Clandestine (20 page)

Sarah hesitated by the door with her hand on the knob. Moisture gleamed faintly silver on her cheeks.

“You're very kind, sir,” she said. “I know the truth of what you say. I don't berate myself so very much. That's only another form of self-indulgence, isn't it? Anyway, what would I have done with warehouses and a shipping business? I'm far better suited to be a schoolteacher, and I've made a perfectly good new life. Yet please don't think that I'm always honest. I'm not. No more than anyone else.”

“Yes, you are,” Guy said.

Her knuckles tensed on the knob. “I'm glad to have been able to tell someone,” she said. “Not even Rachel knows how much I was at fault.”

“And afterwards—?”

“The Mansards blamed only Captain Callaway for what had happened. That's the general way of thinking, isn't it? That a man who leaves any business decisions to his wife is a fool.”

Moonlight traced across the backs of his hands, throwing stark shadows between his fingers.

“I can only honor any man whom you have loved,” he said. “John Callaway doesn't sound like a fool. He sounds remarkable.”

Sarah opened the door. Her shoes rapped softly away down the corridor.

Guy sprang to his feet to fling open the casement.

Night cast black shadows in a gray world. The lake lay still and dark, like a great expanse of wet slate. Yet where the moonlight reflected off a bank of low-lying mist to glimmer across the water, it looked like the White Lady walking.

Who was that—one of the heroines of Celtic myth—the lady who'd come walking over the sea to her lover?

Sarah Callaway would no doubt know, because she had escaped a painful girlhood by losing herself in books. And then she had escaped again to find a joy that was only seared by more pain in her brief marriage.

He wished—quite insanely, but with a profound intensity—that he could wipe all of that pain away to find the girl she had also once mentioned, who had worn a straw bonnet and enjoyed carefree picnics with her cousin.

—until hail obliterated all of our gaiety.

Guy swung rapidly down the wall and strode off across the grounds.

I'm glad to have been able to tell someone—

Someone!
She had told him precisely because he meant nothing to her, because she imagined that he was a perfect gentleman, because she thought therefore that he was always absolutely trustworthy and honorable, like the man she had married.

The White Lady shimmered in the mist, trailing tears across the water.

Guy shrugged out of his clothes as he walked, leaving garments strewn across the damp grass. At the edge of the lake he tugged off his boots and breeches.

He dived naked into the cool moonlit water.

Impossible to shed dishonor as easily.

Faint phosphorescence fringed his shoulders and arms as he swam, but clouds moved to drop a black cloak over the lake. The mist vanished into darkness. The White Lady disappeared.

Impossible, always, for any mortal to compete with a ghost.

F
IVE
carriages bowled along the leafy lanes, each one carrying its bouquet of parasols. Sarah sat in the last carriage with the governess and the children, and tried not to watch Guy Devoran. Most of the gentlemen had chosen to accompany the carriages on horseback, as had Lady Whitely.

Mr. Devoran controlled his spirited blood bay with unobtrusive skill: lithe, restrained, and a magnet for every female gaze. Lady Whitely rode beside him on a showy chestnut mare. His dark head bent a little toward her as she chattered. She glanced up at him and laughed, her blond ringlets caressing her lovely face, her neat figure displayed to perfection by her fashionable habit and elegant feathered hat.

Sarah forced her gaze away. A sharp, dark pain stabbed beneath her corset, as if she had the right to be wounded by his paying such careful attention to a beautiful woman.

Why on earth had she told him the truth about John? Not even Rachel had really known why she had broken off her mourning so precipitately to take up a post as a schoolmistress—and then the Mansards had died, and Rachel, too, was cast unprotected into the world.

Yet how could a duke's nephew ever understand any penniless gentlewoman's plight? And how absurd that she had stared at herself in the mirror that morning and wondered if he could ever find her lovely! Yet Sarah had agonized over her appearance. She was not beautiful. She was even freckled like a currant bun, because—never really caring before—she had spent too much time in the sun.

She reached deep into her heart to try to find acceptance, doing her best to laugh at herself, yet the pain still hurt.

B
ARRISTOW
Manor sat in a small fold of hills between the moor and the sea. Mr. Barry Norris and his wife welcomed their guests with wine and cakes, before they broke up into little groups to explore the gardens.

Sarah walked with one of the younger girls and tried to explain the botanical structure of the flowers. Yet Mary Blenkinsop, interested only in one of the younger men—since she considered Mr. Guy Devoran far too far above her touch—simply giggled.

“Is this really quite suitable, Mrs. Callaway?”

Sarah looked up. Mrs. Barry Norris stared at her over the end of her long nose and sharp chin.

“The gentlemen have retired to the glasshouse,” Mrs. Norris added. “Your opinion is wanted. Such pursuits may be acceptable, I suppose, for a widow, but certainly not for a young girl. Miss Blenkinsop may remain here with me.”

Sarah smiled her thanks and hurried away. As she entered the orchid house, a voice boomed.

“Stole m' head gardener, sir!”

“Really?” Guy Devoran said. “My heart bleeds, sir.”

“Ever since the man left, the demmed plants have been dying. Ah! Here's your little botanist! What do y' think, m' dear? Not hot enough in here for orchids?”

Sarah had stopped just inside the doorway, but Mr. Norris marched up to seize her by the arm.

“Take this bloody thing!” He pointed to a sad clump of brown roots in a pot. “Never bloomed once. Cost me a fortune! What the devil do ye know about making orchids bloom, ma'am?”

“Nothing at all, sir.” Sarah bit back a grin. “I'm very sorry if you've been led to believe otherwise.”

A similarly repressed mirth was dancing in Guy Devoran's eyes. “But I thought you knew orchids, Mrs. Callaway? How foolish of me!”

“I know them only from prints and from books, sir,” she said. “I've never grown one.”

Barry Norris dragged her deeper into his hothouse. “But tell me what you think of these, ma'am! Only things blooming.”

He pushed aside some greenery and pointed to a handful of small flowers.

Seven orchids burst from the shade of a mass of spear-shaped leaves. Snowy outer petals spread open in erotic surrender.

Eria rosea
.

At the heart of each blossom, blush-pink lips frilled around a small round knob, like a golden pearl.

“M' wife thinks the blooms shocking,” Barry Norris said with a guffaw. “Remind a man of things he ain't supposed to think about.”

Obviously fighting an incipient outbreak of hilarity, Guy Devoran coughed into a closed fist. “Tricky things, orchids,” he said.

Afraid that she would burst out laughing, Sarah swallowed hard and walked away to gaze out at the gardens.

“I'm so sorry to hear that you lost your head gardener, Mr. Norris,” she said as soon as she could trust her voice. “I trust the poor man wasn't taken ill?”

“God, no! Moorefield stole him. Chap by the name of Croft.”

“Croft?” Guy asked. “The same fellow Moorefield just hired this spring?”

Barry Norris gave Guy a sharp glance, as if beneath the crude, jovial facade he concealed a set of razors.

“That's no secret, sir. Clever chap with flowers. Moorefield's been wanting the man for years, and he got him only a few days after the fellow got back from London in May.”

Guy stroked the white petals with one gentle finger. “Then I'll wager it's exactly the same man that beat mine to the punch at Loddiges.”

“Could ha' been.” Norris kicked idly at a pot of greenery, his mouth pursed.

“A shipment of some particularly fine orchids had just come in,” Guy said. “Annoyed quite a few of us, sir, when the pick of the crop was whisked out from under our noses and sent down here to Devon.” The
Eria rosea
trembled slightly as Guy dropped his hand and turned to face his host. “These are very fine specimens, sir. I believe I must meet your Mr. Croft.”

“Then you'll find the fellow at Moorefield Hall. But if these plants were the best to be had, I was cheated.”

“Then perhaps another Devon gardener carried off the main prize?”

Norris hesitated for a moment. “Damn me, if you're not right, sir! If it's rare orchids you're after, you should talk to Hawk, not Croft.”

“Hawk, sir?”

“Whiddon's man…went up to town at the same time as Croft—after orchids, you understand—and the rogues traveled back together. Now there's a chap who can grow things!” He turned and grinned. “Better not take ladies into his hothouse!”

Norris cackled at his own wit and stomped off to the doorway.

His arms crossed over his chest, Guy Devoran leaned his shoulders against the wall, threw back his head, and laughed.

Something in the set of his nostrils and the creases at the corners of his mouth poured through Sarah's heart like molten gold—as if she were a rare coin and he were the furnace.

Hating that vulnerability, she walked past him to the door.

Mrs. Norris was shepherding the other ladies back toward the house. Trailing behind them, a nurse carried a golden-haired child in her arms. Norris's expression softened as he gazed at them.

“That's my son,” he said proudly. “Damned smart little lad! Never cries! Never makes a fuss! Not even when a stranger surprised the governess in the garden last month.”

“A stranger, sir?”

“Just some vagabond fellow! Frightened the life out of the nurse, so she ran back to the house. Yet my little boy never set up so much as a wail, for all he's still in skirts, though of course I've given orders she's not to go so far from the house ever again.”

“Very prudent, sir,” Sarah said. “The countryside contains far too many poor souls looking for work, or a little bread.”

“Nonsense, ma'am! Wastrels the lot of them! No patience with that!”

Barry Norris hurried off across the grass to join his wife and child. The toddler saw his father and reached out with both arms. Mr. Norris plucked him from the nurse and swung him, until the toddler screamed with laughter.

Sarah's heart constricted at the sight of them. A child was the one gift she had hoped for when she'd first married John and what she had longed for as she grew to love him, but thanks to her own choices, she had been left bereft.

Determined not to succumb to self-indulgent melancholy, she walked back to Guy Devoran. He was watching her carefully, the glint of mirth in his eyes now shadowed by concern.

Her heart skipped a beat, sending another ripple of mad awareness through her blood. With the dappled sunlight caressing his dark hair and highlighting the pure lines of his face, he seemed both brilliant and a little feral, like the King of Faerie. Yet that wild heart also seemed infinitely open to compassion.

She immediately reached for levity, for a return to uncontaminated, uncomplicated laughter. “You see, sir, that I am indeed invisible to Mr. Norris. Since I don't really exist, sights that would ordinarily shock a lady may safely be shown to me.”

“Ah,” he said, grinning. “You refer to Mrs. Norris's concerns? But surely flowers are among the most innocent of God's creations, so how can any of them be improper?”

Sarah walked back to look again at the orchids:
Eria rosea
, so lovely and delicate, and so perilously erotic.

“No, Mrs. Norris is right,” she said. “These flowers are most unsuitable for the eyes of unmarried young ladies.”

“So why aren't they considered dangerous for the eyes of young men?” He glanced down at his boots. “Such indiscreet blooms might certainly inflame improper male desires.”

“Only for a male insect,” Sarah said. “And a Chinese one at that.”

He smiled as he glanced up at her beneath his lashes. “Ah! In that case, I must banish all thoughts of wantonness, though I'm still left with the image of moths pollinating orchids.”

She turned away, giddy. With this man, even laughter was dangerous.

“Which brings us back to gardeners,” she said. “You already knew that Lord Moorefield had hired a man named Croft?”