Elisabeth Fairchild (26 page)

“I must admit I find it quite remarkable that you and Miles Fletcher stand on such cordial terms. I do not think I would be so understanding were our roles reversed.”

“Roles, my lord?” For the first time that evening Lord Walsh completely captured her attention. What had roles to do with her relationship with Miles Fletcher?

“Had the man inherited my land I do not think I could stand to be in the same room with the fellow much less on friendly terms with him.”

Aurora was still confused.
Inherit her land? Her land?
Like a puzzle all the pieces fit together, no matter that she did not want them to. Sudden clarity hit her deep in the abdomen like a blow. Miles Fletcher’s inheritance, the one everyone was so hesitant to mention in her presence, included her land. Fletcher’s uncle was the old gent who had bested her brother at monte. There could be no other explanation and yet this one stuck like an ache in her throat. Aurora looked across the room at Miles Fletcher, and in that moment as had happened several times before that evening, he looked up in almost the same instant and locked eyes with her. The hurt and dismay she was feeling must have evidenced itself in her expression.

“Are you all right, Miss Ramsay?” Walsh’s voice sounded, as if from a distance. “You look unreasonably pale.”

Miles Fletcher, as concerned as Walsh, broke off conversation in mid-sentence and took a step toward her.

Aurora could face neither of them. With anger and anguish warring in her breast she could not say a word. Almost at a run, she fled the room. She must locate her brother. If anyone might be depended on to help her through this mess, it must be Rupert. She managed to control all tears, to hold back all feelings in connection with this stunning sense of betrayal until she reached Tom Coke’s library. Her hand was on the doorknob, her heart lurching up into her throat when a voice called her name.

It was a footman.

“Are you Miss Aurora Ramsay?” He approached with caution, as if aware that she was not in a mood for conversation.

“Yes,” she said stiffly, reigning in her passions.

“Mr. Rupert Ramsay bade me give this to you.” He handed to her a screw of paper, folded in the manner that Rupert favored for his most personal confidences. Aurora looked at it with a sense of confusion. What had Rupert to say to her that he could not say to her face?

“Do you know where Mr. Ramsay is to be found?” she asked as she took it.

She thought the blankly respectful demeanor of the footman’s expression faltered for an instant. “No marm,” he said crisply, eyes downcast.

Aurora was too distracted by the strange manner in which her brother chose to convey this message to her to stay the footman’s exit. Had he been one of her own servant’s she would have insisted he explain whatever it was he held back from her. As it was, she chose instead to enter the library, certain she would find Rupert there to explain it all himself.

The library was deserted.

There was only one light glowing in the golden gloom. Aurora crossed the room to it, unfolding the screw of paper from Rupert as she went. This unusual communique from her brother seemed somehow more ominous in the vast, ill-lit emptiness of the room where she had expected to find Rue in person. The wound of betrayal she suffered at Miles Fletcher’s hand seemed to bleed into the moment, coloring everything she touched. Her hands were uncertain with the screw of paper. Twice she tore the page. The light flickered with her approach, as if it too was made uncertain by her approach.

With trembling hands she smoothed the folds in the paper and held it to the light of a candle.

My dear sister--

By the time you read this, Miss Fletcher and I will be well on our way to Gretna Green.

Aurora’s h
ands shook too much to continue reading. Her legs managed to carry her to a chair. There they folded beneath her and she sank into the downy comfort of feather-stuffed brocade. A tear slid down her cheek and then another. She was on the verge of abandoning herself to a flood of emotion when a scratch came upon the door and it opened to admit a man’s head. “Miss Ramsay?”

She expected it to be Fletcher. For an instant she convinced herself it was he, and with great strength of will she blinked away her tears.

“Yes,” she said, her voice shaking only a little.

“Have I upset you in some way, Miss Ramsay?”

It was not Miles Fletcher who pushed open the door and crossed the darkened room. Lord Walsh had followed her here.

Aurora crumpled the letter in her hand as she rose to meet the man she had set out to win a proposal of. “It is not you who upsets me, my lord,” she said thickly, her voice lower than usual, its tenor still a trifle unsteady.

“Are you ill then?” His voice was appropriately concerned. That concern threatened Aurora once more with tears.

“Not ill, sir. I am merely at wits end.”

Walsh took her hands in his, and pressing her back into the chair, knelt beside the arm of it, saying calmly, “You must tell me what has driven you there.”

Aurora slipped one of her hands from his and pressed it to her forehead. “My life is a tangle, sir, a tangle so snarled I no longer think I can begin to unknot it.”

“Perhaps I can help. Can you begin to tell me?”

Aurora looked into the beseeching kindness of his face and felt her spirits sink. She was a fraud for conniving so coldly to marry this man. Lord Walsh had begun to care for her, he had perhaps even lost his heart to her, just as she had lost her heart to Miles Fletcher. She felt no single spark of desire within her for this man, though she had intended to marry him, given the chance. “I am betrayed, sir,” she said, “betrayed by passion gone awry.”

“Passion, Miss Ramsay?” He seemed transfixed by the word.

“Yes.” She could no longer look into the fascinated eyes that regarded her, without despising herself. “The most unruly of emotions, sir. Do not let passion betray you. I warn you.”

“I am quite confused, Miss Ramsay.”

How much could she tell him after such a statement? She must explain herself to some degree. “It was a passion for winning drove my brother to gamble unwisely, risking all I hold dear. His passions, sir, would abandon him, and the siblings he was meant to care for, to a life of disgrace and penury. I am betrayed, sir. Betrayed by everyone, and it breaks my heart.”

“Who else dares to so abuse you, my dear Miss Ramsay?”

“My friend, sir, a gentleman I had come to care for as much as any of my brothers.”

“Mr. Fletcher,” he guessed.

She closed her eyes on the tears that threatened to burn tracks upon her cheek once again. “He never told me--” she opened her eyes, and blinking very quickly, her mind set against the emotions that threatened to overcome her. She stared at the mosaic above the mantle, the lion and the leopard. She had wondered once who was the lion, who the leopard in the strange and moving relationship she shared with Miles Fletcher. There was no question now. His teeth marks were on her throat. The wrenching pain of his deception threatened her ability to speak.

“He never told me it was he who was to have our land,” she said. The words tasted bitter in her mouth. Their meaning burned even more bitterly in her soul. “I have been betrayed,” she said, stiffening her spine, “by a man I took for a gentleman--one whom I trusted above all others. My own unruly passions, I am ashamed to admit, led me to believe him genuine in his concern for my well-being. But in all the time we shared,” her voice broke and a single tear spilled over onto her cheek, “Mr. Fletcher never saw fit to tell me of his role in my family’s undoing. He has, I think, betrayed me most cruelly in that, because my brother and I had so come to trust him and his sister, that Rue has succumbed completely to his own passions. He has, and I know it must pain you to hear this, my lord, run off to Gretna Green with Miss Fletcher.”

Walsh frowned and remained completely quiet for so long that Aurora feared he was harder hit by this news than even she might have imagined.

“Are you all right, my lord?” she whispered. “I know you care dearly for her.”

He tried to smile and failed. “We are both betrayed by passion, it would appear, Miss Fletcher. I have known for many years that Grace Fletcher shared not my feelings,” he laughed dryly, “one might say my passion for her. And yet I continued to deceive myself, to believe that with time and patience the fire that burned within me might warm her to me. I had, you see, no interest, not so much as a glance to offer any other female who crossed my path, until you thrust yourself upon my attention. Perhaps we two can untangle the knotted affair that passion has made of both of our lives. I would offer you my hand in marriage, Miss Fletcher. Will you take it, I wonder?”

Miles had gone to Aurora’s room when she dashed from the ball room thinking he might find her there. He meant to explain, he was sure from her expression she had discovered what he had so long intended to reveal to her. She was not to be found in her room however, so he tried next, her brother’s room, which wore even more of a deserted air. Only then, did it occur to him she might take refuge in the library. The door was half open when he arrived, but he was drawn up short by the touching tableau that played itself out in the circle of light thrown by the only lamp that illuminated the room. Aurora Ramsay was perched on the edge of a gold damask chair, hair glittering like flame in the lamplight, and at her feet knelt Walsh, his hands wrapped around hers. He had the look about him of a lovelorn swain. Could this be the proposal that Aurora had claimed all along she intended to illicit?

Miles was devastated by the thought, and yet he could not believe the posture of these two meant anything else, for as he watched with breaking heart, Walsh leaned forward to kiss his lopon the lips and she made no move to elude his passionate intent.

Stunned and disheartened, Miles collected himself enough to take himself off to his own rooms. There, he found the note his sister had left explaining where she and Rue Ramsay had taken themselves off to.

Aurora returned to her own rooms not much later, head whirling with the enormity of what Lord Walsh offered her. He had asked her to marry him. He meant that they two should work his lands together, side by side, just as she had imagined. She need no longer look forward to a pauper’s future. She need no longer worry about money or debts, or a mad fit of gambling relieving her of all her possessions. All that she had dreamed, all that she had hoped for, was to be hers.

And yet, she could not be content in the offer. She entered her room with but one thought in her mind, a thought so consuming she swept past the note that littered the floor by her door. To the escritoire she went. Pen and paper she drew forth. Furiously she scribbled,

Do you mean to go after them?

Having allowed but a moment to dry the ink, she leapt up and would have dashed as quickly out the door had the note on the floor not caught her eye.

It was from Grace.

My dearest Aurora--

I hope you do not mind my addressing you so, we shall, after all, call one another sister when next we meet. I hope you do not object to such a future. I am supremely confident, you see, that great happiness will come of this runaway marriage. Never has a man so suited me as dear Rupert suits me--not in position, perhaps (a factor to which my eldest brother and guardian was sure to object), nor in wealth, (another matter that is sure to anger), but we will not allow our overflowing passions be stayed by such poor objections.

In all other ways two hearts could not be happier, no nor better suited. I know that somewhere in your heart you will understand our haste in marrying. The death of my uncle threatened to return me to London. Once there, under the sway of not one, but two elder brothers, I feared my desires would become subordinate to those of my guardian.

 Life’s a tangle and we must each see our own way to unknotting it. I close this letter with the hope that you will not see fit to separating the tangled strands of happiness that bind me, heart and soul, to your brother. As a token of my deep and lasting affection, I leave the painting you so admired in the temple in the woods.

Aurora sat herself on the edge of her bed to read this letter. She fell back now, across the coverlet, looking from the scribbled line she had meant to shove beneath the door to Miles Fletcher’s room to the passionate lines that touched her heart far more than she would have imagined. With a heartfelt sigh she balled up the single line she had written and tossed it across the room. Lunging from the bed, she returned to the escritoire and pulled forth a clean sheet of paper. No words flowed from her freshly dipped quill however, and at last she returned it to the standish. Hands trembling, she drew forth from the drawer in her wardrobe where she kept with her undergarments, the love knot that Miles Fletcher had twice given her.

As she stared at it, the tears she had held back so diligently throughout the evening flowed freely from her eyes. She could not interfere in her brother’s chosen road to happiness when her own way was so confused. With a sigh, she tucked the love knot into its bed of white linen and closed the drawer on it and her tears. Resolutely she took up the quill again and dipped it in the inkwell.