
my tea, and was prodigiously hungry as well as exceedingly angry, I
made my presence known and insisted that dear, dear, Uncle Harry be
the one who lifted me down from my perch.” She smiled at the memory
of the rather squat, definitely portly man as she had jumped down,
into his arms, nearly sending the two of them crashing to the
ground.

“Then, after Mama had done with kissing me,
and Papa had done with saying the hounds would, too, have found me
as I’d already been good and treed, I insisted that I would only be
happy if Uncle Harry put me up on his shoulders and
carried
me all the way home, playing horsy with me, as he had done once or
twice before, always under duress. But he had done it. He did it
again that day, after Mama told him he’d never slide his feet under
her dinner table again if he refused me.”

“So, you
rode
Uncle Harry all the way
home,” Burnell said, grinning. “A fitting punishment for having
upset your mama.”

“All the way home,” Sherry repeated, closing
her eyes and reliving those childishly wonderful moments. “I dug in
my heels from time to time, used a slender stick I found in my hair
as a whip, and called out ‘giddy-up, giddy-up’ every time be
flagged in the slightest. Papa was so happy with me he gave me my
very own hound. And the poor man has been Uncle Giddy-up ever
since. Although he never visited quite so often after that, but
just sent Little Harry along on his own.”

“A fine story.”

“No, it’s not. Not really. It was a silly
story. But at least mine was true. Mr. Beau Brummell telling you
the secret of his boot polish? I daresay that’s what tipped me off,
you know. He’d never do such a thing. You should be ashamed of
yourself.”

“And yet I’m not. Not in the slightest,”
Burnell said, helping Sherry to her feet, then bending to gather
the remains of their impromptu picnic. “I’m the very Devil that
way.”

Sherry picked up the blanket and shook it a
time or two before folding it. “Ha! The Devil is it?” She turned to
look at her companion. So handsome, so blond, so very kind and
approachable. “You don’t have the look of the Devil, Mr. Burnell.
No horns.”

“I sent them out to be polished,” he told her
as they walked back to the finely crafted curricle.

“And your tail?”

“My tail? The Devil has a tail? Must be
horribly inconvenient.”

Sherry giggled. “I agree. How does one sit,
with a tail?”

“Gingerly?” Burnell suggested, helping her up
onto the bench seat. “But I am the Devil.”

“Certainly you are,” Sherry said, pushing at
her skirts so that he could sit beside her. “Tell me, Mr. Devil,
just what is it you do? I’ve always wondered.”

“I enjoy myself, mostly,” he answered as he
urged the horses forward, back toward the road, and London.

It may have been the wine, or the pleasant
afternoon, or the fact that she’d had so little to laugh at
recently. Sherry wasn’t sure. But she most certainly was enjoying
herself. “And how does the Devil
enjoy
himself?”

He smiled at her, his blue eyes dancing.
“You’ll recall the recent revolution in France?”

“I do,” Sherry answered, trying and failing
to maintain a sober expression.
“You
did that?”

“I did. I consider it to be some of my best
work,” Burnell said, winking at her.

Laughter bubbled up inside Sherry, found its
way out. “I shouldn’t laugh. Those were terrible times in France,
even if we’re almost always at war with them now.”

“That, too.”

“What, too? Oh! You mean you’re responsible
for wars, too? Now you’re being ridiculous. Soon you’ll be telling
me you started the Great Fire.”

“No, sad to say, I can’t claim that one. The
fire began all by itself, in a small bakehouse, I understand.
Farriner was the man’s name, if I’m recalling the incident
correctly,” he said as they neatly feathered a corner and Sherry
held on for dear life as a curricle coining the other way all but
touched wheels with theirs. “Cow-handed idiot,” Burnell said, his
pleasant voice suddenly ice-hard with anger. “He’ll lose a wheel on
the next turn and end in a ditch, I can promise you that. Are you
all right?”

“I’m fine,” Sherry said, but some of the fun
and nonsense had gone out of the afternoon. That had been young
Baron Gilesen in the curricle, a friend of Geoff’s. She’d
recognized him in the brief seconds the two vehicles had come close
together; she’d seen the moment of fear in his eyes, quickly
replaced with the thrill of having so nearly avoided an accident.
Like the baron, Geoff had taken a turn too fast, lost a wheel, and
ended in a ditch. “But there is no rush to get back to Grosvenor
Square, Mr. Burnell. We don’t have to fly quite so fast.”