Chapter 5 #3
“I overheard her discussing this with Gilgallon when he came by her sitting room to see about her ankle. She wants him to ruin her so she can’t marry respectably. She was begging him, in fact. I don’t think he was very taken with the notion.”
· · ·
The baron had spent his morning in the library, some damned book about fowling pieces open before him as he’d waited for a shrieking chambermaid to rouse the alarm.
He’d been certain the English spinster would be found dead in her bedroom, or at the very least, quite, quite ill. Either outcome would do, because it would be little trouble to press a pillow over the face of a badly debilitated woman and finish the job in the dead of night.
The rest of the morning had passed, and no alarm had been raised.
When Augusta had sent word she’d take a tray in her room rather than join the family for luncheon, the baron had been encouraged.
She was a damnably stubborn woman; likely even poison would have trouble overcoming such a constitution.
The thought of laying flowers at her grave cheered him through the afternoon, flowers to celebrate a family fortune finally made secure.
Then she had appeared at dinner, pale and retiring as usual, her only comment that her cat appeared to have run off to go courting in the stables.
Well. So be it. Calibrating a dose of poison was tricky, a calculated risk. At least she’d be leaving her French doors unlocked as long as she fretted over her cat’s whereabouts. A man of parts who could think up one sound plan could easily think up two, or even three.
The baron excused himself from the dinner table and sat smoking cheroots on a bench in the garden.
When he spied a certain plump scullery maid scurrying out into the gloaming with the slop pail for the hogs, he rose from his bench, pasted a smile on his face, adjusted himself in his trousers, and set a course to intercept his prey.
· · ·
Augusta rolled over for the twentieth time in as many minutes and sat up.
She wasn’t going to fall asleep, and she wasn’t going to bother the kitchen at this hour to make her some warm milk—which, had she requested it, and had the kitchen provided it, she would have been sharing with her cat, had he still lived.
She sighed with the futility of that thought and grabbed her wrapper from the foot of the bed. The moon had risen and was spilling in through her French doors, which remained open despite the cat’s demise.
The air here was so fresh, so bracingly sweet and cool, Augusta let herself keep the doors cracked as a simple indulgence. Acting on impulse, she tossed the afghan—green-and-white plaid, of course—from her fainting couch over her shoulders and made her way to the terrace.
The gardens were beautiful by moonlight, peaceful and silvery like a faery world.
“Good evening, Miss Augusta.” The large shadow with the low, pleasant voice detached itself from a bench along the wall.
“My lord.”
“Ian,” he said, coming closer. “As we are quite alone. I suppose you could not sleep?”
“I could not, which is silly. My usual ability to rest at any opportunity seems to have gone missing.” She was also missing her slippers, which was beyond silly. He sauntered up to her, his features arranged into a frown as he studied her by the moonlight.
“You miss your cat. Sit with me and tell me about him.” He clasped her wrist in a warm grip and led her back to his bench. This relieved Augusta of the need to demur and fuss and retreat to the solitude of her room, when she really had no interest in such a course.
None at all, and neither did that appall her at all when well it should have.
“He was your guardian cat, was he not?” The earl waited until Augusta took a seat, then came down beside her.
“He was a fat, lazy house cat, but he was mine.”
“He kept your feet warm.”
Augusta’s gaze traveled down to her bare toes. She looked over and saw in the earl’s expression that he’d also taken in her barefoot state—again. Well, let him be shocked, though he didn’t strike her as a man much given to the vapors.
“He kept my heart warm.”
She felt the man beside her measuring those words. Were it broad daylight, were it one of their quiet conversations at the breakfast table, she could not have uttered that truth to him. Out here, in the cool and sweet night air, she didn’t think to keep it to herself.
“Your aunt is throwing herself at my baby brother.”
And he probably would not have said those words to her by day either. “I know. Is this a problem?”
“It means Miss Genie’s chaperone is distracted. That could be a problem.”
“Or a suitor’s opportunity.”
“I suppose it might mean that too.”
He fell silent while Augusta lectured herself on family duty and tried to forget three—no, four—innocuous kisses.
“I’m concerned that Genie is so disenchanted with the idea of marriage she’s willing to risk her reputation to avoid it.” That should be plain enough.
“She’s going to drag one of my stable lads off into the trees? They’ll go willingly, most of them.”
“Not one of your stable lads.” She counted on his canny intelligence to provide the details. A flirtation with a stable boy could be hushed up; an affair with the earl’s heir could not.
“Bloody damn.” He sat forward much as Hester had done earlier, but on him, the posture showed his shoulders to wonderful advantage. He was in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, his cuffs turned back halfway up his forearms. “Please forgive my language. Is your family given to drama generally?”
“No more than yours, probably. I don’t find it appealing to observe these goings on, my lord. I love my family, yet I hardly know how to assist them when they’re taking such peculiar notions.”
She hadn’t meant to my lord him. He glanced at her in the moonlight, a simmering, considering glance that made Augusta’s hand twitch with the desire to smooth her palm over his shoulders. They bore the weight of all the family concerns, those shoulders.
And they bore that weight alone. She shifted a little closer to him under the guise of tucking one foot under her seat. He made no move to scoot away, which meant Augusta could feel the warmth of his body heat.
“Can you speak to your aunt?”
“About?”
Another glance, this one tinged with humor.
“That’s the difficult part, isn’t it? How do you tell a grown man or a grown woman to mind their duties and stop carrying on like a milkmaid and her shepherd boy?”
“Julia’s husband was much older than she, and I gather her marriage was merely cordial. I’m sure she feels…” How to describe the feelings that could drive a decent lady to risk her reputation for a little passion with a Scotsman?
“She feels what, Miss Augusta?”
“Like me.” Augusta got up, gathering the blanket around her shoulders and taking three steps out into the moonlight. “I sometimes feel like a wild creature with a broken wing, taken captive for the purpose of healing, but now my bones are knitted and the door to my cage is cracked open and I…”
He rose. She could feel him standing behind her. “Tell me, Augusta.”
“I can’t step through,” she said. “I forget how to step through into freedom, though I have the certain conviction that I must.”
The ideas were forming in her head even as she spoke, and they rang true. They rang so, so true. “Julia might feel like that. A little desperate and more confused than she can say.”
“While I feel as if my freedom is slipping from me, day by day. I don’t know how to stop it, but I have the certain conviction that I must.”
His hand, big and warm, descended to her shoulder and gave a slow squeeze.
He’d spoken quietly. Augusta feared very much he’d spoken from the heart.
She covered his hand where it rested on her shoulder, hoping—perhaps as he had—that a simple touch would say what words could not.
When he stepped away, she was torn between relief and disappointment.
She turned to face him. “What would you have me do with respect to Julia? Hester noticed her lapse, and that will be a significant reproach in itself.”
“I don’t ask that you do anything,” he said, his lips quirking.
“Con and Julia are adults, and provided they use discretion, I expect them to work out their own dealings. What I ask of you is that you keep the requisite close eye on Genie. I would not have my prospective bride err when adequate supervision would spare her the misstep.”
“She will not misstep, my lord.” And this time, Augusta used the honorific intentionally.
“Then it falls to me to assure her our marriage will be congenial and comfortable for her, which assurances I can honestly give. It’s late, my dear. Should we be going in?”
She nodded but made one more push at the door of her cage.
“It should be congenial and comfortable for you too, Ian.” She wanted him to know this, that she thought him worthy and deserving of happiness.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your marriage. It should be congenial and comfortable for you as well.”
“Intriguing notion.” He winged his arm at her, and Augusta realized she was being gently dismissed. “And here I thought the main priority was that my marriage be lucrative for me and socially advantageous for her.”
She let him escort her back to her terrace doors, the bleakness in his tone leaving her heart aching for him.
Mostly for him.
· · ·
On the balcony adjoining his second-story suite, Willard Daniels, Baron of Altsax, blew out a silent puff of smoke from his cheroot.
Women were idiots. That little tableau on the terrace below confirmed this universal truth. Children generally took some direction from a stout caning or a well-delivered slap. Nonetheless, girl children could be relied upon to grow into incorrigible stupidity.
Julia trying to take a reluctant Scotsman for a lover was only to be expected.
The better her breeding, the more a decent woman longed for the mud.
And an impoverished younger Scottish son definitely qualified as mud, particularly when he sported the hulking dimensions of Connor MacGregor and generally savored of the stables.
A peasant in plaid, and she was welcome to him.
Genie and this fool notion of getting herself ruined was a different matter altogether. The girl had her mother’s complete lack of sense. If Genie was willing to be ruined to avoid marriage, then her dread of the wedding night couldn’t possibly be what put her off the idea of matrimony generally.
She was just being contrary, and a word in certain ears ought to see that contrariness brought to an end.
And then there was dear Augusta, an antidote with a hidden stubborn streak, whose blasted cat had saved her life by sacrificing its own. Guardian cat, indeed.
The baron hadn’t been able to see the earl and the antidote as they conversed below him. Moon shadows and the plants intended to make the balcony private had obscured them.
But he’d heard them. Heard Balfour call a dried-up spinster by her given name, heard the quality of the silences between them, heard Augusta’s pathetic little confidences and the earl’s reciprocal confession.
The earl sported a title and was decent looking in the way a plough horse could be a handsome specimen of brute ability. Such a man was going to dally and flirt and take his pleasures where he found them.
But when the baron’s plans for Augusta bore fruit, the earl wouldn’t be finding those pleasures with her.
· · ·
Augusta draped her ugly shawl around her shoulders and tried to convince herself this early morning constitutional had nothing to do with an unbecoming desire to spend time with a certain handsome, charming earl.
An earl whose voice in the darkness promised secrets and pleasures, for all he’d been a perfect if startlingly honest gentleman.
The pleasure of a simple touch, for one.
The pleasure of a confidence shared and a confidence received.
The soul-deep pleasure of, for a few moon-gilded minutes, not feeling so desolately alone in this life.
As she churned along past the gardens, Augusta tried to tell herself to put away these fancies, but the lovely Scottish morning, the scent of the flowers, and quite possibly her own dormant stubborn streak, combined to chase off her better intentions.
He had touched her. He had spoken with her. He had behaved with complete propriety and still been able to give her a sense of… A word bloomed in her awareness. A word spinsters had no occasion to use, a word that warmed her heart and put a wide, purely female smile on her face.
They had shared a sense of intimacy. A good intimacy, with elements of trust and consideration about it, not the pawing, undignified liberties Henry Post-Williams had inflicted on her.
She was savoring this insight as she gained the trees, and savoring it yet still as she turned onto the path she’d taken yesterday with Gil.
Intimacy, closeness, warmth—physical warmth, yes, but a warmth of the heart as well. Just describing those few minutes with the earl was buoying her somehow. Opening the door of her cage, the windows of the cell she’d occupied since her parents’ deaths.
Augusta raised her gaze to the beauty of the forest around her only to come to an abrupt halt when the elf in the tree started clambering down limb by limb.