The Legend of Lyon Redmond (9 page)

“I think most men drink when they can. Have a look inside the Pig & Thistle on any given night.” Though he suspected Mr. Duffy did more than his fair share.

She laughed. “Most of the men we know, surely, but within reason, at least in polite company. Outside of polite company, God only knows what happens. My brother Colin once threw his boot at his door when I knocked on it too early in the morning. He'd been at the darts and the ale at the pub very late.”

“My father would murder me if I drank to excess in any sort of public fashion. Or threw shoes.”

She darted a quizzical, sympathetic look. “Murdered? For throwing shoes?”

He laughed. “Perhaps not literally. It's just . . . I've always been held to a rather strict standard of behavior. I don't suppose I objected. There are benefits associated with it, after all,” he said ruefully. “Such as, my father doesn't withdraw my allowance.”

In the little silence that followed the two of them freshly realized how very constrained Lyon's position was.

“Aren't you ever
tempted
?”

He considered what to say. “I have spent much of my life learning how to resist temptation.”

Which caused a funny, awkward little ripple in the conversation, given that they privately considered each other temptation on legs.

He hurriedly added, “Which I suppose is a fancy way of saying, yes, indeed, I've been tempted, but I've learned the easiest way to manage my father is not to throw shoes. Or dice. Or tantrums. Cricket balls are allowed.”

She was watching him rather avidly, a tiny crease of sympathy between her eyes.

“A very good deal
is
expected of me, Miss Eversea.” He was only half teasing. He wasn't certain if he knew how to explain the magnitude of his role as Redmond heir.

“Ah, yes. People often speak of you in hushed and awestruck tones. Lyon Redmond. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and so forth. Will be a legend one day.”

He laughed, and it tapered into a happy sigh. She was so very surprising. So forthright and confident and
happy.
Very unlike poor Lady Arabella.

“I fully expect I
shall
be a legend one day,” he said gravely, only half jesting.

“It's rather a tradition of the Everseas for the young men to find their own ways to fortune. My father went out to sea more than once and came home wealthy. I can't imagine my father threatening murder. He does have rather a
look
he uses when he wants to make a point.”

Lyon knew the Eversea brothers had allegedly found their ways into the bedrooms of married countesses and the like.

“My father has a look, too,” he said, rather grimly.

She cast him a sidelong glance. “I thought you were meant to go on a tour of the continent on behalf of your father's business straight away. Or marry the daughter of a duke.”

His head whipped toward her in surprise. “Where on earth did you hear that?”

“One of my brothers heard it at the pub.”

“I was a topic of discussion in
your
household?” And now he was astonished.

“Not for long,” she said revealingly. “It was shot down like the season's first grouse.”

He gave a short laugh. “Your house sounds like anarchy compared to mine. I don't think I've ever heard the word ‘Eversea' spoken aloud voluntarily.”

“It's not anarchy!” She whirled on him in a passionate defense. “We all have
beautiful
manners.”

And while he was certain this was true—whatever debauchery Ian and Colin Eversea got up to, he was certain they said “please” and “thank you” before, during, and after—he felt a surge of almost painful tenderness. She of course would always passionately defend the people she loved.

It was a quality he shared with her.

It was also the thing that could divide them, if they lingered on it. The history between their families was complex and sensitive, much of it still not fully known to either of them.

He wanted no complexity to intrude on this idyll.

He reached out and nearly laid a hand on her arm, a reflex to soothe and reassure.

He withdrew it swiftly. It was definitely one of the “ought nots.”

Oh, but the day she was in his arms . . .

It was not an “if” but a “when.”

And he suspected they both knew it.

“I didn't mean to imply any insult, Miss Eversea, so do forgive me . . . I suppose it was my clumsy way of saying that our families are likely very different. My mother is a placid sort, loving and tolerant, and Father . . .” How on earth to summarize Isaiah? “. . . I admire him a great deal,” he decided, though it strangely felt less sincere to say this than it would have mere days ago. The admiration was shot through with a rather dark awareness now. “I am acutely aware of the grandeur, if you will, of the family name, and that great things are expected of me, and that every move I make reflects upon every
member of my family, him most especially. Or rather, it's very much how he sees it. My good fortune is immeasurable. I both know this inherently and am essentially told this rather frequently.”

He said this dryly.

She took this in thoughtfully, and a little silence passed. “I imagine the consequences would likely be dire, should you diverge from your proscribed path.”

She was startlingly astute.

Simply walking with her along this road to the Duffys constituted a divergence from his proscribed path.

He paused, and chose his next words carefully. For regardless, he had loyalties of his own.

“My father has ways of making his displeasure known. And yes, he has plans for me.”

She turned to watch him, her face somber and yet so vivid, so intelligent and sympathetic. He sensed all at once that she wanted to touch him, too, for the same reasons he'd wanted to touch her. To soothe.

And the idea of touching her made him restless, indeed.

It occurred to him that perhaps it hadn't been entirely sensible to meet her alone in the woods. Because within a hundred feet of where they now walked, off the road, there was a small clearing, carpeted in moss and enclosed by hedgerows and trees, and he knew from now on when he lay in his bed at night he would imagine lying her gently down on her back there, and leaning over her to—

He hurriedly cast about in his mind for an erection discourager, and settled upon the image of Mrs. Sneath.

Olivia was an innocent, but hardly naïve. And the air between them was as full of sparks as the hours before a lightning storm, and it seemed almost dis
honest not to discuss it directly. A bit like not saying the word “rain!” even as the sky opened up and poured.

Someone, one of her tall brothers, ought to have walked with her, he thought perversely. Lyon wanted to protect her from himself even as he contemplated ravishing her in a clearing. A paradox.

Into the silence birds sang competing arias, and the trees shook their new leaves like tambourines.

“He'd like me to address the Mercury Club in London soon. To present my thoughts about steam engines and introduce some investment strategies.”

“I'm certain you'll acquit yourself as well as your father does.”

“I shall do it better.”

He said this so simply, and with such easy conviction, that she gave a delighted laugh.

“Is it what you want to do? Investing, and the like? Just like your father.”

He hesitated. “I've been groomed for it. I'm good at it. But I've lately learned a good deal about what I want.”

He let that statement ring a moment.
What I want.
Like something being wrought on an anvil. What he wanted was her.

She flushed with pleasure.

“Have you been to London, recently, Miss Eversea?”

“Oh, not recently, but I suspect shall have a season next year. I should have had one last year, but I managed to catch an ague instead.”

And he already knew what her season in London would be like: men swarming her like bees swarmed flowers. A rogue surge of jealousy swept in, which was absurd, given that it was jealousy for something that hadn't happened yet.

“To your earlier question, Miss Eversea . . . I was indeed meant to go on to the continent straight away. But I have decided to stay in Pennyroyal Green.”

They both knew that statement for what it was: a confession.

He did not mention the daughter of a duke. She didn't ask again.

At the quiet heart of the storm of sparks around them was a strange, peaceful certainty.
This person was meant for me
.

They walked on, or rather floated on, silently, as if the moment was a small wild creature neither one of them wanted to frighten away.

“Well,
I
should like to tour the continent,” she said finally and gave a little skip, reaching up a hand to touch a leaf on an elm tree as if it were an old friend, which it likely was.

He did like to watch how she moved. He'd once watched a dandelion spiral in a breeze, and she seemed that natural and graceful.

“Would you?” he said, somewhat mistily.

“I've always wanted to go on an ocean voyage. To see the water
all
around! How magnificent! And pluck an orange straight from a tree that isn't growing in a hothouse. And dig my bare toes into warm golden sand. The closest I've come is Brighton. And reading
Robinson Crusoe
.”

He laughed. “I've long wanted to see Spain. I want to build a house of my own there, with a view of the sea, in a
sunny
country.”

“Not England, in other words.”

“We're hardly the tropics, are we?”

“Though today is paradise, isn't it? Imagine a land where the weather is comprised of day after day just like this one.” She tipped her head back and took a deep, spring-filled breath.

“You're describing Spain.”

“I'll read your book, then!” she said enthusiastically. “I haven't yet, you know. I only read the message that fell from it. Tell me, what sort of house will you build there?”

“Graceful lines. Perhaps a bit Moorish. White. Simple. Large rooms with vast windows, and from every angle you'll be able to see the sea. Filled with light and fine things, but not a
lot
of things.”

He was describing the opposite of his family home, Redmond House. Which was ancient and handsome and lush, all dark woods and hushed hallways and frighteningly dear things they'd never been allowed to touch as children.

“That sounds heavenly. I hope I see it one day.”

There was a funny little silence. Because that sounded rather like a declaration, too.

He could sense her deciding whether to ask her next question.

“Does your father know you would like to have a house in Spain?” She said it almost gently. Carefully.

This girl understood so much so quickly.

“No,” he said.

It seemed odd, suddenly, to realize that Olivia Eversea already knew his heart better than his father did. Better, in fact, than anyone else in the world.

He had been waiting for this opportunity to exhale, it seemed, his entire life. And with her, he felt more himself than he'd ever been.

She'd already begun showing him that there was much more to himself than he'd ever dreamed. Not entirely comfortable, but wholly seductive.

The Duffy house was now in view and Lyon consciously slowed his steps. But no matter how slow they went, they would eventually arrive.

“Perhaps you best stop here,” she said, a bit awkwardly.

He slid the basket from his arm to hers into a fraught silence, because there was far too much to say and it seemed there would never be enough time. And their arms brushed, briefly, and yet deliberately across each other, and it really was only like throwing kindling onto the fire.

That little touch rendered both of them mute for a moment.

“Miss Eversea . . .”

“Olivia.”

“Olivia.”

He said this gravely. Accepting it with the ceremony such favor deserved.

And he smiled slowly, which made her flush to her roots.

Her eyes were a shade bluer than the sky, and her lashes, when she lowered them, cast a shivering shadow on her cheek.

“Olivia, I . . .”

He stopped. He could have finished the sentence in a million ways.

“I usually bring a basket to the Duffys every Tuesday, after the meeting for the Society of the Protection of the Sussex Poor,” she said in a rush.

And then she whirled and dashed off, stopping once again to stretch up to touch a leaf. “We meet again, spring!” she said.

He gave a short laugh and watched her go.

And then he whirled around and though he mostly walked nearly all the way home, he occasionally leaped a few low fences just for the devil of it.

And he stopped just once, to touch the “O” he'd carved into the elm tree.

Six weeks before the wedding . . .

“H
ERE ARE FOUR SHILLINGS.”
Olivia dropped them one at a time into the cup shared by the beggars against Madame Marceau's wall. “I hope you will buy something hot to eat with it. Do consider going to Sussex, if you would like to work and live quietly. This should be enough for mail coach fare.”

She stepped back abruptly.

“This may be the last you see of me. Farewell.”

The bandaged beggar never lifted his head or spoke, and she wondered again if he even could. Perhaps he couldn't even hear. But he raised his hand and brought it down in a slow blessing. It was like watching a curtain lower on a portion of her life.

Madame Marceau was clever and busy and she congratulated herself on the hiring of Mademoiselle Lilette, for she and Olivia had established a rapport.

Mademoiselle Lilette was whistling softly as she pinned. As it so happened, she was whistling “The Legend of Lyon Redmond,” and it was just too much today.

“Mademoiselle Lilette, may I ask you not to whistle that song?”

“I am so sorry. Do forgive me. It is very lively, the song,
non
?”

“Oh yes,” Olivia said blackly. “Very lively indeed.”

A prickly, raw little silence ensued.

“Forgive me, Miss Eversea, if the subject is a
peu difficile
, but you are the only woman I know for whom a song was written. He was a lively man? As lively as the song? This Lyon Redmond?”

Was he
lively
? She did not want to think about Lyon during the final fitting of her wedding dress.

No, he wasn't lively.

He'd been life itself.

She never talked truthfully
about
him. She only talked around him, in generalities. No one had known him the way she had.

Suddenly she wanted someone to know.

“He was a surprising man. A . . . vivid . . . man who was also very disciplined. He was very clever and alarmingly quick. He was tender-hearted. And he did so want to see places. He had a wonderful laugh. He would . . . he would have enjoyed the song. I hope—”

She stopped.

“You hope?”

She'd nearly run out of ability to speak about him.

“I hope he did.” Her voice was husky now. “See places.”

She did, God help her. He might have died in a ditch. Or he might in fact be riding the Nile on a crocodile. She had entertained every imaginable scenario over the years. She imagined him again on the deck of a ship. It gave her some small measure of comfort, even as a hair-fine filament of anger ran through the picture: no matter where he was, he wasn't here, and he had gone without her.

“Was he brave? Was he good?”

Mademoiselle Lilette seemed a trifle too curious.

But Olivia closed her eyes. She couldn't find it in her to mind at the moment.

And she, as she'd once told someone else, never lied.

“Yes.” Her voice was thick. “Very brave. And very good.”

She didn't know how long her eyes remained closed.

She opened them, because when she closed them she saw his face again in the rain, in the dark.

She slid Landsdowne into place in her mind's eye instead. His dear face and dark eyes.

“I had a great love, once,” Mademoiselle Lilette volunteered softly, hesitantly.

Ah! Perhaps this was the source of the questions. “What became of him?”

“I do not know. He disappeared one day.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that. I have never married.”

“Oh, Lilette . . . I am so sorry.” Olivia's heart squeezed painfully.

“
Merci
, Miss Eversea. You are very kind.”

There was a little silence.

“Surely one day . . . you are still young . . .” Olivia ventured.

“Perhaps. But my heart, she cannot seem to see anyone else.”

Oh God. Olivia wondered what her life would be like if she'd ever dared explain that to her family that way:
My heart, she cannot seem to see anyone else
.

And then had quietly retired from life. There! Done with that nonsense.

Instead she'd endured years of bouquets and wagers in betting books. She'd dodged suitors neatly, charmingly, and had managed to hide the greater part of herself for years.

Until her cousin Adam Sylvaine, the vicar, had given her the miniature she'd once given Lyon. He'd
said he was not at liberty to tell her how it came into his possession. All she knew was that Lyon had somehow relinquished it, and he'd once vowed he never would.

It had broken the spell. She had decided then to do something to rejoin life.

And life for any woman typically meant getting married and having a family.

“I'm sorry that you lost him, Mademoiselle Lilette. Truly.”

She reached down a hand, and found Lilette's hand coming up to squeeze hers.

“
Mais bien sûr
, I am strong.”

Olivia couldn't see it, but she sensed a Gallic shrug from down around the area of her hem.

There was a hush, honoring lost loves.

“Mademoiselle Lilette . . .”

“
Oui
, Miss Eversea?”

She was almost afraid to ask the question. She'd never known another soul she could ask, and she was half afraid of the answer.

And finally she did.

“How did . . . how did you go on?” Her voice was nearly a whisper. “When you knew he was gone?”

She had never met another soul who could possibly
answer
that question.

Mademoiselle Lilette was quiet for a time.

“I have my passions, too, you see. If you are a passionate woman, you find things to care about, for you cannot help yourself. As you have, yes? For the strong, we do go on.”

Olivia couldn't speak. It had taken all of her nerve to even ask that question, and she hadn't yet found her voice again.

“Your heart is healed,
non
, Miss Eversea? The song, it is silly nonsense, and you should not let it
trouble you. You will be happy, Miss Eversea, you will see. You are marrying a fine man.”

Olivia was not willing to discuss the condition of her heart. “One of the finest of men I've known.”

“And you are fortunate.”

“I am fortunate.”

“And only the grandest of women are sung about.”

Olivia snorted at that. “There I fear our opinions must diverge. I wish more than anything for a little time away from songs and wagers and prints and all this nonsense. It's everywhere I turn. If only I could escape for a week or two to catch my breath . . . so I can be married with a clear mind.”

“Perhaps a trip to the country?”

“
Another
country, perhaps,” Olivia said mordantly. “My home is in the country, in Pennyroyal Green, Sussex. I would have to go very far to escape the nonsense, as we've agreed to call it. It seems to have saturated London and its environs. Then again, my mother might not even notice I've gone and I've hardly been very helpful lately. My nerves are making me shrewish.”

She was still talking when she noticed Mademoiselle Lilette was motionless for some time.

“Miss Eversea?”

“Yes?”

“We are
fini
.”

Well, then. She and Mademoiselle Lilette were the first to see her stand up in her wedding dress.

The seamstress turned her around by her shoulders ceremoniously and aimed Olivia at the mirror.

The dress was a masterpiece of gossamer, flowing simplicity. The tiered sleeves were short and ever so slightly puffed and trimmed in silver lace. They looked as dainty as little fairy bells perched on her shoulders. A train flowed behind her like mist—a
train
, not cobwebs—and silver ribbon gleamed at the neckline, the hem, the waist. The hem was caught up in little loops of silver ribbon, with just a scatter of beading. She was to wear white kid gloves.

She hardly recognized the girl who stared back at her. White-faced, dazzled. Haunted.

“I would certainly marry me,” she said.

Mademoiselle Lilette smiled.

“You are beautiful, Miss Eversea. Surely it is all anyone should require of you right now.”

It was time to think about Landsdowne.

And how his dear, strong face would look when he saw her in the dress.

Perhaps her
heart
could not see anyone else. Perhaps her heart had indeed been permanently blinded.

But she had decided that making someone else happy was the next best thing to being happy, and she knew she could do it.

And perhaps one day she would not be able discern Landsdowne's happiness from her own.

About five years earlier . . .

A
NNIE,
J
ENNY,
P
ATRICK,
M
AEVE,
Jordy, Christopher, Michael, and the baby, who likely had a name, but was a girl and would be called “the baby” until another one was born, which, given that these were the Duffys, was an inevitability.

Lyon knew the names and all their little dramas by heart.

Rather the way he'd come to know his ceiling at night.

For almost three months he'd met Olivia just once a week, for just shy of two hours, unless one counted church, where he could hardly look at her, let alone speak with her. He didn't even make excuses anymore. He simply disappeared from the house about the same time every Tuesday. He hadn't tried very hard to be convincing, but he'd managed rather skillfully to dodge his father, the only person he truly needed to convince.

He knew she liked marmalade better than blackberry jam, that she preferred coffee to tea unless the tea was very black indeed, and she didn't take sugar in either of them, just like him, and that she preferred to take breakfast in the kitchen rather than the dining room because she liked the way the sun came in that particular window in the morning, gauzy and bright, and that she yearned after a pair of white kid gloves trimmed in gold that were in Postlethwaite's window. He knew that she'd had a kitten who'd died when she was nine years old and she'd never forgotten him, and that she was worried about her brother Chase, who seemed rather quiet lately, and about Colin, who was conducting quite the stormy and obvious courtship of Miss Louisa Porter, that her favorite flower was red poppies, that she had named the immense holly tree outside her bedroom window Edgar, because it seemed to fit, that her heroes were Mrs. Hannah More, Zachary Macaulay, and Mr. William Wilberforce, who were passionate, tireless abolitionists and crusaders for the poor. And, of course, Mrs. Sneath.

His ambition was to be her hero, too.

He admired her almost helplessly. It was the first time in his life Lyon had felt he'd needed to
earn
anything. Sometimes when he was with her he felt as though he were walking a narrow fence rail,
arms balancing him, worried that the next moment would be the one she decided he was unworthy.

But his native confidence always returned.

It was so very clear she felt the same way.

Conversation spilled from them, sparkling and effortless, ricocheting from topic to topic. They found each other an infinite source of delight.

But every moment with her seemed to enhance his awareness of her, until it was so acutely sensitized he found the smallest things erotic. The bend of her elbow. The skin of her wrist when she turned it up. He longed to trace the faint blue veins with a single, delicate finger, and press his lips against her pulse. That shadow between her breasts that made his head light, because all it did was make him imagine them bare. The pale, tender strip of skin between her bound-up hair and the collar of her pelisse. The way her slim back flared into her hips. The whorl of her ear. He imagined tracing it delicately with his tongue, and how she would moan softly. When they stood near each other the space between them pulsed with heat, until it seemed patently absurd that she wasn't pressed against him.

And he lay awake and suffered.

This kind of consuming
want
was entirely new to him. He was accustomed to appetites, not obsessions, and there was usually an aristocratic widow available to satisfy an appetite. And he certainly knew how to satisfy himself alone in bed at night. But he could do neither, because they were so far from what he really wanted it would have been like eating wood shavings simply because no food was available.

His restlessness had driven him out to the Pig & Thistle at night, where he watched Jonathan win dart games, and had begun conducting a halfhearted flirtation with a charming teacher from
Miss Marietta Endicott's Academy who took some dinners at the pub. It distracted him slightly, but alleviated nothing.

Lyon simply wasn't a rake or a rogue. One didn't seduce well-bred young ladies, particularly one's neighbors, and most definitely not an Eversea, if one was a Redmond. Even stealing a kiss from her was fraught with a statement of intention.

But the silences between their giddy rush of conversation had begun to grow longer and more tense. They stole little touches here and there—a brush of their fingers when he handed off a handkerchief, or when she slid the basket onto his arm to hold. It was so absurdly not enough that it bordered on torture.

He understood why Romans didn't feed the lions before they set them upon the Christians. Hunger made one furious and untenable.

He was off for a good gallop one morning after a sleepless night, when he slowed his horse to a walk and then pulled him to a halt in front of Postlethwaite's. He stared at the window.

Then slid from his horse's back and tethered him.

He hesitated briefly. Then he pushed open the door, and the bells danced and jingled merrily. This morning the sound shredded his nerves.

“Why, Mr. Redmond, good morning!” Postlethwaite bowed. “What brings you to my fine establishment?”

“Good morning, Mr. Postlethwaite. I'd like to purchase the white kid gloves in the window. The ones trimmed in gold.”