The Emerald Swan, page 15
The mushrooms smelled delicious but Miranda decided they were a trap for the unwary. With a regretful smile, she waved the bowl away. It was presented to the chaplain, who without hesitation used his own spoon to help himself.
Miranda took a sip of wine, only half listening as the chaplain continued on his merry prattling way, obviously convinced that he was being both benignly amusing and extremely tolerant.
"Indeed, sir," she said, interrupting what had become a sermon on the miseries of convent life, "I do assure you I have seen the error of my ways." Her voice sounded very loud and without the slightest rasp of hoarseness. Eyes turned toward her and the chaplain looked both astounded and offended.
"My dear cousin, the error of what ways?" Gareth inquired with a lifted eyebrow. "I find it hard to believe one so young and sheltered should find herself with too much to confess." The remark produced chuckles and Miranda felt her cheeks warm slightly. He was making game of her, and she knew it was designed to distract attention from her impatient dismissal of her neighbor.
She cleared her throat, lowered her eyes, said with becoming hesitancy, "I had once a desire for the religious life, but as I was trying to explain to the chaplain, I no longer have those leanings." She speared a piece of beef with the point of her knife and was about to put it in her mouth when she remembered the fork.
Her cheeks grew hotter. She placed the knife on her platter and drank from her wine goblet, before surreptitiously transferring the meat from knife to fork.
“The religious life, indeed!" boomed the unpleasant Lord Beringer. "What girl would go for that when she has a husband in the offing? And such a husband. That's a devilish fine bracelet you're wearing, Lady Maude."
"A gift from Roissy," Imogen reminded him. "An earnest of his intent to court my cousin."
Miranda felt all eyes on the bracelet as her arm rested on the table. They were all assessing its worth. All but the chaplain, who was clearly still offended and offered little in the way of conversation for the remainder of the meal. Miranda was able to sit in silence, keeping her eyes on her plate while the conversation hummed around her. It seemed safest to refuse all unfamiliar dishes and her generally healthy appetite was barely satisfied when the interminable dinner drew to a close.
"Let us return to the parlor." Imogen rose from the bench." The musicians shall play for us there. My lord brother, will you accompany us, or will you and the gentlemen stay over your wine?"
Gareth caught Miranda's glance of anguished appeal and said, "We'll join you, madam. I'm loath to be parted so quickly from my betrothed."
Gareth picked up the brandy decanter. "Come, gentle-men, we shall drink as well in the parlor as here."
Lord Beringer brightened somewhat and hefted two flagons of fine canary, as he tottered after his host, his wobbling thighs rubbing together like pink blancmange.
The chaplain didn't accompany them to the parlor and his bow to Miranda was distant, but she didn't think Maude would mind particularly if her future relations with the man of God were a little cool.
Miranda's head was aching, whether from too much wine or strain she didn't know. She sat on the window seat, away from the group of women who gathered together on one side of the empty grate, while the men congregated beside the sideboard, where the bottles were placed. The musicians plucked their strings plaintively.
"Are you fatigued, my ward?"
At Gareth's question, Miranda jerked herself out of her rather miserable reverie. "A little, sir."
He laid a hand on her brow, saying solemnly, "Perhaps you have a touch of fever again. I do believe you're a little warm. Imogen, I believe Maude should retire to her chamber. We don't want her to try her strength before Roissy arrives to do his courting."
"No, indeed not, brother," Imogen replied with a credible appearance of concern. "Maude, my dear, I should ask your maid to prepare you a tisane. It will help you sleep. Or perhaps you would prefer a sack posset."
"You're very kind, madam," Miranda managed as she rose with alacrity at the prospect of escape. "I give you good night, my lord Harcourt," she said formally, before curtsying to the room at large. She hastened to the green bedchamber, where Chip was waiting for her, clutching her orange dress and chattering distressfully. He leaped into her arms, flinging his own scrawny ones around her neck.
Miranda cradled him. "Oh, Chip, what a dreadful evening. I don't think I can endure to do this. I didn't realize how difficult and how horrible it would be." She held him tightly for a minute, then wandered over to the window. The garden below was in darkness, except for a gravel pathway that wound from the house to the river wall. Torches flared from posts set at intervals along the path, and as she leaned out, Miranda could hear the sounds of the river traffic, voices carrying on the night breeze. She could see bow lamps flickering from the wherries crisscrossing the river highway and hear the plash of oars and the rhythmic calls of the bargemen.
"How was it?"
Miranda turned from the window. "I thought perhaps you'd be asleep."
"I don't sleep much," Maude said, closing the door behind her. "Do you like this chamber? I've always thought it very gloomy."
"It is," Miranda agreed. Chip jumped onto her head and perched there, regarding Maude with customary alert intelligence.
"So, how was the evening?" Maude shivered into her shawls, curling into a carved wooden armchair. "The night air is very bad for you."
"I've slept outside in a thunderstorm," Miranda said, but she drew the shutters partly closed out of courtesy to her visitor. "And to answer your question, the evening was detestable."
“Told you it would be." Maude sounded remarkably cheerful about it to Miranda.
"So you did, I was forgetting." It occurred to Miranda that she sounded as dry as Lord Harcourt. "You were certainly right about the chaplain, and Lady Mary is… is so stately and proper." She shook her head and perched on the broad windowsill, enjoying the slight riff of the breeze coming through the small aperture, the river smells, the faint sounds of the world outside this dark, confining chamber.
"Why would milord wish to marry her?"
It was Maude's turn to shake her head. "He has to marry someone. He has to have an heir, and his first wife didn't give him one."
"What happened to her?"
"An accident. No one talks of it. I never knew her because I was living with Lord and Lady Dufort in the country when it happened. After she died, we all moved here."
"Oh." Miranda frowned. "But why would he pick Lady Mary as his second wife? I admit she's quite well-looking, and has an elegant figure, but there's something so… so forbidding about her. There must be hundreds of women who'd give their right arms to wed Lord Harcourt. He's so charming, and amusing, and… and… well-favored," she added, aware that she was blushing.
"Do you think so, indeed?" Maude looked doubtful. "You don't find him rather cold and unapproachable?"
"No, not in the least."
"You don't think his eyes are very sardonic and intimidating?"
Miranda was about to deny this, then she said slowly, "Sometimes, they are. But mostly they seem to be laughing. He seems to find a lot of things very amusing."
"That's interesting," said Maude. "I've never thought he had a vestige of humor, which is why I always assumed Lady Mary was the ideal partner for him. I'm sure he has friends, but they never come here."
She rose from the chair with a yawn. "I'd better go back before Berthe comes looking for me."
She drifted toward the door, shawls dangling, then paused with her hand on the hasp, struck for the first time in her life by a sense of hospitable responsibility. "I don't suppose Lady Imogen's assigned you a maid. Is there anything you'd like Berthe to get for you? Hot milk, a hot brick for the bed, or something else?"
"No, thank you." Miranda was touched by the offer.
"Will you be able to undress yourself?"
At that Miranda grinned. "I believe so."
"I suppose if you're accustomed to sleeping out in the rain and lighting fires, there's very little you couldn't do for yourself," Maude observed. "Well, I give you good night." She wafted from the room, leaving the door just slightly ajar.
Miranda went to close it. She stood with her back against it, frowning into the middle distance. There was something so barren, so purposeless about Maude's existence, and it began to seem as if she too were getting sucked into this cavernous void. The outside
world, the world she knew, where the aroma of freshly baked bread mingled with the reek of sewage, the world where shouts of joy competed with wails of loss and pain, a world of blows and caresses, of hatred and love, of friends and enemies, seemed to have receded, leaving her beached on a hard, featureless shore.
She began to unlace her bodice, shrugging out of the unfamiliar garments, stripping off the confining farthingale. It went against the grain to leave such finery in a heap on the floor, and yet she did so with a defiance directed only at her own conscience molded from years of thrift. Clad only in the chemise and stockings, she went back to the window, flinging wide the shutters, breathing deeply of the fresh air, the promise of freedom.
How could she survive in this place, for as long as it took before milord decided she had earned her fee? She couldn't breathe.
She didn't know how long she'd been sitting lost in miserable reverie when she heard gravel scrunching beneath the window. Lord Harcourt moved out of the shadows into the light of one of the torches. He wore a dark cloak, but his head was bare, and once again Miranda recognized the hardness of his profile, the curl of his lip. The face that Maude knew but that Miranda had seen only rarely.
She ducked back into the chamber. She didn't stop to think, but pulled on her old orange dress, and ran back to the window. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a pile of soft blue wool. Maude had dropped one of her innumerable shawls. Miranda picked it up and flung it around her shoulders, drawing it up over her head.
The earl was a dark figure now, almost at the water gate at the bottom of the garden. Miranda threw one leg over the sill, feeling for the thick ivy with her bare foot. She curled her toes around the thick fibers, and swung herself over the sill. Hand over hand, she climbed down the ivy as surefooted as if she were on the balance beam.
Chip, chattering gleefully, raced ahead of her, reaching the ground several minutes ahead. She jumped down beside him. There was no sign of Lord Harcourt in the garden. Miranda ran across the grass to the water gate, Chip leaping ahead of her. The gate was closed but unlocked. She could hear the earl's voice exchanging pleasantries with the gatekeeper on the other side.
“‘Ave a good evenin', m'lord."
"Don't expect me back before dawn, Carl." Lord Harcourt was moving away from the gate. "Good even, Simon. Blackfriars, if you please."
"Aye, m'lord."
Miranda eased through the gap in the gate. The keeper was standing foursquare on the bank, a pipe of tobacco in his hand. Lord Harcourt was entering a barge from a short flight of stone steps. An oil-filled cresset swung from the stern of the barge. The gatekeeper untied the painter that held the barge to the steps. The four oarsmen took up their oars.
Chip leaped into the waist of the vessel a minute before Miranda jumped from the bank onto the stern, ducking beneath the cresset.
Chapter ten
"What the devil…?" Gareth spun around at the light thud on the decking behind him. Chip jumped excitedly onto the rail, taking off his plumed hat and waving it merrily at the receding bank. Miranda stood under the oil lamp. The yellow-and-black pennant flying the Harcourt colors cracked back and forth from the bows in the freshening breeze. She threw back the shawl and lifted her face, taking a deep breath of the cool air.
"Miranda, what the devil are you doing here?" Gareth stared at the slight orange-clad figure in astonishment. She seemed to have come out of the blue, once more the urchin of the road; the elegant young lady in the periwinkle gown might never have existed.
The oarsmen in the absence of orders to the contrary continued to ply their oars, pulling the barge into midstream, where the current flowed strongly.
"I saw you from the window. I was feeling so breathless, so confined in that gloomy chamber. It's like being in prison!"
She came over to the rail beside him, the light from the lamp setting the auburn tints in her hair aglow. "I needed fresh air. That was the most… most suffocating evening." She looked up at him, her eyes grave. "I beg your pardon for making all those stupid mistakes. I can't think why I called you Gareth."
"It is my name," he observed. "But it wouldn't be appropriate for Maude to use it in public." "But in private?"
Gareth considered this with a wry smile. "No," he said. "It would not be appropriate for my ward to use my first name under any circumstances. Not until she ceased to be my ward."
"But for one who is not your ward?" Miranda's voice was a little muffled, and her head was lowered as she flicked at a moth on the rail. Her hair fell forward, and the faint silvery crescent mark on her neck was visible in the light from the cresset.
She was clearly referring to herself and it posed an interesting question. Was this unacknowledged scion of the d'Albards as much his ward as her twin? Acknowledged, she would certainly be. "It would depend on the circumstances," he said carefully. "But one would not wish to become so accustomed to using it that it would slip out again by accident."
"I don't believe this charade is going to work," Miranda said after a minute.
"What?" Gareth looked down at her, startled. She was now looking out over the stern rail and kept her eyes averted.
"I don't think I can do it," she said simply. "Tonight was hideous and I made so many mistakes, and that was just among your family and friends in your own house."
"Don't be silly," he said brusquely. "Of course you can do it. You did very well in the circumstances. You were thrown into the middle of the situation without any preparation."
At least he was prepared to acknowledge that, Miranda reflected. It was the first time he'd shown the slightest recognition of the difficulty of the task. "I still think it would be best if you were to find someone else to do it," she said, perversely aware that it was actually the last thing she wanted, even though the thought of more evenings like the past one made her queasy. She waited for her companion's response, not knowing what she wanted him to say.
Gareth braced his legs against the motion of the craft, distantly aware of the freshness of the breeze that not even the wafts of cesspits and rotting river garbage could sully; the swish of the dark water; the wavering lights from passing river traffic. It was a clear night, the skies above London brilliant with stars and a great golden harvest moon. His senses seemed particularly sharp and clear.
Her body was very close beside him at the rail. Close enough that he was piercingly aware of every breath she took. Her hands were curled loosely around the rail, her mother's bracelet a gold glimmer, a pearl and emerald glow beneath the lamp. Her hands were thin, the bones clearly delineated beneath the delicate blue-veined skin. And yet he knew how much strength they contained, just as he knew how the seeming fragility of her small frame was belied by its tensile muscular power.
