Chapter Thirteen
“You slept late,” Clive’s sister commented as she poured him a second cup of coffee from her breakfast service in her rooms.
“I did. Thank you.” He strolled with his cup and saucer to the window. He knew what Terese was about to say.
“Is this”—she waved a hand—“wise?”
“Infatuation is never wise.” He dared not call it love. Not aloud. Perhaps soon he could shout it to anyone, because the feeling pulsed like a potent promise in every fiber of his being.
“I do agree with that,” she said. “Many noticed that you and Giselle departed early.”
He took a drink and shook his head. His sister was not angry, nor did she really care what society thought or rumored. But she was careful of his emotions, proud of his status and his work, honest to a fault when it came to discussing their challenges with others.
“There was nothing for it, Terese. I wanted her. She cares for me.”
“Well then, I think we must make her more welcome. Shall we have her to luncheon?”
“I have invited her to a picnic and to sail kites at noon. I hope Langley will come.”
“I’m sure he will.”
He faced his perceptive sister. “I do adore you, Terese. You are my bulwark and my confidante. How you help with Bella. Here. In London. Now with this…this.” He stared into his coffee. “I feel oddly light, as if I am fifteen.”
She shivered in her chair. “A bit of a tingle to be in love and fifteen, yes?”
Clive knew once she had been in love recklessly.
When she was seventeen, she announced to their father that she would wed the new young gardener on their country estate.
Their sire had ended that with the announcement that she would wed a man he chose.
Terese packed a bag and ran south to her swain.
She did not get far, only to Maidstone, before their father’s men hauled her back to London.
She was married the next month to a man twice her age.
But the two of them had found love, even if it was short lived.
The loneliness of widowhood did not sit well with her.
However, she’d never lost her good humor or her hope for a better future.
If she had hoped for a better mate, she’d found none for years.
When she helped Clive get through his own loveless marriage and its disappointments, she had helped to save his sanity and right his thinking.
He had no compunction about asking the next thing of her. “Advise me on this, please, Terese.”
“Oh, darling brother of mine, I am no authority on such matters. I find love before me once again and marvel at the apparition. I can impart nothing but how blissful it is to find it.”
Clive stilled at the thought he might be truly in love. “Terese, I am thirty-four. I am too old to fall for a lady so quickly.” Aren’t I?
“Age and time are qualifiers of desire?”
More than that is my niggling sense that something is very wrong with those paintings of hers. “I don’t know. I cannot believe I spent the night…” He left off the rest. It would be indelicate to indicate the hours he’d spent making love to Giselle Laurant three times.
Terese chuckled. “Clive, really. You are not the first person to celebrate the honeymoon before the wedding.”
“You assume I will marry her?”
His sister, two years his senior, was educated, temperate, and just the finest, jolliest person. She saw wise men for what they offered the world…and called out all fools for what they assumed was theirs to command.
“I leave that to your discretion, my dear. I’d say to be careful. If she is for you, then each time you meet, the love will grow and never falter.”
“No matter logic or doubts.”
“No matter.”
*
They walked to a park west of the pavilion, Terese and Giselle arm in arm.
Bella had her father’s hand and chattered about the kite and the sweets she knew were in the hamper that Clive carried.
Langley carried another smaller filled with juices.
Along the path, Giselle noticed her new guard lingered not far off.
As they chose a spot on a grassy knoll, the man took up a spot in the foliage of an old fir tree.
She shook off the feeling that someone else followed them. Her ugly stalker again? With so many around her, anyone would be foolish to try to harm her.
Langley was discussing marriage, and suddenly, Giselle realized he meant that he and Terese were about to be wed.
“Congratulations to you both,” she offered. “I gather from your words that your plans are recently made?”
“Yesterday, Terese did me the honor of accepting my proposal. I’ll return to London tomorrow to acquire a special license for us to marry soon.” Langley lifted Terese’s hand and kissed her fingers. “I’d say next week would be good, don’t you?”
“You don’t mind, do you, Clive, that the wedding will be so soon?” Terese asked.
“Not at all, my dear. You must please yourself,” Clive replied.
“But you wanted to stay for another week here so that you and Bella would have a proper holiday.”
“Terese, you have done so much for me, taking Bella every day so that I could work. Coming with me here to help with her. I could not refuse you anything in this world. All I ask is that you two do not wed without me there.” Clive smiled with the affection of years of loving his kind sister.
“I can continue to be her loving aunt. I hope you will allow me to take her each day.”
“Dearest,” Clive said with a kind smile to Langley, “you will be assuming the role of wife to your new husband, ordering his house and becoming mother to his eight-year-old son. You will have so many new responsibilities, I cannot ask you to keep on with Bella.”
“But I am not a young bride, Clive.” Terese had an edge to her retort. “I know how to run a house, surely. I do not wish to give up the joy of Bella.”
“I did not mean to anger you, Terese. I would not tear you two apart.”
Langley reached over to take his fiancée’s hand. “Neither would I. You come to me as my wife, Terese, I do hope, with all your desires assured. I would welcome Bella to come to us each day.”
Terese shrugged her shoulders. “Very well. As long as we each understand that I am not abandoning who I was for who I will become.”
Both men agreed.
“Forgive us, Giselle, as we settle our family issues in front of you,” Terese added.
Giselle smiled at each in turn. “I am pleased to see a family who can solve their problems.”
The warm regard that Giselle saw in each person’s attitude toward the other inspired her anew. So few of her husband and her challenges were ever solved so quickly and without malice.
As she got to her feet and brushed off blades of grass from her skirts, Clive rose to help her up. “I think it is time to put this kite into the air. Bella!” he called to his daughter, who talked to herself as she plucked petals from wildflowers. “Come fly this new kite!”
*
Giselle plunked down on the picnic blanket, winded from her run with Bella. Content, she watched Clive run the kite with his daughter. She grinned, more alive than she’d felt in years. The sun shone on her, Bella, Terese, Langley—and on her lover.
My lover.
She savored the words in her mind. The delicious man she’d discovered was worthy of a portrait by her friend élisabeth. His light-brown hair streaked with blond, his shining gray eyes, his breadth, his depth of person, how she loved him.
Loved him.
The flames of her desire flared up, and she gazed at him with a yearning she knew not that she had ever possessed. Her mouth fell open at the admission to herself. She must not love him so much, so well, or she would endanger him. Bella, Terese. Who knew how many could fall to her enemies?
He looked over at her—and paused. As if he’d heard her thoughts, her fears. Perceptive man. He saw into her. Finishing her sentences. Understanding her before she had a chance to tell him all.
How was that?
In the village outside her papa’s chateau near Blois, a gypsy woman had lived. She lived alone, her family long gone to some purge. But she remained, an infamous and yet valued resident.
Her father called the woman One-Eyed Esmeralda. But she saw with more than that one orb. She predicted Giselle’s own marriage. “A selfish man will take you,” Esmeralda had told her when she begged for a reading of her hand. “You will not like him, and he will take you for your flesh.”
All of that had been true. Too accurate.
Esmeralda had also predicted her father’s death by guillotine. “The razor,” she’d said with a swipe of her fingers across her throat and sadness in her craggy face. Those in the village loved Giselle’s father. “The Vicomte de Touraine,” Esmeralda had said, “his like will never be seen here again.”
“Have you been in England long? …Giselle?” Terese leaned across their blanket to touch her hand. “Giselle?”
“Je suis desole.” Giselle straightened in her chair. “I…as you say here, gather silk.”
Both Terese and Clive gave a laugh.
“That’s wool,” he said.
“Please repeat what you asked of me, Terese. I am enjoying the day.”
“I wondered how long you had been in England,” Terese said.
“Since last October.”
Clive frowned. “That must have been difficult, what with the blockade.”
“It was. Very.” Giselle rubbed her arms, recalling the freezing journey. “I sailed from Ostend on a merchant’s boat. He is a renegade from the French government and runs a business smuggling those like me out of France to Britain.”
Terese murmured an epithet, then said, “How brave of you.”
“It was necessary.” Giselle hated to tell the story of her family’s ruin, but these people before her were kind and loving. She had no reason to conceal who or what she had been.