Chapter Six
They put that plan in motion immediately the next day.
The Roses had been invited for hunting by Lord Danton, a wealthy client of Sir Thomas’s, at his private estate north of Naples.
It was the perfect arrangement in which to inaugurate their ruse.
The trip required six miles in the close confines of the carriage which meant six miles of Ismay shooting daggers at him over the top of her book when she wasn’t firing barbs or ignoring him outright.
The situation might have been too perfect.
It was hard to tell if Ismay’s rudeness was real or part of the plan.
Alistair studied her during a stretch of silence.
Sir Thomas was dozing beside him, and both of the ladies were supposedly reading, though he hadn’t seen either of them turn a page in a long while.
Ismay’s anger was certainly justified. Sir Thomas’s announcements last night had done more than shock her.
They’d upended unspoken expectations she’d carried deep within, even if one might argue they’d always been unrealistic.
Women didn’t run family businesses alone.
Still, he didn’t take any pleasure in being part of a plan that stripped those expectations from her.
Perhaps she should have seen it coming. She was twenty-eight.
Well past the age of marriage for most women.
What had happened to bring her to this point?
Beautiful women with money didn’t end up on the shelf, and she had all the attributes London deemed necessary for a successful Season.
Then, he imagined Ismay actually in London and couldn’t repress a smile.
She’d send all but the most intrepid of suitors running.
Perhaps that was what had happened here.
‘Stop staring at me.’ Ismay’s head snapped up, eyes blazing. ‘Surely, you’ve seen a woman reading before.’
‘Yes, I have. That’s why I am so intrigued. You haven’t turned a page in a whole mile.’ Alistair grinned, enjoying catching her out.
She did not back down. ‘I often take some time for reflection as I read, especially when I run across a particularly insightful passage.’
The carriage hit a rut in the road, and Alistair took advantage of the jolt to snatch the book from her hands, going immediately to the page she’d been on and reading out loud in a dramatic tone suited to a Gothic.
‘I can best describe its shape by likening it to a pine tree. It rose into the sky on a very long “trunk”…’ Oh my, maybe he shouldn’t be reading this out loud, but he couldn’t stop now.
‘…from which spread some “branches”… At times it looked white, and at other times dirty and spotted.’ That sounded singularly unappealing and perhaps diseased.
He persevered and finished the passage. ‘According to the quantity of earth and cinders that were shot up. Wait, “quantity of earth”?’
He stopped, a truth sinking in. He checked the cover. This was not what he’d expected. ‘You’re reading Pliny the Younger?’ That seemed quite ambitious. Most ladies of his acquaintance limited themselves to novels, Ann Maria Radcliffe, Regina Roche and the like.
She held out a hand for the book, her words crisp and smartly cool. ‘It’s actually a combination of translations. Only part of it is his letter to Tacitus on the eruption of Vesuvius. You needn’t make it sound like something sordid.’
‘Why are you reading about a volcano?’ He reluctantly handed the book back to her.
‘Because I live in the shadow of that very same mountain. Because I am interested in the science of volcanoes. Or is such interest only the purvey of men? Should a woman not also be interested in something that might one day so profoundly affect her life? Her home? If we could learn to predict signs of an eruption, we might fare better than our ancestors.’
Lady Rose stirred into action, a moment’s alarm in her eyes. ‘Ismay, darling, it’s not polite to argue.’
Ismay turned her gaze to her mother. ‘Then, I am not polite. Neither is Socrates who suggests argument is the means by which we discover a higher truth.’
‘Socrates is dead, darling. Alistair might get the wrong impression of his fiancée.’ There was a warning in Lady Rose’s voice now, a censure.
‘That I am well-read? That I mean to apply the education lavished on me so generously by my parents? Surely, the right man would see that as a blessing in a wife.’ She turned back to Alistair.
‘After all, Socrates saw argument as a cooperative activity, not necessarily a competitive one.’ But she was competing.
Alistair could see that. She was testing his own mettle, his own depth.
What had he done with his education? Perhaps she was also seeking to show him in a poor light, a man not educated enough to handle the intricacies woven into her father’s business.
Alistair resented that, part of the plan or not.
‘Rigorous discourse is how Socrates referred to it,’ Alistair offered with a wicked smile, earning himself a quelling look.
Ismay was no doubt disappointed that he’d not argued against her position.
But to do so would have made him appear as uneducated as she’d like to show him to be, which he was not.
His pride wouldn’t allow it. Neither could he let the opportunity for his own sharp remark pass.
‘Well, at the very least, we shall have plenty of rigorous intercourse in our marriage, if nothing else.’ He fixed Ismay with a purposeful smoulder proven to melt even the most frozen of hearts.
He’d won a bet two years ago with that stare.
Ismay’s boot kicked him beneath the cover of her skirts.
Lady Rose’s cheeks heated furiously as she reached for her fan and glanced outside. ‘Thank goodness, it looks like we’re nearly there.’ Those were Alistair’s thoughts exactly.
* * *
‘What were you thinking to make such an innuendo?’ Ismay hissed as they tromped through the grouse fields behind her parents and their host. ‘And it wasn’t even a veiled innuendo, as evidenced by the state of my mother’s cheeks. How could you suggest such a thing when we hardly know one another?’
Alistair chuckled in the wake of her chagrin. ‘That’s half the fun of going to bed with a stranger. You can be anything you want. They don’t know better, and neither do you. The fantasies can be endless.’
Ismay rolled her eyes and adjusted the gun beneath her arm. ‘Now you’re just trying to shock me.’
‘Turnabout is fair play. You are always shocking me.’ Alistair stopped and paced out his steps from Sir Thomas as they joined the line of shooters.
‘I’ve done nothing of the sort. I’ve only been myself. If that’s shocking, then perhaps society is too narrow-minded. It takes very little to be shocking these days if you’re a woman, even in Naples where behaviour is less tightly regulated.’
‘I had no idea you were interested in volcanoes.’
‘There’s a lot you don’t know. Twenty years is a long time, Alistair.
I am more than the girl who stole your breeches from the swimming hole.
’ She meant the words as a parting shot as she began to count off her own paces, but Alistair reached for her arm, their gazes colliding, a hot, furious flame leaping between them that had nothing to do with the ruse.
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me.’ His words were a growl, his mouth, his body close to hers. Too close. She could smell the bergamot of his soap amid the scents of the meadow, could feel the masculine energy of his body.
She wrenched her arm free. ‘I know you’re here, and that seems to be quite enough.’ She nodded to the fowling piece beneath his arm as the cry went up to release the dogs. ‘Can you shoot that?’
‘Can you?’
It became a competition then. Each of them firing in alternate rapid succession, keeping their gun-handlers busy.
The estate was well-stocked and there was no shortage of grouse.
In fact, their host, Lord Danton, had remarked on the walk out to the fields that his grouse population had gotten out of hand.
Having them out today to shoot was truly a favour to him.
‘That’s ten for me,’ Ismay boasted proudly as they walked to the blinds set up closer to the pond.
‘One could hardly miss,’ Alistair said, dismissing her effort. ‘They were as thick as locusts in the sky.’
She tossed her head. ‘So you have at least ten as well, I assume? Or perhaps more since you are a man.’
Alistair laughed. ‘I have ten, and you are the very definition of impertinence.’ Not impertinent enough, though, if all he did was laugh at her efforts to rile him. Well, he’d get tired of her sharp tongue soon enough. They all did in the end.
They broke for luncheon at one, eating enormous servings of a ragout Bolognese served en famille beneath the shade trees and sipping a hearty red wine.
‘Your daughter is an excellent shot,’ Lord Danton complimented Sir Thomas as a bowl of arugula salad sprinkled with parmesan was passed down the table.
‘No one shot as much as she did. You should bring her back to try her hand at boar-hunting. I have several of them in the forest.’
Ismay beamed her victory at Alistair who sat across from her.
She’d outshot everyone at the blinds. But her sense of triumph was short-lived.
When the men rose to see to the gathering of the grouse, her mother motioned for her to stay.
‘At least try to act like a lady some of the time, Ismay,’ she scolded.
‘Gathering and plucking is not a lady’s work. ’
‘Since when am I a lady?’ Ismay sulked.
‘Since you knew better. Since we knew better.’ That meant since she’d lost Edward Ashford.
‘You want me to be something I am not,’ Ismay argued.
‘I want you to be safe and cared for. If being a lady is the price one must pay for that, I do not think it is too high. You cannot lose Alistair. What if he decides the enticement of your father’s business is not enough? What if he decides to break the contract?’