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“The temptation is nearly overpowering,” he said. “But I’m determined to resist. Ah, here’s my house steward, Edkins, who does us the inestimable honor of opening the door himself. No doubt one of the servants spying at the windows has informed him of his master’s arriving with a beautiful young woman in tow, identity unknown. I hope he doesn’t faint. I never bring beautiful young women home. Yet I daresay he’s up to this or any other occasion, are you not, Edkins?”
“Your lordship pleases to jest,” Edkins said. “I have not fain
ted in several days.”
By this time Lisburne had handed over his hat and gloves. “Send refreshments to my study, as soon as you may,” he said over his shoulder as he headed toward a great staircase.
Leonie followed blindly for a moment, then stopped short. “Your study?”
He paused and turned to regard her with upraised eyebrow. “Did you think I’d take you to my bedchamber, after the way you’ve behaved?” he said in an undertone. “No, the study it will be, and I’ve half a mind to use it as my father used to do the one at our town house, to deliver a lecture and a birching.” He looked her up and down. “Maybe more than half a mind.” His voice dropping further, he added, “I should bend you over the desk, and lift your skirts and petticoats, and then . . .” He trailed off and shook his head. “I’m unbearably tempted, for you’ve used me abominably. But we’ve business to attend to.”
He continued up a splendid staircase and into a corridor and she followed, her mind tangling with lifted skirts and petticoats and . . . spankings? She was hot everywhere.
He stopped in front of a doorway and opened the door.
She looked in. Bookshelves filled with books. A desk and a few chairs. A fine rug. Everything expensive and comfortable and without question the furnishings of a study.
“You brought me all this way for . . . business,” she said.
“You can’t think I brought you here for pleasure? After what you said in the hackney—”
“About that, Lisburne—”
“I didn’t even know some of those words,” he said. He opened the door and ushered her inside.
He walked behind the desk and drew out the chair but did not sit down. He opened a desk drawer and took out three pieces of writing paper. He tapped them on the desk to align the sides exactly. He moved the inkstand within easy reach. He brought out from another drawer three sharp pencils and laid them neatly next to the inkstand, ends precisely aligned. He took out a ruler, and set it down alongside the paper. Then he moved the ruler one inch farther to the right. He straightened the inkstand to make it exactly parallel to the paper.
“There,” he said. “Or do you want me to rule the sheets for you?”
She stared at the stationery items he’d laid out. “What game are you playing? Did you bring me here to do your accounts? I thought your secretary—”
“Don’t be nonsensical,” he said. “I brought you here to explain to me, in a logical and concise manner, why you won’t marry me. You may wish to draw two columns, one listing the pros and one listing the cons. If you need anything, ring the bell over there.” He indicated a bellpull near the chimneypiece. “Or open the door and tell the footman outside what you require. His name is John.”
He walked to the door and paused. “I could send Uttridge to you with a list of my assets and liabilities, but I’m sure you’ve a fair estimate of my financial worth.”
She found her voice, “Oh, Lisburne, as though I cared about that!”
“That’s emotion speaking,” he said. “If I were an investment you were looking into, you’d care. View this as a question of investment—of your life.”
And he went out, closing the door behind him.
Lisburne waited as long as he could, but when two hours had passed, his willpower ran out.
He opened the door to the study. The tray of refreshments looked decimated. So did she.
She sat, head resting on one hand, the other holding the pen, which inched along the paper. Her lower lip trembled.
She looked up. Her eyes brimmed. “Oh, Simon!” She leapt up from the chair and threw herself at him. His arms went round her.
Simon. At last.
“I love you,” she said against his neckcloth. “How does one write that in a column? Two yards of this and six ells of that. How do I measure love, or what makes it? You know how it happens. That beastly little boy—Cupid or Eros, or whoever he is. He shoots his arrow and you’re done for. Love won’t be weighed and measured. It isn’t so much of this silk and so much of that, this quantity of bows and this embroidery pattern. What do I put under pros? His beautiful eyes. The sound of his voice. The scent of his skin. The way he ties his neckcloth. I wrote it all down, but it doesn’t add up.”
The knot in his chest eased.
“You might add to your list,” he said, “his willingness to move heaven and earth to make you happy.” He kissed the top of her head, careful to avoid impaling his eye on one of the decorative sprouting things. “I hope you included my assets.”
“All of them,” she said on a sob. “Including the ones we don’t mention in public.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t know why he loved her or how or when, exactly, he’d come to fall in love with her. That was all as she said: One couldn’t add it up or point to precisely this or that. But she made him laugh and she taxed his intellect and he’d not felt truly happy until he found her. He hadn’t thought it possible to be truly happy again.
“Well, then, I forgive you,” he said, “for all those ghastly things you said in the carriage.”
“I was overwrought.”
“Do you think so? Leonie Noirot, in Lord Warford’s garden, covering her ears, like a child, and shrieking to drown me out. It was so out of character that I became truly alarmed.”
She drew away a bit and looked up at him. “Is that why you took me away in that highhanded manner?”
“Somebody had to keep his feet on the ground,” he said. “And somebody had to help you get yours back down there as well.”
She closed her eyes. “That’s why you sat me down with sharp pencils and a ruler and paper.”
“If that didn’t work, I planned to dose you with laudanum. The trouble is, one has to be very careful with dosing. I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of enacting a tragedy. Romeo and Juliet is all very well on the stage, but in real life, one wonders at their stupidity.”
She opened her eyes, a deep twilight blue by lamplight. “I believe they were quite young,” she said. “During a certain phase of youth, everything is tragic.”
“Thus my cousin’s popularity,” he said. “And it’s so typical of Swanton to find his true love and win her in a matter of days, while I work and slave for weeks, and cannot bring my girl to the sticking point.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s embarrassing to be tragic. But I’ve written them down. The cons. And if you mean to move heaven and earth, you’ll have your work cut out for you.”
She straightened her posture and squared her shoulders and slipped out of his arms. She returned to the desk and picked up the three sheets of paper. She’d filled them, both sides, with her curiously precise and inescapably feminine script. She gave them to him and walked to the window and looked out into the darkness.
He scanned them quickly. “This is rather . . . overwhelming,” he said.
“I warned you it was complicated,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I feel a strong desire to lie down. And have my brow bathed in lavender water.”
She turned away from the window. “I can do that,” she said.
Where else should Lisburne lie down but in his bed? And if Leonie didn’t get far with bathing his fevered brow in lavender water, that was only because he pulled her down into his arms when she’d scarcely begun, and kissed her, and she dropped the cloth onto the floor. The papers he’d had in his hand, the papers she’d labored over, flew about before floating to the floor as well. In another moment he and she were making love, urgently, too impatient to trouble with undressing. And that was an experience, all the silk and lace foaming about them, and the pearls knocking him in the head until he swore, and stopped wrestling with her petticoat to take them off.
It was not the most elegant coupling of his life. Her carefully assembled coiffure nearly blinded him, but he persevered. A simple enough matter of unfastening
his trousers and lifting her skirts and petticoat. Then it was elegant enough, this night, to be inside her, to watch her face as they moved together, to hear her voice—a soft moan, a sigh, murmured French—and to watch her open her great blue eyes and to see pleasure there, and love, and wicked laughter.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you.”
He told her over and over, like an incantation, while he watched her face and the way it changed, because in bed she hid nothing. He watched until he saw her nearing the peak. Then he let go of self-control, and gave himself up to the onrush of pleasure, and heard her give a little cry at the same moment he spent himself inside her.
Saturday 1 August
The first bout of lovemaking hadn’t been the last. Eventually, their clothes had come off. And eventually, exhausted, they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms.
For this reason, Leonie wasn’t completely surprised when she woke, to see sunlight pouring through the lantern. She was surprised, however, to discern how far it had risen. It must be past noon. This was an aristocrat’s idea of early morning, not hers. No matter how late she went to bed, she always rose at the same time on workdays, at half-past seven, to allow time for bathing, dressing, and breakfast before the seamstresses arrived at nine.
For a moment she wondered if Lisburne had given her laudanum after all.
But no. Relief must have sent her into so deep a sleep. Relief because she’d made some sort of peace with him and with herself. And it had been a relief and a joy to make love with complete abandon, not fretting about his needing to depart before daylight, before any of his friends could see him leaving Maison Noirot. Small wonder she’d slept as she hadn’t done in at least a week, even though she’d solved none of her problems.
She’d slept in his arms this time. When she turned in the night, he was there, and knowing he was beside her eased her heart.
He wasn’t beside her now.
But she was too content to worry. She stretched lazily, then sat up, drawing up the bedclothes to cover her nakedness, in case of strange servants popping through the door without warning.
