Love's a Stage (3 page)

He smiled. “Actually, I’ve been walking beside you, but you’ve been so busy scowling at the doorways that I’m afraid you haven’t noticed.”

Miss Atherton fought the urge to deny that she’d been scowling.

“If you have been walking beside me, then please don’t do so anymore. I don’t walk with gentlemen to whom I haven’t been introduced.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said, “because you strike one as being a little untutored.”

“Untutored! What, pray, do you mean by that?”

“Do you realize that your eyes lighten almost to amber when you’re angry? It’s very unusual. Was your father by any chance a Moor?”

“Certainly not! I wish you will go away.” Frances grabbed her case, hoping fervently that he would ask if he could carry it so that she would have the pleasure of refusing. Unfortunately, the gentleman was either too perceptive or too lazy to offer his assistance, and Frances was forced to endure him strolling beside her while she tugged at the heavy baggage.

“Do you know, Prudence . . .” he began.

“My name is not Prudence!”

“No? What is it?”

Not so easily tricked, Frances remained silent. He gave her a sidelong glance and smiled inwardly.

“As I’d begun to say, and believe me, I wouldn’t mention the matter if it were not that you might encounter this problem again . . . You see, in London we have a quaint custom called the gratuity. Believe me, it’s very pervasive.”

Frances would have liked to discard this verbal tidbit, but the import of his words began to penetrate her tired mind. She set down her case, rubbing arms that felt as though they had been pulled from their sockets, and allowed herself the luxury of one more glance at her companion.

“Do you mean,” she asked slowly, “that the hack driver was angry because I didn’t give him a tip?”

“Something like that.”

She got a new grip on her case and dragged it a few more feet. “Very well, you’ve told me, so you can go away. If you’re waiting for me to admit I was in the wrong, you’re wasting your time, because I won’t. I hate admitting it when I’m wrong.”

“An admirable quality.”

“You know it’s not,” she said with a gulp of exertion. “Everyone knows that it’s a terrible weakness, besides being a sin of pride.”

She heard his soft laughter as he stepped in front of her, bringing her painful trek to a rest. He placed one caressing hand on her shoulder and, with the other hand, lifted the tip of her chin between the thumb and forefinger.

“I find your pride enchanting, Prudence, and I would never consider it a sin. Will you let me carry your case, or are you going to drop first?”

Frances had already more than noticed his attractiveness, and felt the tug of its magnetism. But nothing in her previous experience with men had prepared her for a swift transition from magnetism to this captivating force. The shock of his touch on her face caused for her a suspension of rational thought, as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice water on her. His expression radiated a charm so supple that it flowed about her like a golden net. It was lethal, that combination of sympathy and humor, and it had led to the undoing of far more canny women than she. And Frances was exhausted and vulnerable. But years of being the practical eldest daughter of a vicar were not compatible with the frivolous heady emotion she was experiencing. Miss Atherton came to earth with a bang. What in the world had gotten into her? Grimly, she instructed the too-helpful gentleman to remove his hands. She readjusted her grip on the case and began to lug it forward, free again. He stepped out of the way.

“Don’t you like my tactics, Prudence?” he asked conversationally. “I had a suspicion that it might not work.”

Frances swallowed, a hard task considering the dryness of her throat. Rather abruptly, she said, “Why do you keep following me?”

“Two reasons,” he said easily. “The first is that you don’t look like a person who would arrive safely at her destination.”

Miss Atherton was inclined to take umbrage. “I have arrived safely,” she informed him, “at every destination in my life for which I have ever embarked.”

“I know a very good drama teacher who could get rid of that staccato within two weeks.”

Miss Atherton was not sorry to see that the tile above the next doorway bore Number 59.

“Here I am, arrived
safely
at my destination. Good evening!”

She prided herself on having just the right note of finality in the good evening, and without a backward glance she set her case against the brick balustrade leading to the door and ran up six marble steps. Frances gave the tarnished brass door knocker a lusty whack. Nothing. She tried again, feeling a miserable trepidation grip her heart. Homesickness, a fat bulldog, and a muddy walk had not been the only trials of her ride to London. Uppermost in her mind had been the ever present fear that her great-aunt might not be home, but instead on one of her jaunts to the continent. What would come of Frances’ plans then?

The sound of a slow shuffle came from behind the door. There was a loud clank and the door opened a crack, letting a bar of light into the darkening street. A shiny, gray-fringed head poked quickly around the door, preceded by a squat hooked nose and a bristling mustache. A ratty pair of eyes darted back and forth.

“What is it? What do you want?” asked the mustache.

Frances stared back nonplussed. What could this man have to do with her great aunt? Could Aunt Sophie have possibly married in the three years since she had last corresponded with Miss Atherton’s mother?

“I would like to see Miss Sophie Isles, if you please,” she said.

“If you’d like to see her, why’d you come here?” he said unpleasantly, and blew his nose on a big white handkerchief.

“This is Number fifty-nine Charles Street, is it not? And the residence of Miss Isles?”

“H’mph.” He twitched the hooked nose. “It’s fifty-nine Charles Street all right, but there’s no Isles woman here.”

“But that can only mean she’s moved! Perhaps you know . . .?”

“Don’t know and I don’t want to know. Don’t know who she is, where she is, and don’t care to. And what’s more, don’t like the way you inconsiderate young folk come pesterin’ an old man with a bunch of foolish questions. In my day a decent woman would
know
who she was lookin’ for and
know
where to find’em.” He snapped the door shut in her face.

Frances stared quietly at the unresponsive door knocker before turning to walk down the steps. She sat wearily on her case. The sun had vanished behind the block of townhouses, rendering the severe Palladian façades of Charles Street colder and more austere than they had been in the kindly afternoon light. The pavement was still crowded, though less than it had been earlier, and faces carried the impatient preoccupation of those returning home from their labors. Across the street, a woman in a large crowned cap was pulling the chock pegs from under a cart piled high with baskets and covering her merchandise with a red wool blanket. A postman hurried by thrusting his brass bell through the leather straps of an empty canvas letter bag. One by one, a row of bright dots appeared, following the slow progress of the lamplighter.

The man with the golden hair was leaning against the balustrade, his elbows resting comfortably on the stone newel.

“Prudence,” he said musingly, “. . . Sweetsteeple.”

Frances roused from her self-counsel to say, “That is
not
my name!”

“Prudence Sweetsteeple,” he continued, ignoring her indignant outburst, “leaves the remote hamlet where she was reared and travels to the Great and Terrible Capital only to find herself stranded friendless and hungry without so much as the price of a return ticket or a night’s lodging.”

“How,” she said suspiciously, “do you know that?”

Age had softened the fabric of her cape, permitting the top button to slip, at times, from its hole. It was loose now and he reached down, refastening it. “If you could afford a room, you would have rented one to shake off your dried mud before arriving at the home of a lady you don’t know well enough to be sure of her address.”

Frances smiled reluctantly. “Very clever. You must have been a source of continual amazement to your tutor.”

The man leaned back against the newel post, crossing his finely muscled legs at the ankles. The searching hand of the soft evening breeze stroked through his hair. He smiled at Frances in his odd, affectionate way.

“I never had a tutor. My parents held that public school was superior for the development of character.”

“Did they? How do you know I come from a remote village?”

“Your clothes are twenty years out of fashion.”

Frances frowned at the serviceable gray cape that her own mother had worn at Frances’ age. Then she looked at the stranger in his beautifully cut blue jacket, tight buckskins, and shiny Hessians. “It’s wasteful to throw out perfectly good clothing simply because the style is no longer the current thing. I don’t care a fig about being fashionable.”

“Very proper,” he said affably. “Frills and furbelows won’t get you into heaven.”

She stood, emphatically brushing at the mud on her cape. “Going to heaven is nothing to joke about,” she said primly.

The gentleman did not appear in the least chastened. “And I knew you were hungry,” he said, “because you’re so cross. Let me take you somewhere and feed you.”

Miss Atherton ignored the wheedling of her stomach. “Absolutely not! I don’t know you. Now, if you’ll pardon me, I’ll have to think of a plan.”

“I believe you could.” Smiling, he came to stand close to her. “But you won’t have to, I know where Sophie Isles lives.”

“You . . . how could you know that?”

“She lives in an apartment above a young male relative of mine, on Long Acre, about ten blocks from here. How would you prefer to travel?” Green devils danced in his eyes. “Shall I call a hack for you?”

“For ten blocks? I should say not. Although I can see you are funning. If you would be so kind as to give me directions,” she said formally, “I shall do very well on foot.”

“You will, if Miss Sophie doesn’t go to bed before two
A.M
. I’m afraid that’s how long it will take you to drag your case there.”

She looked at her boot tops and kicked at the caked mud on the hem of her cape, so that a tiny piece fell off and crumbled on the sidewalk. Pride had carried her case down Charles Street. She wondered if a miracle might give her the strength to carry it another ten blocks. Her arms and legs ached miserably. Mayhap the Lord had provided this stranger to carry her traveling case, although any virtuous young lady would have wished that the Lord had provided someone a little less spectacular.

“I’m not weak,” she said. “It’s just that this case is very heavy.”

He reached for her bag and lifted it with irritating ease. “A Herculean weight,” he agreed. “What’s in here?” He started walking toward Russell Street, carrying the case, and she went beside him.

“Lots of things. But mostly, a brass bed warmer.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you would need that to keep you warm in bed.”

“I didn’t think so either, but then Grandma said she wouldn’t sleep nights if she wasn’t sure I had it with me.”

“Grandma Sweetsteeple?”

This time she laughed, a musical rippling sound that caused a boy pushing a cart heaped with broccoli to stare after the girl who was lighting the evening with laughter. “No, Atherton. That’s my name as well. What’s yours?”

“David,” he said easily. “So you were named after your grandmother. My felicitations. Atherton is an unusual name for a girl.” He was pleased to hear her laugh again.

“How can you be so absurd? Atherton is my
surname
. And you were very bad to joke me by not saying immediately that you know where Miss Isles lives.”

Privately, the man with the golden hair marveled at the relative ease with which he had won her trust. It spoke volumes for the depth of her naïveté that she so readily accepted his word that he was taking her to the residence of Miss Sophia Isles.

“I admit to being very bad.” They were walking through a circle of lamplight that glimmered on his shiny hair. “I ought to warn you that your reluctance to tell me your first name leads me to believe that you are too embarrassed to tell me. What could it be . . . Bathsheba? Armilla?”

“It’s nothing like that.” They were separated briefly by a man carrying a giant stick of bread who shouldered his way hurriedly between them.

“Jarita?” he asked after they were reunited by the man’s passing.

“That is not a name!”

“Ah, but it is. I can see you haven’t studied Hindi.”

A certain twinkle danced in Frances’ eyes. She peeped sideways at her companion. “I confess I haven’t. Does that sink me utterly beneath reproach?”

“Not for a moment. I’m the soul of tolerance. What have you studied? Painting? Do you know who Cooper was? That’s right, the miniaturist that Mrs. Pepys sat for. That apartment house above the coffee-seller’s was Cooper’s home.”

Long, long ago, the surrounding nineteen acres had been the garden of the Westminster Abbey monks. The Convent Garden, folks had called it; but since, it had known a transformation to the Duke of Bedford’s garden, then into a fashionable piazza, and finally, to its current earthy and colorful incarnation. Somewhere in history’s unthinking plunge, some unsung innovator with an eye for abbreviation had shortened the obsolete name and restyled the area Covent Garden.

The gentleman knew the area well. He entertained Frances with an enthralling walking tour of this historic place. Frances could almost see the beloved actress Nell Gwynn viewing a parade from her lodgings as the cavaliers of the Stuart Restoration saluted her from horseback. The gentleman beside her seemed to be one of the rare people who can bring history to life and turn a stroll through busy streets into an adventure. Frances began to forget her earlier caution. She had never met anyone like this man before—so charmingly animate, with such unselfconscious ease.

It was not Miss Atherton’s habit to be easily impressed. However, by the time she had walked from the corner of Charles Street, down Russell, and over to James, she realized that he possessed a degree of erudition, wit, and education that placed him on a level of sophistication far above her own. She was not intimidated, she told herself, but as they turned the corner of Long Acre, she began to wonder why he should have taken the trouble to befriend and assist a nobody like herself, especially as she’d been less than polite to him earlier. He had said there were two reasons he had been following her on Charles Street, the first being that he was concerned about her safely reaching her destination. It was true, Frances thought, that she might have had a difficult time locating her great-aunt’s new address without him.