More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (61 page)

Viola watched him lope up to the near wickets, throw the ball in one fluid overarm motion, and shatter the far wickets every time. He had stripped down to his shirt and breeches and boots again, she could not fail to notice—he was wearing the same tight black leather breeches he had worn when she first saw him in Trellick. He was patiently and good-naturedly instructing his group, none of whom displayed the smallest suggestion of talent. Then he spotted her.

“Ah, Miss Thornhill.” He strode toward her, his right hand extended. “Allow me to help you over the hedge. Have you come to join us? We need another adult. How would you like to take the schoolmaster’s place while he
instructs the batters and Paxton sets out the pitch ready for a game?”

Viola had very little experience with physical sports. But she had been caught by the gaiety of the scene. She set her hand in his and stepped over the hedge, smiling gaily before she could think of reacting any other way. A few minutes later she was throwing the ball underhand, silently lamenting her inability to throw it nearly as far as Mr. Roberts had done, but nonetheless enjoying the fresh air and exercise.

“You will have more success if you throw overarm,” a voice said from directly behind her.

“But I have never been able to throw that way,” she told Lord Ferdinand Dudley. To prove her point, she bent her arm at the elbow and hurled the ball with all her might. It hurtled ahead at a downward angle and landed with a thud on the grass perhaps twelve feet away.

He chuckled. “The motion of your arm is all wrong,” he said. “You will do better if you do not clutch your upper arm to your side and tighten all your muscles as if for a feat of great strength. Throwing has little to do with strength and everything to do with timing and motion.”

“Huh!” she said derisively. The children, she half noticed, were all running toward Mr. Paxton, who was about to explain some of the basic rules of the game to them.

“Like this,” Lord Ferdinand said, demonstrating first without a ball in his hand and then with. The ball arced out of his hand and landed some distance away. He went and got it and held it out to her. “Try it.”

She tried and achieved perhaps thirteen feet. “Huh!” she said again.

“Better,” he said. “But you let go of the ball too late. You are also locking your elbow. Let me help you.”

And then he was right behind her, holding her right arm loosely just below the elbow and making the throwing motion with her.

“Relax your muscles,” he said. “There is nothing jerky about this.”

The heat of his exertions radiated from his body. His vitality somehow wrapped about her.

“Next time open your hand as if throwing,” he said. He chuckled softly again a moment later. “If you had had the ball that time, it would have bounced right at your feet. Throw when your arm is just coming to the highest point. Ah, yes, now you are getting it. Try it on your own—with the ball.”

A few moments later she laughed with delight as the ball arced upward out of her hand and sailed an impressive distance before curving in for a landing. She turned to share her triumph with him. His eyes were smiling into hers from a mere few inches away. Then he went striding after the ball and she crashed into reality.

She did not join in the noisy, vigorous game that followed. But she did stay out on the lawn, cheering batters and fielders with indiscriminate enthusiasm. After the first few minutes Lord Ferdinand took over the bowling when it became obvious that none of the children could pitch the ball anywhere near the batter. He threw with gentle ease, not to shatter the wickets, but to give each batter a chance to hit the ball. He laughed a good deal and called out encouragement to everyone, while the
schoolmaster and Mr. Paxton were more inclined to criticize.

Viola unwillingly watched Lord Ferdinand. She could tell that he had a real zest for life. And he was genuinely kind. It was a bitter admission.

A procession of servants was coming from the house, she could see at last, surely long before the hour could be up. But the game was over, and everyone sat down on the grass, enjoying the rare luxury of steaming chocolate and sweet biscuits. Lord Ferdinand seated himself cross-legged right in the middle of a dense mob of children and chatted with them while they ate.

Then the schoolday was over and the long crocodile of children, walking in orderly pairs, was marched off down the driveway by Mr. Roberts while the servants carried the empty cups and plates inside and Mr. Paxton disappeared back in the direction of his office. Lord Ferdinand was pulling on his coat when Viola turned back to the house.

“Miss Thornhill,” he called, “would you care to join me in a stroll? Along the avenue to the hill, perhaps? It is too lovely a day to be spent indoors.”

They had been avoiding each other since the night when they had kissed and her attraction to him had warred with the temptation to lure him into falling in love with her. Neither had referred to the incident since. The broken pieces of the urn had been swept up before she left her room the morning after. Another vase had appeared on the table in its place.

It would be as well if they continued to avoid each other. But they could not go on indefinitely like this, inhabiting the same home, each claiming ownership. She just feared that when one of them left, as one of them inevitably
must, it was going to be her. She would never be able to prove that the will had been changed or lost.

His eyes were smiling at her. It was another of his gifts—the ability to smile with a straight face.

“That would be pleasant,” she said. “I’ll go and put on a bonnet.”

RAWING HER INTO THE CRICKET LESSON HAD
been a mistake. So had teaching her how to throw a ball overarm, especially cozying up behind her to demonstrate the correct motion of the arm with her. Suddenly it had felt like a mid-July day during a heat wave. But even more dangerous than her sexual appeal had been her laughter and her exuberant glee when she had finally hurled the ball correctly. When she had turned her sparkling smile on him, he had only just stopped himself from picking her up, twirling her about, and laughing with her.

And now he had invited her to walk with him.

She was wearing a straw bonnet when she came back outside. It fit snugly and attractively over her coronet of braids. The pale turquoise ribbons, which matched the color of her dress, were tied in a large bow beneath her left ear. She looked purely pretty, Ferdinand thought.

They conversed about trivialities until they were on the avenue behind the house. It was already Ferdinand’s favorite part of the park. Wide and grassy, it was bordered on both sides by straight lines of lime trees. The turf was soft and springy underfoot. Insects were chirping in the grass, birds singing in the trees.

She walked with her arms behind her back. He could scarcely see her face beyond the poke of her bonnet. The
devil of it was, he thought unexpectedly, he was going to miss her after she left.

“You have been helping teach at the village school for some time,” he said. “Where were you educated?”

“My mother taught me,” she said.

“I understand from Paxton,” he said, “that you have been keeping the account books.”

“Yes.”

“And have taken an active role in the running of the estate.”

“Yes.”

She was not going to be forthcoming on that topic, he could see. Or perhaps on any topic. But she turned her head to look up at him just as he was thinking it.

“Why do you want Pinewood, Lord Ferdinand?” she asked. “Just because you won it and believe it to be yours? It is not a large estate and it is far from London and the sort of life you appear to have been enjoying there. It is far from any intellectual center too. What is there for you here?”

He breathed in the smells of nature as he considered his answer.

“A sense of fulfillment,” he said. “I have never resented my elder brother. I always knew that Acton Park and all the other properties would be Tresham’s and that I would be the landless younger son. I considered various careers, even an academic one. My father, had he lived, would have insisted on a commission with some prestigious cavalry regiment. It is what Dudley second sons have always been expected to do. I have never known what it is I want to do with the rest of my life—until now. I know now, you see. I want to be a country squire.”

“Are you wealthy?” she asked. “I think you must be.”

It did not occur to him to consider the question impertinent.

“Yes,” he said.

“
Very
wealthy?”

“Yes.”

“Could you not buy land elsewhere, then?” Her head was angled away from him so that he could not see her face.

“Instead of remaining at Pinewood, do you mean?” he asked. Strangely enough, buying land and settling on it was something he had never considered. “But why should I? And what would I do with this property? Sell it to you?
Give
it to you?”

“It is mine already,” she said.

He sighed. “I hope within the next day or two that question will finally be settled beyond doubt,” he said. “Until then, perhaps the least said, the better. Why are you so attached to Pinewood? You grew up in London, you told me. Do you not miss it and your friends there? And your mother? Would you not be happier back there?”

For a long time it seemed she was not going to answer at all. When she spoke, her voice was low, her head still averted.

“It is because
he
gave it to me,” she said. “And because the difference between living here and living in London is the difference between heaven and hell.”

He was startled—and not a little disturbed.

“Is your mother still in London?” he asked.

“Yes.”

She was not going to elaborate on that monosyllabic answer, he realized. But going to live with her mother seemed to be another solution.

They were almost at the end of the avenue. The hill rose steeply in front of them.

“Shall we climb?” he asked.

“Of course.” She did not even break stride, but lifted the hem of her dress with both hands and trudged upward, her head down, watching where she set her feet. She paused for breath when they were still not quite at the top, and he offered a hand. She took it, and he drew her up the rest of the slope until they stood on the bare grassy top.

He made the mistake of not immediately releasing her hand. After a few moments it would have been more awkward to let go than to hold on to it. Her fingers were curled firmly about his.

“When I stood on top of the highest hill in Acton Park as a boy,” he said, “I always imagined it as the roof of the world. I was master of all I surveyed.”

“Imagination is the wonder and magic of childhood,” she said. “It is so easy to believe in forever when one is a child. In happily-ever-afters.”

“I always believed happily-ever-after could be earned through honorable deeds of heroism and derring-do.” He laughed softly. “If I killed a dragon or two, all the treasures of the universe would be mine. Is not childhood a gifted time? Even though disillusion and cynicism must follow?”

“Is it?” she asked, gazing about at the wide view over fields and river and the house below, centered perfectly between the trees of the avenue. “If there were no illusions, there would be no disillusionment. But then one would have no fond memories either, with which to fortify oneself against the pain of reality.”

Her hand was soft and warm in his. A light breeze
fluttered the poke of her bonnet and the ribbons that dangled from the bow beneath her ear. He wanted desperately to kiss her and wondered if he was in love with her. Or was it the tenderness of pity that he felt? Or merely lust? But he did not feel particularly lustful at the moment.

She turned her head to look at him. “I have wanted to hate and despise you,” she said. “I wanted you to be all the nasty and dissolute things I thought you must be.”

“But I am not?”

She answered with another question. “Is gaming your
only
weakness? Even if it is, though, it is still a serious one. It was the vice that ruined my mother’s health and happiness and destroyed my life. My stepfather was a compulsive gambler.”

“I never wager more than I can afford to lose,” he said gently. “Gaming is not a compulsion with me. It was only because a friend of mine was called away by his wife’s confinement that I played against Bamber that night.”

She laughed, though there was no amusement in the sound. “And so the last of my illusions must be abandoned?” It was not really a question.

He gazed into her eyes and then raised her hand and held it to his lips. “What am I going to do with you?”

She did not answer, but then he had not really expected her to. He bent his head closer to hers, his heart thumping painfully, not so much with the knowledge that he was about to kiss her as with the realization of what he was about to say and seemed powerless
not
to say. There was really only one solution to this situation he had found at Pinewood, and at the moment it was
looking like a rather desirable one. It was time perhaps to trust again, even to love again, to take a leap of faith.