Elisabeth Fairchild (9 page)

“Rue . . .” she said, with no idea how to go on.

“Hmmm?” His gaze remained fixed on the woman whom might never so much as realize he existed.

Aurora sighed. “I shall be at the archery range beside the Greek temple, if you should need me.”

“Yes,” he said absently.

She turned in the doorway to look back at the brother she thought of as a three-legged cat. Was her pursuit of Lord Walsh equally pitiable? Rue still gazed distractedly at the remotest of possibilities, a wounded mouser who dreamed of downing a swan. Aurora wondered how long he would stand, tail twitching, transfixed.

Half an hour later, Aurora strode into the stable yard of the remarkable barn where Thomas Coke housed his horses and prize cattle, her manner subdued. No such magnificent, Palladian style housing for her stock. It took an investment of money, time and the belief that both were well spent to erect such splendid quarters for animals. Even the pens for the sheep scheduled for shearing were remarkable for their trim neatness, their roomy, well-planned layout. Aurora had not the money for such extravagant accommodations. Her brothers saw no value in such things. All save Rupert. What money came into their hands was wasted on women, wine and cards. Rupert gave her a share of his stipend, for the upkeep of the land and livestock that brought in the monies to begin with, but it was not enough, even combined with her own meager share.

So blighted was Aurora’s mood by such thoughts, that she did not pay attention to her surroundings as she stepped from morning brightness into the stable’s twilight. Her eyes, not yet adjusted to the change, went temporarily blind and so she plowed, quite unaware, into Lord Walsh, who was exiting the door even as she entered.

His hand shot out to catch her by the shoulder. “Miss Ramsay. We meet again.”

Aurora laughed, completely flustered by the unexpected encounter. He was a bull, she decided, and she was an indifferent toreador trying to bring him down. “So sorry,” she apologized. “I did not see you.”

“No harm done,” he said with jovial sarcasm. “This time we did not land in a heap on the ground.”

She blushed.

He saved her from the struggle of responding. “A fine morning,” he said conversationally. “You mean to ride?”

“Yes.” Tongue-tied, she could think of no more response than that.

“I have just been for a gallop myself.” He stepped back from the door that she might pass. “Enjoy!”

It was a dismissal. Aurora acknowledged it with a nod and passed him with the thought plaguing her that she would like to have said something more substantive, more scintillating, more self-assured. She could not always answer the man in monosyllables and expect him to fall on his knee to propose!

Her already disheartened mood was even more downcast as she made her way to the area within the stables where she was to meet Miles Fletcher.

In direct contradiction to her mood, Fletcher was whistling a happy tune when she found him. He stopped when she appeared and directed his sparkling gill flower blue gaze in her direction along with a sunny smile.

“Good morning. My sister has gone on ahead,” he fairly chirped. “Everything is arranged. Are you ready to set off?”

Fortunately, their saddled mounts were led out at that moment. Aurora was not required to respond to this allo cheerful greeting. Her lack of smiles and enthusiasm could not quench Miles Fletcher’s sunny mood one jot. He made merry remark on the beauty of a bird’s song and the quality of the morning air. He demonstrated he came prepared. Longbows had been obtained from Coke’s store of equipment and provisions arranged in baskets on each side of his horse.

“Sustenance,” he said, when she raised her brows.

She laughed, unexpectedly lifted from the valley of her unhappy thoughts. With so many baskets to accommodate his tastes, this gentleman’s queer idea of sustenance far exceeded hers.

Swinging onto the horse that stood saddled and waiting, she put heels to the animal. “Come then,” she called out as the gelding bolted into action. A good gallop would restore her spirits. “We must work up an appetite.”

They proceeded apace to the temple, Aurora tearing along in the lead, Miles more sedately bringing up the rear, his baskets full of booty clanking with what sounded like glass and cutlery.

How amusing, Aurora thought as she and the mare flew with gratifying haste across the turf, that a man should feel a picnic required such accoutrement. Walsh would never have burdened his horse with such a rattling compliment of condiments. A hunk of cheese and a heel of bread would have contented his needs, just as it would hers.

Miles’s excess struck her not so much as accommodating her requirements as his. He was, she decided as the horse stretched out beneath her, a finicky sort of fellow, a man who knew not how to feel comfortable in mud-caked boots and wind-blown hair, a man who might ride all afternoon and still not smell of horse. He was wearing chalk white breeches this morning! Such a gentleman was a mystery to her, a pitiable creature. He had no comfortable place in her world.

Her brothers were the sort of fellows Aurora was accustomed to: rough, brash, loud and reeking of the outdoors or an overindulgence of spirit. Aurora tried to imagine Miles Fletcher drunk as a wheelbarrow, and could not. He would probably reel quite gracefully, she decided, if he allowed himself to imbibe too freely. He did not strike her as the type to allow such a loss of control, and in that realization, came a strong clue to the essence of this man’s difference from all the men she was acquainted with. Miles Fletcher had himself under tighter rein than the galloping horde she was used to dealing with.

Control governed his every move. Such control baffled her. She was unused to thinking of men as more than green-broke creatures. Rupert, the only exception in her experience, was governed by the limitations of his leg and the memory of military order. There was a difference.

She found this difference, this contradiction to her assumptions with regard to the wildness of the male gender, amusing to the point of the ridiculous. She could not have dreamed up a fellow more different than her brothers, more removed from Lord Walsh. Cutlery on a picnic! The very idea had her grinning like an idiot the whole pleasant gallop to their destination. The weather was fine, the light good and the targets still conveniently at their disposal. There was much to keep her smiling, the least of which was not the cutlery bearing exquisite whose horse trailed hers by several noisy furlongs.

Aurora slid laughing from her horse to wait for Fletcher to catch up. An attractive bay was tethered in the clearing before the temple, evidence of the Grace who had gone ahead. Of the horse’s rider there was neither sign nor sound.

The clearing was still. Light poured like golden syrup through the trees onto the pale, dun colored brick of the temple. The birds had stopped singing, disturbed by her noisy approach. The setting walmost surreal. An otherworldly aura held it enchanted. Aurora was beset by the notion she had stepped out of normal time and place into some other, more interesting reality. An uneasy quiet settled around her like a Norwich shawl. All she could hear was the thudding of her own gallop stimulated heartbeat and the echoing thud of hoof beats as Fletcher’s jingling mount approached. Silverware and white breeches on a picnic! He was an amusing part of the strangeness of this setting.

Aurora was reminded of the library. There was, inherent in this coming together of she and this unfamiliar gentleman so far from the crowds that had filled her eyes and ears these past few days--with no sign of his mysterious sister to play chaperone--an unsettling air of laughable danger, mindful of the mosaic lion eating mosaic leopard in the golden peace of the library. Even such a mental comparison could not but amuse. Who in this instance was the lion and who the unlucky leopard?

As Fletcher’s horse clanked into the clearing and Fletcher swung from the saddle, Aurora decided there was an awkward tension in being left alone with a man who was not a relative, or in any way known to her or her family, for the purpose of teaching him what came so naturally to her. With five brothers, she was used to men telling her what to do, not the other way around. This strange fellow whom she had struck a bargain of shared knowledge with, this exquisite who watched her with as much amusement in his gaze as she must possess in watching him, turned her life strangely upside down. He turned her understanding of men upside down. There was amusement to be enjoyed in such a topsy-turvy state of affairs, but beneath her amusement there ran a thread of uncertainty and fascination that made her every moment alone with Miles Fletcher an adventure.

Fletcher, all unknowing of the effect he had on her peace of mind, relieved his horse of its burden. Handing her one of the bows and taking up the other, along with a quiver of arrows, he asked expectantly, “How do we begin, Miss Ramsay? I await your wisdom.”

Aurora liked the ring of his words. She liked too, the look of anticipation he concentrated on her. She met with something foreign, even exotic, in this strange peacock of a man whose gill flower blue eyes roved over her with the same intense interest with which she had seen him examine priceless marbles in the statue gallery. Their endeavors possessed an exhilarating sense of adventure, an intoxicating sense of worth.

“We begin with the stringing of the bow,” she said with a show of confidence betrayed by the tremor in her hands as she lifted the string. Miles made her nervous and self-conscious. He was too attentive a pupil, watching and listening with lively curiosity, head cocked to one side, eyes twinkling, and mouth curved in an unshakable half smile.

Surely the silly flutter in her ribcage would go away given enough time and a moment’s relief from the unsettling focus of the man’s gaze. Yet, Aurora’s hands betrayed her. As she showed him the method of stringing that involved stepping through the bow to use one’s leg as leverage in bending bow to meet string, so intently did dancing blue eyes follow her every move, hanging on her every word, studying her with a thoroughness she had never met before, she could not even begin to hope he did not notice the shaking of her hands.

“Will you be so good as to repeat that last bit?” He raised his quizzing glass and bent to more closely observe the movements of her leg.

She obliged him, but was struck by the notion as she did so, that his glass remained focused on her nether region far too long. Aurora bent her head, bringing them eye-to-eye.

“Did you get it that time, Mr. Fletcher?”

She gasped. Here was evidence of the rough grain of crass masculinity lurking beneath polished veneer after all. She was almost relieved to find it.

He went on, unperturbed. “I am, you see, an insatiable observer of beauty.”

She shot a glare at him, mouth popping open with the idea that such brass deserved a snappy rejoinder. Nothing occurred to her. Her customary responses for this sort of male behavior simply could not be thrown in the face of this peacock. “Where is your sister, Mr. Fletcher?” was all she could manage. “Does she mean to join us?”

He neatly stepped one glossy boot into his bow and precisely followed her example in stringing it, smiling contritely when he was done. “My sister is a painter, and like most who are artistically gifted, she tends to lose herself in her work. She will not have wandered far.” To prove his point he whistled a bit of a tune. When he paused, from a distance a whistled refrain picked up where he left off.

Another painter, Aurora almost sighed. Was she the only woman in the world who took no joy in watercolors?

“If I promise to refrain from further impertinences, will you continue your instruction?” The weasel was rather handsome when he smiled.

Aurora bit back a retort. Could she win in a battle of words with this erudite young man? With businesslike firmness she took up the bow again. “The next step is to understand why there is a cock feather on your arrow and how to go about knocking it in a smooth and consistent manner.”

She paused, daring him to provoke her a second time with some predictably craven double entendre in connection with the suggestive terminology. Miles no more than raised an eyebrow, his eyes sparkling. Aurora thought he showed admirable restraint in refraining from any cruder reaction. Her brothers would have never allowed such an opportunity to slip by unquipped.

“You are an unusual gentleman, Mr. Fletcher,” she said.

“Unusual?” His interest in what she said deepened. She had not thought that possible, yet his focus on her intensified. His eyes had never looked so cool, his expression so serious. “In what way do you find me unusual?”

“It is just . . .” she frowned and nervously fingered the arrow in her hand. She was far more comfortable aiming at targets than in trying to pin truth. How did one go about saying such things without giving a false impression of undue flattery? She shrugged and blurted out exactly what had run through her mind. “It is just . . . I’ve so many brothers I thought I understood well the ways of men. Yet you are wholly unlike any of them.”

His brows rose. He splayed his hands. “I do not know whether to be flattered or confused. What is it you find so different in me?”

She tried to make light of what she said. Despite the effort, there was too much importance, she thought, in the way the words tumbled out. “It is just . . . I have never had a gentleman pay such favorable attention to my every word. I suppose” --she licked her lips and laughed--“the men I know have never so patiently allowed me to point out their ignorance.”

His laughter joined hers. She thought, perhaps, from the sound of it, that she surprised him as much as he surprised her. The thought pleased her. His amused understanding made her feel as if she might tell him anything and not worry over the words.

“If one cannot acknowledge one’s ignorance, one cannot move beyond it,” he said, as lightly as she. “You’ve a wealth of knowledge and skill worthy of anyone’s undivided attention.”

Again that focused look. Again a compliment! She blushed, but he was not yet finished paying court to her.

He paused, eyes unfocused, as though he saw through her to some far horizon. “Man is to woman what a bow is to its cord, bending one to the other, inexorably drawn to one another with a tension of sufficient power to loft arrows.”