Elisabeth Fairchild (8 page)

“My sister’s wedding, sir,” Jack said. “I gave the bride away.”

He detailed the events of the evening in question.

Dulcie watched Roger.

As if he felt her stare, he turned and looked at her. The visual connection struck Dulcie as physically as a blow to the chest. Her hand flew to her throat. Dreamlike memories surfaced: fog, the blood, a gun gone off--Roger the lamplighter! He was the mysterious Gargoyle. Agent provocateur!

She could see the truth of it in his eyes as he turned and made for the door.

Slipping from her seat as the proceedings drew to a close, slipping, too, Lydia’s company, she plunged into the crowd that pushed from the gallery down the stairs leading to the street--in pursuit of him--in pursuit of the truth.

Emerging into the temporarily blinding daylight, she ran, quite literally, into her quarry. Strong hands briefly steadied her, sending pulses of energy through her arms, fingertip to shoulder blade, as though she were iron filings and he a magnet, as though a force within pulled her to him.

“Miss Selwyn.” He doffed his hat, the shine of him leaving her breathless.

“I am pleased your brother still lives.”

Like a candle caught in a draft, his eyes, his light, flared wide. Then he had her by the arm, pulled her out of the stream of passing people, to say with a dangerous nonchalance, “As you see, Jack yet breathes, with no inclination towards suicide. He claims never to have met you. Has, in fact, no idea who you are.”

His hand on her arm, linked her to him with a chain of images. Oranges. She saw oranges, rolling across a sunlit floor. A man falling.

She freed her elbow from his grip. “We have never been introduced, but I know you both far better than you might imagine. What I do not understand is how you could sit and say nothing while he lied for you.”

Cobalt flared and then sank to a low glow next to his skin. His lips tightened.

She squinted at the small, round, black silk kissing patch beside his mouth and remembered her dreams of passionate lips that shimmered with suppressed heat.

His eyes narrowed. A provocative half smile moved the patch. “You are all grown up, Miss Selwyn,” he drawled. “But just as full of mad notions as when first we met. You believed me blue on that occasion, did you not? And now?”

“Still blue.” She could not deny what her heart knew to be true, what her fingers had divined more than once. Like a moth to flame, she reached out to touch the low burn of his color, almost to touch the patch at the side of his mouth.

“Not dying,” she murmured, surprised. “Not ill!”

He fell back a step, frowning.

“Your arm!” She touched the air above his shoulder with a sigh. “Heals nicely,” she said with all certainty.

Chapter Twelve

Outside the Old Bailey

Roger glanced about, unnerved. Sharp and cunning, this lovely bit of lunacy kept intruding upon his life. How did she know of his shoulder, recently dislocated? His injury was not common knowledge. That he suffered the pox was. And yet she knew it for a lie.

He had not deceived her when all else were completely fooled.

“Last time we met, you said you saw death, Miss Selwyn.”

“It’s shadow has faded, sir. Now, you carry secrets.”

“We are all possessed of secrets.” He waved his quizzing glass.

“You hide more than most.”

He could not easily brush her aside. Her searching blue eyes frightened him, too keenly knowing, stripping him of all subterfuge. As she stared into the darkest corners of him, words poured from her lips recounting memories--his memories.

“Oranges, rolling across a floor. Does that mean anything to you? Do not trouble me with lies, sir. I am no longer the gullible girl you once deceived.”

The crowd, massing from the stairwell, shoved her into him.

“I never found you gullible,” he muttered, off balance in this odd conversation, his hands on her shoulders. How did one steady disbelief? “Only mysterious.”

“And you, sir,” she tipped her head. “Are sad.”

“Sad?” He protested with a laugh.

“And lonely,” she went on, as if truth were painted in broad strokes upon his forehead.

Mirror-like, her eyes reflected the truth of him. Storm cloud blue, as if heaven itself sought the hidden depths of who and what he was, she stripped him naked, left him vulnerable and exposed.

“Your secrets are safe with me,” she said quietly.

“Secrets?” Lydia Oswald glared at him as if he were dung flung by passing coachwheels. “And what business have you sharing them with an innocent young lady?”

He answered readily, with a polite bow. A man in his line of work always stood ready with answers, with a facade of social charm. “Have you not heard? I am a sad and lonely man, Mrs. Oswald? A creature to be pitied.”

“I will not pity a man who, by his own actions, places himself in a position for which he then begs sympathy.”

Roger chuckled. He knew just how to set the tone in such a situation. “No more should you.”

Nose in the air, the loud-mouthed Lydia dragged the mysterious Miss Selwyn away. He could not blame her. Too well had he built himself a reputation deserving of distance.

He hoped Dulcie Selwyn spoke the truth in promising him her silence. A catastrophe awaited, if she ever voiced her suspicions to the gossip-prone Lydia Oswald.

The Royal Naval Hospital

He waited for Dulcie at the Royal Naval Hospital the following day.  He knew she would come. She and her father took a river barge every week from a dock near the Tower around the jutting Isle of Dogs to Greenwich. Mr. Selwyn served escort in his daughter’s weekly visits to the sick and wounded.

Selwyn spent most of his afternoon at the College or strolling the docks examining ships. Dulcie whiled away the hours reading to, and chatting with, injured and retired sailors.

Roger told himself he waited for her because Miss Selwyn might do him mischief. He could not admit, even to himself, that the knowing look in her eyes drew him, that the tone of her voice, and her recognition of his loneliness, drove him to it.

A miserable place, the infirmary, and yet Dulcie stepped fearlessly into that sulfurous den of mangled and missing limbs, a seeping, stench of ill-healed wounds and moaning men.

Those with strength enough, cried out to her when she entered the wards. Enthusiastic greetings.

“’Ow are you today, Miss?”

“Good of you to come.”

“Best look in on Stapleton and Dawley. Bedeviled by pain, they are, poor lads.”

“Suffering turrible from ‘is burns, Dawley is.”

“Cap’n Stapleton has not slept so soundly since your last visit, miss. He brightens when he hears you’ve come.”

“Always dreaming, poor man, and tossin’ about. Shouting for mercy from them heartless pirates, Persian priggers!”

“Watch yer language, Collins, or I shall have your tongue out, quicker ‘n any Joassamee!”

“Beggin’ your pardon, miss.”

Her voice soothed as she moved among them with quiet purpose. “Sorry to hear he does no better. How heals the leg, Mr. Walden? Does the phosphate of manganese and iron improve your energy, Mr. Hall? You have better color today. Is the wound knitting, Captain Kelly?”

She knew the patients intimately, the doctors and caretakers almost as well. He might have spoken to her there, in the wards, one more bandaged man among many, and yet he could not bring himself to interrupt her work. He content himself in watching. She lingered at Stapleton’s cot, spent some time chatting with the poor man, and with soothing words and swaying bauble, put him to sleep.

Her gaze rose from the sparkling crystal as it swayed.

Her eyes met his. The bauble gave a little jerk.

Roger made no attempt to avoid her. He hid in a head bandage for the occasion. He leaned against a crutch. She could not know him. His own mother would not have known him, had she been alive to see him.

And yet, Dulcie Selwyn locked eyes with him on more than one occasion and as she left, breezed past, saying, “Good day, Monsieur Gargoyle. I see you are well.”

His jaw would have dropped had the bandages allowed. How did she recognize him with his head bound like an Egyptian mummy’s? He hobbled after her, heart thumping wildly, ready to demand an explanation. How could she penetrate such a perfect disguise?

Her father stood waiting. He had no opportunity to ask. But neither could he wait patiently for an answer to the mystery. So, he shadowed her. And opportunity presented itself by way of a ball, the perfect ball for a man in his line of work--it was a masquerade.

Chapter Thirteen

October 31, 1816

Tristam Hall, On the Thames

Light spoke to Dulcie, drew her, defined her. Elusive, pervasive, untouchable, it whispered to mind and soul, promising mysteries, rendering the world magical and new. A calming light, the night’s, soothing as water’s rush against the barge’s hull, perfect counterpoint to the riverbank’s swaying hush of ash and willow.

The moon flung pearls against the night’s dark, silken slip. A moonglade danced in their wake, hundreds of silvered orbs rioting on roiled waters, giddy with the barge’s passage. Their destination loomed, high along the moonlit bank, in the flicker of a flambeaux-lit garden, the golden falsehood of the Neo-Classically styled Tristam Hall stood high and proud, as she did--waiting.

Five years anticipation.

Dulcie donned her mask, a temporary dousing of the light--feathers tickling cheek and temple in the breeze. A wise bird, the owl. She felt anything but. How wise is it, after all, to wait so long for a stranger met but a dozen times--to realize they were meant to be together? And yet she did, content in her anticipation--true love worthy of such pause.

Eyes closed, she savor moonlight’s azure and gold swim against eyelid’s veil, then blinked, dispersing the jewel-like glow. The Thames stank less here than in London. Glad to be gone from coal smoke and fog, to drink in autumn’s country perfume of fire and fallen leaves, she would have been equally glad to distance herself from Lydia’s incessant chatter. Not that she usually mind Lydia’s runaway tongue. Her friend had a gift for conversation. Dulcie was better with comfortable silences, a combined strength of their friendship. Tonight Lydia focused on the topic Dulcie assiduously avoided--marriage.

Their barge bumped the Hall’s private pier, knocked them unsteady, lamps swaying, flaring, as shaken as Dulcie’s resolve. Lydia, like the drip of water against stone, continued, “You are fast approaching twenty, my friend, and Stapleton a fine fellow.”

Dulcie had heard it all before. Stapleton was not the first young man Lydia had determined she must wed. Dulcie flung back her head, drinking in the night’s wine-sweet chill, refusing to feel like an old maid.

“A wonderful fellow, barring the unfortunate limp.” Commander Oswald leapt to the pier and extended his falconer’s glove. “The night terrors no longer trouble him so desperately, do they?”

The golden haze about Lydia’s head stirred like an unpleasant memory. Her falcon-faced mask loomed brown and bird-like against the moon’s pock-marked gleam. “Everyone has bad dreams now and then.” Costume dreamlike, she clutched feathered shawl close, belled jesses jingling. “His unfortunate bout with Jossamy pirates in no other way incapacitates him. Can you not find it within yourself to marry him?”

Can you not allow me to find for myself the man I would marry!
Dulcie wish to shout.

Moonlight stopped her. The water’s silvered sheen, the rock of the boat, reminded her of the childhood voyage to France. Just such a troubled look her father had worn. Her odd ways had worried him then. She worried him now by refusing to marry. She was fortunate to be blessed with two who care so deeply for her happiness.

Exhaling anger’s white, misted heat, she gathered owl’s wings about her, that the feathers might not get caught by the breeze, nor distract her as she walked the boat’s ribs. “The Captain is a tremendously fine fellow,” she admitted. “Courageous to have survive torture.”

From Lydia’s lamp dimming shape, as she stepped to the pier in a flutter of feathers, comes the relentless suggestion. “Marry him then.”

Not the first time Lydia had recommended it. Heaven knew, Dulcie’s father did his best coaxing. She would soon be considered a fusty old maid if she did not give up her dream. And yet, she clung to the ghost of possibility in the innermost glow of her soul, that brave Stapleton, survivor though he might be, dear man, was not the match heaven intended. She loved another, drawn to him from the moment he first lit her gaze. She tindered his flame. Memory of him consumed her.

Like a match head caught in a draft, he leaned in her direction from the depths of his carriage, head cocked, eyes narrowed, light intensely blue.
The day of the riot.

As Dulcie leapt from the barge, she questioned her conviction, as much as she had once questioned the light. There lingered a niggling uneasiness concerning her unshaken conviction that she was meant for a notorious rogue. It seemed preposterous. Father would be appalled. Lydia outraged. Yet she could not deny heart’s truth or, soul’s certainty.

She could count on her fingers the times they had met. She remembered every minute, every word, every flicker in his light. Ramsay’s grip as he lifted her from the crushing throng--saved her from a trampling--quite possibly saved her life.

She turned and watch the boatman shove paddle to pier post, making way for the next in a line of more than a dozen guest-filled craft, delicate bubbles on water, lanterns bobbing--fragile as her feelings. She must marry--wanted love, a home and children. The Captain was a good and worthy man. Could she be wrong about Ramsay?

Up the embankment they flew ahead of her, falcon and falconer, Lydia fluttering with anticipation. A blaze of crimson light rippled and flew in the wind. She loved nothing so much as a good masquerade.