Duty Before Desire (36 page)

“I cannot.”

Brandon must have heard the desolation in his tone. He sighed. “They are meeting in what was a gun room, when that part of the house was built in the seventeenth century. The only windows are high up the wall, and there are no trees or vines to facilitate peeping.” His mouth pulled to the side, his expression thoughtful. “But,” he said, “there is a hidden passage that goes from the study to the gun room. Evidently, the old baron had cause to fear his tenants.”

Sheri's eyes widened. “A hidden passage,” he breathed. “I could crack the secret door and watch that way.”

Brandon shook his head. “No good. The door in the study is still existent, but the one at the other end, opening into the gun room, was bricked over ages ago.”

Sheri's temper flashed. “Then what good—”

“Ventilation,” Brandon cut in. “There are narrow slits in the wall, hidden in chinks in the mortar, that provide the passageway with fresh air. Some of them are incorporated into the gun room's wall.”

A grin split Sheri's face. He clapped Brandon's shoulder. “Brilliant! Let's go.”

Moments later, the three friends stared into the dark corridor revealed by a hidden pocket door in the study's paneling. A cold draft blew stale air across their faces. The floor of the passage was thick with dust to the point that Sheri could not discern the color of the stone.

Dropping to the floor, he hastily pried off his boots.

“What are you about?” Henry asked. “Is this another manifestation of your madness?”

Sheri raised a brow. “Not done much sneaking about houses in the dead of night, I take it.” His history of accepting invitations into the bedchambers of married women might have been morally questionable, but it had taught him the finer points of keeping secret assignations secret.

Glancing at the filthy floor of the passage, he paused to silently apologize to his stockings.
You sacrifice your lives in service of a noble cause.

The passage was narrow and low. Almost immediately, Sheri cracked his head on the ceiling. He cursed. There was a heavy sigh behind him. “A moment.”

Sheri twisted himself around and saw Brandon removing his own boots. “You can't go alone,” Brandon said in answer to Sheri's look of question. “If you hit your head again, you might bleed to death inside the walls of my house. The smell would be atrocious.”

“Well, I don't want to be the odd man out.” Henry crossed his ankle over his knee and hopped on one foot to remove his footwear.

There was much grunting and hissed curses as the three men squeezed through a space that Crispin and Webb would find cozy. Their only light filtered through the ventilation slits. Each of those being about two inches high and half an inch wide, and spaced at intervals of four feet, the going was gloomy.

Sheri felt as if he'd run a long footrace when at last Brandon halted, peered through a ventilation slit, and gave him a nod.

Sheri brought his eye to a hole. The room that came into focus was about fifteen feet on a side. The walls and floor were gray stone, but a hodgepodge of rugs had been brought in to cover the floor.

Arcadia, Lorna, and Claudia sat on the floor, their backs to Sheri. They faced Poorvaja, who was likewise seated. The Indian woman's legs were crossed, each bare foot atop the opposite knee. He saw the bottoms of Arcadia's feet; she, too, had bent her legs in the challenging configuration.

Sheri fretted over her bare toes. There was no fire in the room, and the stone would leach whatever heat came with the sunlight slanting through the high windows. He hoped she was not too cold.

For long minutes, the women just sat. Poorvaja's eyes were closed. She spoke several times about drawing attention to the breath.

“How's the big show?” Henry whispered near Sheri's ear.

Disappointing, honestly. Sheri was pathetic, as his friend had alleged. So pathetic, in fact, that he'd worked himself into a frenzy and ruined a perfectly good pair of stockings over what amounted to a breathing lesson.

Poorvaja pushed to her feet and bid the others follow. Arcadia unfolded her legs and rose in a graceful, fluid movement. Sheri noticed that all the women had changed into loose tunics and skirts, which they'd drawn between their legs and tucked at the waist to free their legs. Poorvaja stepped one foot forward and brought her back knee to the floor. She spoke instructions, her hands tracing the lines of her own body. The other three joined in. Arcadia reached over to help Claudia find the correct posture, then turned, positioning herself in profile for the benefit of the other women—and, unwittingly, her husband.

“Mrs. De Vere and Mrs. Dewhurst are participating, too,” he whispered over his shoulder.

“
What?
” He felt, rather than saw, Henry plaster himself to the neighboring spy hole.

The women reached their arms overhead and leaned backwards. Arcadia looked almost worshipful, her lovely face lifted skyward, eyes closed, the hint of a smile on her mouth. Sheri's chest hurt.

“They look like a coven,” Henry hissed. “We should stop them before they summon a malevolent spirit.”

They rose to standing and bowed at the waist. Arcadia's face touched her shins, as did Poorvaja's. The other two gave it a try, though they did not fold as deeply as the experienced yogis.

There was a pose in which they all stood on one foot with the sole of the other pressed to the inside of the standing leg. Lorna quickly mastered this exercise, while Claudia toppled over onto her rump. After that followed a pose that held the legs in a wide angle, the upper body bending to the side to reach the hand to the floor. There were poses that twisted the spine or stretched the joints, and others that challenged the practitioner's balance. Sheri watched, rapt, as Arcadia's bare arm and leg muscles engaged to meet the demands of each posture. This was why she was strong, he realized, why she could hold the weight of her own extended arm through an entire waltz.

Next, Poorvaja said something; in response, Arcadia spread her feet and dropped to a squatting position, her hands in prayer position at her chest and elbows pressed to her knees, while Poorvaja narrated an explanation to the others. Arcadia placed her palms on the floor and slowly tipped forward, knees pressed into her upper arms. Her feet rose off the floor; all of her weight was balanced on her hands.

Sheri felt his lungs seize. She would fall, she would be hurt—but she wasn't. Her balance was true. To Sheri's right, Brandon let out a low, quiet whistle. “Christ on a crutch,” Henry muttered.

Slowly, Arcadia reversed the exercise, lowering herself back to her feet. Claudia applauded. “Oh, well done!”

Sheri felt like applauding himself. He was absurdly proud of Arcadia. How much dedication, how many years of work, did it take to master such a feat? His wife was beautiful and strong and—j
ust look at the smile on that face.
She grinned at her friends, accepting their praise with a silly bow, and he found himself grinning, too.

A realization jolted through his mind.
This is what she misses.
He understood then, in a new and deeper way, that Arcadia wasn't his, and she never would be. She had a life in India she loved. He couldn't keep her from it any longer.

All four women tried the next exercise. From an upright kneeling position, they reached their hands back to their heels. Arcadia bowed her spine, pushing her chest out and up. Her body followed an elegant arc from the top of her tipped head to where her knees met the rug.

Sheri's breath caught again, for a different reason. Were he in that room with her, the front of her body would be open to his perusal. He would kiss her neck and nibble those delectable collarbones while his hands took full advantage of having her breasts so flagrantly presented. Too, he could reach right between her legs—

Oh no.

He drew a shaky breath, struggling to master himself. This was neither the time nor the place for the physical stirring in his trousers. He turned his face away and looked at Brandon. That would squelch his ardor.

Brandon was looking at him.

Shit.

Back in the gun room, the women had released that pose and were making their way down to lie on their backs. That looked harmless enough. With a word from Poorvaja, both she and Arcadia raised their legs straight up into the air and kept going, lifting their backs off the floor until only the head, neck, and shoulders remained on the rug. Arcadia braced hands on her hips and propped her elbows on the ground for support.

“I can do that!” Claudia chirped. She threw her legs up, grunting and panting until, red-faced, she'd maneuvered herself into the same pose. Lorna went more slowly, finally achieving the same, albeit wobbly, result. Arcadia dropped her straight legs towards her face, her toes coming to rest on the rug above her head. Poorvaja padded over to Lorna and assisted her, and then Claudia.

“That's …” Sheri gulped on a dry throat. “That's impressive.”

At Poorvaja's instruction, the ladies separated their feet, tracing an arc on the ground. Arcadia took the additional step of bending her legs and drawing her feet back towards her head, so that her rump was in the air and her knees around her ears.

 He wanted to whimper.

With knowledge acquired on their wedding night, Sheri could picture her naked now, which made this so much worse. Spread before him thus, he would bend his head and lap at her swollen sex, making himself drunk on the taste and smell of her. She would squirm and beg but he would hold her still, his hands on her smooth haunches pinning her—

Henry punched Sheri's shoulder. “Enough. I don't want you perverts looking at my wife.”

“I wasn't looking at your wife, idiot,” Sheri corrected, “I was looking at mine.” As far as he was concerned, the other women might as well not have been present. His eyes only saw Arcadia. “My wife,” he whispered, the grief of impending loss already lapping at his heels.

Mine.

Lorna had allotted only one bedchamber to Sheri and Arcadia. On the first night of their stay at Elmwood, Arcadia went to bed with her heart thundering in her ears. But Sheri stayed up late with the gentlemen, and Arcadia fell asleep alone. When she awoke in the morning, Sheri was in the bed with her, but huddled on the far side of the mattress, as if he was loathe to touch her, even in his sleep.

On Saturday night, Sheri excused himself just after supper, pleading fatigue. Oddly, Mr. Dewhurst and Mr. De Vere likewise proclaimed that the trials of the day had done them in. Lorna and Claudia exchanged a knowing look, then followed their husbands to their respective chambers.

Arcadia wasn't so naïve that she didn't realize what was going on. She bid her friends good night and fought to suppress a spurt of jealousy that each of them were headed to the welcoming embrace of the men they loved.

Poorvaja had declined to sup with the group, instead taking her meal in her room. And so Arcadia found herself alone, browsing the bookshelves in the library. She wasn't an avid reader, but a tome was likely to be all the companionship she'd find this evening.

There were French novels and Greek poetry, Roman histories and German philosophies. None of these appealed to Arcadia. Of mild interest was the large collection of books pertaining to human anatomy and disease—the collection being related to Mr. Dewhurst's surgical career, she presumed.

A large atlas caught her eye at last. She pulled it from the shelf and carried it to a podium illuminated by a standing candelabrum. The leather cover made a cracking sound as she opened it to the frontispiece, a map of the world, covering two pages. Laying her hands on the vellum, she spanned the distance between England and India in less than the width of her ten fingers. It seemed such a brief distance, but seven months of her life had been spent traveling from one to the other. She could expect roughly the same for her return—six months, if the weather was cooperative. So long. By the time she reached India, she will already have been apart from Sheri for half a year.

Would that be time enough to heal her heart?

She flipped through the pages to a map of the subcontinent. Tracing the western coast with a finger, she could almost smell the scent of rain splashing on parched earth, breaking the dry season. The sounds of the rowdy village marketplace filled her ears, and she envisioned the mounds of cardamom and turmeric powder in the spice seller's stall. Almost, she could feel the sun's rays touching her face as they broke over the horizon, and her bones echoed with the roar of tigers and the trumpeting of elephants.

In keeping Arcadia in India, Sir Thaddeus Parks had not just permitted his motherless daughter to stay in the only home she knew, he'd given her a childhood most English girls could never dream of. India had taken his wife, and so, in preservation, he'd turned his daughter over to it entirely, encouraging Arcadia to adapt and thrive. How many ladies at a Society ball could say they'd dangled their feet in a river while keeping an eye on the crocodile floating lazily nearby, or that they'd once been gifted a doll by a Mughal prince?

But then, what other lady at a Society ball could claim Lord Sheridan Zouche as her husband? In balance, which memories did she treasure more: her many long summers in the
zenana
, or a single night in the arms of the man she loved?

She was glad she'd come to England. Sheri didn't want a wife, but he would always have one. Arcadia would carry the connection in her heart forever. From half a world away, she would remember the delicious slide of his skin against hers and the rapture she'd glimpsed when he possessed and filled her.

From the corner of her eye, a flicker of movement alerted her to his presence. “I thought you'd gone to bed.”

Sheri stepped into the candelabrum's circle of light. He wore his silk dressing gown and trousers. “Not so tired as I'd supposed. Where's everyone else?”