The next day . . .
AT TWENTY MINUTES TO two o clock, Lyon all but flew from his bedroom.
He halted in his doorway, yanked open his desk, and snatched a sheet of foolscap he kept under the rosewood box, the one with the false bottom, a delightful puzzle of a box. He scrawled two short sentences, sprinkled it with sand, willed it to dry immediately, which it mostly did, and then folded it and shoved it into his coat pocket.
He paused in a mirror to ensure his cravat was straightened, which proved to be a mistake. Just as he had one hand on the banister—he liked to use it to launch himself a few stairs at a time—a voice stopped him like a wall.
“Lyon . . . a word, if you please?”
Lyon glanced over his shoulder and saw just his father’s hand and forearm. Both were thrust out the door of his study and making beckoning motions in the air.
Bloody hell. Summoned to the Throne Room, as he and his siblings liked to call it. He often had pleasant enough visits with his father, but an actual summons seldom boded anything good and was rarely comfortable, particularly for poor Jonathan, who could, rather amusingly, do no right, and not even for Lyon, who could generally do no wrong but was as conscious of the need for rightness as a horse is of its harness.
He inhaled deeply, exhaled gustily, resignedly pivoted, and strode into the room, aware he was usually a welcome presence and his father sometimes merely liked to beam proudly at him and discuss the latest work of the Mercury Club, which Lyon usually rather enjoyed.
But as he entered, his eyes avoided the clock.
It was his enemy right now, and perhaps time would slow if he pretended it did not exist.
“Good afternoon, Father,” he said cheerily.
“Have a seat.”
Damn. If sitting was required, then something serious was afoot.
Lyon did, pulling out a chair and arranging himself casually in it, crossing his legs and swinging one polished Hoby Hessian.
He could see the reflection of the clock in its toe. Its pendulum kept swinging traitorously.
“Did you enjoy your first ball in Sussex?”
“It’s definitely pleasant to be back. Very different from London. I should like to stay a bit longer and rusticate, if no one objects. I’ve missed the country a good deal, I realize.”
It was his way of preparing his father for the fact that he didn’t intend to leave Pennyroyal Green anytime soon.
“We always enjoy having you about, Lyon. Did anything else interesting happen last night?”
“Saw a few old friends.”
“Such as young Cambersmith?”
“Yes.”
All at once suspicion flared bright and hot and he was, in an instant, on guard.
“His father mentioned that you danced with Miss Olivia Eversea. Stole a waltz right out from under his nose.” His father sounded faintly amused.
Just the very words “Olivia Eversea” made the back of Lyon’s neck warm and tightened the bands of his stomach.
He would not look at the clock he would not he would not.
“Yes. I believe I did. Among other girls.” Whose names he could not remember even if someone had pointed a pistol at his head. “Isn’t it funny that Cambersmith would tattle?” He smiled faintly.
His father was silent. Never a good sign.
Lyon and his siblings had more than once jested about his father’s green eyes. They suspected he could see like a cat right through to any secrets hiding in what he no doubt (affectionately, one hoped) considered the black little hearts of his sons, as well as his one quite lively daughter. He’d always seemed to know who’d gotten jam on the banister, or who had accidentally shot the foot off the statue of Mercury in the garden, or who had stolen a cheroot from the humidor.
His father steepled his hands and tapped the tips of his fingers lightly together.
Which was peculiar, as his father was neither a fidgeter nor a procrastinator. He preferred to deliver orders and news the way a guillotine delivers a nice sharp chop. Swiftly and surgically.
“Did one of your brothers or friends dare you to dance with her, or . . .”
Lyon blinked, genuinely surprised. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re sorry for dancing with her?” His father sounded faintly relieved.
“Forgive me if I’m being obtuse, sir, but I don’t understand the question. Why would anyone dare me to dance with a young woman who doesn’t want for partners and would hardly be likely to refuse me? We are Redmonds, after all.” He said this half in jest.
It was the sort of jest his father typically enjoyed.
It rang flatly in the room.
Lyon dancing with an Eversea was aberrant, and they both knew it. Because Lyon was dutiful, and he had been raised with the notion that the Everseas and the Redmonds quite simply did not dance with one another, any more than cats and dogs enjoyed a good waltz.
“Why, then, did you dance with her?”
Lyon stared back. He saw only his own reflection in his father’s eyes.
He wickedly contemplated saying, Because she is my destiny just to see whether his father was too young for apoplexy.
He’d never even known he was capable of thinking such words. Let alone believing them.
And then all at once it wasn’t funny.
He decided to try cajoling. “Come. You’ve eyes in your head, Father. And you were young once. It was an impulse, I suppose.”
His father would likely disinherit him at once if he’d said, Because she reminded me of the first wildflower in spring. His father considered excessive use of metaphor a character flaw.
His father smiled, faintly and tautly, a smile in which his eyes did not participate. “I was, indeed, young. Once.”
It was as ironic a sentence as Lyon had ever heard.
Something about it stirred a faint memory, a suspicion he’d had for some time. Because he was, as he’d told Olivia Eversea, indeed observant, and he’d seen his father’s eyes linger ever so slightly on a particular woman more than once.
He cautiously echoed his father’s faint smile with one of his own. Over the years he’d learned to modulate his emotions, his expressions, his word choices, all in order to ensure his father remained indulgent and proud, because that’s what ensured a comfortable life in the Redmond household.
“And yet you’re not typically impulsive, Lyon.”
“No. I suppose I’m not.” He knew better than to expound.
Lyon was in fact demonstrably the opposite of impulsive. He hadn’t squandered his allowance in gaming hells, impregnated the servants, or appeared in the broadsheets for cavorting on Rotten Row with notorious aristocratic widows.
Though he had indulged in an aristocratic widow or two. Sometimes he thought God had created aristocratic widows for the sole purpose of indoctrinating handsome heirs into carnal pleasures. But he was both discreet and discerning.
From the moment he was born Lyon’s responsibility as future head of a dynasty had been impressed upon him, the way a signet ring grinds into hot wax.
He was coming to realize his learned carefulness was something of a useful skill.
He was also beginning to understand the grave cost to himself.
So he said nothing more.
But God help him, he darted a swift look at the clock.
His father usually missed nothing. But if he noticed that glance, he didn’t remark upon it.
“Lyon . . . you should know how proud I am of you. A man could not ask for a better son.”
He said this so warmly that despite himself, Lyon nearly flushed. His father’s pride and approval was as potent as his censure, and his three sons, despite themselves, had lived for it their entire lives. His brothers usually had to make do with whatever splashed off Lyon and landed on them. (Their sister, Violet, occupied her own category. Every one of them doted on her, his father included, and she was in danger of becoming hopelessly spoiled.)
“Thank you, sir.”
“Your future with the Mercury Club is brilliant. The world is your oyster. You have not only your family name to thank for this, but your focus and intelligence and discipline. There will, in fact, be an opportunity in a few weeks for you to accompany me to London to present your ideas for investment to the members of the club.”
Yesterday this would have been dizzying, gratifying news. It was everything he had always hoped for.
But oddly, now a trip to London sounded like a trip to purgatory. Heaven, as far as he was concerned, had a population of two.
“Thank you, Father. I should be honored.”
“You are poised now to make a magnificent marriage, as I did, one that will bring a wealth of blessings and stature to the Redmond family for decades to come. I know your suit will be welcome by one young lady in particular, and her family will welcome us to London, too.”
Lyon was wary now. The name of some girl would likely be produced any moment. A girl with a title and a fortune and a father with connections that Isaiah could charmingly exploit in the service of building the fortune.
In all likelihood, Lady Arabella.
Yesterday Lyon would have been curious to hear the name. He’d, in fact, had several names in mind not too long ago. Yesterday, Lady Arabella would have seemed a perfectly reasonable, indeed, desirable choice. It was a choice he understood, and he’d been raised with the knowledge that making a spectacular marriage, and conferring the associated kind of honor and influence upon his family for generations to come, was his duty.
He knew, definitively, that it no longer mattered what his father said.
Lyon now knew who and what he wanted.
And before yesterday, he hadn’t even known what it was to truly want.
“I always hoped to marry as well as you did, Father.”
Lyon thought he saw a flicker in his father’s eyebrow region. He could have sworn something about that sentence had touched Isaiah on the raw.
Isaiah finally merely nodded once. “Nothing makes me happier or more proud than knowing I can count on you to do the right thing, son, for your actions are a reflection of your fine character. I am absolutely certain you will never disappoint me or bring shame to our family, and this is such a comfort to me and your mother.”
It was as though he could will these things into existence by merely stating them.
Lyon had always been fascinated by the fact that Isaiah could persuade nearly anyone of anything. He’d watched his father subtly but relentlessly ply wit, charm, and strategy in meetings at the Mercury Club, over drinks at White’s, milling about with port and cigars after dinner parties. He studied people for weaknesses, strengths, fears, and proclivities, and he used them to his advantage the way conductor shapes a symphony. Lyon had witnessed one wealthy investor after another succumb to his father’s tactics, none the wiser. Thusly the Redmond fortune and influence grew and grew.
It was an extraordinary talent, his father’s intellectually driven intuition, and Lyon had always been secretly proud of it.
But now that Isaiah was employing the same tactics on him, it seemed faintly sinister.
Lyon’s skin itched. As if strings binding him were chafing.
It was not the first time he’d had these sorts of thoughts. Almost two bloody o’clock in the afternoon would not go down in his personal history as the hour of his epiphany.
But it had finally come completely into focus, and with it came an interesting sort of calm.
Lyon was a separate person from his father.
He did not like to be told what to do.
And, like his father, he intended to get what he wanted.
“Thank you, Father. Your opinion means the world to me.”
His father said nothing. He pressed his lips together thoughtfully.
The clock ticked inexorably on. It was now bloody hell two o’clock.
Lyon shifted slightly. The message he’d shoved in his pocket rustled.
He finally could no longer bear it. “Will that be all, Father?”
“I hope so,” his father said. And smiled faintly.
IT HADN’T BEEN difficult for Olivia to persuade Genevieve to accompany her into town to Tingle’s Bookshop the following afternoon. Genevieve loved Tingle’s Bookshop, and Tingle was fond of the Eversea girls. They were two of his best customers, after all, between Olivia and her pamphlets and love for a good horrid or adventure novel, and Genevieve and her predilection for florid romances and biographies of great artists and the occasional indulgence in a London broadsheet, which usually made both her and Olivia giggle.
But Olivia rose late, because visions of waltzes had kept her feverishly awake all night. And Genevieve dawdled at home, because she was attempting, and failing, once again to curl her hair, and Olivia thought her head might launch off her neck from impatience as the clock raced toward two.
It was a quarter past two by the time they arrived.
They burst in the door and both paused on the threshold to inhale at once the singular perfume of leather and paper and glue that characterized Tingle’s. It was a roomy shop, serving all of Sussex, and it was partly sunny, so that people could admire the gleaming of gold-embossed bindings and comfortably flip through a page or two of books that had already had their pages cut, and partly softly dark, to keep the fine covers from fading.
A few other people were in the store, two older gentlemen and a woman, and all were absorbed in the separate little worlds of their books.
Tingle looked up, beamed, and bowed as if they were princesses. “If it isn’t the Eversea girls! What wonderful timing. Miss Olivia, I’ve a new pamphlet for you.”
Mr. Tingle lived to serve his customers.
Olivia seized it delightedly. “Oh, wonderful, Mr. Tingle. So very kind of you to remember to get it in for me.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all, my dear. And Miss Genevieve, I’ve a shipment of books I know you’ll want to see,” he said, twinkling. “It’s in the back, however.” He beamed at them. “I’ll be just a moment.”
He ducked into the back of his shop, and they could hear him rustling about and whistling cheerily and tunelessly under his breath.
Olivia drifted, as casually as she could make it seem, over to the section of history books. Her blood was ringing in her ears, since her heart was circulating it rather enthusiastically.
“History books, Olivia? Wouldn’t you rather have a look at the horrid novels? I thought I saw The Orphan on the Rhine on the shelf. You want that one, remember!”
“Shoo,” Olivia muttered beneath her breath to Genevieve, who had attached herself to her hip.
“I beg your pardon?” Genevieve was startled.
“Er, my shoe. I believe there’s a pebble in it.”
“Oh. Well, perhaps you ought to take it off and—”
“Oh look! Mr. Tingle has returned with your books, Gen!”
“Ohhh, lovely!” Her younger sister whirled and all but skipped to the front of the store.
Olivia took a deep breath and rounded the corner of a shelf.
Mr. Redmond was standing there idly, his long form looking as at home there as he did in a ballroom, one leg casually bent, and he was studying the spines of the books as if he had all the time in the world to do precisely that.
A book was already tucked under his arm.
She stared at him.
He didn’t even turn. “Well. Good afternoon, Miss Eversea.”
His voice was scarcely above a murmur.
“Why, good afternoon, Mr. Redmond. Have you an interest in history?”
“As a matter of I’m positively fascinated by the events of the past. Specifically, the events of last night.”
“Last night . . . do you mean the first time you stole a waltz?”
He smiled. “I still refuse to feel chagrin.”
“You did indeed do me a charity, for Lord Cambersmith would have trod upon my foot. He always does.”
“You see? I am a veritable Robin Hood of the ballroom.”
“Didn’t Robin Hood give to the poor?”
“Oh, but I did. I gave to poor me, who had heretofore gone my entire life without dancing with you.”
She stifled a laugh at that.
He turned. “I have already made a purchase.” He gestured with the book beneath his arm. “I just wanted to make certain I didn’t leave the shop before I ascertained there was nothing else in the store I wanted.”
“Very thorough of you,” she said, her voice just barely above a hush. “I should hate for you to forgo something you want.”
He approved of that saucy little sentence with a slow smile she felt in her solar plexus.
“What’s that in your hand, Miss Eversea? Have you brought me a love letter?”
Olivia stifled shocked laughter. Then reflexively whipped the pamphlet behind her back.
“I’m terribly sorry, was that too bold?” He was all mock somber contrition.
“Hush. No. I’m difficult to shock. I’ve a number of rather lively brothers, you know. One becomes inured to being startled.”
“Oh yes. Everyone knows about your lively brothers, Miss Eversea. Very well. Difficult to shock, is it? Have a care, or I may consider that a challenge.”
“I personally find challenges invigorating.”
“Bold words from a woman who doesn’t want to show me whatever it is you’re holding, because she’s afraid of what I’ll say about it.”
Damn. This was precisely true and she blinked at being skewered with the truth.
He raised his eyebrows in a challenge.
“It’s true. I don’t want to show it to you,” she admitted. Quite pleased with him, perversely.
“Oh God. Is it because . . . is it because it’s a . . . poem?” he said with such crestfallen trepidation she burst out laughing and then clapped her hand over her mouth.
“If you’d told me you liked poetry I would have stayed up the entire night to write a poem about you, Miss Eversea. And I never thought I’d say that to a soul in my entire life.”
“Fear not. It’s not a poem. And I shouldn’t wish for you to endure that ordeal. Particularly because nothing rhymes with Olivia.”
“Nothing rhymes with ‘beautiful,’ either. But for you I would undertake the challenge.”
Her breath snagged in her throat.
She’d heard that sort of compliment a dozen or so times before.
But somehow the way Lyon Redmond said it made her understand precisely what he saw and felt when he looked at her, and what he saw and felt were very adult, very complex things, indeed. “Beautiful” was not a word to be taken, or delivered, lightly.
The backs of her arms heated, and she prayed it wouldn’t turn into a blush.
“You are very bold, Mr. Redmond,” she managed finally. A little subdued.
“Am I?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “I’ve never been accused of such a thing. I thought I was simply being truthful.”
“Truthful, and a bit of a rogue.”
He smiled slowly, crookedly, pleased with that assessment, apparently.
“What will you do, Mr. Redmond, if you ever succeed in genuinely scandalizing me?”
“If I do, you’ll forgive me straight away.” He said this with a little shrug that was both thrilling and irritating.
She gave him an insincere scowl.
“Come, show me what it is.” He nudged his chin in the direction of what she was holding. “I shan’t judge.”
She didn’t want to introduce a discordant note into these giddy, stolen few moments of his company.
But she remembered his own truthful bravery of the night before.
And she loathed artifice.
She drew in a bracing breath and sighed it out.
With resignation she turned it around and held it up so he could read the title.
“‘A Letter to His Excellency the Prince of Talleyrand Perigord on the Subject of the Slave Trade,’” he read aloud softly. “William Wilberforce.”
He looked up into her face again.
“It’s . . . an antislavery pamphlet.” He sounded faintly confused.
Her heart sank.
He studied her, a question in his eyes, but none of the other things she dreaded: censure or mockery or condescension or boredom or that blank, dull complacency of someone who utterly lacked intellectual curiosity.
He simply waited for her to expound.
“You see, it’s just . . .” she faltered.
And now she was abashed.
“What? What is it?” he urged softly, and stepped closer to her. She recognized it was an unconscious reflex to protect her from whatever was distressing her, to put himself between her and danger or upset.
And it was odd, but she immediately felt sheltered.
Now the back of her neck began to heat, too, and she was worried it would migrate to her face in seconds, and she would be in the throes of a full-blown scarlet blush.
She looked up at him. His eyes were so warm.
“It’s just that I cannot bear it.”
She’d never confessed this to anyone, in so many words, anyway. Her family thought Olivia was clever—too clever by half, much of the time—and vivacious and witty, occasionally cuttingly so. Everyone had a role in their family, and this was hers.
But all of these qualities also nicely disguised how much she actually viscerally suffered over the world’s injustices. How they settled into an aching knot in her stomach and made her restless, and were only eased when she did something, anything about it. She had never tried to truly explain it. It would have confused and distressed them and upset the natural order of the Eversea household, and they would have tried to soothe her out of it, for they hated her to be uncomfortable, when she knew it was a permanent condition.
“Cannot bear it?” he repeated gently.
Her cheeks were hot now. “The Triangle Trade . . . these merchants . . . this illegal practice . . . they buy and sell people. They tear them from their homes and families and sell them. Can you imagine your freedom and your home and your life stripped from you? For profit. It’s . . . really quite unbearable to contemplate, and there’s so little I can do to help. And you see . . . so I read and share pamphlets when I can, and, help out with Mrs. Sneath and . . .”
He was clearly listening intently, but his expression was difficult to decipher. A mix of thoughtfulness and schooled inscrutability. He was listening, but he was also thinking something else altogether.
Shining through all of it, like the sun rising, was a sort of blazing tenderness.
Every jagged uncertain place in her was instantly soothed. She should not have questioned him. Of course he understood. Somehow she’d known he would.
Oh, I’m afraid of him. But it was a dizzying, gorgeous sort of fear, like standing on a mountaintop and seeing infinity in every direction.
“Why didn’t you want to show me?” He was puzzled, gently.
“Well, it’s not considered ladylike, is it? Crusades and good works and the like. Or rather, it’s an activity for spinsters and bluestockings and young women who haven’t dowries, and I’m not one of those. Or for very strident women with booming voices who frighten men. Who do you think of when you think of crusades?”
“Mrs. Sneath,” Lyon said promptly. He looked fascinated.
“And she booms, doesn’t she?”
“She does boom.”
“My parents don’t precisely deplore my interest, but they’ve taken to changing the subject when I broach it. I do have other topics of conversation. And other interests. I do not always run on and on about it.”
Ironically, she felt as though she was running on and on about it. More truthfully, she was babbling. His gaze, unblinking and unabashedly admiring and very blue and intent, had sent her thoughts careening off their track.
“The slave trade is an evil practice, a blight upon all humankind. And I can’t think of a lovelier quality than compassion. Promise me you will never feel ashamed of it, Miss Eversea.”
She was speechless.
“Promise me,” he insisted fervently.
“Very well,” she said shyly, and gave a little laugh. “But truly? Doesn’t that sort of thing bore you?”
“I’m finding it difficult to conceive of a circumstance in which you would bore me. I imagine you’re simply filled with surprises.”
“Careful, Mr. Redmond, or I may consider that a challenge.”
“Even when you’re sleeping, I’m certain you’re fascinating or at least entertaining. Perhaps you snore or mutter things, like Colonel Kefauver at White’s, who talks in his sleep. About tigers eating the natives and the like.”
She ought to have laughed. But her mind’s eye was instantly flooded with an image: she was opening her eyes to the light of dawn, and turning her head on her pillow.
To finding him lying next to her, his blue eyes on her, warm and sleepy.
She dropped her eyes, all of her aplomb hopelessly lost.
The silence that followed was filled with the comforting sound of the pages of books being turned, the faint merry lilt of Genevieve chattering with Mr. Tingle.
“Mr. Redmond, I think this is one of the instances in which I may need some time to forgive you for cheek,” she finally said, softly.
He was silent for the time it took her heart to beat twice.
“Was that enough time?” he whispered.
It was, indeed, but she wasn’t about to let him know. She simply looked up again through her eyelashes.
He hadn’t gotten any uglier while she was looking down.
Though now he looked faintly worried. There was a faint little shadow between his eyes. Her impulse was to take his face in her hands and smooth it away.
She’d never had that kind of impulse in her entire life.
Let alone for someone at least a foot taller than she, like Lyon Redmond.
She sensed he carried more burdens than anyone knew.
“I’m sorry if . . .” he whispered, finally. “I’m not normally so . . .” He made a helpless gesture. “It’s just that I . . .”
She shook her head sharply: Don’t be.
She knew what he meant.
And suddenly neither of them could speak again.
The initial giddy rush of words ebbed into a velvety silence. Olivia knew a temptation to close the gap between them and lay her head against his chest.
As if she’d done it dozens of times in her life.
“May I . . . may I have this pamphlet?” he asked suddenly.
“You want to read it?” She was skeptical.
He nodded somberly.
So she hesitated, then held it out to him, ceremoniously, with both hands, and he took it as gravely as if it was coated in gold leaf.
It wasn’t until their fingers were a hairsbreadth from touching that she noticed his hands were trembling, too.
And as she relinquished the pamphlet, his thumb lightly, deliberately skimmed the back of hers.
A bolt of pleasure traced her spine. Her heart flipped over in her chest.
The first touch of his skin against her skin.
Illicit and far too bold.
And not enough.
Oh, not enough.
She knew it was just the beginning.
“Take this,” he whispered urgently, and thrust the book he was holding into her hands.
“Olivia, Mr. Tingle said he’d—”
Olivia leaped backward as if Lyon was a bonfire and whirled on her sister, who had just flounced innocently around the corner.
“For heaven’s sake, Genevieve, you gave me a fright!” she snapped, and tucked the book beneath her pelisse.
Genevieve froze like her father’s pointing hunting dog, her eyes perfect saucers of astonishment. “I merely turned a corner, Olivia,” she pointed out, reasonably, because Genevieve was nearly always reasonable, except for the fact that she longed for hair that curled and hers simply wouldn’t. “It was you who jumped like a trod-upon cat. Wasn’t that the Redmond heir? Lyon?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Did he spook you?”
She said this sympathetically. As if the Redmonds were goblins out of folklore or ghostly highwaymen, like the legendary One-Eyed William, the highwayman who had once allegedly haunted Sussex roads. As if they could be stirred into mayhem, like the devil, unless they were spoken of in whispers.
Then again, Lyon had indeed vanished like a ghost.
And there might be something to the bedeviling theory. She surreptitiously skated her forefinger over her thumb. Her hand still buzzed from his touch.
As if he’d been the fuse that had set her cells permanently alight.
Olivia shrugged. “I suppose it could have been him. I was absorbed in my pamphlet.”
Genevieve studied her gravely. “Olivia, you’re somehow very, very pink and very, very white at the same time. Those are not your usual colors.”
“You’ve been looking at too many paintings, Genevieve. I’m certain everyone has begun to look like a Gainsborough to you.”
Genevieve laughed. “There is no such thing as too many paintings.”
Olivia smiled at her. Genevieve was a dear. Funny, lovely, quiet. She was suddenly tempted to reach out and hold on to her, as if she were receding out of sight. This was the first time she’d had a secret from her sister.
“Did you find a book you liked, Genevieve?”
Genevieve gestured mutely with a little stack cradled in her arms. All of them, in all likelihood, about art or artists. Stacked atop it was a broadsheet. “Do you think Papa will mind if I buy all of them? Did you find what you were looking for, Olivia?”
There was neither sight nor sound from behind the bookshelf.
“I believe I did,” she said.