Love's Reward Page 14

  This was worse, far worse, than Juanita.

  Lord Grantley was in bed. His servant hesitated for only a moment before allowing Fitzroy into the house and sending a message up to his master.

  Helen of Troy was the password.

  Half an hour later, Lord Grantley faced Fitzroy over a pot of coffee in his private study.

  “This had better be urgent, Tarrant. I have a set of state functions today, and could have used my sleep.”

  “Urgent?” Fitzroy glanced up, his voice ravaged by sarcasm. “I have just abandoned my new wife after a most edifying scene at Lady Reed’s ball. If I hated Joanna, I could not have done her more hurt. The honor I owe my name ought, at the very least, to demand discretion when I pursue other women. Instead, I have left her shattered by my public betrayal. Sadly, Lady Reed would have it no other way. But is it urgent? No, no more than usual. Yet I cannot go on.”

  The older man’s glance was sharp, with very little compassion. “Pray, stick to the facts, sir.”

  Fitzroy ran both hands back through his hair.

  “Almost every day I get another of these mysterious missives. They send me on a wild-goose chase that ends in some minor humiliation or embarrassment of one kind or another. I’ve been halfway to the coast, for God’s sake, and to Buckinghamshire and back in a day. There’s absolutely nothing to show for my efforts but a steady exhaustion that’s beginning to eat at my bones.”

  “And now you’ve received another?”

  Fitzroy reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

  “This is today’s mission, delivered by hand, though no one in my household saw the messenger. It will take me into Hertfordshire on another bloody fool’s errand. Yet I’m afraid to ignore it, in case this is the one that matters, or in case another death waits at the end, instead. The man who killed Green hanged himself, effectively closing that trail. But I’m no nearer to knowing who murdered Herring or Flanders. And there’s no hint of a plot against Wellington that I can discover.”

  Lord Grantley dropped his lids over his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

  “According to Herring’s message there won’t be, until you bed the right lady. I am to assume from your unfortunate state that it was not Lady Reed?”

  Fitzroy looked up and laughed, with a wild, bitter undertone.

  “It was not. Trojans and Greeks mean nothing to her. Yet it would seem that she is in on the game.”

  “What game?”

  “A game of cat and mouse. By God, what an apt expression! Have you ever watched a cat with its prey, Grantley, tossing and batting at a living creature? The mouse ends up in a paralysis of terror, longing for the final blow of the claws or bite to the jugular, only to be toyed with again and again.”

  “What of it, sir? It’s the game we played in the Peninsula to force the French to give way, isn’t it?”

  “But this time I am the mouse, and the cat is invisible, crouching somewhere in the dark. Lady Reed went much further than Lady Carhill. It was not pretty. But because she might have replied that Helen’s smile was only for Paris, I had to go along with it, whatever degradation I might feel, however dishonorable or vile my part in the play. And at last she let slip that she had been put up to it.”

  Lord Grantley slammed his hand palm down on the table. “By whom?”

  Fitzroy stood and began to pace, his hands clasped behind his back. When he stopped and turned to face the older man, he was smiling, an empty, courteous smile.

  “She wouldn’t say. But I gather that a group of society ladies have made a little wager concerning me, as some kind of retaliation for the cruelties perpetuated on their sex by heartless rakes. If nothing else were involved, I would say the entire game is simply that, and that we shan’t find out anything sinister concerning the Iron Duke’s safety. No dastardly plots, no assassins, nothing but a few ladies suffering from ennui.”

  “For God’s sake! Killing your men seems a very absolute way of revenging womankind on a rake.”

  Fitzroy dropped back onto his chair and stared at his hands, pressed palm down on the table in front of him, the fingers spread.

  “Exactly! Flanders, Herring, and Green, God rest their gallant souls! My men. Killed in spite of all the warnings and guards that I’ve tried to provide. And now my wife’s little sister, Lady Matilda Acton, used as a decoy to deliver another empty message. That’s why I dragged you from your bed, Grantley. I must tell Joanna what’s going on. Or I can’t go through with any more of this.”

  Lord Grantley stood up, towering over Fitzroy. With the flat of his hand he gave the younger man a stinging blow across the face.

  “That is not a challenge, sir, for you to meet me at dawn,” he hissed. “But a reminder that you have an obligation to do your damned duty. You will not go mewling to your wife. God knows how she might react, what she might give away!”

  Fitzroy touched the fingers of his left hand to his jaw, knowing the skin had gone livid.

  “Should I thank you? I cannot retaliate, of course. Our respective positions insure that. But no doubt it was deserved. I have done the same to more than one green soldier who threatened to lose his nerve before a battle.” He gave a wry grin. “Now I know how it feels.”

  “I don’t question your nerve or your courage, Tarrant,” Lord Grantley said, leaning forward with an awkward commiseration, as if embarrassed that he had lost his temper. “But we cannot risk what might happen. The fate of Europe may be involved. Yet you think that this entire imbroglio could be personal, that it doesn’t need to involve Whitehall, that Wellington isn’t in danger?”

  “I do.”

  Lord Grantley drummed his fingers on the table top. “And I do not. I cannot take the risk that you’re wrong. You will continue with the charade, sir, in spite of your imprudent wedding. You will go to Lady Kettering’s affair and do whatever is asked of you. For God’s sake, it cannot be that hard to bed a pretty woman, and this marriage was arranged—was it not?—one of convenience.”

  Fitzroy did not reply for a moment. Then he stood up and bowed.

  “If I’m to ride to Hertfordshire today and be back in time to visit my sister, I must go home and change.”

  “Your sister, Lady Mary?”

  “She is ill, possibly dying. I visit her every day that I can.”

  “My dear fellow!”

  “It’s one of the reasons why I resent all this so damned much.” Fitzroy pulled on his gloves. “There aren’t enough hours left in each day. Flanders and Green were both single, thank God, but I have taken on the care of Herring’s family. In fact, I have hidden them, in case innocent women and children might be the next target.”

  “You surely don’t think that children—?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But many men served under me in the Peninsula. I cannot protect them all, were I to ride the length and breath of this island every day, though I’m still doing what I can. You know, if she wasn’t already with the angels, I would say that this is just the kind of game Juanita would have enjoyed. It has the very mark and stamp of her. In fact, it reeks of it.”

  “Juanita? Oh, your first wife, of course.” Lord Grantley looked distinctly uncomfortable. No doubt an unholy suspicion had arisen in his devious mind, one a little awkward to verbalize. “There’s no question that—?”

  “That she died? None at all. I was there. You might say that she died because of me.”

  Fitzroy stopped in the doorway to glance back at the older man.

  “Unless we are being beleaguered by a ghost?”

  * * *

  Joanna did not see Fitzroy at all the next day. She visited Lady Mary and worked on her portrait.

  It was easy to take pleasure in this painting. Their visits were becoming ever merrier, even when interrupted by Lady Mary’s fits of coughing, and the face taking shape on the canvas glowed with laughter. Joanna stood back to look at it and found an answering glow in her own heart. It would be the best she had ever done.
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  So she was leading the life of a spinster while married to a rake. Surely it didn’t matter as long as she could do this?

  Nor did Fitzroy come to her studio that night. Joanna waited for him, nervously pacing, until at midnight she doused the candles and went to bed.

  So he could not even keep his promise to sit for her every day!

  Yet in the morning she came down the stairs to find him waiting.

  Joanna stopped, surprised, her heart beating a little fast. He seemed drawn, preoccupied, as always. But as she stood on the stairs, lost for words, Fitzroy grinned up at her, the corners of his mouth supple with a laughter that she could not trust.

  “‘There was a roaring in the wind all night; / The rain came heavily and fell in floods; / But now the sun is rising calm and bright; / The birds are singing in the distant woods,’” he quoted without preamble. “I thought I would take you and my sister into the country today. If you would like.”

  “Good heavens!” Joanna replied tartly. “How I am honored, to be sure! What on earth brought about this sudden change of heart?”

  He still looked amused, but there was a strange, deeper undertone.

  “We can visit our old nurse, a gentle and harmless creature, whose day will be gladdened by our arrival. Or at least by Mary’s arrival. My sister will love it.”

  Joanna would not let him escape so easily. “And what about all the other business that usually keeps you so busy?”

  “I have taken care of it by working through the night.”

  “How very diligent! And that’s enough?”

  “Alas, I have also recently received a lecture about doing my duty. Surely escorting my wife and sister on a rustic outing is dutiful enough?”

  “I am to believe that the person exists who dares lecture you?”

  He leaned on the newel post as if considering this. “There are many, Joanna. You among them. And now you’re about to object that it didn’t rain at all last night.”

  “How did you know?” She laughed. It was impossible to stay hostile when he was looking up at her beneath his lashes like that. “Very well. I was. The rain came heavily and fell in floods? It did not. There was a roaring in the wind all night? Stuff! It was exceptionally calm and peaceful.”

  “Oh, no, my dear, it stormed. Graves yawned, spirits roamed, and wolves wailed and howled like banshees. I can still hear the noise of it.”

  Joanna gave him a keen glance. “On the contrary. The night was perfectly still. How the devil did you spend it that you thought otherwise?”

  He glanced away, the amusement gone. “In unholy enough pursuits, of course.”

  She knew he would not say more and was proved right.

  As he looked back at her, he changed the subject. “I would be grateful if you would allow me to act the gallant, and take you and Mary away from this godforsaken town for just one day.”

  Joanna stepped down off the last tread and gave him a formal curtsy, practiced often enough for Miss Able.

  “I should enjoy it above all things, sir. Pray, allow me a few moments to change.”

  * * *

  Fitzroy drove west out of London in an open carriage, the high strung bays in harness. He handled the horses with confidence, tact, and authority.

  Once again Joanna studied his hands and the set of his shoulders, limber, graceful, intensely masculine. Why was he so impossible to paint?

  Under a tasseled cream silk parasol, Mary leaned back on her seat and exclaimed enthusiastically about the beauties of the spring countryside.

  “Oh, look, Fitzroy! Lambs! May we stop for a moment?”

  Fitzroy instantly pulled up the horses and held them steady, while the ladies watched newborn lambs cavort in a pasture.

  Joanna pulled out her sketchbook and began to make rapid studies. The page filled with gamboling, tumbling lambs, with the stolid ewes mumbling their cries through mouthfuls of cud.

  They stopped again for a tree full of blossom, for nesting swans, for two young children fishing in a pond.

  It was bright and warm, the sun climbing strongly in the sky, when they reached a small thatched-roofed village straggling along its millstream.

  Soon Joanna found herself being introduced to an elderly lady, who sat in her best parlor like a robin on its nest. Lady Mary’s childhood nurse, now retired to the village of her birth.

  They took tea, which Fitzroy had brought, and chatted of sane, ordinary things, while the old lady patted Lady Mary on the knee and smiled at her.

  Joanna let them talk, making a few quick sketches of the nurse and her quiet room.

  She glanced up only once to find that her husband was watching her hands moving on the paper. For a moment she even thought that his eyes betrayed an odd longing, before he laughed and looked away.

  “Come, Joanna,” Fitzroy said at last. “Let’s take a stroll and leave these two friends to their reminiscences.”

  For Lady Mary’s sake, Joanna took his proffered arm and left with him.

  Dappled sunshine mottled the dry dust and rough cobblestones of the village street. It was quiet, almost hushed, as if the dogs had forgotten how to bark and the thatched houses held their breath, afraid to awaken the baby.

  “Who, do you suppose, managed to slip this serene moment unnoticed into the normal bustling country routine?” Fitzroy asked quietly.

  Joanna could not afford to be charmed, to be beguiled by this unexpected truce or this calm, bright day. Only two nights before he had publicly seduced Lady Reed in a manner guaranteed to humiliate her. It still hurt.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been wondering how you fit this outing into your outrageously busy schedule.”

  They turned off the street and began to follow a path that wound down through a birch wood.

  The answer was taut. “So have I. Don’t make me question it! Life is nothing but moments, anyway. Take each one as it comes, for God’s sake.”

  Joanna took her gloved hand from his sleeve and turned to face him.

  “What fustian! Life is a great deal more than moments. Everything that happens takes meaning from what’s happened before and from the expectations we bring to it. By your philosophy, Lady Mary simply sits with an old woman, and it wouldn’t have mattered that you brought her here. I do understand why you did it, you see—in case there’s never another chance for either of them.”

  “And is that enough?”

  “No, because it’s the years of shared memories that make it meaningful—the baked apples on the nursery fire, the stories told to a half-sleeping child—and the trust in mutual love and caring.”

  A bird flew away through the trees in a hiss of wing beats.

  Fitzroy looked back down at her with something close to anger. “By God, are we allowed nothing pure and fresh, untainted by thinking and recollection?”

  “It’s impossible. When Lady Mary looks at an apple tonight it won’t be the same as one she looked at yesterday. This apple will have the aura of childhood about it, bubbling and hissing in the flames, tender and wholesome. Or it will be half red and half green and poisoned by a jealous stepmother, the magic apple of a fairy tale. Nothing exists entirely by itself. Everything comes trailing its retinue of associations and memories with it.”

  He was carrying a cane. With the end he sketched rapid shapes in the dirt. A circle, a stalk, two leaves.

  “Can’t an apple simply be an apple?” he said. “What the devil is it when you draw it? Just a shape, a fruit, without all this trail of remembrance.”

  “No,” Joanna said, passion rising in her voice. “It becomes what I bring to it. No human being ever saw just a fruit, unless he were a saint or a mystic.” She grabbed the cane from his hand and sketched a curve like a bite out of the fruit before handing it back. “Snow White bit into something luscious and innocent, but the wicked stepmother gave her a deadly poison that made her appear dead. Which was the real apple?”

  Fitzroy swept the cane through the shapes in the dirt, scattering the lin
es.

  “They were both the real apple, two halves of one whole. Oh, God! By your argument we are forever doomed by our prior experience. Nothing can be new and innocent. There can be no forgiveness and no salvation.”

  She couldn’t bear what she heard in his voice.

  “Why doomed? We are made by what we have done, but must we be cursed by it? Snow White was rescued, wasn’t she? Kissed by a prince?”

  He looked up, straight into her eyes. Her heart seemed to stop for a moment, then lurched wildly.

  “We know Snow White. We have been shown her life: the time in the castle with the wicked stepmother; her naive, kind-hearted days with the seven dwarves; the more innocent, indeterminate period while all life was suspended in the glass coffin. But the prince has no former existence at all in the story. He has never seen a woman sleeping before. He doesn’t even accept the finality of death. Hadn’t you noticed? He isn’t real. If he were, he would never have believed that he could raise Snow White from the dead.”

  “Fiddlesticks!” Joanna knew she should turn away, flee this man and this moment, but her attention was caught, straining to understand. “He just believed in the healing power of love, that’s all.”

  They were standing far too close to each other. His dark, heated gaze threatened to singe her.

  “Did he?” Fitzroy asked softly. “Did he believe that a kiss could cure anything?”

  Joanna felt the roaring of awareness in her ears. Every nerve seemed to sing, shout for her attention. His lips were infinitely beautiful to her—as he formed the words “Snow White,” as he took a breath—every detail highlighted, magnified, fascinating.

  She knew exactly what those lips could make her feel, if he wished it.

  You have eaten the poisoned, forbidden apple, sang a high, wild voice in her ear, and only the kiss of a prince can save you. Then the words spoken eons, ages ago, by a child came rushing in like a storm surge: a woman can’t do anything of her own, nothing real anyway, if she’s gone soft in the head for a man and children. So if it has to be marriage, then very well, let it be to a self-centered, arrogant bastard like Fitzroy Mountfitchet. At least he will leave me alone!