Elisabeth Fairchild (12 page)

Closing her eyes Dulcie saw his touch reflected in the darkness, an explosion of rose pink, into which bled brilliant lapis lazuli blue. The connection of color and feeling, leached into her, tingling the length of her spine, spreading heat all the way to her fingertips. Like the day they had met. Like the day in Hatchard’s bookstore. She wondered if such a feeling, such vibrant color, might last a lifetime.

Hat settled, Dulcie lifted her chin and dared to look deep into eyes that met hers with such understanding and camaraderie it awoke within the depths of her, the same golden heat.

She shivered, not with fear or anxiety, but with anticipation.

“Nervous?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You’ll grow accustomed.” He made it sound as if this jaunt were the first of many on which they would embark.

“How long have you led this double life?”

He shrugged. “Longer than I care to remember.”

“Have many women helped you?”

His gaze shifted, blue eyes elusive. “Why do you ask?”

Dulcie pointed to the warren of hatboxes, costumes, and wigs. “There are any number of women’s things.”

Quinn emerged from his search bearing the requested hat and coat, a red belcher and a much used, ill-washed apron.

“For you, Miss.” He handed her the apron, his tone conspiratorial. “On occasion, you will understand, Mr. Ramsay disguises himself as a crone, or charwoman. Even a slattern.”

“A very ugly slattern,” Roger agreed with a laugh.

She pursed her lips--skeptical of his explanation. She had seen too great a change in Ramsay’s light to accept it.

Roger’s gaze locked with hers--as if they spoke by way of shared glances. His voice changed. “In addition . . .”

“Sir.” Quinn interrupted, the word a warning.

Roger’s eyes remained fixed on hers. “Miss Selwyn deserves to be told the truth.”

Dulcie tensed, expecting the worst.

“On occasion,” Roger explained without trace of embarrassment or apology, the stony gaze of a Gargoyle looked out at her. “I work with women I trust, women who need the money, who will, without question, do anything I ask of them.”

“I see.” The flashes, hot and bothersome, stirred in touching the clothes in the wardrobe, made more sense, the rumors, too, in connection with Roger and his reputed predilections.

“Does it disturb you?” the Gargoyle asked stone-faced.

Feigning sophistication beyond her ken, she shrugged. “It is not for me to judge, either your life, or the company you keep. A dangerous business, is it not?”

“A desperate business,” he said calmly, ice in his words. It glittered coldly in his eyes. This time her shiver was undeniably fear.

He led her from the house by way of the mews, his high-collared Garrick coat swirling flamboyantly in the breeze. The sky was gray, the horizon thick with clouds threatening rain. The spindly ash tree that had sprung up volunteer, in the mews, was losing the last of its browned foliage. The fingerless mittens Quinn had insisted she must wear warmed her, as did the wool stockings and the drab wool cape with mud-smutted hem.

“The colors you see--” he no longer questioned that she did, indeed, see. “What do they tell you?”

She said, “I am not always clear about it.”

Quinn pulled up in a hay wagon, as promised.

Dulcie did her best not to gasp as Roger helped her into the straw-filled back, the sensation of his gloved hand against her waist briefly filled her head with images of bared hand against bared waist.

Ramsay vaulted into the wagon beside her, settling the Garrick coat about him like bat wings. In the cushion of straw she found it impossible to sit in a ladylike fashion, struggling to cover her ankles with the unfamiliar and wholly inadequate length of her milkmaid’s skirt. The cape, waist length, offered little assistance.

Like a street urchin, cross-legged beside her, hair blowing in the wind, cheeks ruddy with the cold, Roger said wryly, “I have seen your ankles before.”

Her ankles and more--at Carlton House--in her bedroom.  Memory of him, in her bedroom, heated her cheeks.

Quinn clucked up the spavined bay. The wagon’s lurch threw Dulcie against Roger’s arm. He grabbed her elbow, steadying her.

“They are very nice ankles.”

His compliments were unexpected and completely improper. A lie, as well. Rumpled wool stockings did not make for nice ankles. And yet, she could see he intended no lie. Cheeks burning, she threw an uneasy look at Quinn’s back, and would have pulled away had Roger not held fast, a dangerous gleam in his eyes. “Be not so hasty. You must appear comfortable in my company if we are to bring off this charade.”

She felt the need to explain. “I am unaccustomed to being touched inappropriately.”

He leaned closer, clasp tightening. “My touch is very appropriate given our circumstances. You are now Bethany White, milkmaid. And I am George Edwards, penniless sculptor, your lover.”

His light flared, voice impassioned, not with love, but with purpose. “You must not slip up and forget. Playact we do, but this is no Punch and Judy farce, no meaningless ploy for illicit fondling. Lives, perhaps the future of England, are at stake.”

The wagon headed east along the northern edge of St. James’s Park, their progress slowed by traffic.

She bore his reprimand with a chastened nod.

He leaned back on his elbows in the straw, eyes twinkling. “You must pretend to appreciate my touch, no matter how detestable.”

“I never said detest,” she contradicted him. “I said I am unaccustomed.”

His brows rose. The now familiar hint of a smile touched his lips.

Past the Admiralty they clopped, through the Arch. She thought of her father, flushed to think what he would say of today’s ruse.

“Why can we not pretend to be brother and sister?” She stared blankly at the team of matched bays pulling the carriage to their rear, rather than meet his eyes.

He cocked his head a moment before tweaking a flyaway strand of her hair. “We have not the same features.”

She laughed. “Many a sibling shares little in the way of looks or blood.”

“We know not enough of one another’s history to pull off the pretense,” he said firmly, dismissing the idea. “Now, about these colors of yours? I know they reveal when someone is dying, or surrounded by death. What else?”

Back to the work at hand, she thought, the real reason he had her along.

“I can see if someone is of unsound mind, or in great pain.” She sighed. “If they are angry, blissful, spiritually moved or simply lost in a cloud. I can see inner strength, or peace, or rage. I see,” she studied his clouded color, voice dropping “when the past weighs heavy on a man.”

His attractive blue eyes flew wide, briefly vulnerable. Through cinnamon lashes, long and thick, he regarded her, the fox in a thicket.

She studied the color of him, voice strengthening. “I see when someone carries too great a load of care, when a shadowed past clings to their neck and shoulders.”

He shut his eyes, turned his head, said harshly, “The colors. Blue? Yellow? They tell you this?”

“Not precisely.” She licked her lips, took a verbal plunge. “Yellow I associate with intense intellectual stimulation. People who value their capacity for thought and reasoning shine different shades of yellow, as do people who like to tell others how to run their lives.”

He frowned, lips pursed. “And blue?”

“Depending on strength and clarity, blue generally exhibits a need to communicate. Writers and public speakers as well as those who secret themselves away from the world.”

His mouth curved in a tight smile, a faint display of skepticism. “Is there more?”

“Colors can be clouded. Certain circumstances allow me to better see them.”

“Such as?”

His desire to understand did her heart good, something in his curiosity reminded her of the Comte Puysegur, the last to question her so keenly.

“They are clearest when viewed in diffuse light against a plain, pale background--a white wall for instance. They flare when passions are high.”

His brow rose a fraction of an inch.

She went on hastily, her mouth dry. “When an issue is emotionally compelling, or mentally stimulating, it strengthens one’s color.”

The wagon turned from Fleet Street into Farringdon.

“Almost there.” Gaze darting, he studied their location-the hunted wary of traps. His watchfulness increased as their progress slowed, the streets crowded.

She felt the need to warn him. “Sometimes I see nothing.”

 That got his attention. “What? Why?”

She shrugged, held out her hands, palms up. “I think my mind must be clear. I warn you, it is a nebulous talent at best. I cannot guarantee to be of much use to you.”

He leaned forward, his eyes pinning her with the same delving intensity with which she had earlier examined him. “I have every confidence you will serve me well.” 

Serve him well. There were so many connotations one might attach to the words.

He tugged her skirt hem, his eyes changing. “Ow are you with voices?”

“What?”

“You’ll need ta sound the part.” His accent and gestures were of the commonest sort. Like a chameleon he changed before her very eyes--the Gargoyle revealed.

“Give it a go, lass,” he said. “Wha’ of yer father? ‘E  seems to ‘ave coom to terms wiv yer differences.”

She frowned, and did her best to imitate the speech pattern of Betty, the downstairs maid. “Father thought me ill.” She flattened her vowels, dropped her h’s. “’E was certain I could be cured. Consulted physicians, ‘e did, countless quacks.” Her voice drifted into silence, the memories too painful to be revealed in a comical voice.

Chapter Eighteen

Spa Field, London

Ramsay, her candle in the wind, flickered dangerously amongst so much straw. The fire he tindered, scorched Dulcie’s cheeks, and crackled in her fingertips, singeing the heart of her, the core. Before she lost nerve, she blurted. “You listen. I thank you for that.”

The blue of him rose pale and wispy above his head, like steam above a just filled cup. He asked, gently, “Was there no one to talk to?”

This man who had seen the world from the belly side up sounded genuinely sympathetic. Dulcie was not a woman not easily surprised. Feelings had to be buried deep to elude her gaze. And yet, he never failed to surprise her.

She shook her head, and laughed, on the edge of tears. She would not allow them to fall, not before the Gargoyle. “When I was young, father consulted a vicar.”

She could hear her own bitterness, tasted it upon her tongue, tried to swallow the sound. No use clinging to pain.

She plucked up a handful of straw, twisting it into a rude straw cross.

He studied her hands, “What happened?”

She tossed aside the half-finished twist, breathed deep the autumn air, heady as wine. “The cloth did not call Vicar Leeds so much as he was driven to it. He would sooner declare me touched, or damned, than trust in God-given miracles. Like the locals, he believed me responsible for the fish not biting, winds blowing ill, hens no longer laying, or cows gone dry.” She paused, gauging his reaction.

His eyes narrowed, expression severe. “And so to London.”

She nodded. “Father says God did not lead us so much as he pushed us here.”

Roger took up her abandoned straw cross, twirled it gently in strong fingers.

“I know what it is like to live with a secret. To be judged guilty of crimes never committed.”

She could not take her gaze from his plaster-stained hands and so she closed her eyes, breathing in the faint odor of sandalwood beneath the stronger reek of turpentine, opened them again to find he had finished twisting the cross.

His gaze rose--met hers--eyes deep wells of compassionate understanding. Sparks of emerald kindled in them, in the blue of him, a pulsing warmth and light that reached out to her, spanning the distance between them.

She wanted to lean into the light of his empathy, to wrap arms around the light. She wanted to unburden her heart of all its sorrows.

Here sat answer to her prayers, for she had not given up on God, despite Vicar Leeds’s bumbling ineptitude, despite his fearful insistence she must be bled free of the evil humors that possessed her, and then blessed and cupped and bled again.

Here sat God’s emissary, less an imposter than Leeds had proved. In clay-stained disguise, the glory of fox fire hair doused by animal fat --Roger Ramsay, the king’s ruthless and secret Gargoyle. Here sat, without contest, the most beautiful and blessed being with whom she had ever conversed. His eyes, for the moment, reflected truth, a comprehension she had longed many years to witness. His mouth remained as guarded as ever, but in his eyes, a glow kindled an answering fire within her heart, and deeper, a burning she feared might consume her.

The wagon stopped with a jolt. Ramsay jumped down and offered her his hand.

She had jumped down from the carriage step, a big jump for an eight year old, into the tall grass of the Green, her father’s hand helping.

“What in God’s name!” His voice had been strained.

A strange sight they beheld--the largest tree on the Green, an elm, ropes dangling like strange seed pods, and clingingto the ropes, the local halt and ill.

“It is the magne’tisme!” Their coachman called down to them, voice hushed with awe.

Latched onto her father’s fingers, she ran to keep up as he cut a path through the waving grass.

“Dr. Puysegur?” She could still hear the hope, the apprehension in his voice. Anticipation coursed from his hand to hers.

Bruised green, the smell. The color of the day--lavender.

Like today, a day of expectation.

Spa Field smelled of roasted sausage, the day was colored orange and the hand, warm and firm and steady, that helped her from the wagon, was not at all her father’s. She did not want to release Roger Ramsay’s strong fingers when her feet found solid ground. She felt oddly abandoned though he stood beside her, breathing deep the smoky air and gazing about him in the oddly all-encompassing way peculiar to him.