The Indiscretion (27 page)

He tormented his sister. "It isn't as if you haven't been
busy. Out wandering the Dartmoor, I understand."

She pushed him playfully.

Clive continued, "With Rose and a disgusting chap who drank
like a fish and had you walking in circles…"

Sam frowned, pushing his tongue against his teeth. Disgusting
chap? With no sense of direction? Why was there any mention of a man at all?
What story had Liddy and her maid come up with?

Not that it mattered, he told himself. All that mattered, of
course, was that it was a good enough story to keep Liddy safe from any hint of
the misconduct they'd gotten up to. As her brother continued, though, Sam's
brow drew down.

"So did he have a mustache and six-shooter? Someone said he
was a cowboy from the Wild West Show—"

Beside him, a voice interfered with his eavesdropping. The fellow
Boddington asked, "Do you fancy her?"

"A little," Sam lied. "You?"

"A lot."

In silence, they both watched Liddy link her arm into her
brother's, the two of them strolling through the terrace doorway and out of
sight.

Sam slowly sat himself down, agitated. He threw a scowl at the
Englishman, wishing for no reason in particular that he could think of an
excuse to bludgeon the fellow. "So are you in love with her?" he
asked.

The Englishman moved his jaw once as if chewing on a difficult
question, then folded his arms across his chest like a schoolboy who realized
suddenly he knew the right answer. "Indeed," he said. "I do
believe I am."

*

Lydia
had a long, delicious tête-à-tête with Clive over a much more agreeable
breakfast of tea and toast, which he fetched for her. It was lovely. He brought
the tea sweetened just as she liked it and the toast with the perfect amount of
marmalade.

At one point, as the two of them sat on a bench alone, she'd
thought to whisper to Clive about Sam, the real story on the moor, or at least
part of it. "There was a man—" she began.

He paused, his eyes fixing on her. Something in her tone must have
said already too much, for his brow lifted, his expression suddenly far too
avid.

She covered by saying, "On the train," and shrugged.
"I didn't give him the time of day." She couldn't help adding,
"But he was so interesting – different." She shook her head.
"Too different."

Clive frowned at her, then patted her hand.

Nonetheless, her spirits improved for having spent breakfast with
him. Then churned up again when, on her way upstairs again, her father, on the
landing above, called down to her. "Lydia."

She stopped and looked up, her foot on the first step.

Jeremy Bedford-Browne continued down the stairs, a balding,
well-dressed man – thickset, yet with an alert mien that defied both the slight
stoutness and age of his body. He was sixty-six and shorter than average: an
inch shorter than his wife, only an inch taller than his daughter.

"I'd like to speak to you," he said as he came to a halt
on the step above her. He looked down from the added height, laying his hand on
a polished wood newel that was round as a cannonball.

"Yes?"

He patted the wood once, frowned, then said, "Last night,
more or less asked Boddington what he's waiting for, why he hasn't come to me to
ask my permission to marry you."

"Oh, Father, no—"

"Oh, Father, yes. I
am
your father, which gives me the right, no, the responsibility to worry for your
future: meddle with it, if I think it's appropriate." He cleared his
throat. "Wallace says he isn't sure of you, of your affection for
him." He held up his hand when, again, she tried to protest. "Lydia
Jane, a man needs encouragement sometimes. He can't stand out in the open
forever with little or no help. It's a woman's job to give him some sure ground
to walk on." He frowned at her. "Shown favor, I feel sure this young
gentleman would offer for you. We could see you engaged by the end of the
week." He paused. "Boddington's a nice chap. I think he'd make a good
husband." Softer, his voice imbued with an unfair degree of affection, he
said, "It would make me very happy, Lydia, to see you so well
settled."

"I, ah—"

"What?" he asked impatiently.

Her distress made her brave. "I'm not sure I'm ready to
marry."

He raised his shoulders – her father was much less fazed by her
newfound directness than was her mother. "Who's ever sure?" He made a
short, dry laugh in his throat. "For that matter, who's ever ready?"

"Weren't you and Mother ever sure?"

He frowned swiftly and deeply, then said, "I was sure she'd
be a good mother to my children and an energetic supporter to myself, which she
is."

"What's wrong between the two of you?"

He was taken aback by the question. "Nothing." Then
resigned. "Nothing important." He lifted his finger, pointing at her.
"Boddington: Go over and say something nice to him."

"I'd like to say something nice to him later."

What cheek. Lydia reveled in it; she frightened herself. To exert
here the same will as she had discovered, and come to love, in herself out on
the moor felt dangerous. Yet necessary. No one, she had come to realize, was
going to hand her life over to her. So she'd claim it.

Her father's brow drew down again. It was a look more of concern
than censure.

She added quickly, "The new bow. I've been trying to get out
onto the shooting range to test it for days now. Giles has put out the targets.
I'm late. If I don't hurry, I won't be able to shoot eight full rounds and
still be back in time to dress for dinner."

He nodded, studying her with a troubled expression. "Later
then," he agreed.

"Yes, later I'll say something nice."

She intended to. No reason not to. Boddington was a decent sort.
Being kind to him was nothing less than he deserved.

17

Negotiations,
like a poker game, usually have a sucker, a donator – if you look around the
table and aren't sure who it
is, it's probably you.

A Texan in
Massachusetts

I
f a person asked Boddington about love, he listed the qualities he
wanted in a woman, like common sense and good manners and a comely degree of beauty.
As if love were a rational decision that could be determined by measured
attributes. As if a person chose the one he or she loved like a new suit of
clothes.
I'll take one with pin tucks in
seersucker.

Proof that Boddington had yet to be in love – yet to be thrilled
by it, tortured by it, leveled by it. Or so Lydia imagined, since this was how
she envisioned it: a cataclysmic event. Certainly, no such event had passed
between herself and
Boddington
. She was quite certain
he wasn't in love with her, and equally sure she was not in love with him. On
the other hand, they accepted and appreciated each other, which seemed not the
worst basis for a married partnership.

So if she waited too long to show "favor," and he went
elsewhere, how would she feel?

Disappointed.

Was that all?

Yes. There were other suitors. And she knew who she was and why
they came.

They were drawn, first and foremost, to her family's fortune and
position. On both sides, she came from notably powerful people. Even with this
sizable advantage, though, she was by no means a favorite. She tended to
contradict men – an unpopular trait. (Generously, Boddington told her she did
so because she was smart and didn't like to hide it – when she contradicted
him, he nodded, appeared to listen, and sometimes even laughed over it.) The
surprise was that, after six social seasons, she still was not considered a
failure for having not made a match. Rather, she had gathered the reputation
for being difficult to please – some might say, nigh onto impossible.

Her strength lay in an ease she had with the opposite sex, a
healthy liking for men combined with a liking of herself. And in her …
wiles
, her brother called them. By which
he meant: Rose was good with her hair; Lydia herself was good with her clothes;
and, perhaps most important, she had an intuition for gazing and smiling along
in a playful manner. As a result – smart, contradicting, or not – every season
one or two of the new gallants succumbed to her charm. The fact that one of
them, the Earl of Boddington, son and heir to the Marquess of Ernswick, had for
two years now been competing for her attention gave her in fact a certain
amount of cachet – though the day be lost interest her stock would drop.

Stock
. That was how
she, and every other member of her family so far as she knew, approached
marriage: as business, a negotiation. She might have liked for it to have
included her being in love, but love, she was wise enough to admit, wasn't
something she could command. It would happen, or it would not. And life must go
on, regardless.

Perhaps because there was so much Lydia couldn't control, the fact
that she had almost uncanny control over one thing fascinated her. She could
hit a straw target with an arrow from sixty yards with remarkable accuracy.

She shot a thirty-two-pound bow, a heavy pull for a woman, a bow
that was also long for her sex, five feet, eight inches; it was taller than she
was. A week ago, a new bow had arrived from Wales, where it had been handmade
for her. She had already tried it out briefly in London at Regent's Park and
knew it to throw an arrow smoothly, barely any jar: a good cast. Today, though,
was the first she would have a chance to shoot as long as she liked, all day if
she wished, and get a feel for how her new equipment was going to work at
competitions.

Thus, the moment her father let her go, she was up the stairs like
an arrow herself. She quickly dressed, gathered her equipment, then headed down
again toward a day to be spent out on the target field.

Coming outside, however, she got only as far as the side terrace
before she stopped. She'd walked out into the middle of a dramatic story,
apparently – one Sam was telling to the rapt audience of Clive, Julianne
Werther, and Elizabeth Pinkerton.

He waved his arm and said, "The Indians came up over the
hill. First only about sixty or so, but they kept coming and pretty soon"
– he spread out the other arm – "they lined the whole horizon. And,
doggone, you have never seen anything so fearsome as a thousand Comanches on
horseback—"

Julianne tilted her heart-shaped face and asked, "So is that
how you did this?" She reached toward him, her fingers outlining in the
air the cut at his mouth, the faintest red mark of a fresh scar.

Elizabeth answered for him. "Oh, you didn't hear?" she
delighted in telling the group. "Mr. Cody was a hero in Devon. He stopped
five thugs from robbing the greengrocer's wife in Plymouth. Before he leveled
them all, he was hit in the face. Five of them, one of him, and he won, hands
down." To Sam, she asked, "So did the Indians attack?"

His back to Lydia, he started to say something. "No—"

"They aren't really that fearsome, are they?" Julianne
asked. "I mean, they're just savages."

"Heck, no," he corrected. "They're so slick, they
can make your eyeballs pop out far enough to get a rope on 'em." The young
ladies looked frightened for a moment, then tittered – they realized he was
speaking metaphorically. He must have given them his down-home smile, because a
second later they both blushed, then tittered more. "In battle," he
told them, "the Comanches can ride at full gallop hanging off the side of
their horses or even underneath. You can't even see them."

From the doorway, Lydia found herself scoffing. "That sounds like
something fresh from one of those cowboy novels."

He turned around, surprised, then a huge, toothsome smile bloomed
across his face – revealing truly fine teeth, one crooked incisor, the rest
straight, all a gleaming white. He had a fine smile, broad and easy. It beamed
at her as it covered her once from head to toe. "How would you know?"
he teased.

"I wouldn't. It just sounds—" She hemmed, frowning.
"Outrageous."

He tilted his head. "It's true." Then he undid her. He
reached and lifted her new bow off her shoulder and down her arm; he took it
off her, saying, "Ah, and this—"

"Wait!" she said. He'd ruined the last one.

He turned away, out of reach, leaving her to grab at his arm.

She realized there were more people. At the side of the terrace,
just beyond Clive, Julianne, and Elizabeth, stood Meredith and Frederick, Lady
Motmarche, her stepson Charles and his wife, all of them seemingly fascinated
by Sam's wild story.

He held her bow in front of him as if he knew how to shoot it,
then looked at her over his shoulder, asking, "You feelin' better?"

"Why?"

"You weren't feelin' well last night."

"Oh." She blinked. "Yes."
Thank you
, she should have said, but couldn't. If his looking at
her in front of people at breakfast was embarrassing, having him tease her in
front of them now was impossible. It made her tongue thick.

To the others, he used her bow to demonstrate. "They can also
gallop on their horses bareback like this" – he pulled the bowstring back
– "the horses' ribs in the grips of their legs…"

Lydia frowned as she watched and listened. His deep, resonating
voice, oh – the way he gestured his arms, the way he braced his legs, his
balance … his rueful expression every time his eyes glanced at her… It all made
her so selfconscious eventually that she didn't know where to look. She
studied the yellow bricks at her feet.

The story wasn't long. It ended with some sort of parley, the
upshot of which hadn't made him happy – he'd been negotiating for the Indians,
oddly enough, and the best he'd been able to do he still considered unfair.

Fairness. Sam had an admirable sense of it. There was something
noble in him that could not be passed down in letters of patent. She wondered
how many people standing here might consider this quality worthy enough reason
for one of their own to have lain down with it, embraced it in a very literal
sense.

In the lull at the end of Sam's story, she held out her hand.
"May I have that back?" Her leather arm brace dangled from her wrist,
not yet properly in place.

He turned toward her, and his smile faltered.
"Certainly." With a look of puzzlement, he handed over her bow.

"Thank you," she managed this time.

To get past, she had to march between him and his audience. She
moved quickly, head up, trying to look more confident that she felt. Hypocrisy.
She was coming to be on frighteningly familiar terms with it. Yet it seemed so
necessary. The situation so unsettled her. Why?

Her heart was thudding by the time she took the terrace steps.
Then she cut through the garden at a dead run.

*

Sam
pardoned himself shortly after, then went in, through the house, and out a side
entrance, all so he could go down the parlor steps into the same garden without
being seen. He walked out into a crisp August coolness that always took him
aback every time he stepped outside: clear and sunny and barely seventy
degrees.

He tried to follow Liddy directly, then was flummoxed when the
rose garden joined a series of hedged gardens that led in different directions.
He wasn't sure which way she'd gone. He'd all but given up when he came through
a copse of trees, and a whole vista opened up, a wide view of rolling English
fields as far as the eye could see. And there she was: the Englishwoman who
fascinated him a hundred yards off in profile, her arm cocked, an arrow in her
bow. She let it go, and it flew. She watched it, lowering her bow into her
skirts, vigilant. He didn't care where the arrow went, but she did. She focused
on nothing else – allowing him, as he walked toward her, to focus on her to his
heart's content.

Ooh, Liddy was a fancy thing. She stood out against the horizon, a
slim, green piece of femininity, greener than the fields around her, deep,
mossy, vibrant. As he got closer, the green of her was marked with bits of reddish-rust
– velvet trim, he thought. Then, no, fox. Fox, for goodness' sakes – the dress
itself was velvet, like no dress any woman would wear on a Texas summer day,
but perfect for northern England. Reddish gloves – suede – folded into her
jacket's band at the waist. Her style was more subtle than Gwyn's, not as pale
and frilly, and infinitely more striking. From her simple dress on the moor, he
would never have guessed Liddy could be such a showhorse: a thin,
ordinary-looking girl who put herself together extraordinarily well, a real
competitor, Lid.

She wore another little hat. He remembered the one out on the moor
that became so sweetly crooked. This one was on straight, or at least on right
– it sat forward at an angle on her head, more dark green with several short,
almost hairlike feathers, white, that ruffled in the breeze.

She didn't see him as he came up, her concentration was that
focused – she'd loaded another arrow. He watched her draw back her bowstring
again to aim down the shaft at a round target on a stand in the distance. A
round target painted with circles. She uncurled her fingers – they were covered
by leather tabs – the smallest, smoothest of little motions. The arrow took off
with a
thwack
as the bowstring
snapped sharply against the leather of her arm guard.

The air whistled for a moment,
f-f-f-hoo
,
then in the distance, a faint
f-f-whap
.
Even from across the field, he could see the arrow bury itself neatly into the
center of the target, blue feathers standing out in a dark yellow bull's-eye:
so squarely centered, it looked a perfect hit. Pretty damn impressive. Or
lucky.

Without so much as cracking a smile, she reached behind her and
pulled forth another arrow from her quiver.

"Can you do that twice in a row?" he asked.

She started, turning her head, an arrow in her leather-tipped
fingers – light-colored wood, silver at one end, dark metallic blue feathers at
the other. "On a good day, I can do it a dozen times in a row." She
returned her attention to the arrow, pulling it back in the string.

"On a high-scoring day," he said. "No wind. No
excuses, but no trouble, either."

She glanced at him again, a brief assessment, then back to her
target. The arrow pointed toward it, she asked, "What are you doing
here?"

Thw-wap
, the bowstring
hit her leather arm protector again. Another whistle, then a distant
f-f-woop
. It was almost as if the target
drew the arrow, sucking it into its center, dead on again, two blue splotches
of feathers on yellow.

"I came out to have a normal conversation with you, with no
one else around. I thought maybe I could reassure you, and then we'd get along
better."

"Reassure of me what?"

That he came for her, he wanted to say, though it wasn't
completely accurate, and she'd specifically told him not to last time they spoke,
so maybe not. "That I'm here to—" He halted, then came up with,
"I'm not here to make a sow's bath of anything."

She glanced at him, a little snort, almost humor. It felt good to
make her laugh, even unintentionally. Without looking at him, reaching behind
her to draw another arrow, she said, "No, I rather suppose you're
not." She threw him a mordant look, the raise of an eyebrow. "Your
Excellency." She loaded the arrow in the bowstring, saying, "You're
here to shoot someone, as I recall."