Authors: Yennhi Nguyen
“But that’s perfectly awful.” Lily was a little aghast.
“That’s the
ton,”
Gideon and Kilmartin said in unison.
“What if I can’t abide Lady Clapham?”
“You will ‘abide’ everyone, Miss Masters. Which is how
you
, of course, will be quickly perceived as ‘agreeable. ’”
Lily was growing more and more convinced she could not “abide” Constance Clary.
“And furthermore,” Kilmartin added a little haughtily, “
everyone
can abide Lady Anne Clapham.”
“Yes, yes, Laurie,” Gideon soothed. “She’s lovely.”
Lily was bewildered. “Does
no
one ever say precisely what they think?”
“It’s
society
, Miss Masters,” Kilmartin explained gently. “Imagine the chaos that would ensue if people actually said what they thought.”
“But perhaps if you were to say what you thought in just the right way—”
“Miss Masters,” Gideon interrupted. “You may say what you think, but never
all
of what you think. You may say, for example, ‘I find
Pride and Prejudice
to be an excellent novel, ’ but you must
not
say, ‘Mr. Darcy haunts my dreams at night and gives me fits of longing. ’”
Kilmartin turned to Gideon, half incredulous, half amused.
Lily’s cheeks had gone a little warm. “Mr. Darcy does
not
haunt my dreams.” He
had
, in fact, on more than one occasion.
Gideon’s crooked smile told her he suspected the truth. “Do you understand the difference, Miss Masters?”
She sighed, her shoulders slumping in acceptance. “I suppose so.”
“And if ever you find yourself at a loss for something to say, simply look enigmatic. You will find your conversation partner so disconcerted that the topic will be changed in no time at all.”
Kilmartin looked up at Gideon with another faintly amused expression. “Is that what
you
do, Gideon?”
“It works,” Gideon said shortly. “Can you appear enigmatic, Miss Masters?”
As it turned out, Lily
could
appear enigmatic, though it didn’t come naturally to her. It required, she discovered, that one look inward and think of something else. Lamb chops. Peacocks.
Dark eyes. A sensual mouth
. “Enigmatic,” Lily thought, might just become a very useful strategy for enduring Gideon Cole. That unreadable look of his—he must have cultivated it to endure the
ton
. It seemed a suffocating way to live, burdened with layers of careful masks.
Kilmartin pushed himself upright and retrieved his watch from his pocket to review the time. “Well, Gideon, Miss Masters, as much as I am enjoying our lesson, I must go away to London for the rest of the day. I need to persuade Aunt Hester to be our hostess for our stay in the
ton
and to be Miss Masters’s chaperone for the duration. And it will take some doing, I assure you.”
“Your Aunt Hester? Wasn’t she the Countess… something?”
“Yes, she is the dowager Countess Avery. She’s about a hundred years old and irritable, just so you fully understand the sacrifices I make for you.”
“It’s much appreciated, Laurie.” Gideon said it somberly. “Oh, admit it, your life would be dull otherwise.”
Kilmartin bowed, and when he was upright again, he was smiling wryly. “I will see the two of you tomorrow midday, unless something untoward befalls me. Like Aunt Hester’s cane.”
1: 00 Picnic
They convened for their picnic near the fountain, and Gideon took one look at Lily’s wary expression and almost laughed. He could hardly blame her: He’d been decidedly charmless all morning.
“Miss Masters, you are going on a picnic, not to the gallows. Picnics are considered a pleasant way to pass the time.”
Lily turned that expression up to him. “Very amusing, Mr. Cole. It seems to me that everything you do is ‘considered’ something. Nothing just… ‘is. ’”
Gideon was struck silent by the observation. She was right, he decided, with a mixture of irritation and amusement. Just about everything he did these days, from dancing to dinners to conversations, came wrapped in a carapace of duty and ambition.
And yet…
some people do walk for pleasure
, he’d told her with amused condescension, as if he were an expert on the subject.
Do
you,
Mr. Cole
? She’d wanted to know. Words thrown down like a gauntlet.
So he’d given it some thought. And if he was being honest, not even his first stroll through Aster Park’s grounds with Constance could qualify as “pleasure”: he’d awaited her judgment of the place the way he awaited a verdict in court, with the same heightened anticipation, the same sense of consequence.
To find a memory of walking for pure pleasure, he’d had to rifle through a decade of remembrances. But he did find one: the very first time he’d wandered over Aster Park’s grounds.
It had been like… trespassing in Eden.
He hadn’t yet become a
complete
prig. This picnic was evidence: Because he’d
known
Kilmartin would be away this afternoon. And like any healthy, normal young man who’d had the astonishing good fortune to find himself alone in a darkened library with a fetching, robe-clad young lady, Gideon had immediately conspired to get her alone again. After Lily spun on her heel and padded out of the library, he’d feverishly scrambled for a pen and foolscap so he could revise her agenda for the following day. And then he’d sent her gifts, for God’s sake. He was grateful Mrs. Plunkett was the most impassive creature on earth; she hadn’t even blinked when he’d requested stockings at dawn.
But this morning, at the very last minute, his sense of honor had reared up, and he felt faintly abashed by the feverish revision of the agenda and the gifts, the way one might after a night of drunken carousing. Not quite abashed enough to cancel the picnic
altogether
, however. So he’d asked Mrs. Plunkett to send Alice out to join them, too.
“Alice will be joining us,” he told Lily.
“She will love a picnic,” Lily said, though her face darkened subtly; was that the barest hint of disappointment? Gideon felt a very masculine surge of gratification.
Alice came bounding up a moment later, carrying a long knobby stick. Lily looped one affectionate arm around her sister. “Where did you get a stick, Alice?”
“It’s a musket,” Alice declared. “It will protect us from the wild boars in the park.”
“Then I shall feel very safe,” Gideon said somberly.
Alice gave him a pitying look. “It’s not really a musket, Mr. Cole. It’s a
stick
. I was
pretending.”
Gideon met Lily’s eyes; they were dancing. “Oh, you’re quite right, Miss Alice, I see that now. Perhaps I need spectacles.”
“McBride wears spectacles,” Alice volunteered.
“And who is McBride?” Alice would no doubt be a wonderful and unwitting source of information about Lily’s life.
“We’ve a lovely lunch in the basket, Alice,” Lily interrupted. “I think there may be some cakes.”
Alice was immediately diverted by the topic of food. “I helped the cook with the cakes.”
“You helped gobble them up, you mean,” Gideon teased.
Alice giggled, and Gideon laughed, too. Sometimes there was nothing so purely rewarding as a ten-year-old girl’s giggle.
He glanced at Lily again; he caught her eyes just as they were swiftly moving away from him, but he’d seen in them a hint of begrudging warmth.
“Shall we? We will walk to the edge of the park and have our picnic there.
For pleasure
, Miss Masters.”
“As they do in the
ton
. As a lesson.” It was a statement, but Lily’s eyes held, as usual, a challenge.
“Why else?” He agreed airily.
He picked up the basket and took a step forward.
They walked across the green in silence for a minute or so, an oddly companionable silence, while Alice raced ahead and whacked things with her stick, or pretended to shoot at boar, or gleefully pursued the fluff of a blown dandelion as it sailed by, caught and tossed by the soft breeze. The sky was a rare brilliant blue, empty of clouds, and it was almost as though they were the only three people on earth.
Gideon would have thought Lily’s gaze would be roaming the magnificent parklands, but she was staring steadfastly forward, instead, like an acrobat walking a tightrope.
Aster Park had been landscaped by Capability Brown himself, and the result was a masterful blend of serene order and the illusion of wildness. Neat stone pathways wound through calculated disarrays of flowers and thick, informal stands of old trees—beeches, oaks, maples, and chestnuts, many of them American varieties—and humble English flowers flourished everywhere, elevated to elegance by their thoughtful placement. Vast green expanses of lawn spilled like lakes between all of it.
Gideon had once known every inch of the park; he’d wandered over it discovering little universes within universes: a stone roughly the shape of a sleeping cat embedded in the walkway near the statuary; a grand old monster of an oak tree—reputedly a sapling when William the Conqueror set foot on English shores—that thrust up through the ground like a defiant fist; a secluded trickle of a stream that hosted dragonflies and hummingbirds and tall nodding lilies. And the practical things fascinated him, too: the flock of fat sheep—he could just see them now, if he squinted, looking like tiny blown dandelions in the distance —and the vast, fertile kitchen gardens, redolent of rich dirt and green leaves, which yielded enough vegetables and fruits to feed the denizens of the park and some of the neighboring town, as well. If he hadn’t become a barrister who intended to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, he suspected he’d be perfectly happy being a farmer.
Great messy clumps
, Constance had called those big American trees. Thanks to the impulsive purchase of a pickpocket’s freedom, Aster Park—or rather, the
promise
of Aster Park—was about all he had to offer Constance now.
Aster Park, and his charming self.
He felt another rush of impatience. Bloody
impulse
. He wondered if Jarvis now owned that town house.
“And how is my walking, Mr. Cole?” Lily’s ironic question cut through his thoughts.
He glanced at her. “Slightly better, Miss Masters. Although I imagine it would be difficult to bolt like a thief while trudging along grass in a long skirt.”
“Oh, I could probably manage it.” The words were idly disdainful. And then Lily slowed her pace thoughtfully. “In fact…”
She stopped walking altogether and turned resolutely to him. “Ten pounds, Mr. Cole.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ten pounds says I can race you to that stand of trees…” She pointed to a cluster of beeches about fifty yards off… “and win.” She turned back to him, all sangfroid and challenging upraised brows.
Gideon stared at her incredulously, “A
footrace
? Don’t be absurd, Miss Masters. Ladies don’t—”
“Afraid you will lose?” she sympathized sweetly. “Ah, well. I know how you would
hate
to lose.” She shook her head regretfully and trudged forward again.
Gideon stayed rooted to the spot and stared toward the cluster of beeches, perched like a bouquet at the far edge of his vision. And the wildness he’d deliberately tamped into a stupor so long ago began to stir and kick at the walls of its pen.
There was no one about to see him.
Lily was still trudging forward, her hands clasped behind her, looking for all the world like a professor on his way to teach a class at Oxford. Gideon took three long steps to catch up to her.
“Which is precisely why I
won’t
lose, Miss Masters.”
She stopped again. They eyed each other in measuring, cocksure silence.
“So you’ll wager ten pounds, Mr. Cole?”
“
Ten
pounds? Robbery! Five.”
“Nine.”
“Eight, and that’s my final offer.”
Another silence. A few yards away, Alice hurled her stick through the air like a javelin, and then trotted off to retrieve it.
And then, though he could hardly believe he was doing it, Gideon lowered the picnic basket to the ground. “On the count of three.”
Lily’s mouth went thin and determined. She kicked off her slippers and clutched her skirt in her hands, rifting it a little off her ankles, and Gideon shook himself out of his coat. He folded it carefully before placing it on the ground.
“One…” he drawled “Two…
three
!”
They bolted.
And it felt extraordinary.
Air ripped into his lungs; he pumped it out again, relishing the sensation. The wind raked his hair as he plunged through it, and in moments, the strictures, the concerns, of his life loosened and flew from him, until at last he was nothing more than a creature running for the pure joy of running.
Well, that and
winning
.
The beech trees were closer. He began to silently gloat, which he knew was unworthy of him, but he knew he was going to win this race. He risked a glance at Lily.
Aargh!
She was ahead of him
! Good God, but the girl ran like a wild thing, low to the ground and with utter abandon. Her ribbon came undone and twisted through the air, and the gold plume of her hair burst out behind her, like the tail on a comet.
No
girl
was going to best him in a footrace.
He stretched out his legs, eating up more ground, his boots thumping hard over the grass, but it was no use: he was out of practice, and she was born to it. He tried for one final burst of speed, but Lily reached the trees and touched one, and then bent to catch her breath, her delighted laughter ragged from her run.
And then she had the nerve to stand there and tap her foot until he loped up behind her and touched the same tree. To add insult to injury, Alice was already there, too, jumping up and down and clapping. God, that little girl must be able to leap like a flea.
“Hurrah for Lily!” he heard her exult over the low roar of his own panting.
“Lily is very quick,” Alice added sympathetically, bending down to peer into his reddened face.
“And I’ve had a good deal more practice,” Lily allowed. She wasn’t even
breathing
hard anymore.