Elisabeth Fairchild (16 page)

What he said was. “Loose tongues get people killed in my business.”

Her chin went up.

He cocked his head. “Your friend, Lydia. She doesn’t know, does she?”

The most delectable of feminine jaws twitched. “About you? Of course not.”

“I meant about you. Your talent. Your history.”

She blinked.

“You do not reveal yourself to many, do you? And yet, to me, you have.” His voice dropped, the matter their secret. “A trade off, is it?”

The toss of her head, reminded them both of her pain. He saw the flinch.

Throwing wide the door, she stepped down. Skirts whirling she ran for the safety of her father’s house, and as she ran he allowed himself to consider what she hid beneath those skirts. He allowed himself to study, in his mind’s eye, all that he had seen gleaming, wet and uncovered in Polly’s tin tub.

Chapter Twenty-Two

November 11, 1816

Captain Stapleton’s Ball

Dulcie and Lydia stood at the punch bowl, filling their cups with Captain Stapleton’s famous apricot negus. All of the Naval celebrations he hosted featured the mild, sweet drink.

He had hosted many such gatherings since his release from the Naval hospital. He told Dulcie he would be a light-hearted fellow, a man who slept the night through, living the present, not the pirate-riddled past.

They had become the closest of friends. He wished her to marry him. Twice she had refused. She believed herself meant for another man’s arms--that had enfolded her in the middle of a riot--that had carried her away from the fighting--that had lowered her, near naked, into a harlot’s tub. The woman, Polly, could not have managed it alone. Dulcie thought often of Roger Ramsay’s arms.

Lydia faced the door, the better to keep her eye on arrivals. On her first sip of the negus, she choked, and in a voice meant for none but Dulcie’s ears, sputtered, “What does he do here?”

Dulcie knew without looking who
he
must be, knew before Lydia said snidely, “Not at all the kind of gathering I would think suited a Ramsay, this naval crowd. Do not turn! He stares in this direction.”

Ignoring her, Dulcie caught for a brief, telling moment the intensity of Roger’s gaze. When he greeted his host with a circumspect smile, she examined with growing anticipation the sleek, fox-red hair, the attractive profile, the smooth line of a perfectly cut coat stretched across broad shoulders.

It had been almost a dozen days since she had last seen him. Too long. How was she to greet him? What to say? How to act?

He did not rush to her side. In truth she began to think he deliberately avoided her. He made the rounds, said his hellos, and asked his hostess to dance. He asked Dulcie for the first waltz, and went away to dance with another.

“You said yes!” Lydia railed.

“I did,” Dulcie agreed calmly.

“But it is too intimate a dance to share with one so unworthy.

Dulcie laughed. “I can think of no one with whom I should like to waltz more.”

“Your persons will be shockingly intertwined. Your father would not approve.”

“Father trusts me, Lydia. Do you not? After all, Ramsay is the most accomplished dancer in the room. I would not become an old maid without once having had the pleasure of twirling about on his arm.”

“Old maid! Do not be ridiculous!”

“I am soon to be one and twenty, and have yet to meet a man I should care to have as husband even so much as this Ramsay.”

“You jest. Does not Captain Stapleton make his affections known? And he far worthier than any two Ramsays put together.”

Dulcie said nothing, merely smiled, tapped her foot in time with the music, and sipped her punch, waiting for “Rogering” Ramsay to claim her.

She waited, bright-eyed and smiling, no milkmaid tonight, but a young woman of substance, hair dressed in curls, bosom fashionably displayed in a low cut, round-necked ballgown of peach-blush pink. The color proved so perfect a compliment to her complexion, his gaze made connection again and again between hue of mouth and cheek and hue of fabric and hair ribbon. So enticing, indeed, the plunge of her décolletage he could not help remembering that there were other, hidden parts of her that blushed the same fruited hue.

“I’ve something to tell you.” He led her onto the polished floor.

Dark lashes lifted, revealing the clear blue eyes that lived in his memories of a riotous night in Cheapside, of stolen kisses in a dark doorway.

“You did not come, then, for the pleasure of dancing with me?” Mischief sparkled in those eyes.

“There is none other I should care to waltz with.” He drew her into his arms as the music began--as a hand is drawn into kid gloves.

A perfect fit, she entrusted her body to his, following his lead by way of eyes and hands subtle guidance. He felt as if strings bound them. They danced in perfect unison. Caught in the orbit everyone else followed, they circled the room, at one with the music, with each other.

“What would you tell me?”

“The artist is in,” he said, deliberately cryptic.

“Edwards is part of the group then?”

She caught on quickly.

A small frown troubled the set of her dark winged brows. “He will have little need, then, for his milkmaid.”

He read unerringly the disappointment in her voice and eyes, knew she was more than a little infatuated. He wanted her to understand. “I would guard her from danger.”

Worry flit across her features. “Are these radicals dangerous?”

He would not lie to her. She had assisted him too much. Her talents might prove useful in future.

“Perhaps the most dangerous in London.”

He did not tell her what he had learned. It did not serve to reveal too much.

She maintained her composure admirably. “Edwards? He is a careful fellow, is he not?”

“On that you may depend.”

“Good. I would not have him come to harm.”

Around and around they went, the world a whirl of color, a blur of candlelight. Was this how it looked to her? The light she spoke of? She seemed not at all dizzied by their exertions, only a trifle breathless. He enjoyed the increasingly agitated pace of her every inhalation.

“I’ve a favor to ask,” she blurted.

“Ask away.”

He would grant her the moon could he but reach it. His progress among the Spencean Philanthropists pleased him. Lord Sidmouth and the Prime Minister were impressed. And all because this elegant young woman saw lights that no one else could.

Voice low, she said, “My stitches.”

He recognized her need immediately. “Ready to be removed?” 

“Yes. I cannot reach them. They are in a position too difficult to see in the mirror, and I know not who else to . . .”

“Of course. It should have occurred to me.”

“It is no great thing.” She tried unsuccessfully to ease the growing undercurrent of tension between them. Undiminished, it spun around them.

He glanced about, looking for an alcove into which they might slip. The room, plain and boxy, the windows flat, promised nothing. “I haven’t a knife or scissors with me--”

Her brows rose, askance at the implication of his suggestion. “I did not mean it must be done immediately.”

He pinned her on the pivot of this new spin between them, dizzying her with the demand, “When? Where?”

“Tomorrow?” Not answer, but question she offered. “Perhaps you could . . .” her voice fell away. “Perhaps you could come . . .”

“Tonight . . . via the rainspout?” Deliberately mild, his tone yet carried the weight of suggestion--to which he dared hope she might be open.

She hesitated to agree, fear in her eyes, as if with such a question her world spun along with the room. “Tonight--” the tip of her tongue nervously dampened her lips “might be unwise.”

He lowered his head to whisper, “I promise to be good.”

For the first time, her steps hesitated. “In what way, good?” she countered.

He threw back his head and laughed, turning heads, bringing her to the blush, firing the blue of her eyes with a knowing gleam.

“In every way imaginable,” he vowed, sweeping her into the tempo of the dance with verve. He could not tell her the reason for his excitement, could not tell her they had identified the man in the blue vest--a Mr. Thistlewood--that tonight he would be arrested.

He did not come.

She waited, fully clothed, the lamp low, the window open, her finest needlework scissors on the table at her elbow.

He did not come, and the minutes turned into hours. She believed herself forgotten, shoved aside by matters more pressing. Slipping at last from the safety of her dress, she slid into nightclothes and thence between the cool linens of the bed--disappointed down to her toes. She had dreaded and longed for his arrival, afraid he would ask too much of her, afraid she had not the strength to say him no.

She slept fitfully, kept rousing, to what she believed to be the noise of him at the window. Wind proved culprit, or a passing carriage, or a cat making nightly rounds. When, at last, he did come, she heard nothing until his hand closed upon her mouth, and he whispered, very close to her ear. “Miss Selwyn. I am come at last.”

She opened sleep-bleared eyes to the sight of him knelt beside the bed, a man-shaped darkness, one finger pressed to his lips, his hand soft upon her mouth.

Warm, drowsy, her guard down, she reveled in his presence, in the heat of his breath in her ear. Toward the shadowy reality she stretched drowsily, blinking away the clutch of sleep. The scent of his hand, breath and cheek, filled her senses, teasing the memory of their wild kiss in the midst of a riot as turbulent as her feelings ran riot now.

She tried to pull wits together, but she was a creature of light huddled in the dark nested warmth of her bed. The virile reality of him, crouched bedside, surfaced too vividly her desires, her wish to be kissed again, her long night of waiting and wild daydreams--come to fruition.

Hand leaving her mouth, he said, “Sorry to wake you. Important business detained me.”

She stopped his apology, his excuses, stopped all but the warm pull between them, by reaching up to catch a lock of his hair.

“I think you had better call me Dulcie, if you intend to make habit of visiting my room in the middle of the night.”

“Dulcie,” the darkness responded agreeably.

“I did dream once, Roger Ramsay,” she said, her voice low and muzzy “that you stood leaning over my bed, your hair swinging down like silk against my cheek . . . ”

He stilled her words with a kiss.

Lips parting, she returned his ardor with unguarded enthusiasm.

He pulled away, drawling ironically, “You make me sorry to be late, sorrier still that I cannot stay long, sorriest of all that I did promise to be good.”

She sat up in the bed, heart pounding, fired for more.

His looming darkness stepped back from the bed. “We had best tend to your back.”

She swung her legs free from the bed linens, would have risen, had he not said, “Stay. Only tell me where to find light and scissors.”

She pointed.

His voice floated back to her. “Will you be good enough to bare your back?”

Was it being good to bare her back to Rogering Ramsay, in the night?

Baring her back meant baring her nether regions, in drawing high the hem of her nightshift, a situation provocative in the extreme, even with sheets swaddled beneath the weight of pelvis and thighs. The drag of linens against her buttocks seemed a sliding caress of fabric fingers. Odd that the cloth in a garment, should feel so much more substantial a barrier. Every inch of her flesh awoke to the presence of the man who drew table, light and scissors to her side.

Baring her back, too, meant baring that which was ugliest about her--her past, her scars--the sight of which must surely quell his ardor--they were too hideous to provoke any other feeling. She sank face down in the pillow, gown bunched high at her shoulders, linen cool and stiff against her cheek, the night air chill, tantalizing upon exposed flesh. Prepared for his touch, clutching the bedclothes, she wished the scars away, her back smooth and perfect and desirable.

He placed the table beside the bed, and went to the fire for tinder to light the lamp. Color bloomed golden in a small pool immediately around them, the rest of the room receding into deeper darkness. Rolling back his sleeves, he settled beside her, mattress sagging beneath his weight. Her body rolled into his thigh.

Before she could squirm away, his hand made contact with her bared shoulder. Scissors snipping, he went to work. Gentle and strange, like the sensation of a cat’s whiskers against her back, with the gentle tug of stitches came the gentle tug of questions. “How old were you when this happened?” He ran a finger in a circular pattern along one of her cupping scars, and planted an unexpected kiss in the center of the ring.

She closed her eyes, the better to savor that kiss.

He traced another circle. “And this.”

Color bloomed against the darkness of her eyelids; a splash of brilliant saffron, in it a pool of blue, first cobalt, then cerulean.

Another sweetly chaste kiss, shell pink, the sensation so pleasant in the face of the unpleasant sting of stitches pulled, that a tear burned from the corner of her eye when he asked again, ever so gently, “Will you tell me?

“They were made before I reached the age of nine.”

“So young.” Not a question, a statement, his voice wistful. “Your mother and father allowed this?”

“Mother had every faith in the church, and none at all in me. Father insisted they stop. Armed with Mesmer’s writings, he assured my mother that my visions did not rise from bad blood, insisted cuppings were not the cure. Mother . . .” she sighed, fell silent, plucked at the pillowcasing.

“She is dead, your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Mine, too.”

“Were you close?” she asked faintly.

He carefully tugged another clipped stitch free, the pain of his loss distant. “As close as one can be to a parent as a child. Her carriage overturned on an icy road.”