The Shadow and the Star (39 page)

The incident upset Lady Tess and Mr. Sydney quite miserably. Once the jaguar had been caught and returned to her cage, the two of them went about apologizing to everyone they met. Lady Tess burst into tears, and promised Mrs. Goldborough that the jaguars would be got rid of once and for all—she should have known that this might one day happen; under Mr. Sydney's care, Vicky the Fifth had always been the most tractable of creatures, but a wild animal was not to be underestimated; she should never have allowed them to be kept in the first place.

Lord Gryphon finally bore her off to a private conversation, which seemed to provide some comfort and relief. When they returned to the drawing room where everyone had gathered, she managed to smile weakly and even laugh a little over Robert's description of the jaguar's astonished expression as it had sailed over Samuel and into the pool.

Lord Gryphon announced that an extra full-time keeper would be hired immediately to guard the animals, and the little zoo would be expanded and strengthened, with an outer perimeter added to contain any escapees before they could get into the main park. Mrs. Goldborough looked as if she might like to expound at length on the wisdom of keeping vicious jungle animals anywhere within a global hemisphere of a house in which her daughters resided, but since her oldest was wildly determined to have Lord Robert, and anxious to squelch any maternal quaverings, she stifled her mother's protests with an emphatic "Pray don't think a thing of it, Mama—if I had listened to Lord Robert when he said not to move, instead of being so poor as to try to run, it shouldn't have become a difficulty. It is entirely my fault."

Everyone chorused a denial, but Leda rather felt that the girl was correct. However, it was by no means her place to mention it, and she had several duties left to perform in preparation for the informal holiday party that was planned for after dinner: a small exchange of gifts that the young people had insisted upon before the guests left for their own Christmas celebrations. She withdrew quietly to the hall.

Mr. Gerard met her as he came up the staircase. The late-afternoon sun played down through the miniature forest inside the dome. With his athletic form in a black coat, his golden hair, he carried the flavor of the jaguar itself: fluent motion and the ghost of topaz eyes in the green jungle. For the first time in a fortnight, he paused to speak to her, standing on the step below, his hand resting on the opposite banister of the wide sweep of stairs.

"Miss Etoile." He inclined his head slightly.

Leda did not wish to appear giddy. She felt that she was bound to keep order in spite of the considerable palpitations which possessed her heart at this unexpected renewal of recognition. "Good afternoon, Mr. Gerard." She nodded in a dignified manner. "May I say that you are to be commended on your courage and quick action. I saw the incident from the window. I hope you took no serious hurt?"

He moved his hand, as if dismissing that. "This party tonight—we're to exchange gifts?"

"Yes. You need bring only one. Everyone will draw lots from a bowl. I am just going to prepare them."

For a moment he gazed past her, into the sunlit green shoots and emerald shadows of the layered forest canopy rising up toward the skylights. Then, with a subtle move, he slanted a look toward her, the sort of look she imagined of lesser immortals—those nameless, unpredictable demigods of fields and lonely mountains, with both murder and grace at their fingertips. "No drawing." His voice was too soft to make echoes in the well of the dome. "Let's play blindman's bluff, Miss Etoile. Whoever we catch�that person opens our gift."

Leda's hand tightened on the banister. "Mr. Gerard—"

"If you don't care to suggest it, I will. I think they'll like the idea."

"I'm certain that they will." She rubbed her fingers on the polished wood, then frowned directly at him. "But if I comprehend what you mean to do—Mr. Gerard—I cannot but think that it is not wise."

His intent gaze held hers. "Why?"

"It is not suitable." She could not say that she didn't wish to see him hurt; that Lady Kai would not understand him; that it might be disaster to his hopes. "It is too soon to give her such a gift."

His mouth tightened into the ironic semblance of a smile. "It's by no means too soon. Of that I assure you, ma'am." With a cursory bow, he moved past her, not even crediting her advice with a word of appreciation.

The idea of blindman's bluff met with high approval, as did the tiny glasses of cherry brandy arranged with sprigs of holly on a silver tray. Leda herself did not feel quite up to cherry brandy, but everyone else, with the exception of Lady Whitberry, who thought it interfered with digestion, seemed to find that the liqueur added a certain
joie de vivre
to the proceedings. As the evening proceeded, the blind man's twirls and fumbles became more droll, the jokes more witty, the intermittent carols more melodious, the laughter—even the Curzons'—warmer. Only Leda seemed to feel a certain constraint in her smile.

Only Leda, and Mr. Gerard, who stood watching from behind Lady Kai's chair. Not that one could accuse him of gloom, certainly—he smiled at the appropriate moments, if he did not laugh aloud. When she thought of it, she did not believe she had ever seen Mr. Gerard laugh. Tonight the element of latent alertness in him, the sense of a steady and unfailing attention within his relaxed stance, seemed striking to her.

The diamond necklace lay amid the pile of gifts. She had seen him place it there, a box instantly recognizable to her by the size and shape in its tissue wrapping. She thought the awkward bow unlike him, inconsistent with the spare and subtle elegance of the gifts he'd made to her and to Lady Tess.

Having known him to scale ceiling beams with a broken limb and pass silently in the dark through locks and walls, she wholly believed that he could locate one rather talkative girl when merely blindfolded. However, why he was not afraid that some other guest would single out Lady Kai, Leda had no notion. She would have expected him to insist on taking the first turn, at least.

When she watched him surreptitiously, though, she had the most uncanny impression that he held a direction over the course of events; that amid all the giggles and conversation, the rip of paper and the admiring comments on each gift, his discreet intensity as he stood over Lady Kai radiated some invisible shield against the other players in the game. It was nonsensical, of course… and yet, though the participants were spun and careered in all directions, and often let go immediately facing her, no one touched Lady Kai until all the small presents had been claimed but the tissue-wrapped box.

Leda had held herself in the background for most of the game, and rather suspected that Lord Ashland had been shamming just a little when he'd caught her by the sleeve during his next-to-last turn—peeked beneath the blindfold to find her, which was very kind of him. She liked exceedingly the photograph album that she'd unwrapped, although she didn't have any photographs to put in it.

She tapped her finger nervously against the small album. Mr. Gerard did not put on the blindfold—there was no point. His was the last gift, Lady Kai the only one without a present. He merely left his place and brought it to her, and yet there was something in him that caught notice. All the chatter and rustle of paper and examining of presents paused; everyone looked at Lady Kai and Mr.

Gerard as he stood in front of her and laid the box in her outstretched hand.

"This is no fun at all!" She made a pout that broke into a sudden smile. "Although I suppose I must be the winner of this game, since the blind man never caught me. What a very silly bow, Mano." She held it up, dangling the lopsided red ribbon for all to see, and then tore at the paper with the enthusiasm of a toddler.

Leda closed her eyes for an instant when she saw the velvet box. Until that moment, she had still hoped it was something else. She opened them again, full of an anxiety out of all proportion to the situation.

Mr. Gerard stood beside Lady Kai as she raised the lid. She looked inside the box. While everyone waited to see her turn it around, an expression of amused exasperation crossed her lovely face. "Mano! What on earth!" She tilted her head back and dropped her shoulders. "Of all the absurd things! You're absolutely hopeless when it comes to choosing gifts, poor dear. Now I ask you: what if Mr. Curzon—or… or
Robert
had been the one to be presented with
this
?" She held up the box to display the contents to the room.

Several ladies drew in their breath with audible murmurs. Someone said, "How magnificent!"

And then a dead and collective silence reigned.

It's worse
, Leda thought.
It's even worse than I'd feared
. The most of them knew, or guessed instantly, what Mr. Gerard meant by it: Leda could see it in the shocked and speculative stares.

"Darling Mano." Lady Kai gave him a hug. "You just haven't a clue, do you? You were supposed to wrap up something like a nice book. I ought to have known—Miss Leda and I might have helped you to choose something, if I'd thought."

Mr. Gerard stood without speaking, without any open sign of chagrin, but when she went to her mother, taking the necklace and holding it up to Lady Tess' throat with a comment on how prettily it would suit Mum, his silent gaze fell away from both of them.

"It would suit any of the ladies here," Lord Ashland said gallantly. "I doubt Samuel would have let it go to the wrong sex."

"Not a chance of that." Mr. Gerard smiled. He did it well, lightly, with no outward sign of what it must have cost him. He moved behind Lady Tess, slipping the necklace out of her daughter's fingers to clasp it around Lady Tess's throat. She looked up at him and squeezed his hand, with an expression very much like the one she'd had when she'd tried to express her regrets to Mrs. Goldborough over the danger to her daughters.

"Could I serve you with a little more cherry brandy, ma'am?" Leda turned to Lady Whitberry, willing to do anything to break the spell of attention.

Like dependable clockwork, Lady Whitberry launched into her discourse on the unwholesomeness of sweetened spirits, the evils of indigestion, and the untoward effects of cherry brandy in particular. Lady Tess sat in her chair with the necklace sparkling around her neck. Lord Ashland engaged Mr. Gerard in a discussion of the recent changes in the city of New York, a topic of such painstaking neutrality that it encouraged the rest to fall back into their previous conversations.

Leda thought for a few moments that Mr. Gerard would find some reason to excuse himself, but in the end it was she who could not seem to maintain an ordinary air of unconcern. She had the most dreadful urge to burst into tears—on whose behalf, she had no notion. But when the earliest pretext to pardon herself and retire arrived, she took it with unbecoming haste.

She sat up late in her room, poring over and over the
Descriptions and Oddities of Japanese Culture
, trying again to find some special item to give him for Christmas. A simple, exquisite gift, full of shades of meaning. It did not have to be costly. None of the traditional gifts such as the five-yen coin that the book mentioned were expensive, but somehow the idea of giving him a salted strip of aba-lone meat did not appeal, nor a piece of dried seaweed as a symbol of joy and happiness, even wrapped in the pretty little folded fans of red and white paper that the book illustrated. She really could not imagine giving him shellfish or seaweed, even supposing that she could obtain such items.

Much nicer would have been a pair of the beautiful long-tailed Japanese goldfish shown in the pictures, but that too was impossible. She finally gave up leafing through the book and went to bed, though she lay awake for a long time, with the pillow wrapped up close beneath her chin.

Sometime in the darkness, long after the house had gone quiet, she became aware of him. There was not a sound that proved it, not a breath of motion that she could see. She just had a fancy that he was there.

"Mr. Gerard." She sat up in bed.

No answer.

It felt a bit strange to be talking to what was most likely an empty room, but since there was no one to hear her, she spoke again. "I hope you are not very disappointed with Lady Kai."

No one answered that, either. She plumped her pillows up against the headboard, resting back against them. The room was in utter darkness.

"I wish I could give you some goldfish." It felt rather nice, to speak to the dark, imagining him to be there. To say things she would never have had the courage to say in person. "I don't believe Lady Kai would ever think to give you goldfish with long tails. They aren't very sensible, I suppose, as handkerchiefs would be. But I think they must be lovely. I should like to see one, someday."

She drew her legs up and curled her arms around them, resting her cheek on her knees, building dream-castles.

"Really, I should like to have my own garden, with a fish pond in it, full of goldfish with tails like silk. Do you ever think of things such as that, Mr. Gerard? Whatever do gentlemen think about, I wonder?" She pondered the question, and answered herself. "Political difficulties, I suppose. It must be very trying and dull to be a man."

She stared into the dimness. She knew the sex to be useful on occasion, primarily in carrying one's parcels, or in discovering the cause of leaky ceilings and smoking flues, but all the ladies in South Street had advised against allowing a man in the house. One could expect him to be forever tracking-in because he
would
forget to remove his boots in spite of all attempts to tame him.

Men were a mystery: formidable and comforting, elusive and forthright, full of strange passions and turnabouts.

"Mr. Gerard…" She whispered it—afraid, even alone in the darkness, to ask it aloud. "Why did you touch me? Why did you look at me so in the mirror?"

She thought of all that the ladies in South Street had forewarned. She did not think they ever could have met a gentleman quite like Mr. Gerard. She pressed her hands together and admitted to the imaginary man in the shadows what she had not even admitted to herself.