Point of Honour (22 page)

“It sounds dreary.”

Miss Tolerance laughed. “It was dreary. When I first saw Connell demonstrating a
pasado
, I was seized with such a … I hardly know what to call it. Longing, I suppose. To move that way, to have that freedom and that power. I took to the lessons at once.”

“And the preceptor soon after?” Versellion asked dryly.

“It was not a difficult step to go from loving the exercise to loving the preceptor, no. But Connell was hardly a hero from a romance; he was portly and rather shy, except when he had a sword in his hand. It was certainly not his intent to seduce me.”

“Then what was his intent?”

“To serve out his six months teaching my brother, then to find another position, and so on and on until he had the money to open a small
salle
in London. Our elopement ruined him, in a sense, as well as me.”

“If it was not his intent, how did you come to—”

“Elope? Have you ever fenced with a person of the opposite sex, my lord? The focus and the exertion can be … stimulating.”

Versellion appeared to consider the idea. “And so you eloped.”

“Not at first, no. But later … we were not left much choice in the matter,” Miss Tolerance said. “When we were discovered, my father went into a frenzy of high Gothic rage, threatened to turn me out on the highway in my shift! He challenged Connell—and a duel between them would have led inevitably to my father’s death and Connell’s exile. So we ran away.”

Versellion had been studying the moonlight. Now he turned his gaze back to Miss Tolerance. “But if your father was prone to—what did you call it? high Gothic rage?—how came you to be studying fencing? Surely your he—”

Miss Tolerance sighed. “It was done in secret. My brother detested fencing, so we worked out a trade: I would take his lessons and he would do my mathematics.”

“My God, you
were
young.” Versellion appeared to muse over this for a time. “Where did you go?”

“We feared pursuit if we went to Scotland. We went to the continent.”

“The hazard of that—in what year?”

“Ninety-nine. sir. We went over in the trail of the English forces to the lowlands, and stayed behind when General Brune chased them out. The French forces were everywhere, trailing havoc in their wake—and we took advantage of the chaos and hid ourselves in it. I traveled as Connell’s nephew, we taught fence, and finally opened a
salle
in Amsterdam.”

“His nephew?”

“I wanted to fence, sir, and neither of us wanted the
salle
to have the reputation of a brothel.”

“And the man never married you?”

Miss Tolerance shook her head.

“He had a wife?” Miss Tolerance thought she heard disapproval in the earl’s tone.

“Oh, far worse than that, sir,” she drawled. “Connell was Catholic, and we could not agree
how
to marry. I was very young, and disliked the idea of a civil wedding—and I fear I was determined that he should love me enough to marry as
I
wished. By the time I had stopped refining upon it, we had been together for so long the ceremony seemed unnecessary, even dangerous—how could I change from a boy to a wife overnight? Perhaps my father was right and I am like my aunt, with no discernible morality.”

“Your father,” Versellion said crisply, “was an ass.”

“Well, yes. But that does not mean he was wrong. I made my bed very thoroughly, and now …” She stirred up the crushed grass at her feet. “Now I am lying upon it. And very dusty it is, too.”

The earl smiled. For a few minutes the only sound to be heard was the breeze riffling the grasses.

“If your father could not see the honor in you, he
was
an ass,” Versellion said at last. He took a step toward Miss Tolerance. In the silvered light, his face was ghostly; he examined her closely, and she was aware of his unghostly height and warmth.

“Not everyone reckons as you do, sir,” Miss Tolerance said. She looked up at his face, reading what was there to be seen. “My lord, this has been an extraordinary day; I beg you will not confuse the excitement of our situation with any other kind of—”

Versellion took her hand and studied it, tracing the veins under his thumb. “Miss Tolerance, I assure you I am well able to distinguish the excitement of the day from any other sort. My admiration for you did not begin this morning—or last night.”

Her heart beat so strongly that Miss Tolerance was sure the strokes must be audible to Versellion; he must be able to feel them in the hand he held, and only moonlight hid the flush that warmed her cheeks. She drew her hand from Versellion’s grasp with some reluctance. “My lord, this is not wise. Your assailants—”

“Are miles away. Look.” He gestured toward the moonlit fields. “Not a cutthroat in sight. Miss Tolerance, if your feelings are not in sympathy with mine, I will say nothing more than to beg your pardon for my impertinence. But I thought you were not wholly insensible—”

Miss Tolerance shook her head. “Not insensible, sir, no.” Feelings she had believed lost, or buried across the Channel in a pauper’s grave in Amsterdam, wakened. She shivered.

“Come back inside. The moonlight makes shadows and ghosts; you will catch chill. Please—I beg your pardon, but I have forgot, what is your Christian name?” His voice was almost a whisper.

“Sarah, sir.” She said it firmly, not certain what she would do.

“Sarah. Come back inside with me, Sarah.”

He held out his hand but did not touch her. The space between them was filled with heat, the lack of contact more persuasive than an embrace.

With the feeling that she was jumping from a very high place into a pool of darkness so inky she could not predict if she would swim or drown, Miss Tolerance took the hand he offered and followed Versellion back into the cottage.

Eleven

M
iss Tolerance awakened to find herself in an embrace of the sort which had been foreign to her since the death of Charles Connell, and lay for some time cherishing the sensation. They were face-to-face; Versellion’s arm lay light across her hip, his face pillowed upon her hair (which, she was shortly to discover, pinned her to their rustic bed), and the warmth of his body communicated itself to her own. Her arm stretched under her head like a pillow, then arched around Versellion’s head, with the fingers lightly brushing his dark hair. Straw prickled beneath her hip, and a single shaft of bright morning light danced across the blanket which covered their closely joined bodies. The mingled smells of straw, dust, and Versellion’s skin caught her with such force that her eyes closed of their own accord.

“Sarah?” Versellion murmured. She let her eyes open and found the earl looking at her. “Good morning.” He moved his face closer and brushed a kiss upon her eyebrow.

Miss Tolerance ran her fingertips up the arm that lay across her hip, over his shoulder, and spread them through his hair before she moved to kiss his lips. “Good morning,” she said at last. Their faces were now very close together, their eyes darting from mouth to chin to eyes and back to mouth again, as if each of them were committing the other to memory.

“Ought we to rise?” Versellion asked. He made no move to do so.

Miss Tolerance shook her head slightly. “Wait a moment. When we rise, we go back to Miss Tolerance and the Earl of Versellion. I become your protector again, and you my client. Let us just … tarry … for a moment.” Her hand loosed itself from his hair and moved down across his back.

Versellion slid his hand around the swell of her hip and drew her toward him. “By all means,” he murmured. “Let us tarry.”

The sun was high when they started for Oxford. Versellion had carried the argument; even with the lexicon, he did not think they could reliably translate the Italian letter on their own, and Oxford was the nearest place outside of London where they were likely to find a disinterested scholar fluent in Italian. It was also, Miss Tolerance warned, a place where so notable a person as the Earl of Versellion might well be recognized.

“Then we use my notoriety as a shield,” Versellion suggested. “In daylight, in a populous town where I am likely to be recognized, will it not be more difficult to attack us?”

He had donned the rustic clothes Miss Tolerance had purchased for him in Reading, and sat now, with his back against the cottage wall, observing Miss Tolerance as she combed her fingers through the tangled mass of her dark hair and attempted to pick the hay straws from it. She was very aware of his gaze, but strove to adopt again the professional composure which had previously characterized their relationship.

“That would work if we were amidst a crowd where everyone knew you, Versellion—say, on the floor of Parliament, or in an Almack’s cotillion. But in Oxford, all it requires is one person who recognizes you amidst a great crowd of people who do not, telling a man who is hunting you, and we’d have all your pursuers fall upon us in a quiet alleyway.”

“You must see I cannot spend my life in hiding—particularly not now, when the political situation is so unresolved. Why cannot we take up one of these searchers and ask him who has sent him to find me? I dislike running. It smacks of cowardice.”

Miss Tolerance finished braiding her hair and wound it upon her head again.

“Common sense. Connell taught me to keep my feelings in check when I fought—and never to attack an opponent of whom I knew nothing, unless I had no alternative. If I had accosted one of our pursuers in Reading yesterday, what do you imagine would have been the result? He might have had a friend—or two friends or five-and-twenty—in the next street, ready to come to his aid and kill me. I might have got some little information from him and then, scrupling to kill him where he stood, let him go … so that he could follow me here to you. The minute we tip our hand to the opposition, let whomever set the hounds upon your trail know where you are, your peril increases tenfold. Where’s the sense in that?”

She took up her saddlebag, packed the Italian lexicon in it, and turned to survey the area for any other trace of their tenancy. Versellion stood and approached her, smiling.

“What do I need to fear with my protector near me?” His tone made an endearment of the title.

Having satisfied herself that they had left nothing behind, Miss Tolerance sidestepped the earl’s approach. “Your protector can only do so much, sir. I cannot catch a bullet, for one thing. No, I see the logic of Oxford, Versellion. I just hope we can go as quietly as possible, at least until I can hire assistance.”

The earl bowed. “I will be guided by you in all things.” But he stepped directly into her path and drew her into a light embrace. “Don’t scold me, Sarah. I only wished to kiss you good morning.”

Miss Tolerance permitted the embrace, but with an air which said quite clearly that the kiss was meant to seal all further endearments away until a later time.

T
hey rode without much conversation; the journey was not a long one. By early afternoon they had arrived on the outskirts of town and found rooms in an inn in the shadow of St. Clement’s Church, across the Magdalen Bridge. At Miss Tolerance’s insistence, Versellion stayed at the inn while she went out into the city to find an Italian scholar. As she had never been in Oxford before, she expected that this would be a task which consumed her for several hours: one could not, after all, stand on street corners crying out for a scholar as if one were hawking strawberries or cockles. Versellion, who had spent a year at Oxford without emerging with anything so undignified as a degree, told her to inquire first at the coffeehouse on Queen Street and, if she had no joy there, at the Bear, in Alfred Street. She left him ordering a vast dinner, his manner very much at odds with the broken-down coat he wore.

As the university was nearing the end of Trinity term, the streets teemed with young men, most gowned and with the heavy, anxious look of students facing examination. Miss Tolerance began to wish she had kept her good coat and breeches—a common laborer such as she looked had less chance of disappearing in a crowd like this. There was no point in repining; better to suit her words—and accent—to the clothes she wore. The host of the Queen Street coffeehouse, however, displayed no democratic sympathies; he was plainly prejudiced against Miss Tolerance by her plebeian look.

“What’s the like of you want with a don?” he growled.

Miss Tolerance had thoughtfully provided herself with a story. “I’ve a letter from a—a signorina in Italy. My brother’s gone to fight for the Queen, and not a word have we had till now, when I get a letter from this …” She paused as if remembering. “This Constanzia, naming my brother. But I can’t make heads nor tails of it. I’d pay one of them teachers to read it to me.”

The man shook his head. “Not my job to remember who tutors in what,” he said, and turned his back on her.

Miss Tolerance bit down on her frustration, finished her coffee, and took herself off to the Bear, where she was pleased to find a far more egalitarian spirit. The barman clearly noted her gender and, as clearly, decided it was none of his business; for the price of a pint of bitter for each of them, he regaled Miss Tolerance with his opinions on which starving tutor to approach first. After discarding this one, then that one, for reasons no clearer than “He won’t do, will he?” the barman at last offered Miss Tolerance the name and direction of a tutor named Deale who roomed in Leckford Road. Having provided this information, the barman went on to explain Mr. Deale’s situation, antecedents, and family troubles. Apparently the tutor, when in funds, spent his coin at the Bear.

At last, with thanks, Miss Tolerance escaped this torrent of information and left the Bear. At the inn she found Versellion in the private parlor he had engaged. He had bathed and changed into his own clothes, which made her more conscious of her own grime. The earl greeted her with the news that he had ordered venison and squab for their dinner. “I am tired of bread and cheese. But you! What news have you?”

“I’ve a name and direction of someone. I thought I would stop here and send a note; better if he call here as soon as possible. You will want to be there when the letter is read, and I prefer for your safety that you not go much abroad while we are here.”