The Adventurer (2 page)

Sitting in the courtyard garden of the house her father had rented just off Rue Saint Honore, with her morning
chocolat
cooling in a pot on the table beside her, she couldn’t think of a single one.

For nearly three months—one-and-eighty days to be precise—Isabella had delighted in the French capital city. Her days had flitted by in a swift succession of late morning strolls through the Jardin de Tuileries, visits to the Louvre Palace to view the royal art collection, and performances of Molière at the Palais Royale.

And that had only been during the first week.

She’d very soon established a routine. On Tuesdays she sipped strong coffee at a window-side table in café Procope, the quaint coffeehouse she’d discovered just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain where she could watch the incredible bustle of the city pass by. On cobbled streets scarcely wider than a footpath, carriages would careen at breakneck speed—
Regardez!
their drivers would shout, only seconds before narrowly missing pedestrians who would be left waving their fists, shouting a volley of Gallic invective against the retreating noise of the clattering hooves and churning wheels.

On Wednesdays she passed the morning with her letter writing and her sketching—in the garden on sunny days, in the front parlor that faced the street when it rained—filling a constant string of letters back and forth to her parents and sisters at home in England at Drayton Hall. Catherine, not quite nineteen and the eldest of the younger three Drayton daughters, had written faithfully each week, keeping Isabella apprised of the goings-on at home. In her latest letter, received just three days before, she reported that fourteen-year-old Mattie was apparently once again “in love”—Isabella had lost count of how many times it had now been—and that the youngest, nine-year-old Caroline, was simply refusing to accept that she couldn’t ride her prized pet hog, Homer, in the sidesaddle races at the fair in Hexham, no matter how showy a step he might have. She’d evidently managed to convince their mother, the duchess, to it through sheer inexorable persistence. The duke, however, wasn’t to be swayed.

Most other days Isabella could be found walking along the gay boulevards that followed the curving line of the sleepy River Seine. With its gray-green waters shimmering under the morning sunshine, she would toss chunks of stale bread to the swans and pause to look at the baubles for sale in the stalls of the tradesmen, which she bought as gifts for her sisters back home.

Sometimes she would stand, watching the painters who made their livelihood committing scenes of the famous city to canvas. More often she would sit and sketch them herself. Le Notre Dame, the Pont Neuf at twilight, the magnificent stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle, she’d detailed nearly a dozen of the scenes herself so that she would always have them to remind her of her time in Paris, the most exciting time of her life.

If only Elizabeth could have been there to see it with her.

Isabella’s eldest sister would have loved Paris, its sights, its sounds, even its smells. There was a vivacity to the city, that same
joie de vivre
that Elizabeth brought to everything she ever did.

For the whole of Isabella’s three-and-twenty years, Elizabeth, now Lady MacKinnon of Dunakin, had been Isabella’s closest confidante. She’d been her secret inspiration, doing the things, being the person Isabella could only have ever dreamed of.

When Isabella had been just thirteen years of age, she had fancied herself in love with the seventeen-year-old son of the neighboring Earl of Chilton, Kentigern St. Clive. He’d been everything she’d ever thought a man should be, very blond, very handsome, with a way of looking at her that made her blush to her eyebrows. But what Isabella hadn’t known—and Elizabeth apparently had—was that a good many of the young girls across the whole of Northumbria had also fancied themselves in love with him. In fact it was a standing joke the young St. Clive only sought to improve by talking sweetly and smiling handsomely at most any young lass he encountered from milkmaid to noble miss.

Isabella, however, would discover the terrible truth of it on the very day of the same Hexham fair at which Caroline was so set upon riding her hog.

It had been a clear sunny day much like the present one, with the sky stretching as far as the eye could see. Isabella had been picking daisies along the hillside that overlooked the River Tyne, pulling petals one by one, tossing them to the breeze, and asking that same age-old question ...

Loves me.

Loves me not.

Instead of the result she so very much hoped for, Isabella found herself stumbling upon her beloved wrapped in the arms—and very naked legs—of eighteen-year-old Maggie Flowerdew (more commonly known about the district as Maggie the “Deflowered”).

Like most genteel young ladies, Isabella had been duly sheltered from the more unrestrained aspects of human temptation. Thus, she had never seen, would never have conceived such a thing as what lay sprawled before her upon that windswept hillside. She very nearly fainted at the sight of them. Oh, how she wished she had, instead of standing there like some pathetic mute, fighting to catch her breath, staring at them in maidenly horror while they scrambled to their feet, all flashes of white skin and hastily pulled-on clothing.

Maggie had giggled at Isabella’s naïveté, thinking it all great fun.

Kentigern St. Clive had merely looked annoyed for having been interrupted.

When Isabella finally did manage to speak several long and terrible moments later, all she could manage was a single, tearful word:
Why?

“You’re just a child, Bella Drayton,” St. Clive had said, with the clover into which he’d tumbled Maggie still stuck amidst his sandy-colored hair, and the breeches that had been down around his ankles yanked clumsily into place.

He might well have told her she had horns coming from her head and a nose that looked like Homer’s wriggly snout.

Isabella had been humiliated to her thirteen-year-old toes. She had responded by dropping the daisies she had gathered so dreamily as she’d fled to the sanctuary of the Drayton carriage to cry herself numb against the soft velvet squabs while the rest of her family ate berry tarts and watched the races, utterly unaware that her heart had just been devastated.

All except Elizabeth.

She had found Isabella and had held her, smoothing her hair and taking her every youthful sob until after she had quieted and all her tears had dried. And then Elizabeth had done something. Something so reckless and so audacious, it was still talked about each year whenever the Hexham fair came around.

It had been a tradition for as long as anyone could remember that the final contest of the day, before everyone bundled their belongings and children together and headed back for their homes in the village, was the archers’ competition. The local gentlemen’s sons always entered and for three years running, Kentigern St. Clive had taken the prize. That year, however, more than just a few heads had turned when Elizabeth suddenly announced
her
intention to compete.

Disapproving whispers
hished,
rippling like a restless wind throughout the tiny gathering. To think that a lady, and the daughter of a duke, intended to compete against all those young men?

Shameful
had been a word some of them had used.

Scandalous
had been another.

But their father, who had doted on Elizabeth, on all of his five daughters really, from the day they’d been born, had given his consent. That was one advantage to having a duke for a father; a certain degree of impropriety could always be overlooked.

The targets were accordingly positioned. The archers, some looking unnerved at the prospect of competing against the daughter of the Duke of Sudeleigh, formed a reluctant line to take aim. And while Elizabeth didn’t take the prize that afternoon, she did score her mark rather with a flourish, sinking her arrow dead at the center of a fat old oak—

—the very oak against which Kentigern St. Clive had been leaning.

For as long as she lived, Isabella would never forget the sight of the splendid St. Clive, frozen with shock, with the feathered butt of Elizabeth’s arrow sticking at a near-perfect right angle from the tree—quite between his legs and not two inches beneath the perfervid crotch of his grass-stained breeches.

It had always been that way with the two sisters, Elizabeth the dazzling one, with her brilliant red-gold hair and flashing eyes, like a flickering flame, vivid and intense. Dark-haired Isabella had had little choice but to adopt the role of shadow, envying her sister for her spirit and boldness—wishing she could just once be so bold herself.

But Elizabeth was in Scotland now, married to her handsome Highlander husband, and Isabella couldn’t think of a man better suited to her sister’s fire than the imposing Douglas MacKinnon. He’d brought out a vulnerability in Elizabeth that she had spent the first part of her life trying very hard to deny, while at the same time celebrating her spirit, the headstrong will that made Elizabeth who she was.

They were a perfect complement to one another. And wasn’t that always the way of it with love? A chance meeting ...

Or a slipper in search of the intended foot?

Somehow, incredibly, they always lead to happily-ever-after.

Somehow, magically, Fate finds a way.

For some people anyway.

Not, apparently, for Isabella.

Her Paris holiday was to have been her adventure, her chance for her own encounter with destiny.

Her
last
chance.

It had been agreed before she’d left England that her father and mother would spend the weeks she was away considering a list of prospective bridegrooms for her. It had been Isabella’s decision. It was, in essence, her way of giving Fate an ultimatum.

Isabella was a practical girl. She was nearly four-and-twenty, and unlike Elizabeth, who would have happily passed her days living as a spinster had she not met Douglas, Isabella had every intention of one day becoming a wife and, saints willing, a mother, too. She realized that her upbringing at Drayton Hall in the far reaches of Northumbria had sheltered her. Kentigern St. Clive aside, she had only a very limited acquaintanceship with members of the opposite sex. She had been to London once, but had been too young to do anything more than ride in the park in the early morning hours or go along to the modiste’s shop with her mother, sitting quietly on a cushioned bench while the duchess had been fitted and fêted and fussed over.

So who better than her own parents to decide who would best suit her? Their own marriage had been arranged, and there couldn’t be two people happier to spend their lives together.

It wasn’t as if Fate hadn’t had ample opportunity. While in Paris, Isabella had attended countless soirées and social gatherings, had been introduced to and flattered and even admired by any number of suitable gentlemen. French and English, viscount to marquis, while they had all of them been gracious and honorable and a few even quite handsome, not one of them had inspired in her so much as the slightest spark of feeling.

Perhaps adventure just didn’t come to everyone. Perhaps some people were simply destined to lead quiet, comfortable, rather
ordinary
lives, without chance encounters, without the unexpected ...

... without a mysterious gallant bearing that fated slipper.

Her parents certainly had. They’d had over five-and-twenty years of an arranged and
ordinary
life.

And now, it seemed, Isabella was to as well.

She let go a deep, slow sigh. “It isn’t too late, you know,” she whispered to the clouds, giving them a small frown. “If you’ve anything planned, dearest Fate, anything at all, there is still this one last day, this one last night before I must leave my chance for adventure behind.”

On the morrow, Isabella would turn back to England, with a stop on the way at the French royal palace of Versailles. The duke and duchess had received a royal invite some months before, but her father and mother had been unable to make the crossing with her. So the duke had sent Isabella in his place, with his widowed sister, Isabella’s aunt, Idonia Fenwycke, as her companion, to pay the family’s respects to Louis XV and his queen. Isabella had been enjoying Paris so much, had been reluctant to leave it for the pomp and ceremony of the Court, she had put off the visit until she’d nearly run out of time altogether.

So she would stop now, briefly, as she made her way to the Calais coast, where the ship awaited to take her back to England. And then after tomorrow? It would be time for Isabella to return to her life, to her future in England—a future that would very soon include marriage and children, with a husband Isabella had yet to meet.

While the idea of a marriage did possess its own excitement, Isabella couldn’t ignore a niggling sense of apprehension at the prospect of becoming a wife to an utter stranger. She certainly knew well the intimacies that took place between a man and woman. She had, after all, seen it sprawled vividly upon that hillside at the fair and had overheard enough cryptic comments made by her mother’s acquaintances at tea. It had been Elizabeth, however, who had explained everything to her, answering her sister’s questions honestly and with a candor that had left Isabella dumbfounded.

It had been just before Isabella had left for France. The two women had been sitting in Elizabeth’s bedchamber at the MacKinnon’s town house in Edinburgh. Elizabeth had come to see her sister off with the happy news of her expected child, due later that year. The announcement of it had tugged at something in Isabella, giving root to a new and unfamiliar longing. Isabella had always known she’d wanted children, but it wasn’t until that moment, while watching the quiet joy of it in Elizabeth’s eyes, that the
need
to be a mother had made itself known.

It was a yearning that had only grown since.

“It just seems so very
personal,”
Isabella had said. “Doing
that
with a man.”

“It
is
personal, Bella. Good gracious, can there be anything more personal than that? But believe me when I say it isn’t just what you saw when you found that wretch St. Clive at the fair. It is much, much more than that. When it is with the man you are meant to spend your life with, it is natural and right and the most beautiful, most liberating thing a woman can experience.”