Rite of Summer: Treading the Boards, Book 1 (11 page)

Beaufort raised an eyebrow, but said nothing unkind. “It appears to have worked out rather well for both of you.” His paints stored away and his brushes cleaned, he rested his arms on the edge of the table, between Stephen’s knees. He smiled up at Stephen from that unfamiliar angle.

“Better now,” Stephen said. The flash of guilt that had come with the kiss was foolish; Evander had long ago given him permission to dally, as long as Evander knew beforehand and had first say in with whom. And he had approved of Beaufort from the beginning.

Stephen kissed Beaufort again, and his doubts vanished entirely.

Beaufort yearned up into him, his indecently dexterous hands splayed out over Stephen’s thighs.

“Much better now.”

Beaufort picked up music lessons better than Stephen did painting, given that he could already read the notation with a little bit of skill. He had not sat at a pianoforte in at least a decade, however, and his fingers showed it. The first two missed notes in his scales got no more than a glance from Lady Charlotte, curled up in a chair by the window with a book she only pretended to read. The third earned them a muffled giggle and a rustle as she turned a page ostentatiously. Beaufort took it in his stride, but his jaw worked and a vein throbbed in his temple when his thumb hit the wrong key and a sour note rang out.

“My music master would strike my knuckles with a willow switch if I were so persistently awful,” Lady Charlotte advised archly. Thankfully, she rose to take herself and her maid away before Stephen said something impulsive and ill-advised.

“What a pity it had not been her bottom,” Beaufort murmured
sotto voce
after they were alone again. “She might have developed a personality less ‘persistently awful’ in the process.”

“And you wanted to be a teacher,” Stephen teased. He pushed Beaufort over a few inches on the padded bench so that he could sit beside him. Beaufort slid over easily, his presence a warm and solid thing on Stephen’s left when he sat. “Where is your vaunted patience now?”

“Tried,” Beaufort said dryly, his sea-gray eyes twinkling with repressed humor. “I would feel sorry for Coventry, except that Lady Charlotte has a considerable dowry and so, I imagine, will not be his problem for too much longer.” He set his fingers to the keys again, carefully copying the positions of Stephen’s hands.

“Here, like this—” It was easier and much nicer to slide his hands over Beaufort’s, laying each finger on top of one of his student’s to adjust the curve and placement of his fingertips. The heat of him was a lure, the faint scent of oil from his hair an intoxication. The way he arched his eyebrow in skeptical disbelief and amusement, a chastisement Stephen would gladly take.

“Fine, then,” Stephen said. “Do it yourself.” He let go and ran a rapid scale up the high end of the keys, just to be perverse.

He did watch while Beaufort copied the movements, his own rendition of the scale hesitant but correct. A few runs later and he had improved, so much so that he was embarking on sheet music by the time the doors downstairs opened and the hunting party returned.

“So what would your music master think of you now?” Stephen asked, turning the page for Beaufort as he doggedly plonked his way through a simple air.

“He would be cringing behind his horrid old pipe and disavowing all responsibility for the way I turned out,” Beaufort replied, with an ease that suggested he really had studied from a music master as a boy and not the kind of scraped-together lessons given by the postmaster’s wife after school.

He missed the next bar, though, and had to backtrack, which made Stephen feel a little better about Mrs. Collier and her careful instruction. “I had no idea you came from such privilege,” he did tease, though. “Perhaps I should be looking for your name in the gossip pages next Season. Shall you be setting your cap for Lady Charlotte and her magnificent portion?”

“Hardly,” Beaufort replied, thumping a sour note. He began again from the top of the page, at Stephen’s gentle tap, a wry smile tugging at his lips. “I am the third born of the second son of nobody particularly important in the first place. My one claim on society is a distant relation to Lady Horlock, and that plus a shilling will rent me a room for a night.”

It was the most he had told Stephen about himself—in words, anyway. He was loath to let the conversation trail off into nothingness, even as Beaufort frowned at the page and walked his fingers carefully through the run of eighth notes that had stymied him the first time.

“And is that how you came to study music and painting?” Stephen asked once the difficult section was over. “Learning the genteel arts to please distant aristocratic relatives?”

Beaufort let his hands rest on the keys. “My parents had the kindness and the ability to encourage my interest in art, on the understanding that I either had to become good enough to find myself a patron or clientele, or industrious enough to find myself some other living. Luckily, the former won out. I doubt I would have made a good clergyman.” He had the audacity to wink at Stephen. His lips quirked up at one corner in a grin that promised mischief, and Stephen was done for.

“Come to bed tonight,” he murmured low, even as voices rose up the stairs and the clattering of feet could be heard in the hallway. He shivered as he spoke, his lips barely brushing the round swell of Beaufort’s earlobe, close enough to bite. “Cade and I shall make confessions of all our worldly sins.”

“All of them?” The reply came, hushed and breathless.

“All. And then, with your blessing, Father Beaufort, we shall commit a dozen more.”

It was Cade who induced them both to join him on the lawn on sunny days. With the three of them and young Mr. John Downe at play, the shuttlecock proved too valiant a foe for the ladies. The ladies dropped about on the grass, pastel flowers in the sunshine, to egg the men on with cheers and applause for pleasingly dramatic efforts.

Downe smashed the shuttlecock and Stephen dove for it, landing hard on his shoulder in the grass. He swung up at the last moment and his battledore connected, sending the small cock flying back up into the air.

“Rise, rise up, fallen warrior!” Lady Amelia urged him gleefully, but Stephen flopped onto his back and waved a hand in the air in surrender instead, his forehead damp with sweat.

“Go on without me, I am done for. Avenge me, Cade!”

Evander stepped into his place against Downe, and Beaufort passed a cup of lemonade Stephen’s way.

“You abandon your post,” Beaufort teased, handing over a damp handkerchief.

Stephen mopped his brow before handing the linen square back.

Evander and Downe drove the shuttlecock back and forth through the air, their arms swinging strong and their faces golden in the sun.

“I concede to the greater sportsmen.” The glass was sticky in his fingers, the lemonade cool and sharp against his tongue.

“Is there salt in this?” Lady Amelia asked suddenly.

Lady Charlotte frowned. “Not in mine.”

“Nor mine. Perhaps it is your imagination?” Miss Talbot replied, wearing one of Lady Charlotte’s bonnets.

Hardly earth-shattering stuff. The girls’ attention taken elsewhere, Stephen murmured for Beaufort’s ear alone. “Besides, this way, I can appreciate the view. Now I see why you took up art as a profession.”

Beaufort’s laughter, when it was genuine, sounded the way a fire in winter felt—warm and homelike, through and through.

Five young men, three silly debs, two chaperones, two earls, a countess, a viscount and a veritable brace of footmen were hardly, Stephen reflected to himself alone, what he would call a picnic. “Add a partridge in a pear tree and we have ourselves a carol.”

“That could probably be arranged.” Beaufort came up beside him on the front lawn, the rest of the group assembling slowly. He had some sort of straw monstrosity on his head that cast his entire face in shadow, spotted through by pinpricks of light that shone through gaps in the weave.

“Good Lord,” Stephen greeted him cheerfully, “what is that thing eating your head? I think a bird’s nest has landed on your hat.”

Beaufort shook his head and sighed as though aggrieved. “Thus speaks a man who has never been concerned about freckles.”

“They can be pleasing on the right person.”

Beaufort’s cheeks pinked up in a highly gratifying way. Evander came out of the house then, followed by Lady Charlotte and her maid, and then they were all off in a herd like the strangest collection of cattle—or gaggle of geese—to ever wander the dirt roads.

The footmen carried the bulk of the food and the accouterments, as was the way of things when one was wealthy, though Stephen carried a blanket over his shoulder. Evander had taken two picturesque little baskets from the ladies and was playing at being the gallant.

“Mr. Cade!” Lady Charlotte waved back to them, blonde curls bouncing about her shoulders and her bonnet ribbons flying.

Until he was summoned to better things, that is. Evander thrust the baskets into Stephen’s hands with a distracted “Take these, won’t you? There’s a chap” before hurrying off to answer the call. Charlotte tucked her arm securely through Evander’s and led him away.

Beaufort arched that eyebrow of his and took one of the baskets off his hands until they arrived at the bank of the pond.

White-linen cloths had been spread over the deep-green grass, chairs and parasols set up around the perimeter for the ladies who preferred them. Ribbons fluttered gaily from the stakes used to keep the cloths down at the corners. The breeze ruffled the edges of the cloths and sent the multihued silk streamers to dancing. The water stretched out before them, clear and rippling on the surface, kept full by the river at which Stephen had found Beaufort sketching three weeks and half a lifetime ago.

The party went much the same as most days at the house. That is to say, Stephen made casual and polite conversation with the company, Evander flirted with the girls, the young bucks boasted of their affairs in London, and Coventry watched benignly over them all, his hands clasped across his belly like a jovial patron saint, occasionally tipping his head to say something to one or another of his guests.

Stephen wandered away after a while, the quiet of the water’s edge drawing him closer. Frogs stopped their measured song as he came close, only to start again farther down around the shore, and he nodded in sympathy.

“Can’t say I blame you,” he said aloud, smiling at himself. “Sometimes everyone needs to get some distance from people.”

Footsteps crunched on the stones behind him. Beaufort approached. “I hope I don’t count as people,” he said hesitantly. “Because if it’s solitude you seek, I’ll take my leave and think you none the worse for it.”

His heart had not sped up at Beaufort’s approach, because that would be ridiculous. He liked the man, of course he did! They had become, Stephen liked to think, rather good friends over the last few days.

“Not total,” Stephen promised, and hopefully the faint rush of heat to his cheeks would be accounted for by the warmth of the midday sun. “Only escaping the conversation about topiary, for I fear I have little to contribute.”

Beaufort nodded approvingly, and that funny, warm sensation swelled inside his chest again. Sunshine and peace, desire and kindness, it all blended together into something lovely and too far beyond his clumsy words. “A wise commander knows when to hold fast, and when to make a strategic retreat.”

“I am glad that I have never been in position to be a leader of men, in that case.” Stephen stooped to pick up a flat stone from the water’s edge. It sat well against his finger, round and smoothed by the waves. “I’ve never been good at knowing when something is a lost cause.” He flicked his arm and the stone spun from his hand, skipping lightly—once, twice, thrice—across the still surface before sinking beneath.

“I should probably be grateful for that persistence,” Beaufort replied with a secret smile meant only for Stephen. He followed Stephen’s lead, finding his own stone and letting it fly. It skipped beautifully, making five graceful arcs before it too vanished below the water’s surface and sank from sight. “You told me not long ago,” Beaufort said casually, though the glance he threw Stephen’s way suggested that he had something more serious on his mind, “that one man could not own another. Why, then, do you allow Cade to treat you as he does?”

That stopped him short, bent over with his hand among the rocks. Stephen crouched down on his heels, turning a pebble over in his hand. It gleamed dark silver in the sunlight where the water had marked it, dun and drab on the side that remained dry.

“He is my oldest friend,” Stephen began because while Evander could be mercurial, he did not
own
him. He did not mistreat him, and what he did, he generally had good reason for. “The only one who has ever believed in me. He wants me to be a better man than I am.”

There. That was the truth, and surely answer enough. Stephen stood and whipped the rock into the water. It sank without bouncing.

Beaufort crouched, then stood and skipped his rock across the rippling waves. “He wants you dependent on him, and on him alone. Does he permit you to have friends whom he has not himself approved, or pursuits not related to his own needs?”

He reached out a hand to touch Stephen’s shoulder, his eyes shuttered and wary. Stephen pulled away. “You don’t know him the way I do. I’ve seen his vulnerability, the way he needs me.”

Beaufort didn’t take the bait as Evander would have; he neither snapped nor railed nor drew upon his vocabulary to heap imprecations on Stephen’s head. Instead, he simply took his hand back and searched for another rock. “Need and desire are not the same thing as respect. Or love.”

Stephen snorted and shoved his hands into his pockets in defiance of good manners. “Can men such as we even know what love is?” he asked, striving to keep his tone as elevated and impersonal as he could. “We are not made for it.”

“That sounds like Cade talking,” Beaufort corrected him, his voice sad and gentle. “Men such as we need it more than anyone else. As you once so correctly pointed out, God does not permit us to make holy vows. Love itself is all we have.” He skipped another stone, ferocious and hard, his coat flying about behind him with the force of his movement. It bounced six times, then one more, then disappeared. “It is not good for man to be alone,” he quoted, and Stephen recoiled.