With This Kiss: Part One (2 page)

Three

Two more years have passed

December 1831

Ryburn House

The Duke of Ashbrook’s country estate

T
he year Grace turned fourteen, Colin walked through the door in a uniform, and her heart gave one big thump and never beat exactly the same way again. He had grown even taller. His shoulders were very wide, and his cheekbones much more pronounced.

Her family flew from their chairs and everyone clustered around, exclaiming at the fact he’d been made a lieutenant. Grace didn’t quite dare join them, but all day she secretly watched him whenever they were in a room together. When her mother declared that she was old enough to join the adults at supper, Grace walked down the stairs white with excitement.

Sir Griffin happened to be in the entry, and he looked up at Grace and then smiled. He was a justice of the peace, and Papa had been trying all morning to talk him into running for Parliament, before his father died and Sir Griffin had to take up his seat in the House of Lords.

But she didn’t think he would run for Parliament; he liked going to court half the day and then playing with his children or sweeping his wife off for a private talk. She loved her own mama and papa dearly, but they were busy all day long.

Now Sir Griffin waited until she reached the bottom step and said, “Lady Grace, you are exquisite. How did you manage to grow up while my back was turned?”

Grace dropped into a deep curtsy and smiled at him. “I am not quite grown up yet.”

He offered his arm. “Your mother showed me the painting of Fred in which you caught his snub nose perfectly. I think you show a positive genius with a brush.”

Sir Griffin sat her beside Colin, stopping to ruffle his oldest son’s hair, just as if he were eleven instead of twenty. “Why don’t you do a portrait of this ruffian, Grace? It would give us something to swear at when he decides to visit the fleshpots of Europe rather than return home where he belongs.”

Grace had no idea what “fleshpots” were, but they didn’t sound very nice.

“I’d love to have you paint my picture,” Colin said cheerfully as she sat down beside him. “As long as you don’t bring along that naughty little sister of yours.”

“I tried to paint her portrait last week, but she wouldn’t sit still long enough.”

Colin laughed. “Lily is like a sprite, isn’t she? Flying on to whatever mischief she can make next.”

Grace could have sorted him out regarding Lily. She wasn’t nearly as interested in mischief as his own brother Fred was, for example. She was just high-spirited. Papa said he was planning to move to Scotland when she came of age. Mama said that Lily was just like her father.

Deep in her soul, Grace resented the fact that everyone talked about Lily all the time. “I rode my first steeplechase,” she told Colin, ignoring his foolish comment about sprites: Lily couldn’t fly. And she was even worse at riding than Grace was.

“That’s brilliant! Any luck?”

She shook her head. She’d fallen off after about ten minutes, and had been taken home by a groom. “So is it fun being at sea?”

“Fun?”

“Yes, fun,” she prompted. “You always said that the best thing in the world would be to go to sea and never step foot on the shore again. So I was wondering whether it is as much fun as you thought it would be.”

“There are moments that are great fun,” Colin said slowly, then stopped because his mother asked him something from his left.

“Which moments?” Grace asked, when that conversation was over, and she had his attention once more.

“There’s nothing better than being chased by a storm. It howls up behind you, and it takes everything you’ve got to outwit it.”

Grace could almost imagine it because of paintings she’d seen in the National Gallery. “Isn’t it wet and cold? Aren’t you afraid?”

“Storms are not always cold. If you’re in the Tropics, the water can be warm as your bath, but even so a storm can whip it up so that it froths like cream.”

“I shouldn’t like that.”

“You might surprise yourself. There’s a wonderful burst of excitement that comes from skimming before a wind that’s going faster than even the swiftest bird can fly.”

Grace shook her head. “I don’t care for excitement.”

“You don’t, do you? It’s Lily who inherited the pirate sensibility.”

Lily again. Grace was tired of hearing about Lily.

“What parts are not as much fun?” she asked.

His eyes darkened a little, the periwinkle blue going navy. Like seawater in a storm, she thought, or her father’s favorite waistcoat. Her father liked somber colors, though her mother always tried to put him in magnificent purples.

“Oh, you don’t want to hear about that.”

Grace sat up a little straighter and gave him a polite smile. She was her mother’s daughter and had excellent manners. She knew that one never argued at the table. “I do wish to hear about that,” she pointed out. “Otherwise I would not have asked.”

Colin grinned at her. “Do you always mean precisely what you say?”

“Yes.” Grace didn’t have a gift for fibbing. She was fascinated by the way people tried to hide their thoughts. More than anything, she liked watching the secrets people had in their faces. But she knew perfectly well that she didn’t have any secrets herself, and no ability to hide them if she did. “Do tell me what you don’t like about being at sea.”

“Sometimes it feels as if the ship has fallen out from under your feet, and you suddenly realize the water beneath you is fathoms deep: I don’t like those moments.”

Grace shivered. “I wouldn’t, either. Especially because that water is full of fish who would like to eat you.”

“Not all of them,” Colin said. Then he told her about fish that had lights on their noses, and eels whose tails whipped the water so it looked as if a current went through it.

But Grace was nothing if not tenacious. “What else don’t you like about being at sea?” she asked, some time later.

Colin’s smile went crooked. “You never give up, do you?”

“Why should I?” Grace asked. “If I want to know something, I mean?”

“Right you are,” he muttered. “Well, I have to say that I don’t like fighting. And that’s a problem because I’m in the navy, and the navy is all about fighting.”

“Do you fight with swords?”

“Mostly with guns.” His face closed shut and his eyes went the color of the ocean at night, not blue but black.

“When you are fighting, do you wish that you were home instead?”

“There’s no time for it, not in the middle of a sea battle.” He stopped but then he added, “After, when we’re cleaning up from the fight, I want nothing more than to watch Fred and Lily misbehaving, or see my father and yours behaving like idiots at the dinner table.”

“Idiots?” Grace frowned at him. “Papa is never
an idiot. Don’t you have maids to clean up for you on board ship?”

“No,” Colin said. “There are no maids in the navy, Grace.”

“I could write you a letter now and then,” she offered. “If I knew where to send it, that is. I can describe to you what’s happening at home so that you can picture it, even if you are washing the deck.”

A faint smile touched his lips. “I would love any letter that you would write me. If your father forwarded it to the Admiralty, they would send it on to me in a dispatch.”

And that was how Lady Grace Ryburn began writing to Colin Barry, Lieutenant. Her first letter was quite short, and included a frank truth: “I hate Lily. Last night she cut off the fingers of my favorite pair of gloves because she thought it was funny.”

Colin wrote a note back, saying that he’d had a rotten week, and her letter about the gloves made him laugh.

So Grace started trying to find stories that might make him laugh in the midst of the worst days. She described her brother taking all of their father’s neck cloths and turning them into sails for toy boats. She wrote when the chickens escaped and perched on the housekeeper’s clean linens. She even put in a little watercolor of a hen roosting on a sheet.

She told him the plots of plays they saw in London, and what their governess said about them. Once she even wrote down an entire song that Lily learned in German, sending it along with an ink drawing of Lily singing with an agonized expression.

In fact, she found herself writing about Lily quite a lot. Lily
was
funny. Besides, no matter how much Grace resented her sister, she loved her even more. Grace tried to make her own life sound as interesting, but it wasn’t.

At some point, she began painting very, very small portraits (because she had to make them fit between the folds of a sheet of pressed paper), and many of them were of Lily, too.

Mostly, Colin didn’t write back, but when he did, he always thanked her, and he always asked what Lily had got up to lately.

By two years later, Colin hadn’t managed to return to England, but Grace was still writing to him twice a month.

Both families got used to asking Grace how Colin was doing, and after a while she began forwarding his letters to Sir Griffin and Lady Barry. Colin was not communicative, it seemed. The occasional letters he sent to Grace were the only ones he wrote at all.

“He has a best friend,” she told them all one December. “His name is Philip Drummond and he’s a lieutenant as well. Colin says that Philip is a better sailor than he is.”

And the following August: “He and Philip are assigned to the West Africa Squadron. Their ship is trying to protect people from being stolen from Africa. He says slavers fight like demons when they’re caught.”

“He’s a chip off the old block,” her father said, smiling at Sir Griffin and raising his glass. “You raised a good man, Coz.”

But Grace remembered how much Colin hated fighting, and didn’t care whether Colin was good or not; she just wished he could come home.

Four

August 1834

On the way to Arbor House

F
red snorted. “If you don’t fall for Lily, you’ll be the only man for miles around who hasn’t.”

“She can’t be sixteen,” Colin said, raising an eyebrow.

“She’s fifteen, the same as I am. She was swanning about Bath in July, flirting with anyone in breeches.”

“Are you hoping she’ll wait for you?”

Fred scowled. “She’s still a horror, if you ask me. I like Grace better, but she’s older than me.”

The sun slanting low through the carriage windows caught Fred’s cheekbones and his wildly curling hair, and Colin thought that his brother—especially after he grew into his ears—would be as likely to cause swooning as Lily.

Not that Fred cared. He wanted to be an astronomer, and because their parents were quite unconventional in insisting their children learn more than how to dance a reel, Fred spent his time studying planetary motions and the like.

“So what else has changed at home?” Colin asked, settling back into his corner of the carriage. He felt a bone-deep sense of happiness at the idea of spending a few days at Arbor House.

“Nothing,” Fred said, turning a page. “Alastair made a fool of himself over Lily in December, not that she paid him any mind. He’s had a hopeless infatuation for years now. It was embarrassing to watch.”

“I find the idea of Lily as a heartbreaker extremely hard to imagine,” Colin said.

“She’s the biggest flirt in five counties, that’s what Father says. Though he likes her.”

“He does?”

“Everyone does.” Fred thought about it for a moment and then offered, “I think because she’s so pretty, but at the same time, she makes you feel comfortable to be talking to her.”

“A very wise assessment. Is that enough to make every young man in her vicinity fall in love?”

Fred rolled his eyes. “She’s the daughter of a duke; everyone knows she has pots of pirate gold for her dowry; and she’s bigger in the front than most girls her age.”

“That would do it.”

“She’ll love you. She’s up for a challenge.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. At an assembly, she likes to line up all the eligible men and knock them down like ninepins. You weren’t around this year, so she hasn’t knocked you over yet. I’d say that you’ll be desperately in love with her by the end of the first day.”

“Why should I be at risk, since you aren’t?”

“It depends on whether you remember what she’s really like. I shall never forget.”

“And that is?”

“Horrid. Frogspawn horrid.”

Colin nodded. “She might well have changed, though.”

“You never know who you’re really talking to,” Fred said darkly. “You wait. Lily looks as sweet as pie. But underneath?
Frogspawn.
”

“
A
re you truly only fifteen years old?” Colin asked, a few minutes after being charmed by an utterly engaging young lady, who had her mother’s elegance and her father’s looks. “And are you sure that you are
Lily
?”

She threw him a sparkling glance. But as a dashing young lieutenant encounters many a sparkling young lady, Colin just grinned back at every minxlike look she gave him from under her lashes, until she burst into laughter.

“Yes, do give up,” he said, answering her unspoken comment. “I know that you have ambitions to be the most hotly sought-after young lady on the marriage mart, but I’m not available.”

Lily’s face lit with honest laughter was so much more seductive than her flirtatious glances that Colin actually felt a flash of attraction. “I shall be,” she confided. “Mother only allowed me to go to select events this year, but next spring I shall make a proper debut.”

“In London?”

“Of course. Grace will be coming as well as she hasn’t debuted yet. Mother is throwing the town house open and there will be a ball held in our honor…” She chattered on and on, but Colin didn’t listen. He just relaxed into the tinkling prettiness of English conversation. It felt so far from the powdery, acrid smell of cannon smoke. The way bright red blood falls to the deck and seeps between the boards.

With a start, he pulled himself back together. This year, for some reason, he was having trouble leaving the fighting behind on board ship, where it belonged. He needed to buck up and be a man.

“All right,” Lily said, tucking her hand through his arm. “I can tell that you’re not listening.”

“Forgive me,” he said, wondering what he had missed. Her smile was so impish and yet delightful that he smiled back, despite himself.

“You are finding me utterly tedious, and why shouldn’t you?”

“I find you delightful.”

“Pshaw!” she said, laughing. “You would have been my first beau in uniform, but I suppose I shall meet some others in the spring. A lieutenant! We’re all so impressed, Colin. Father said that he thinks you’ll be an admiral before you reach thirty, at this rate.”

Colin made himself smile. “I don’t see Grace anywhere. Will she be joining us?”

“Oh, she’ll be down by the lake,” Lily said. “Probably writing
you
a letter. Do go see her.”

Grace was indeed down at the lake, sitting under a willow and working on a portrait of her brother, Brandon. She had heard a “halloo” and a lot of shouting behind her, up the hill toward the house, but she didn’t move. With so many children milling about, there was always some sort of excitement brewing.

She had discovered that putting tiny flecks of red where someone didn’t expect to see them gave depth to a piece of clothing, no matter how tiny. She realized it after putting her face as close as possible to a portrait by Hans Holbein in the ducal gallery.

Holbein’s portrait was of one of her ancestors, a stuffy, bejeweled duke. Hers was of a naughty boy, but the effect was the same.

She was so intent on painting that she was unaware someone was approaching until a hand came down on her shoulder, and a big body came between her and the water glinting on the lake.

It was Colin.

She looked up at him without a word, cataloguing—the way she always did—the curl of his eyelashes, the deep blue of his eyes, his high cheekbones. The way his thigh muscles bulged as he squatted before her. The way his shoulders seemed much wider than they had been the last time she saw him. Just like that, her heart began beating so quickly that she felt a bit dizzy.

“Hello there,” he said, smiling at her. “How’s the best correspondent in the world?”

Grace felt her cheeks flood with color. “I’m fine. I’m so happy to see you home safe, Colin.” She looked him over. “Without an injury. It’s just marvelous!”

“Yes, well,” he said, with an odd flatness in his voice. “I’m lucky enough to have all fingers and toes accounted for. What are you painting?”

“I’m making a portrait of Brandon.” She frowned down at her paints as she tried to figure out what was wrong with Colin’s voice. Surely it was a good thing not to be injured?

“Brandon is not my favorite ducal progeny,” Colin said. “You are, darling girl, with all those wonderful letters. There were times when I would have gone stark mad but for thinking about the stories you told me.”

“Are you still blockading the slaver ships?” she asked, wishing that she could think of something clever and funny to say.

Colin sat down next to her. “That I am, Grace. That I am.”

They sat for a while and looked out at the lake.

“And do you still hate the fighting part?”

“Your letters help.”

“Do you ever read poetry?” she offered. “Maybe that would help as well.”

He threw her a glance that warmed her down to her toes. “You’re overestimating me, Grace. I’m no good with words. I try to write you back, you know. I sit there and I can’t think of anything to say because it’s all—” He stopped.

“If you hate it that much,” she said, after a moment, “you must leave the navy.”

His jaw tightened. “I can’t give it up. It’s the only thing I know how to do.”

“You could learn something else. There’s no point in doing something you loathe so much.”

There was silence.

“You
do
loathe it, don’t you?”

He said nothing. Colin answered her letters so rarely that she found herself reading the few lines he wrote over and over. Yet it felt to her as if his anguish stretched all the way from the coast of Africa to England.

“Does your friend Philip Drummond hate it as much as you do?”

“No.”

“What’s Philip like?”

“Much more cheerful than I am,” Colin said, shooting her a glance from under his lashes. “He likes excitement.” A little shudder went through him.

Grace saw that with a sinking heart. “You must resign your commission, Colin. Sir Griffin could get you out.”

“There’s no way out, Grace. Not without dishonor.”

“Dishonor is better than death,” she insisted. Rather than look at him, she stared at the drying paint on her brush.

There was more silence, the only sound the lapping of lake water. “They’ve all died around me,” he said, finally. “Everyone but myself and Philip. They call us the golden twins, because no matter what happens on board, we walk off without a scratch.” He reached out his hand before them. “Not even a scratch, Grace. Do you see that?”

She thought it was the most beautiful hand she’d ever seen: large and indubitably male, a strong hand. It bore no resemblance to the pampered hands of the aristocratic boys she’d met. “I am
glad
to see you haven’t injuries,” she said, giving it emphasis.

“It’s a curse.”

A big black swan drifted up to shore. “Don’t look him in the eyes,” Grace warned. “He’s cross most of the time. Your father says he’s a devil in disguise. If you meet his eye, he’ll get out of the water in order to snap at our toes.”

“As you told me in a letter,” Colin said, smiling his lopsided smile. “I take it this is Bub, short for Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness himself?”

“Why is it like a curse to walk out of a battle unwounded?” Grace asked. It had to be asked, even though her stomach clenched into knots at the idea of Colin’s being wounded.

“There’s all this smoke, and when it clears, the men are dead. All around you. Or crying.” His voice was hollow and utterly calm. “Dying men cry for their mothers, Grace. They do. There’s nothing you can do for them, but make promises you can’t keep.”

“That’s awful,” she whispered.

“You must wonder why I don’t write you more often. I’m not good with words. I use up all I have, writing those mothers.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. And then she came up on her knees, put her palette to the side, and pulled at him until her arms could go around his shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”

He resisted for one moment, and then gave in, arms going around her waist, holding her tightly against his big body.

It was a moment Grace never forgot. The sun was hot on her back, and because she was on her knees, and he was seated, her head was slightly above his. She tried not to think about the fact that his shoulders and his back were muscled, because he was hurting. Even if there weren’t any wounds on the outside, he was injured.

After a while he pulled away and looked at her. His eyes were the dark blue of the ocean just at twilight. “You are quite special,” he said, his voice deep and low. He put a finger on her lips.

Grace felt that touch to the bottom of her toes.

Then he stood. “Would you like to return to the house now, Lady Grace?” He held out a hand to her.

She accepted his help and stood, trying to figure out what it all meant. She loved him. She felt it in every part of her being. It would break her heart if he died; she might never recover.

But she couldn’t say that to him, and he didn’t seem to share her feelings.

“I understand that you and your sister are to debut next season?” Colin’s voice had turned coolly pleasant, the voice of a family friend.

Did he like her? Did he care at all?

When he left a few days later, she still had no idea.

So she took up her pen and began a letter to him, about the escapades of the two youngest Barrys, who had decided to run away from home.

She wrote nothing about herself, or the golden twins, or the curse.

He didn’t reply to her next two letters, and sent only a note after the third. From the cursory letters he sent, she had the feeling that he skimmed hers and tossed them aside. And yet, stupidly, she couldn’t stop writing and rewriting her descriptions, sometimes staying up all night working on a miniature watercolor to slip into a packet.

She had always signed her letters,
From Ryburn
, or
From Arbor House… Lady Grace.
But one night in a fit of rebellion, she changed her signature.
Your friend, Lady Grace.

He sent one of his infrequent replies to that one. It was only three lines long, but she took it as a sign he approved.