The Shadow and the Star (24 page)

She sat down in the same chair where she had been, told to sit yesterday, keeping her back straight. "Now, Mr. Gerard. Sheppard assures me that he will be here at your service, so we shall make do with that, considering this is a day of many unusual aspects. It is unlikely there will be any callers, so we won't worry over that difficulty."

He leaned his cheek on his hand, as he had done the day before. "Thank you, Miss Etoile," he said, with a strange little smile.

"You're quite welcome," she said, a little flustered from being rather afraid that he would be angry at her, and somehow more embarrassed by his smile. "It's only what I owe to you as my employer. I wish for you to be taken care of properly."

"You seem to be a great caretaker."

Leda blushed, and glanced at him suspiciously for any sign of mockery. He didn't appear to be ironic in his tone, and the way he looked at her made her feel rather silly and weak inside, full of giddy pleasure at the compliment. She turned up the corners of her mouth in a skittish smile and then looked down at her hands.

"Kai likes you very much," he said.

Leda felt the delight of his prior compliment drain abruptly away. "Lady Catherine?" She put a polite smile back on her face. "I'm honored that you think so."

"They all do."

"That is most gratifying," she said. "The Ashlands are very fine people."

He nodded slowly, as if his thoughts were not really on her answer. After a moment, he said, "She's eighteen."

"Is she?" Leda said, as he seemed to be leaving a pause for a response of some sort. "She is certainly a lovely girl. Very fresh and innocent."

He lost the thoughtful look; his eyes met Leda's with a suddenly troubled expression.

She added quickly, "I'm sure that she'll take very well. She's a little naive, but I understand that society is quite welcoming to American girls these days. That is, Lady Catherine isn't American, of course, but girls with, ah—" She cleared her throat delicately. "—American ways of going on. It isn't expected that they will know every tiny nuance of etiquette. Her family clearly has the
entree;
I'm sure the Queen held very few audiences yesterday—it's the greatest possible compliment to be commanded to attend her so soon."

This view of the matter didn't appear to reassure him. He scowled more deeply and rubbed one eyebrow. "Miss Etoile," he said abruptly. "You are a woman."

Leda bridled up a little. She put her hands together in her lap, trying to think of how Miss Myrtle would have responded to such a barefaced statement, unsure of whether to preen or to be alarmed.

"You have experience of the world," he went on, before she could say anything. "You will… know things
… understand things—that aren't self-evident to a man. To someone like me."

With a peculiar mixture of relief, disappointment, and pleasure in the idea that she appeared to him to be sophisticated and self-possessed, she said, "Well, yes, perhaps that is true." Miss Myrtle had always said so. She hadn't ascribed to this modem notion of equality between the sexes. Women were patently superior.

"Do you have a pen and notebook?" he asked.

"Oh!" She started up. "How silly of me. I'm very sorry."

Leda quickly went to the library, returning with a fountain pen and unused notebook from the stock. She reseated herself, trying not to appear too breathless, and looked up at him expectantly.

"I wish to begin courting her," he said, as if he were announcing a business arrangement. "I'd like your help in planning the best way to go about it."

Leda blinked. She closed the notebook that she'd opened in her lap. "Excuse me, sir. I don't think I could have understood you correctly."

He looked straight into her eyes. "You understood."

"But surely… your courtship… that is an exceedingly private matter. You would not wish me to make it my affair."

"I'd appreciate it deeply if you would make it your affair. I'm not well-versed in how it is that ladies wish to be courted. I don't want to make any blunders," He smiled on one side of his mouth.

Leda's spine was poker-stiff. "I think you must be mocking me, sir."

The smile disappeared. He turned his head, looking out past the bank of plants and flowers to the tops of the trees across the street. When he turned back again, his eyes were cool and intense. "I am not mocking you, I assure you."

His somber concentration was unnerving. It was like being watched by some
silver-eyed Grecian statue, come alive in the shadows of a marble hall. She
pressed back against her chair. "Really, Mr. Gerard," she said helplessly. "I cannot imagine that a gentleman such as yourself is not perfectly conversant with—the courting of ladies."

He made a scornful sound, raking his hand across the plump, cushioned back of the sofa. He thrust against it, as if to stand up, and then abandoned the effort with a grimace. "Well, I'm not," he said fiercely. "What makes you think I would be?"

Leda shrank deeper yet in her chair. "You must not imagine—I did not mean it as an insult. It's only that—you really are an exceptionally well-looking gentleman…"

He looked at her with such violence in his eyes that her voice trailed off.

"She cares nothing for how I look, thank God," he muttered, as if he were the hunchback of Notre Dame.

Leda doubted that many other ladies had been of quite the same blindness as Lady Catherine. He was magnificent even as he sat in moody silence, contemplating his splint, a brooding Gabriel brushed by dark, invisible wings.

"This matter is of the utmost importance to me," he said suddenly, without looking at her.

She fingered the notebook.

"I don't know how to begin," he said through his teeth.

She opened the book, uncapping the pen with a faint snap, blotting it against the square of absorbent paper tucked inside. Watching ink spread from the tip, she ventured, "She does not know of your—intentions?"

"Of course not. She's been too young—I wouldn't impose myself on her. She thinks of me as a brother."

Leda allowed herself a wry smile, directed downward. "Perhaps more as an uncle, I should judge."

"Do you think I'm too old for her?" he asked harshly.

Leda's pen made an extra blot as her hand started at the sharp question. "No, sir," she said. "Certainly not."

"I'm not over thirty. I don't know precisely. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I think."

She bit her lip, her head still carefully lowered over the book. "I don't think that is a concern," she said.

"I'd wait until she was older, but I'm afraid—" He broke off suddenly and drummed his fingers across the sofa's wicker arm. "'She might be old enough to interest one of these damned English lords of the manor, anyway. "

Leda pursed her lips. "I'm sure that you wouldn't like to fall into the habit of using rough language in her hearing," she said quietly.

"I beg your pardon!" He met her eyes and immediately looked elsewhere, leaving an instant's burn of barely suppressed emotion.

She ducked her head again. To Leda, it almost seemed as if he were aggravated by
her
, instead of any nebulous threat of English lords. It wasn't a normal sort of conversation in the least—he only looked at her in flashes; he seemed to prefer not looking at her at all, for each time he did, his face grew taut with some strong feeling that Leda could not begin to fathom. Embarrassment, certainly—the whole topic was decidedly awkward enough�but there was more to his expression, something subtle and unsettling. She felt painfully self-conscious, her fingers fluttery. The blot beneath her pen grew larger as she watched it with her head lowered shyly.

A potent silence stretched between them, a bright mystery, full of uneasy fancies.

"She'll be considered an heiress," he said in a vague tone, the way someone would take up the thread of a topic that had been lost to contemplation.

Lady Catherine. They were speaking of Lady Catherine, of course. Leda cleared her throat and said, "I'm afraid that's true."

She gathered the courage to glance up. He was watching her hands, but just as she lifted her head he looked away, grabbing the newspaper that lay on the floor beside him, drawing it into his lap as he sat back. "I want you to take some notes," he said, folding the paper and resting it against his thigh, scowling down at it as if what he wanted to know might be written there.

Leda sat with her pen poised over the book. She hoped that he would not speak too quickly in dictation.

"What do you recommend first?" he asked.

"With respect to Lady Catherine?" she asked dubiously.

"Certainly." He rattled the paper. "What else would I mean?"

"Well, I… find myself at something of a loss, Mr. Gerard."

"I suppose you haven't known her long," he said, with a touch of moodiness about his fine mouth. "You can't be expected to be aware of her tastes yet." He folded the paper, smoothed it, and then rolled it between his hands. "I've known her since she was a baby, and I can't seem to figure them out myself."

Leda had no ready answer to that. The whole topic disturbed her profoundly.

He held the rolled newspaper between his fists, frowning down at it. "How would you wish to be courted, Miss Etoile?"

Leda felt a sudden, wrenching weakness at the back of her throat. In dismay she stared down at the blurry book, desperate to hide herself and her silliness. "I'm not sure," she said, very quickly, so that perhaps he wouldn't notice anything wrong with her voice.

"You don't have a single suggestion?" He slapped the paper against his open palm and gave a short, humorless laugh. "Take it backward, then. How
wouldn't
you wish to be courted?"

She blinked rapidly. Sergeant MacDonald's embarrassed face, all red and unhappy and helpless, crystallized against the blue-lined blank page. "I would not wish to be abandoned to contempt," she said. "I would wish… to be stood up for."

She felt Mr. Gerard looking at her. She felt it, because she could not lift her head—not after saying something so ludicrous.

She thought he would laugh at her, or think she was mad.

"I see," he said slowly.

"Excuse me. That's hardly to the point, is it?" She straightened her spine, trying very hard to be brisk. She clutched the pen and wrote the date and time and place at the top of the page. "I think—I believe that propriety demands you begin by asking Lady Catherine's father for permission to pay your addresses, if you have not already done so. Shall I make a note of that?"

He reached for his crutches and pulled himself to his feet, swinging forward a step until he stood facing out the great window. "I'd never abandon her to anything�contempt or anything else. Never. I would have thought she would know it. Do you think I should tell her so?"

Leda looked at his back, at the athletic width of his shoulders and the strength in his hands. She remembered his face as she had set his leg: concentrated and severe and beautiful in its intensity.

No, this man would not fade in the face of anything. Whatever else he might be, he was not impotent.

"I'm sure that she knows," Leda said.
How could she not
? she thought.

He looked at her sideways. She could not hold his glance, even for an instant. Something inside of her would not manage it.

She evaded his eyes, seeking an orchid hanging near his shoulder as a focus. "She told me about the shark, you recall. She seems very fond of the story, and your part in it."

"Yes," he said. "I've always watched over her."

"You're very good," Leda said mechanically. "I'm certain Lady Catherine is much obliged to you."

He was silent for a long while, staring out the window.

"So," he said at last, "I'm to tell Lord Gryphon? I suppose that's sensible." He didn't sound as if he looked forward to the prospect.

"I believe most young men find it rather dire, speaking to fathers." She attempted to put a note of sympathy into her voice. "In this case, as Lord Ashland is well acquainted with your background, it would seem to be merely a polite formality."

He gripped the crutch again. "How sanguine you are."

"I shouldn't think he would have any objections—" She stopped.

"Unless he knows me as well as you do?"

Leda moistened her lips, fiddling with the pen.

"I hope I haven't been mistaken in you, Miss Etoile. I've given you the power to ruin me. Are you a turncoat?"

"No," she whispered, not knowing why, or why not, but sure that, God forgive her, she would not go to Lord Ashland and tell him that the man who wished to marry his daughter was a nightwalker and a thief.

Mr. Gerard looked into her eyes then, with an intimacy and connection that Leda felt all down through her in a bloom of painful pleasure.

If only
, she thought, a foible she had been careful not to indulge in all of her life.

Oh, if only
…