CHARLOTTE stiffened abruptly beside her, and a sharp little elbow knocked against her side. Was Charlotte also feeling ill? Then they could go home. With relief she looked around and saw the other three heads all turned like sunflowers toward the vision just coming abreast of the barouche.
There was a strong whiff of warm horse and leather, a musical jingling as the big chestnut tossed his head against restraint, breathing impatiently, his eyes rolling; there was a high jackboot black and lustrous, a magnificent thigh in tight buff doeskin. All eyes rose devoutly past the deep-cuffed white gauntlet, up the blue sleeve past the thick gold epaulet, to the face that shown upon them. The rider removed the big black cocked hat with its red and white plumes and held it against his breast. His head was fair.
If the others had been Phoebus, this was the Sun.
“Nigel, my love!” Lady Clarke’s raddled old face contorted grotesquely with joy. She announced him as if it were the Second Coming. “My grandnephew, Captain Gilchrist of the Royal Horse Guards!” Her eyes were wetly shining. “Mrs. Roger Higham.”
“Dear Auntie!” he replied in a pleasant baritone voice. “Your servant, ma’am.” He addressed Aunt Higham.
“How do you do, Captain Gilchrist?” There was something new about Aunt Higham, or rather something past: the ghost of the blooming country girl she’d been. Who knew but herself what other ghost this completely glorious young man had conjured up? She’d settled for Roger Higham, but in this moment Jennie saw the lost girl in her aunt’s solid flesh, and loved her as she never had before.
The Sun shone impartially upon them all with a flash of beautiful teeth, an irresistible creasing of his fresh-colored cheeks. He had also a romantic cleft in his chin, which Charlotte would have seen at once; her arm trembled against Jennie’s. Jennie told herself she was moved only by the masculine beauty of both horse and man, because they were products of nature, like breaking surf or the full moon.
“Miss Hawthorne.” Lady Clarke named her, but forbiddingly. There was an implicit warning to Jennie not to get ideas. Captain Gilchrist was clearly marked for something better than the Highams’ poor relation.
“Miss Hawthorne!” A courtly inclination of the golden head.
She inclined her own head, trying for a remote, but possibly amused, dignity. Aunt Higham said, “My dear niece Eugenia is—”
Lady Clarke rode over her like a Roman legion. “And Miss Higham.”
“Miss Higham!”
Charlotte was as rose-red as her pelerine; her lips moved without sound; she kept blinking, her fingers dug into Jennie’s arm.
“And how does your mother do?” his great’ aunt asked him. He answered something, controlling the impatient horse with negligent one-handed ease. Jennie recovered her pride and refused to stare, though she wanted to. She observed her aunt and guessed that she had hoped for something like this when she had invited Lady Clarke to join them. She was watching the captain with a religious attention, no doubt trying to decide whether her duty was to her niece or to the hope that Captain Gilchrist would still be eligible in about three years. That hope was also naked in Charlotte’s eyes, as wide with wistful hunger as if she were ten and coveting a marzipan soldier in a shopwindow.
He would make a rather lovely one, Jennie thought with deliberate contempt, breathing slowly to calm herself. Of course he was handsome, but take away the great horse and the splendors of gold braid, jackboots, red sash, and plumed hat, and what would he be?
“What-what is the horse’s name?” Charlotte suddenly blurted.
“Victor,” he said with a smile.
Charlotte sank back, embarrassed by her daring but proud of it.
“Do you ride, Miss Higham?” he asked her.
“Not yet,” she answered in mortification.
“Do you, Miss Hawthorne?”
“Yes,” she answered crisply. “But not here. At home.”
“And where is home?” He sat at ease and spoke to her as if there were no one else present.
Before she could answer, her aunt said, “It’s in London now. Brunswick Square.”
“Ah, but I detect a touch of the north.”
“She’ll lose that soon enough,” said her aunt, as if promising.
“That would be a pity,” he said.
“You would not believe how sought-after my grandnephew is.” Lady Clarke honked in arrogant warning. It really sounds better from a goose, Jennie thought. “He has hardly a moment to himself. It is quite dreadful sometimes, how he is pursued.”
“Come now, Auntie!” He grinned. “I don’t see myself as a victim.” He turned to Jennie. “Could you not ride here if you chose?”
“She may ride,” Aunt Higham said rapidly. “It is only that Mr. Higham does not keep saddle horses.”
“I know a fine little mare she might go on, Victor’s sister. Victor would like her company through the park, wouldn’t you, my boy?” The horse tossed his head and snorted.
Lady Clarke had a violent coughing spell. She became purple, and her eyes spilled water over her cheeks, making streaks through their vivid color. Aunt Higham was frightened. Charlotte stared in horror; the captain looking down like the sun at noon seemed merely interested and possibly amused. Finally the whooping gasps grew less, and Lady Clarke flapped a hand at Victor.
“Take the great beast away,” she panted. “He brought it on . . . I can never be this close to a horse for long without having a choking fit . . . even as a child. Go away, Nigel, do! This instant, or you’ll have my death on your head.”
“Really, Auntie? That’s devilish int’r’sting, you know. Never heard of such a thing before in all these years I’ve known you. . . . Your servant, ladies!” He put on his hat and cantered away. Jennie tried to read Aunt Higham’s face and saw recognition replacing alarm, but so cannily that Lady Clarke could not suspect.
“It was always cats with me,” she said comfortably. “I loved them, but oh, dear, what wicked colds they gave me.”
Charlotte floated home through the first of those iridescent dreams from which all Gothic lovers would henceforth be forever exiled. Jennie retired to her room in a confusion of heat and chills, attacked by powerful physical sensations of desire and longing such as she had never known before. They couldn’t be reasoned away by the argument that the superb creature on horseback was probably no more than that marzipan soldier.
She saw the girl of the morning, wrapped in the old robe and wearing the shapeless fleece-lined slippers, counting her gold sovereigns and aching to be gone, determined to be gone. She stared at this girl as one might stare at a specter, not frightened but incredulous. There was a slow tightening around her temples, and she put her hands to them to loosen the invisible band.
How could it be? How could she have become something utterly different in the space of a few hours, most of them extremely uncomfortable, from the creature who for six months had been one huge throb of longing for home?
Free of her clothes, she sponge-bathed in cool water and, shivering, told herself she had merely been charmed by the display, as she had been charmed by so much in London. But she knew she was lying.
It wasn’t the blue coat and the boots, the mastery of the animal, the bared blond head against the spring sky. It was the way he had looked straight at her, as if he had seen Jennie Hawthorne—her own Jennie Hawthorne—beneath the straw brim and the silk lilacs. Not just any miss being shown in the auction ring, but Jennie Hawthorne of Pippin Grange, Northumberland, England, the World, the Universe.
He saw her and knew her.
She was at once despairing and exhilarated. She dressed for the evening as if he were to be there, though she knew he would not be. Charlotte looked feverish and was sent to bed early. Jennie thought wryly that if anyone should be sent to bed with the megrims, it was herself. She recognized her chaos, ridiculed it, and was powerless against it.
George Vinton came in that evening, along with other guests; Uncle Higham and his particular friends played whist in the library, and in the drawing room Jennie played backgammon with George. He must have been surprised by her gaiety, though she’d always been good-natured with George. Tonight she was like someone who was slightly drunk and immensely entertained by the fact, while recognizing the underlying desperation. Could she bear it if she never saw Captain Gilchrist again?
George’s large, round, wondering dark eyes reminded her of Nelson’s, except that with Nelson that expression sometimes meant that he was about to bite. There was no such doubt with George. He would always be predictable. Aunt Higham could run on about his prospects, but not even money from his mother, mixing with cathedral society, and having an uncle who called the Archbishop of Canterbury by his first name, were going to make him anything more than what he was. But surely there was someone waiting to love George Vinton and to make his rectory a happy one. Jennie felt very tender toward George tonight.
Passing among the game tables, Aunt Higham patted her shoulder, an unusual caress. She had been absentminded since they’d come home, but alone with Jenny for a moment just before the first callers came, she had suddenly said, “We didn’t fit you for a riding habit. It didn’t occur to me because your uncle doesn’t think riding necessary for our girls. But I can see that it may be. We will see Mrs. Meacham tomorrow about yours.”
George won the second game in a row and laughed like a conqueror. Euphoric with victory, he said, “I say, Miss Hawthorne, how about a turn in the garden? The moon’s coming up. Let me get your shawl.”
At dawn she had hoped to be riding north by moonrise. How long ago had she heard the blackbird and the baker’s boy and thought: If I can get George Vinton alone—
“What I’d like better than that, Mr. Vinton, is to hear you sing.”
Flattery assuaged his disappointment. “If you’ll play for me.”
“Of course!”
There was a pleasant stir of anticipation through the drawing room as they went to the pianoforte, where candles at either end of the keyboard burned in slender chimneys. In spite of his occasional incoherence of speech and his gobbling laughter, George sang in a sweet lyric tenor, every word exquisitely clear, as if the music allowed a different George to escape on wings of song. Tonight he sang the tender Elizabethan “Song to Celia,” beginning “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” and the poignant “Passing By.”
Tonight his singing had for Jennie an almost intolerable pathos, as if he meant his songs for her, or for the way he had been willing to love her, as if he were already gazing into the time when she would be in his past.
She wanted to assure him that she wasn’t worth it, while George’s voice floated in the room like a seagull’s perfect glide to the sea.
It was a great relief when tea came in.
Captain Gilchrist called the next afternoon, without his great-aunt. He called on the day after that, and on the evening after that. It became known that Auntie had suddenly felt unwell and had gone to Bath for the waters. Her grandnephew strolled like a tawny lion through the drawing room or, to be more earthy about it, a large golden tomcat in a town of tabbies. His laughter made the teacups rattle and the wineglasses ring. In or out of uniform, he moved in an incandescent aura. George Vinton became invisible, and even Uncle Higham suffered partial eclipse, unthinkable in his own house, but he didn’t seem ill-tempered about it.
Though the Captain was responsible for Jennie’s recognition of this facet of her passionate nature, she never had the temerity to see him as a husband. Not hers, anyway, if ever anyone’s. He surely had a sweetheart or a mistress who moved in circles the Highams never touched. His period of effulgence at Brunswick Square would soon end like a natural phenomenon when he tired of it.
In the meantime it was joyful torment to play the piano while he sang Jacobite songs in his virile baritone, or to stand up with him in the impromptu quadrilles and polkas he organized when he discovered that one of Uncle’s whist partners could play for dancing. This was something neither of the Highams had known about the man, but somehow Captain Gilchrist found out and had him at the Broadwood and enjoying it.
One night the Captain came in full-dress uniform because he had to go on to a ball afterward. “Confounded nuisance, you know, but the Colonel’s giving it for his daughter’s birthday.” Does he intend you for her? Jennie thought with a savage jealousy that shocked her. Then he said, “Let’s have a polka! Where is that genius of the keyboard? Let’s have him away from his infernal whist, what?”
During the dance he whirled her away from the others, out into the foyer across the marble floor, and she saw them in the glass that hung there, he huge in blue and gold with the red sash around his lean middle, she looking as frail as an early jonquil in her yellow silk muslin. Now that she knew his arm, his scent, the essence of him, there were times when she thought she could not bear it. The longer he amused himself at Brunswick Square, the worse the end would be, and in the meantime she was hard put to keep herself out of her eyes when she looked at him; she felt as vulnerable as Charlotte, as fragile as the jonquil that would die in a late snowfall.
To escape from him, if not from his arms, she looked everywhere and saw the children crouched on the landing, watching through the railings. She pointed them out, and he bounded up the stairs four at a time and gave each little girl a spin around the landing, leaving them all dazed but luminous. He saved Charlotte for the last.
“Thank you, Miss Higham,” he said formally at the end of her turn, and kissed her hand. “You should be downstairs. You will be, soon.”
She couldn’t speak but looked past his arm at Jennie with such happiness and gratitude that tears came into Jennie’s eyes.
Then he rumpled Derwent’s head and said, “And you practice your dancing with your sisters, old man. You’ll need it before you know it.”
“Even if I’m going to be a soldier?” It was his new ambition ever since the Captain had been coming to the house.
“Especially if you’re going to be a soldier. Dev’lish important. Colonel gives balls, you have to attend. Orders, you know.”
“I’d rather catch Napoleon,” Derwent said pugnaciously.
“Who wouldn’t?” He laughed, took Jennie’s hand, ran her down the stairs, and danced her back into the drawing room.
One moment she thought that if the sun were removed, she would die, and in the next she would concede that one couldn’t die at will. But having lost all that had mattered to her in her life so far, she would be tougher, far less timid about taking risks. What worse could happen to her? Now she wouldn’t scheme to run away; she’d simply tell the Highams that grateful as she was for all they had done for her, she was leaving London for good, and if it meant being a spinster all her life, so be it.
He rode beside the barouche again; he began appearing at affairs which she attended with her aunt and uncle, danced the two dances allowed an unengaged couple, sat out others with her, brought supper to her. She was nearly suffocated with embarrassment, knowing how they were watched and discussed behind fans. She hated Aunt Higham’s tightly guarded but avid satisfaction, wanting to say, “Can’t you see he’s just amusing himself with the poor little country girl? Condescending to her so she’ll have this shiny memory to keep?”
Jealousy scalded her throat and twisted in her belly when she saw the familiarity of other women with him, the moving lips and significant smiles of his partners while she sat beside her aunt with her gloved hands folded in her lap. Which one had been, or still was, his lover? She brooded over his beauty, so maliciously paraded within her grasp yet not for her, as if it were all a vast, complicated, and vicious practical joke played on her and her ambitious aunt.
That some women flirted with all their partners meant nothing to her; she saw only how they behaved with Captain Gilchrist. For her to dance with anyone else, even the most gallant and obviously admiring youth, was merely to go through a set of motions to music which jangled out of tune in her head. She resented the girls of her own age more than the married women; these London girls were years ahead of her in sophistication. Bitterly she admired their ease with him and wondered which was the heiress who would get him. How could Aunt Higham be so naïve as to believe he was serious about her niece?
The new riding habit was finished: bronze kerseymere almost the color of her eyes, with a velvet collar and three rows of small gilt buttons crossed with bronze silk cord. The narrow-brimmed white beaver hat with its short white feather was especially admired by all the children; even Derwent wanted to try it on.
The shoemaker had sewn boots of russet Spanish leather for her, and her gloves matched.
“Oh Jennie, you’re so elegant,” Charlotte said. Yes, she was elegant, at least in the cheval glass in Aunt Higham’s room. And she knew that on a horse she would be as much at ease as any of those girls she admired and envied. But would he remember his offer of the fine little mare?
He remembered.