The Indian Maiden (7 page)

“Oh no, my dear,” the earl replied with pleasure, “it’s nothing to do with ancestors, but rather with descendants. It’s the sort of tale I’d ordinarily be loathe to tell such a young creature,” he confided, his gray eyes sparkling, “but then, I imagine it’s the type of thing you already understand, since you took such care to assure me you knew all about unicorns and other ho
rn
ed beasts the other day. Why child, don’t look so puzzled.” He laughed before he dropped his voice and his head low to impart the rest of his delicious tale. “After all, if you look at a Viking, you shouldn’t be surprised to find a fellow wearing horns.”

Barnabas Stratton rode back along the beech avenue to the road, and though this time he wasn’t distracted by the sight of his neighbor’s houseguests strewn across the grassy banks, he imagined he could hear the conversation being made by the Earl of Methley and the American girl in his wake, even though they were entirely out of hearing distance and completely out of sight. It was too much to expect that Methley would hold his peace now. The earl doted on gossip even more than he disliked his former schoolmate, and that, Lord Deal thought wryly, was a very great deal to dote on indeed.

And Methley was a clever fellow, always had been, and entirely amusing when he bent himself to be so. Doubtless Miss Hamilton would be savoring the tasty whole of it by now, with the sprightly seasonings of conjecture and inference to dress it for her table. Still, for all his crimes, Methley was not a liar, Lord Deal thought; then too, he reminded himself, he wouldn’t have to embellish this particular tale to make it savory either. As it was, even after all these years it stank of all the rich redolent odors of scandal, sin, and shame that gossipmongers brewed and their customers loved so well.

Lord Deal shrugged, causing his mount to pick up his paces, and this, though inadvertent, suited him, since there were many long miles between Marchbanks and Stonecrop Hall, its nearest, though happily for its owner, sufficiently distant, stately neighbor. At worst, he thought as his horse trotted down the long, treed drive, the young American girl would think him a bloody fool, and since deficient in some wise, a fellow easy to gull. As it was information, not admiration, he wanted from her, that in itself would not be detrimental to his purposes. A fellow one considered an easy mark was a chap one could let down barriers for. On that head, he thought with a smile, remembering Miss Hamilton’s grace and style, a few barriers removed might provide very pleasant diversion in an evening’s work.

At the best, he decided as he finally reached the entrance to Marchbanks and waved a farewell to the gatekeeper who saw him off down the long road to home, after hearing his story she’d be so sympathetic to him that she’d grant him whatever he asked, out of pity. And where he would consider that a worst response if it were true affection he were seeking from her, for the purposes of information-gathering, it would be perfect. A few years ago, perhaps, he would have disliked that reaction for any reason, he would have been sensitive about it on any score. But the years blunt one’s sensibilities, he mused, which was why old people could speak so casually of death, and why he could now look back upon the incident that had changed his life with no more than a shrug which only moved his horse along.

“
I
lost my
fiancée
,” he’d told the American girl. So he had, yet it made so little matter to him now that he could speak it almost as a jest, though those years ago it had been the reason he’d fled his own land to travel so far abroad that when he’d done with the parts of Europe Napoleon permitted him, he’d run all the way to the Americas. For he had lost his
fiancée
, and at least no one in the New World had known that, though it seemed that everyone in England and on the Continent had. But he thought, frowning now, he ought at least be honest as
Methley and not take liberties with the language. Because he hadn’t really lost her. He could have found her easily enough if he’d wished to, and still could, in the churchyard at Little Sutton. For actually, he’d buried her.

She’d been a lively, clever little puss, more of a friend than a lover. But then, in those green years, he’d thought it very good to take himself a wife who’d be his closest friend. It would have been enough. Perhaps it might have grown to more, no telling, he’d never known great love, perhaps, he’d thought, it eventually grew from just the sort of warm affection he’d felt for her. He’d liked her very well. Tiny and plump, never a great beauty but with no pretentions to being one, the Honorable Miss Antonia Wilson had made her way with wit and charm, and had done very well with that. Twelve offers, her father had boasted, an even dozen lads turned down so that she could make her match with you, young Deal, he’d laughed as they downed a toast to future happiness together. And one of those rejected fellows was the Earl of Methley, then only a viscount, but just as witty, just as long and thin and aching with envy. And clever. And unfortunately, he’d been at the house party when poor Nettie had fallen ill.

Had he felt betrayed? Lord Deal wondered again. Had Methley been as shocked as he had been when the doctor, a garrulous old fellow called from the local village, had come downstairs, forgetting in his perturbation that his patient was an unwed young noblewoman, and so announcing to all, with a sad shake of his gray head, that the poor lass was definitely going to lose her child beforetimes, and because of the unexplained hemorraging, perhaps her own life as well.

Had Methley begun to truly hate him then, before he’d known the whole of it, that hatred piling up on the dislike they’d felt for each other as competitors at school? He, Lord Deal thought, as his horse paced the lonely leagues back to his home, had been in too much distress himself to ponder it then. Not at poor Nettie’s diminishing life, damn that former self for his youthful arrogance, but because even with all the shock and frantic whispering going on at the house party, at first no one save himself knew that it had not been his babe and could never have been.

But to save her soul, and perhaps in some mistaken attempt to save her affianced’s reputation, poor Nettie had told everyone, up to the moment, a week later, of her dying breath, that it had not been dear Barnabas that had given her her deadly burden, but a neighbor. A farmer. A married farmer, who was a neighbor. And one whom she had loved since she’d been a girl, and who’d been helpless in his love himself, and so had helped her from her innocence when they’d both realized she must wed, and wed away from him forever.

Poor misguided girl, he thought now. She might have saved her soul, but her confession, rather than absolving him, had ruined him completely. It was one of the oddities of society that he would have been scandalous, but absolved, if he’d been the one to jump the preacher’s starting gun. But as it was, poor Nettie, even as she’d sunk into the grave, had crowned him not with a halo of
respectability
, but with a pair of horns. And bereaved, and totally cuckolded in his own way as well, it had been Methley who’d said, even as he’d left the funeral with stony eyes, “How odd. For here was a case where an English girl was carried off by a farmer from her Viking. Well,” he’d laughed bitterly, “if you look for a Viking, you’ll find a fellow wearing horns, won’t you?”

It was the color of his hair, he supposed, his athleticism, and the cruel aptness of the title that did it. The name clung, though a decade’s time transmuted its meaning from scorn to a weird sort of admiration. It hardly mattered. Contemptuous of its rules and depredations, he’d avoided “society” assiduously since then, and had not felt one whit deprived.

There were, he’d discovered, a great many beautiful, clever females outside the gilded ranks of those select few hundred, women who were pleased to help him transform Methley’s biting epithet into a fitting compliment on his appetites and prowess in matters that his own society had used the name to mock him for. His daring and his adventuresome spirit had caused male companions to further alter the label Methley had tagged him with. They also came from all levels of society, for he’d found the term “gentleman” was not necessarily automatically suitable to any man simply by reason of birth, just as all of the odd Miss Hamilton’s countrymen claimed.

He’d attended to her the moment he’d heard her speak, because her accents had reminded him of her nation and he’d enjoyed the casual way of life in her new world. He’d made friends of enemies, the task being made that much easier when both sides realized neither wanted more bloodshed in the war no one seemed to want to take credit for. He made lovers of enemies too, and there was one amusing female he particularly regretted leaving there, even though she assured him she’d not be lonely, for as soon as he departed from the wars, her husband would return to continue their private one. But for all he’d pleased himself in various ways, he’d left with all his heart, for all the while he knew his name and his place were in his native land.

He’d exiled himself from the society he was
born
to, but he couldn’t abandon his birthright. When he finally returned, as an onlooker he could see even more clearly how bizarre it was for anyone to live by such narrow precepts, or die for them, as poor Nettie had done, or be hurt by such random, meaningless cruelty, as he had been. He became almost a crusader in the matter.

When his young cousin tarried with a hesitant suitor of her choice too long and some cruel wit dubbed her “the shelf-ish Miss Stratton,” though he’d entreated her to ignore it, she’d turned in panic to immediately marry some other more obliging fellow. Now she lived with an oaf and had the rest of her days to regret having done it. Yet, he could not dislike the fellow, who was surely as wronged as he wronged his wife. For how many other gentlemen wed ladies who accepted them from need, real or imagined, rather than love? Perhaps his own family had only been fortunate in such matters, for he had two sisters who’d married unexceptionally and a younger brother in the church who despaired at what he took to be his elder’s
cold-bloodedness
. But it was only that if it were true that love had to be blind, then poor Nettie had opened his eyes so wide he could never close them again.

Despite gossip which grew more romantically fanciful with each year he remained a bachelor, he didn’t believe she had ruined him for anything but a life as a leader of the
ton.
He hadn’t been madly in love when he offered for her, he reasoned. She had only failed him as a friend, or
perhaps he had failed her—he still wondered at that, that at least, still nagged at him. Methley might not have been entirely wrong, at least in his condemnation. For if they’d been such fast friends, she ought to have been able to confide in him. Now, of course, he could never know if he could have been a better friend to her. She was gone, but the question had not died with her.

Or it might be, he often thought, that he ought to have loved her more. He well may have failed her in that, he reasoned, though he couldn’t see how it could have been different. Although he didn’t believe he was a cold man, and certainly hadn’t been that at two and twenty, he supposed it was only that he wasn’t the sort of fellow to ever be leveled by sentiment. That didn’t mean that he could feel nothing.

He’d experienced the bitter taste of betrayal, beginning with Nettie’s and then encompassing all his friends as they contributed to the gossip. But it was nevertheless true, and whenever he searched his soul he had to admit it, that he’d never known the sort of love other men seemed to suffer from. He might regret this, but he couldn’t see how he might change it. It wasn’t from a lack of knowledge of females, or even experience in dealing with them. It was never necessary to feel love to know passion.

Though he’d been celibate with Nettie, as society dictated, he’d not been a stranger even then to the several delights involved in intimacy with her sex. A young nobleman attending a large university, a young gentleman who’d taken the grand tour, a young blade on the loose in London, and he’d been all of them in turn, had many chances, most of them taken, to discover, if not the meaning of “love,” then what passed for it for payment.

Which was never to say that he could only purchase gratification. It hadn’t taken him very long to discover that there were a great many females of all classes who looked for little more than he did, and were willing to settle for even less. There were, he found, all manner of transactions in life where prices were negotiable. In cases where payment in coin of the realm would be considered crass, he soon learned that payment in kind would often be gladly accepted.

No, the episode with Nettie may have made him doubt himself as a friend, but it hadn’t soured him on females. He wasn’t such a flat. He liked them very well and needed them to make life complete. In fact, he thought defensively, as he always did when he contemplated his past and his present single state, his last mistress in town had been quite conversable, as his mistresses always were, for he found scant pleasure taking pleasure from a mere body. And if he were never constitutionally able to know what the poets considered “love,” well then, he reasoned, he could regret it, but he would not miss it either, no more than a blind man misses that which he has never seen.

He’d been orphaned years before and was the eldest of his family. Naturally, then, he expected someday he’d have to make a push to preserve his name and find another pleasant young woman and raise a family. This apparent lack of an ability to love was certainly no impediment to that so far as he could see, or else there would not be so many new young women presented to society each year. And “someday,” he often thought, was an excellent time to take on the responsibility of populating his nursery.