Last Night's Scandal

  “You said you never got to see the sights,” he said. And as vexed as he’d been—and still was—he’d felt sorry for her. When he was a boy, her stepfather had often taken him along on journeys. Lord Rathbourne had always taken the time to point out the sights and tell stories about them, especially the bloodcurdling stories boys liked, about grisly murders and ghosts and such.

  It seemed odd and unfair that a girl with such a vivid imagination, who craved change and excitement, had had so little opportunity of sightseeing.

  “I knew nothing about it,” she said. “Only imagine. Nearly fifty years ago. What must the people living here have thought when they saw it?”

  “They were frightened,” he said. “Suppose you’d been a villager of that time.” He gazed up at the leaden sky. “You look up and suddenly appears a gigantic thing where only birds and clouds are supposed to appear.”

  “I don’t know if I’d be frightened.”

  “Not you specifically,” he said. “But if you’d been a villager, an ordinary person.”

  Which was inconceivable. The very last thing Olivia was was ordinary.

  “I’ve always wanted to go up in a hot-air balloon,” she said.

  No surprise there.

  “How thrilling it must be,” she said, “to look down on all the world from a great height.”

  “Going up to the great height is all very well,” he said. “Coming down is another story. Lunardi had no notion how to steer the thing. He brought along oars, thinking he could row through the air.”

  “But he tried,” she said. “He had a vision, and he pursued it. A Noble Quest. And here’s a stone marking the occasion, for all posterity, as it says.”

  “Do you not find the prose inflated?” he said. It was a dreadful pun, but he couldn’t resist.

  “Inflated. Oh, Lisle. That is—” She gave a snort of laughter, which she quickly stifled. “Abominable.”

  “He took with him a cat, a dog, a pigeon, and a hamper of provisions,” he said. “The provisions I understand. The animals I do not. In any event, the pigeon soon escaped, and air travel disagreed with the cat, who was let off a short distance from London.”

  She laughed then, truly and fully, a velvety cascade of sound that startled him. It was nothing like the silvery laughter so many women affected. It was low and throaty, a smoky sound that slid down his spine.

  It stirred dangerous images—of bed curtains moving in a breeze, and tumbled bedclothes—and it disarmed him at the same time. He smiled stupidly at her.

  “A good thing, too,” she said. “Can’t you picture it? The basket of a hot air balloon—the small space crammed with provisions and oars and instruments and such, and the cat, the dog, and the pigeon. And there’s the cat, being sick on the floor. I can see the look on Lunardi’s face. How he must have wanted to pitch the dratted cat over the side! I wonder if he touched ground when he let it off.”

  “Really, Olivia, you know I have no imagi—” Then he snorted, too, and in a moment he was laughing as well, helplessly, at the pictures she made in his head.

  For a moment, all his grievances and frustrations vanished, and he was a carefree boy again. He leaned back against the railing and laughed as he’d not done in an age.

  Then he told her the tale of fourteen-stone Mrs. Letitia Sage, the first “British female air traveler,” who went up in another balloon with Lunardi’s friend Biggins.

  Naturally, Olivia sketched out a scene: the basket rolling in the wind, and the large woman slipping downward across the floor, inexorably toward the terrified Biggins. In the nick of time, though, the winds shifted again, and Biggins escaped being flattened.

  She didn’t simply tell it; she acted it, complete with different voices for the various parts, including the animals.

  Caught up in exchanging stories and laughing over them, they drew closer together. It was unthinking, so natural. It was as they would have done in the past.

  He could have stayed there for a long, long time, forgetting his anger and resentment, and simply reveling in her company. He’d missed her, and that was an undeniable fact. He remembered the way the world had seemed to tip back into proper balance when she drew him into the antechamber that night—mere days ago—and said, “Tell me.”

  Of course, it hadn’t taken her much time to unbalance his world again, to a spectacular degree, and he still wanted to kill her. But he was dazzled, too, and happy at this moment as he hadn’t been for a long time.

  He was in no hurry to leave, even when a sharp gust of wind struck like a slap in the face.

  But she shivered, and he said, “We’d better get back.”

  She nodded, her gaze on the monument. “We’ve certainly given the ladies plenty of time to speculate about what, exactly, we’ve been doing.”

  “That pair,” he said. “How the devil did you persuade my parents that they made suitable chaperons? Come to that, I can’t guess how you persuaded everybody—”

  “Lisle, you know perfectly well that it’s against the DeLucey code to explain the cheat.”

  He studied her faintly smiling profile. “You did cheat, then,” he said.

  She turned to meet his gaze, her blue eyes seemingly guileless, seeming to hide nothing. “Every way I could think of. Are you still angry with me?”

  “Furious,” he said.

  “I’m furious with you, too,” she said. “But I shall put that aside for the moment because you showed me your stone instead of subjecting me to a tedious lecture about morals and ethics and such.”

  “I don’t lecture!” he said.

  “All the time,” she said. “Usually, I find it rather endearing, but today I was not in the mood. Since you restrained yourself, I’m prepared to kiss and make up. Metaphorically speaking. For the time being.”

  He realized that his gaze had slid to her mouth. He carefully turned his attention to her right ear, which seemed a safe object. But no. It was small and prettily shaped. A gold earring, with a lot of filigree surrounding a bit of jade, hung from it. He realized his head was bending closer to her.

  He made himself look away entirely—at the Balloon Stone, the meadow, anywhere but at her. There was much too much femininity too close to him—and where the devil was that wind? It had died down as abruptly as it had risen, and now he could smell her.

  He turned to tell her it was time to leave.

  She turned her head and leaned in at the same moment.

  Her mouth touched his.

  A shock ran through him.

  For one vibrating instant they simply stared at each other.

  Then they jumped apart as though a bolt of lightning had struck the railing.

  She rubbed hard at her mouth, as though an insect had landed there.

  Heart pounding, he did the same.

  It was no good rubbing at her mouth. Olivia knew she’d never rub it away: the firm, warm feel of his lips, the tantalizing hint of what he tasted like.

  “You were not supposed to put your mouth in the way,” she said.

  “I was turning to speak to you,” he said. “Your mouth shouldn’t have been so close.”

  She clambered over the railing. “I said I was willing to kiss and make up metaphorically,” she said.

  “You kissed me!”

  “It was meant to be a sisterly peck on the cheek.”

  She hoped that was what she meant. She hoped she’d meant something. She hoped she hadn’t lost her mind.

  “You’re not my sister,” he said in his usual pedantic fashion as he followed her out of the enclosure. “We are not related in any way. Your stepfather was at one time married to my father’s sister.”

  “Thank you for the genealogy lesson,” she said.

  “The point is—”

  “I won’t do it a
gain,” she said. “You may be sure of that.”

  “The point is,” he went on stubbornly, “men don’t distinguish in such matters. When an attractive female is nearby and she seems to make an overture—”

  “It wasn’t an overture!”

  “Seems,” he said. “Seems. Do you never listen?”

  “Right now I wish I were deaf.”

  “Women are subtle,” he said. “They make fine distinctions. Men don’t. Men are like dogs, and— Gad, why am I explaining this to you? You know precisely what men are like.”

  She’d thought she did.

  They’d reached his horse. Olivia looked at it, then at him. “We’d better get back, before the ladies die of curiosity,” she said. “You can continue the lecture while we return to the carriage.”

  “I am not getting on that animal again with you,” he said.

  She didn’t want to get on with him again. The muscles and heat and male scent was poison to a woman’s brain. She couldn’t abide to turn stupid with any man, especially him.

  He laced his hands together. “Up with you.”

  It was the only intelligent thing to do. All the same. . .

  “The road’s a foot deep in mud,” she said. “You’ll ruin your boots.”

  “I’ve other boots,” he said. “Up.”

  She disguised her sigh of relief as a huff of irritation, took hold of the reins, and set her booted foot on his linked hands. She gave a little bounce, and up and into the saddle she went.

  Brisk and businesslike, he helped her adjust the stirrups, then tugged her skirts down.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said.

  “People can see everything,” he said.

  “How puritanical you’ve become,” she said.

  “You are abominably careless,” he said, “showing all that—all that femininity to all the world.”

  Ah, well, then, it bothered him, did it?

  Good. He’d bothered her.

  She smiled, and with a soft cluck, signaled the mare to walk on.

  The ladies were asleep when Olivia returned, and didn’t wake when the carriage set out again.

  While they snored, Olivia opened Paterson’s Roads and, to while away the journey, read to Bailey the information about the towns and villages they passed, the names of the important personages who lived nearby, and descriptions of said personages’ abodes.

  A slowish drive uphill took them to the change at Buntingford. The road continued uphill to the next change, at Royston. After that, the horses’ pace increased, as they crossed a stretch of galloping ground. They continued over the River Cam, and on to Arrington. Here they stopped at the Hardwicke Arms, to be greeted by the landlady herself, unsurprisingly. She’d recognized the dowager’s traveling carriage and, like any other innkeeper on the king’s highway, knew the crest was a sign that properly read: Money, Pots of It, Freely Spent.

  At this stop, the ladies came wide awake. Declaring themselves parched and famished, they sprang from the carriage the instant the footman put down the steps.

  Olivia was about to disembark when Lisle, on foot this time, came to the open door of the vehicle.

  “I know you said you were taking charge, but we must stop to eat,” she said. “We’re all starved.” Thanks to the furor at the Falcon Inn, she hadn’t eaten breakfast there. At Ware, she’d been too aggravated to think of eating.

  “I wasn’t intending to starve you,” he said. He offered his hand and she took it casually enough, ignoring the entirely unnecessary flurry within her, while she quickly climbed down the narrow steps. As soon as her feet were firmly on the ground she let go and started toward the inn.

  She couldn’t get ahead of him, though. His long strides easily caught up with hers.

  “I should have stopped sooner, had you reminded me that you hadn’t had time for breakfast,” he said. “You’d better not rely on me to pay attention to such things. If I hadn’t been hungry, I shouldn’t have thought of food at all. In Egypt, when we travel, I don’t think about meals, because the servants do. Moreover, we’re usually traveling in the dahabeeya, with a cook and provisions and cooking facilities. We don’t have to stop at inns for meals—not that there’s much in the way of inns outside of Cairo. Sailing on the dahabeeya is like traveling in a house.”

  Images crowded her mind’s eye, vivid enough to make her forget her inconvenient feelings. “How wonderful it must be,” she said. “The graceful boat sailing up the Nile, the crew in white robes and turbans. Completely different from this.” She waved a hand, taking in the courtyard. “You glide along the river. Beside you on either side stretches a great vista. A swath of green, rich with vegetation. Where the green ends, the desert and mountains begin, and there among them, the temples and tombs appear, the ghosts of an ancient world.”

  They were inside by the time she’d finished describing her vision. She found him studying her as though she were an unfamiliar squiggle on a bit of stone.

  “What?” she said. “What now? Am I showing too much neck?”

  “How easy it is for you,” he said, “to imagine.”

  It was as natural to her as breathing.

  “In this case, it’s like remembering,” she said. “You’ve sent me drawings and watercolors, and we own heaps of books.” Most of which she’d purchased, in order to follow the journeys he wrote of, too briefly, in his letters. “I can’t see it as you do, but I can understand how you’d miss it.”

  “Then why . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “But no. We’ve declared a truce.”

  She knew what he wanted to ask. Why, if she understood how he longed for Egypt, had she snared him into this ghastly journey to one of his least favorite places on earth, to appease parents who cared nothing about his happiness and didn’t understand him at all?

  She understood, better than anybody, the longing to have another sort of life, to pursue a dream.

  She wanted him to have that life.

  She wanted to have such a life, too, but that, she’d realized ages ago, was next to impossible for a woman.

  Not that she’d completely given up hope or had stopped trying to invent a way to make it happen. Next to impossible wasn’t the same as impossible.

  But until she did find the answer—if she ever did—she’d have to live vicariously. If Lisle ended up stuck in England—but no, that didn’t bear thinking of. He’d probably hang himself, and she’d hang herself in sympathy—if she didn’t die of boredom first.

  He ought to know that, but he was a man, and thick.

  And being a man, and thick, he was sure to fail to grasp the brilliance of her plan.

  He would probably run away screaming in horror at what she’d done. No, he’d throttle her.

  But that was because he lacked imagination.

  The George, Stamford, Lincolnshire, eighty-nine miles from London

  Shortly before midnight

  The shouting jolted Lisle from a sound, badly needed sleep.

  “Carousers,” he muttered. “It only wanted that.”

  Shepherding three troublesome ladies over four hundred miles of road was not a task for the fainthearted. Like the horses, they had to be fed and watered. Unlike the horses, they couldn’t be traded in for a fresh set. Unlike the horses, they couldn’t be put in harness. This meant one must be vigilant about stopping times. One mustn’t let the women dawdle, else they’d dawdle forever, and the longer they remained in one place, the greater the likelihood of trouble.

  Happily, by half past nine that night they’d reached the George without further mishap. Here the other two carriages joined them. With all the servants and luggage, they’d taken over most of the rooms along one corridor. To his vast relief, all three ladies promptly took themselves away to their rooms—after Olivia told him she needed a bat
h.

  “The ladies said I smell like a farmyard,” she’d said. Doubtless that pair of bawds had said a good deal else: lewd suggestions about horses and women riding astride and, generally, everything he’d been thinking and wished he could scrape out of his brain.

  He did not need, added to this, mental images of Olivia in her bath.

  He turned over and pulled one of the pillows over his head. The shouting was still audible, though he couldn’t make out the words.

  Sleep gave a mocking wave and ran away.

  The voices, accompanied by angry footsteps, came nearer.

  “I saw you do it!”

  “You’re imagining things!”

  “You were making sheep’s eyes at her!”

  “What about you? I saw you flirting with him.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk and I’m not blind.”

  Lisle gave up, threw off the pillow, and listened—as everyone else in the corridor must be doing, whether they wanted to or not.

  “You’re disgusting!” the female cried. “What were you doing behind the wagon?”

  “Taking a piss, you stupid woman!”

  “I’m not stupid and I’m not blind, either. I saw you, the pair of you, in the stable yard.”

  “Then you were seeing things. Damn you, Elspeth, don’t make me chase you down this passage.”

  “That’s right, Elspeth,” Lisle muttered. “Make him chase you down another passage.”

  “Damn me?” the woman screamed. “You vile, coarse, wicked, false brute!”

  “Come back here!”

  Another shriek. “Take your hands off me!”

  “You’re my wife, curse you!”

  “Oh, yes, curse me. You betray me—and you curse me? I hate you! Why didn’t I listen to Papa?”

  Then someone pounded on a door. Lisle’s door?

  “Sir?”

  Lisle sat up. A thin shadow in the shape of Nichols emerged from the adjoining sleeping closet. “Shall I open the door?” the valet said softly.

  “Gad, no,” Lisle said. “Stay clear of lovers’ quarrels. No predicting what—”