Juliet Landon - A Most Unseemly Summer

He hesitated, then looked around the room. ‘Where?’ he said.

‘Anywhere.’

For a long moment—time waited upon them—their eyes locked in a confusion of emotions that ranged through disbelief, alarm and, on Felice’s part, outright hostility. It was natural that she should have missed the admiration in his, for he did his best to conceal it, but she was close enough now to see his muscular neck where a long red scratch ran from beneath his chin and disappeared into the open neck of his shirt. His jaw was square and strong and his mouth, unsmiling but with lips parted as if about to speak, had a tiny red mark on the lower edge where perhaps his lover had bitten it in the height of passion. His breath reached her, sending a wave of familiar panic into her chest, and as her gaze wandered over his features on their own private search, he continued to watch her with a grey unwavering scrutiny, noting her bruised wrists before holding her eyes again.

Her gaze flinched and withdrew to the loosely hanging points of his doublet that should have tied it together; the aiglets that tipped each tie were spear-heads of pure gold. One of them was missing. She took refuge in the most inconsequential details while her breath stayed uncomfortably in her lungs, refusing to move and gripped by a terrible fear that seeped into every part of her, reviving a recent nightmare. She fought it, terrified of accepting its meaning.

His grip on her body tightened, pulling her closely in to him, then he strode over to the tumbled mattress where she had lain that night and placed her upon it, bending low enough for his forelock to brush against her eyelids. He stood upright, looking down at her and combing a hand through his hair that slithered back into the ridges like a tiled roof. Without another word, he picked up the grimy doe-skin breeches she had worn in the garden, dropped them into her lap and strode past the sobbing Elizabeth and bustling Lydia and out of the room, without bothering to close the door. They heard his harsh shout to someone below them, and the two deerhounds stood with ears pricked, listening to the last phases of his departure.

Mistress Lydia was first to recover. ‘For pity’s sake, Elizabeth, stop snivelling and help me with this mess, will you? What’s that you’re fiddling with? Let me see.’

‘I don’t know. I found it under the chervil in the kitchen garden.’ She held out her palm upon which lay a tiny golden spear-head with a hole through its shaft.

Lydia picked it up, turning it over in the light before handing it to her mistress. ‘An aiglet,’ she said. ‘Somebody lost it. Now, lass…’ she turned back to Elizabeth ‘…you get that wet mess off the floor and throw it out. Plants and men are rarely what they seem: that chervil is cow-parsley.’

T he unshakeable determination that Felice had shown to her early morning visitor regarding her occupation of the Abbot’s House now collapsed like a pack of playing cards, and whereas she had earlier brushed aside Lydia’s suggestion that they might as well return to Sonning, it now seemed imperative that the waggons were loaded without delay.

‘We can’t stay here, Lydie,’ she said, still shaking. ‘We just can’t. Send a message down to find Mr Peale.’

Mistress Lydia Waterman had been with Felice long enough to become her close friend and ally and, at five years her senior, old enough to be her advisor, too. She was a red-haired beauty who had never yet given her heart to any man to hold for more than a week or two, and Felice loved her for her loyalty and almost brutal honesty.

‘Think what you’re doing, love,’ said Lydia, businesslike. ‘That’s not the best way to handle it.’

Felice winced at the advice, given for the second time that day. ‘I have thought. That was him!’ she whispered, fiercely. ‘This is his missing aiglet that Elizabeth found. He’s a fiend, Lydie.’

Lydia lifted a dense pile of blue velvet up into her arms and held it above Felice’s head. ‘Arms up,’ she said, lowering it. ‘Losing an aiglet in the kitchen garden doesn’t make him a fiend, love. And he didn’t arrive here until now, so how could it have been him who chased you? Last night he’d have been miles away.’

‘If he was near enough to get here so early he couldn’t have been far away, Lydie. He must have been snooping while they believed he was away, looking for something…somebody. And I recognised the voice too, and the way he looked at me. I know that he knows. He wanted to humiliate me.’

‘All men sound the same in the dark,’ said Lydia, cynically. ‘But he picked you up out of the water fast enough.’

‘And he pretended to believe that I was Lord Deventer’s mistress, too.’

‘Perhaps he really believed it. His lordship’s no saint, is he? It was an easy mistake to make, with him not recognising the name of Marwelle. Turn round, love, while I fasten you up.’

‘I don’t care. We’re not staying. We can be away tomorrow.’

‘No, we can’t,’ Lydia said with a mouthful of pins. ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

Lydia’s pragmatism could be shockingly unhelpful, yet not even she could be expected to share the torment that now shook Felice to the very core. The knowing stranger she had presumed would take her secret with him to the ends of the earth now proved to be the very person whose antagonism clearly matched her own, the one with whom she would not have shared the slightest confidence, let alone last night’s disgraceful fiasco.

He would misconstrue it, naturally. What man would not? He would believe she was cheap, a silly lass who needed reminding to think before she allowed a man, a total stranger, to possess her, hence his whispered warning that should more typically have come from her rather than him. Oh, yes, he would revel in the misunderstanding: she would see it in his eyes at every meeting unless she packed her bags and left.

It was a misunderstanding she herself would have been hard-pressed to explain rationally, a private matter of the heart she had not discussed even with the worldly Lydia, for Father Timon had not been expected to know what it was frowned upon for priests to know, and his role of chaplain, confessor, tutor and friend had progressed further than was seemly for priests and maids of good breeding.

Timon Montefiore, aged twenty-eight, had taken up his duties in Lord Deventer’s household soon after the latter’s marriage to Lady Honoria Fyner, previously Marwelle, and perhaps it had been a mutual need for instant friendship that had been the catalyst for what followed.

Friendship developed into affection, and the affection deepened. As her mother’s preoccupation with a new husband and a young step-family grew, Felice’s previous role as deputy-mistress of their former home became redundant in Lord Deventer’s austerely regimented household. Rudderless and overlooked by the flamboyant new stepfather, Felice had drifted more and more towards Timon, partly to remove herself from Lord Deventer’s insensitivities and partly because Timon was always amiable and happy to see her. He had been exceptional in other ways; his teaching was leisurely and tender, arousing her only so far and no further, always with the promise of something more and with enough control for both of them. ‘Think what you’re doing,’ was advice she heard regularly, though often enough accompanied by the lift of her hand towards his smiling lips and merry eyes.

She had discovered the inevitable anguish of love last summer when Timon had caught typhoid fever and her stepfather had had him quickly removed from his house to the hospice in Reading. Forbidden to visit him, Felice had been given no chance to say farewell and, during conversation at dinner a week later, she learned that he had died a few days before and was already buried. Lord Deventer was not sure where. Did it matter? he had said, bluntly. Until then, Felice had not known that love and pain were so closely intertwined.