The Indian Maiden (11 page)

SEVEN

T
here
are two
times of daylight that are the most comfortable for those who suffer from homesickness. One is twilight, of course, since that gentle time presages the coming of nightfall. Night’s a sentimental time and though loss is felt most acutely then, curiously it is always comforting as well, at least for those who plan on going home again someday. For in the night, one may forget one’s surroundings, or pretend that time is passing quickly since no matter how it’s actually passing, another day has obviously just been gotten through. And in the night, of course, one may always dream of home and revisit it in that timeless way.

Earliest morning is another blurry hour when the cover of night has only lately been lifted and the full relentless glare of day has not yet been able to point up so pitilessly how far away home actually is. There’s also that sense of the possibility of rescue, since the birth of the day, like any other time of renewal, is the time for hope. And too, in that pastel hour there are more opportunities to be alone, and it becomes easier for some people to bear loneliness when they don’t have to pretend to jollity and contentment.

At least, so it was for Faith. So she slipped from the house when only lower servants were stirring and she walked the dewy garden paths and breathed in the pungent first breath of honeysuckle and though it brought a pang, since in the early mist it seemed so much like home, it was a pleasant pain, not so much of longing as of sweet remembrance. Nostalgia, she thought on a long sigh, was much easier to cope with than yearning.

But as she walked on, down a steep slope, away from the manor, and noted the birdsongs and began to appreciate the way the sun was slowly melting the mists and
showing the gem-clear colors of another lovely summer’s morning, she realized she was enjoying herself. At that, oddly, she experienced a certain unease. For at the thought that she might be becoming more accustomed to her surroundings, that she might at last be adjusting to them, she realized in so doing she was losing a part of her identity. Even if that part was only an aching uncomfortable thing, it had defined her, and if it were leaving then she no longer knew herself as well as she once had done.

But it was hard to regret the loss of pain, and so it was a very quizzical looking young woman that Lord Deal saw standing absolutely still in the path, her head on a tilt, very much like a robin listening for a worm. Or so he told her as he drew rein and saluted her. It wasn’t the most politic thing to say to a lovely young woman, he realized even as he said it, but she lost that lost expression and laughed up at him when she heard it.

“Da
rn
. I thought I was alone,” she said, “and so I was listening to a nice big fat fellow rustling in the earth over there,” she went on, pointing to the side, “but now that you’re here I guess I’ll have to pass him up and find another breakfast.” And she grinned as she said it, which made him quite forget to laugh at her sally.

When she looked at him oddly, and quickly began to explain the jest, he slipped down from his mount and, looking down at her serious face, said on a belated laugh, “Oh I understood and it was clever. But you see, you grinned at me.” When she looked even more confused, he gave out a genuine laugh, and leading his mount by his reins, he began to walk the path with her.

“You see,” he explained, looking down at her as she paced by his side, shredding a bit of dandelion as she did so, “English ladies do not grin. Oh no,” he said seriously as she looked up from the yellow wreckage she was creating at that, “they don’t. They’re trained not to, I think. They laugh, of course, and giggle a great deal, and have been known to simper unmercifully. But grinning,” he said thoughtfully, “that closed upturned mouth, the compressed lips, that cheek-splitting subversive sort of barely suppressed amusement, no, I’m quite sure it never occurs. I think it’s supposed to bring on wrinkles. But no,” he said in alarm, “please don’t stop, because it’s charming. Ah,” he sighed, as she began to laugh, “now I’ve done it. You’re desperate to be in fashion and look at you, falling about with laughter, and not a grin in sight.”

It seemed she could not become sober. Whenever she tried, he’d say something rather wistfully about her vanished grin, and she’d start up again. It was only when they reached the bottom of the lane and had taken a few steps to the right, that she saw where they’d walked and the sight took the laughter from her.

“Oh lord,” she sighed.

“Yes?” he asked. And when she grinned at him, he looked back happily and said, “I couldn’t resist. It’s my one advantage over all your countrymen, that one pathetic jest. I had to use it, didn’t I? And it bought me that grin back again, which was worth it, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t answer, she just looked out at the ornamental lake they’d come to. It was nothing like Marchbanks’s tailored, cement-circumscribed circular body of water. But though it was clearly artificial, no natural formation being so tamely curved, or conveniently arranged into multiple landscaped spillways and goldfish-filled shallows and quiet lily-clogged pools expressly formed for the pleasure of Japanese bridges to wander across, it improved on nature. The great willows to one side certainly thought so, and their long leafy fingers trailed across its face as if tracing their own wind-ruffled images, and there seemed to be no complaint from the wild ducks which streamed in proper family file over its deeper surfaces.

“An ancestor,” he said negligently, holding back his mount, who stirred with the sudden thought of drinking too deep. “It’s convenient having had thoughtful ancestors. This particular fellow was constantly shifting trees and rearranging streams. He died, like Alexander, dreaming of new land to conquer. It pleased him to play at being the Creator, and the results amuse us. But don’t look at me as though I were a lily of the field, Miss Hamilton,” he said at once, although she had done no more than turn her head to listen to him.

“Gad, but you Americans are still a puritanical lot,” he complained, and before she could assure him she wasn’t, he went on, fretfully, “I pay for my forebear’s play, I assure you. Though I don’t work in a shop, my funds do. I invest, Miss Hamilton, though it pains those of the
ton
when I say it, but I agree with your countrymen. If it was my ancestors’ work which made this earthly paradise, it is mine to keep it up, as well as to keep it in my family.”

“But I don’t blame you,” she said at once when he paused and looked out, brooding, to the lake, “and I wouldn’t.”

But before she could enumerate the ways in which she did not blame him, he went on, an unreadable expression in his sun-dazzled eyes, “You don’t subscribe to republican revolutionary ideals, as so many of your countrymen do? As Bonaparte preached? You know the chap,” he said smoothly, “the one who meant no harm to your country during the late hostilities? You know, the fellow who didn’t
burn
Washington to the ground?”

She bit her lip as he looked down at her confusion and then added lightly, “I deplore gossip, perhaps more than any man does, and perhaps with more right. But, I confess,
I
hear it.”

“Lord Deal,” she said at last, for he hadn’t broken die silence again as he awaited her answer, “my lord,” she said seriously, raising her head and looking him in the eye, “I said a few things about Napoleon Bonaparte, you did hear correctly. But I said them as I’ve said a great many things since I’ve come here, impetuously and, I’ll admit, foolishly.

“Well,” she cried, raising her chin, not knowing that with the morning breeze blowing her thin blue skirts about her, and with the militant look in her clear gray eyes so pronounced, she looked the very picture of revolutionary zeal. Very like, he thought admiringly, one that he’d seen in France, of Liberty at the barricades, all she needed was a white blouse, a red ribband, and a banner, and, he thought critically, a somewhat larger bosom, to complete the image perfectly. But eyeing that portion of her person as she breathed in a deep breath to blast him, he thought that he wouldn’t change an inch of her anatomy even if it would then duplicate the finest artwork.

The fashionable light blue frock she wore, which draped in classical style, was designed to present the female form as though it were some sort of statuary. With that in mind, and with the light behind her, it was clear to him that putting on or taking off an inch more from any part of her person would have been sheerest vandalism. The top of her bound amberwine tresses came just to his shoulder, and he decided that every inch of her person between there and the ground suited him perfectly. But a gentleman, especially one who was supposedly goading a suspected spy to rash statements, did not stare at salient points of a lady’s shapely form. Thus, Lord Deal forced himself to gaze down only into an upward-tilted pair of sparkling gray eyes and attempted to disregard all else and only listen to what was issuing from that pair of peony-tinted lips.

Yet he could not help but think she looked entrancing as she angrily spoke the most conciliatory words. “It stands to reason it’s nonsense, doesn’t it?
I
mean, my lord, if you know my countrymen at all, as you say you do, you’d know we wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to throw over your old king just so we could set up an emperor in his stead, would we?”

“Politics often don’t stand to reason,” he answered, leaning back against his steed’s caramel hide, his arms crossed over his chest, looking so comfortable she wished she could whistle the beast to motion and send him sprawling.

“Well, do you think I’m a spy, or something like?” she asked on a laugh that turned to a gasp as he continued to stare at her blandly.

“Well, as you’re fond of saying, well, it has been mentioned,” he said calmly.

“Oh yes,” she cried, “of course. Do have your man search my luggage. I’ve brought some explosive material and packed it in with my incendiary pamphlets. I just can’t decide which to destroy first, Stonecrop Hall or Marchbanks, my primary aim being to decimate the ranks of all English country estates.”

“Thus lowering the morale of the upper classes and making it that much easier for the rabble to take over
—
very clever,” her interrogator mused with an admirably straight face.

“Yes,” Faith admitted, quieting somewhat as the idea began to enchant her. “Will and I will then most likely take to blowing up the gentlemen’s clubs of London.”

“Not that!” Lord Deal gasped. “You go too far, my girl,” he said threateningly.

“Absolutely,” Faith replied, nodding sagely, “for then the gentlemen will have to go home and look at their wives and families again, and we feel that the shock of it will effectively eradicate a good portion of the decadent ruling classes.”

“I think,” Lord Deal said wa
rn
ingly, straightening and looking down at her, “that I will have to take steps, young woman, to disarm you.”

He stood before her, booted legs apart, and uncrossed his arms even as he took that one stated step toward her. He was all in russet browns, from his light riding breeches to his toast-colored jacket, and since his shaggy mane was no darker in the shifting, dappled light than the great buff horse behind him, there was only the blue of the sky above his head for contrast. There was a look half of laughter and half of something very different in the long hazel eyes which studied Faith, and the tanned visage which had held a smile now grew serious even as the firm mouth did, as those light-flecked eyes focused on Faith’s own lips.

There was a warm breeze blowing which brought the ripening scents of summer to her, mixed in with the pungent odor of the horse, as well as a new and oddly interesting scent of lemon and soap and verbena, which must have come from the gentleman as he bent closer to her. And in that fleeting second, Faith wondered, just for that passing second, what it would be like, after all that shared laughter, to be caught up in those brown arms and held captive close, against that—but in the next second the great horse shifted a step and she heard the creaking of its leathers and the jingling of its fittings, and that subtle change, changed everything. For then she looked into those profoundly serious, knowing eyes and at that slightly parting mouth as he drew near and she felt a familiar, but no less dreadful for all that, stab of sheer terror.

She stepped back immediately, almost overbalancing as she did so. And at that, Lord Deal stopped in his tracks and looked at her, no longer with that disturbing growing desire, but with real surprise and puzzlement.

“So,” she asked shrilly, her voice so oddly high and artificial she scarcely knew it, “do you really think me
a
spy?”

“My dear,” he said slowly, dropping his hands to his sides, a troubled expression replacing the threatening avid look of concentration which had so alarmed her, “
I
was going to attempt to kiss you, I’ll admit it. And I know it isn’t done. So, I suppose you were right to deny me. But you could have said something. A word would have been sufficient. Because, my dear,
I
was not going to attempt anything else, I promise you. I’m
...
I’m not so wild as I look.” He laughed hesitantly. “You need not fear me,” he explained again, when she would not answer, but only stood and gazed at him with distress.

Then, without another word, she spun around and literally took to her heels, and ran back up the road they had descended, and rounded the curve in the path and was lost to his sight.

He stared after her a long while, not seeing anything but what had already passed between them. And that, he thought, had not been anything tangible, only a great deal of good fellowship, and sharing, and humor, and then, an unexpectedly strong attraction. He’d wanted to kiss her, to taste her, to know with his lips and his body what his mind and his senses had already promised him. But his mere intention had frightened her. No, no, he thought, not frightened, the shocking thing was that he’d obviously terrified her.

A kiss was, after all, not a very great thing. Oh, he supposed some gothic families used the evidence of one to bind a fellow to a declaration, he’d heard of it, but in truth he’d never known of anyone caught in the parson’s mousetrap for such a little felony. It was generally the theft, or gift, of a great deal more than a brief embrace and two pairs of lips touching that required those holy words to be so swiftly uttered. Most knowledgeable young ladies, even of the highest birth, would exchange kisses with a great many admirers before they decided which of the lucky fellows had compromised them.