The Shadow and the Star (27 page)

"She'll grow older. Wiser, one hopes."

"Too fast. Oh, too fast! And not fast enough." She turned away from her husband. "Not for Samuel."

"He's a man grown," Lord Ashland said gently. "If she tells him no, do you think he won't get over it? At least Kai's plainly ignorant of his background. He wouldn't have to wonder if she'd rejected him for that."

"Do you think he wouldn't?" His wife sounded sad. "Do you think he doesn't believe in his heart that anyone can look at him and see it?"

"less…"

"He's never forgotten it. I didn't find him soon enough. I wanted him to forget."

He caught her hand again and stood looking down at it, folding it between his. "You haven't forgotten."

"No. And what happened to me—with Stephen—a few months in a cold room—it was nothing to what Samuel lived through for years. Just a little boy…" Her voice cracked. "Such a little boy…"

"He's not a boy any longer, my love. He's become a hell of a man."

She turned to the window and was silent. He moved behind her, enfolding her in his arms. They stood together with the late-afternoon light drifting down over them, a woman with the sheen of tears on her face, a man quiet and constant, not offering anything of hopes or solutions, but just standing solid at her back, holding her close.

"Have you said anything to Kai?" she asked him.

"No. I haven't seen her."

"Don't tell her."

"It won't change anything, love."

"Please," she said.

He reached up and pulled her loose hair together, letting it drift through his fingers. "I won't tell her. He didn't ask me to."

Lady Ashland leaned back against him, still gazing out the window.

"Leave your plants to the greenhouseman—he can water them." Lord Ashland turned her back to face him. "Come take a walk with me."

She wiped at her eyes. "Looking like this? In London?"

He produced a handkerchief. "Let's lock ourselves in our room, then. We'll skip dinner and create a scandal. I think the staff's getting too nonchalant about our eccentricity. "

Lady Ashland made a peculiar sound; Leda suddenly realized it was a watery, smothered giggle.

"I feel a strong urge to be bizarre coming upon me," her husband said. "I'd like to see you skin something disgusting. A lizard, maybe. A snake."

She pushed at him. "You."

He caught her waist and put his face down in the curve of her shoulder. Leda's eyes widened as she saw what he was doing with his hands.

Lady Ashland didn't seem properly shocked at all. She tilted her head back a little, the misery in her face beginning to relax into something else entirely.

"Forget the bed," Lord Ashland muttered. "Let's be barbaric in the ballroom."

He was certainly applying himself to that. Leda squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, to find that it was perfectly true, he was verifiably unbuttoning his wife's bodice.

"Gryf," Lady Ashland protested, not very convincingly. "The doors…"

Leda sank instantly down to the level of her chair behind the solid part of the screen as she heard his purposeful footsteps come toward the library door. It boomed shut, and a moment later she heard a key in the lock. She put her fingers over her mouth. From the open door to the hall came the sound of another slam—the other portal into the ballroom locked.

Leda sat still, utterly shocked and burning with benign curiosity.

She was still sitting there, slumped down in her chair with her hand over her mouth, when Mr. Gerard came. She shot upright, springing out of the seat guiltily.

He leaned on his crutches and gave her a peculiar look. "Did I startle you?"

"Oh, no! I was just reading the paper."

He lifted an eyebrow.

"Well, I was," she said, rustling the sheets in her hand. "You hadn't left me any other instructions."

There was a sound from the door to the library. Her glance flew to it in dismay. The lock clicked, but the door remained closed, to Leda's vast relief, and in a few moments there was a distant sound of soft voices and footsteps in the hall.

She knew she was bright crimson. She simply could not help herself.

"Concealing secret admirers?" he asked.

Leda took the high ground. "I believe you wished me to attend you here at your convenience, Mr. Gerard?"

He reached around with one crutch and knocked the door behind him shut. "Close the other one, would you?"

She pursed her lips in disapproval, but he only stood watching her expectantly. With a sigh, Leda stood up and obeyed.

"I spoke to Lord Gryphon," he said, as she turned back to him.

She resisted the impulse to blurt,
I know
. Instead, she walked to the secretary and took up her notebook. "We can cross that off the list, then." She opened it and sat down. "I've been considering recommendations for the next step, but I'm afraid that your injury is something of a hindrance. You cannot conveniently invite Lady Catherine to view the paintings at the Royal Academy, or ride with you in the park."

He leaned back against the door. "I'm not an invalid."

"I'm quite sure you think you could jog-trot all over the gallery on one foot," Leda said tartly. "But you are not, perhaps, an entirely heroic figure on crutches. At least as the escort of a young lady going into society for her first season."

"It's no longer a question. I'm going to have to leave."

Leda looked up sharply.

"I've had some news from Hawaii. It's necessary that I return. Immediately."

The shock closed her throat. She sat staring at him in dismay.

"I'll need a stateroom on the first steamer available. Use the telephone to make arrangements. It doesn't matter what port—New York or Washington are the same. And a private coach to Liverpool." His mouth curled upward. "Keep breathing, Miss Etoile."

Leda took a gulp of air and swallowed. She looked down at the notebook and wrote with a shaking hand.
Stateroom. First steamer. Private coach
.

The she stood up jerkily. "Have the police discovered something? Is that why you must leave the country?"

"It's nothing to do with that." His tone was easy and unremarkable. "There's a political crisis in Honolulu. The king's been made to sign away his dominion by the reform party. By Friday, Kapiolani and Princess Lydia will be informed of it. They'll go back, too, I imagine, and lucky if they find their thrones intact."

"You know of it before they do?"

"Yes."

She did not ask him how that came to be: something in his steady gaze forbade it.

"I can't conduct affairs at this distance with the government shaky," he added.

Leda looked down. She had known it could not last. It had been too wonderful to last. "Well," she said in a subdued voice, "it has been an honor and a pleasure to assist you as your secretary, Mr. Gerard."

"I hope you'll find it as enjoyable in the future."

Her heart made a bound. "You wish me to accompany you?"

"No, that won't be necessary. You can stay here."

In a welter of disappointment and relief, all she could think of to say was, "Here? In this house?"

He shrugged. "Wherever the family is. I told you, they may go down to Westpark."

"They won't go back to Hawaii also?"

"I can take care of what has to be done. I've already talked to Lord Gryphon about it."

Leda remembered the voices from the ballroom, which hadn't drawn her attention until they concerned him. "But—they truly don't mind? They wish me to stay with them?"

He smiled a little. "I believe they view you as something in the nature of a lifeline amid the social tempest."

"Oh," she said.

"You've only to continue as you've been doing�excepting that you may feel free to leave every door in the house open, once I'm gone."

"I don't believe it will be necessary once you've gone," she said quellingly. fortified by the idea that she was a lifeline in a social tempest.

He looked rather self-conscious at that, she thought. Perhaps she was having some refining influence upon him after all. She desisted from mentioning that Lord and Lady Ashland liked one another rather more than was decorous, and appeared to prefer their doors closed, too. With a pattern such as that before him, no wonder he had no notion of setting an example for the servants.

He gave her one of those silver stares. "What would be your opinion, Miss Etoile, of my speaking to Lady Catherine before I leave?"

"Oh, you must not." Leda grabbed at the book as it slipped down her lap. "It would be—it would be entirely too precipitate."

She managed to catch the notebook before it fell. Without thinking, she quickly brushed it off, as if it had actually hit the floor.

"She'd refuse." He said it coolly, with no trace of emotion, but Leda suddenly saw what Lady Ashland saw—the way his hands gripped the crutches, the vast uncertainty behind his impersonal facade.

"As to that, I'm sure I can't say." Leda took on Miss Myrtle's most academic tone, as if it were a mere question of etiquette. "But in consideration of a lady's natural delicacy, a gentleman will not embarrass her by dismissing convention and becoming too previous in his overtures."

His hands relaxed a little on the crutches. The faint trace of a smile returned. "Not even in an emergency?"

"You are not going off to war, Mr. Gerard," Leda informed him. "There is every expectation that you will be restored to us alive and intact. I do not think attending to unexpected business affairs can justly be ruled an emergency."

He inclined his head. "No doubt you're right. As always."

"I feel that I am in this case," she said modestly. "With all respect."

"There is one other thing," he said, "if you'll agree to help me."

"I will be happy to be of service in any way that I can."

"Good." He leaned his head back against the door and looked down at her, his eyes half-closed in an ice-man glitter that made Leda suddenly begin to regret her ready compliance. "There's a certain item that needs to be retrieved from your former room before I leave," he murmured. "This evening, Miss Etoile, you and I are going to go and get it."

Hawaii, 1882

They said that Haleakala was ten thousand feet above the sea.

Ten thousand rivers collect in the ocean.

One true intention will defeat ten thousand men.

Only the wind came here; the wind and the clouds rolling up through a giant, empty gap in the cliffs that rimmed the crater wall. The mists slid silently into the House of the Sun, dimming the vast red sweeps of gravel and cinder, the charred hills and stark distance. The clouds tumbled and boiled and vanished. Samuel and Dojun had walked for half a day within its fantastic expanse, and still the far cliffs were clear and remote—like many things: no closer and no farther than they had seemed at the beginning of the effort.

Count the last ten miles of a hundred-mile journey as but half the way.

Samuel asked no questions. He'd never come here before. Nor had Dojun, that he knew of. It was two days' travel from Honolulu: one day on the inter-island steamer to Maui, another to walk up the mountainside through the cane fields and cloud forest and then above the tree line to the rim of the monumental crater. The air was thin, a dry ache in the lungs. An alien silence held all life frozen—even the scattered plants were strange icy silver star-bursts, glowing from their centers with a faint illumination, as if the inner blades caught daylight and reflected it back upon themselves, intensifying it to a metallic radiance.