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Delagarde stood for several moments in the doorway, watching her in silence. Sleep had proved elusive, and he had been walking the corridors. Was it mere accident he found himself outside her bedchamber door? He did not think so. Stealthy sounds from within had told him she was also awake. He had not knocked. He had not meant to disturb her at all. He’d had no notion of coming in. Yet here he was, and the sight of her star-gazing caught at him with unbearable poignancy.
Delagarde felt shut out, and the desire to be part of it, to be one with her obsession, possessed him to the exclusion of discretion or forethought. He moved softly forward.
Maidie felt him as a presence only seconds before he reached her. She turned her head on a gasp, saw him, and would have cried out. But Delagarde slipped so swiftly on to the stool behind her, his arms encircling her body, and the fingers of one hand pressing silence on her lips, that the cry died in her throat.
“Hush! It is only I,” came the whisper directly into her ear, and the lips there brushed at her cheek and her hair, his chin snuggling into her neck.
Maidie did not know her hands were clasping tightly to his enveloping arms, for the shock had been so instantly overlaid with sensation she was powerless to think, let alone consider her own actions. Warmth enveloped her everywhere his body touched with hers, in too many places.
“Maidie, Maidie…God, my Maidie!” he groaned beneath his breath, and his fingers moved, stroking over clothes now too flimsy, generating heat which coursed through her veins. “Shall I keep you, Maidie?” he murmured darkly into the ardour of her dreams. “Shall I make you mine?”
The words grazed the contours of her clouded mind, and the stark flash of sanity threw her into uncontrollable reflex. She seized on his wandering hands with vicious force, halting them dead.
“Stop!” Guttural and tense. “Get away from me!”
He shifted, loosening his hold, creating space enough to enable Maidie to slip out of his grasp and escape from the stool. She stood up, whirled, and backed away from him, clutching at the edge of one French door.
With dawning horror, Delagarde faced the hideous recognition of his actions. He got up slowly from the stool, his gaze on the livid pallor of her starlit features, the enormous depths of her haunted eyes. He had no words.
His hand came up in a gesture not yet formed, and was halted by the quick shake of her head.
“Go!” A plea, breathless and deathly still. “Leave me—pray.”
In that instant it came to Delagarde that in all the world there was nothing she could have asked of him which he wanted less to do. But the very knowledge commanded him. One last glance, searing him to the core, and he turned from her, and departed.
It was long before Maidie slept. She did not weep, for her despair was too deep for tears. Painstakingly, she went through the routine to put aside her work and to close up the telescope. Shutting the French windows, she prepared herself again for bed, and lay staring sightlessly into the dark.
A heavy thing to have one’s faith shattered. In the man one loved, almost too great a burden to be borne. She knew now, despite everything, she had never truly believed in the slanders of Eustace Silsoe. To have them proved, and in a manner all too swift and crude, which had torn down her defences, was a blow from which she would not readily recover. She had given her heart to a cheat.
She must have slept at last, she realised, for she woke to a sunlit dawn creeping in through the gaps in the curtains she had improperly shut about her bed. Groaning at the heaviness of her head, she turned back into her pillows and tried to recapture sleep. It would not come.
At length Maidie grew too frustrated to remain in bed. Throwing aside the bed-curtains, she got up and rang for her maid, and then stood staring blankly at the empty stool before the shut-up telescope, vainly trying to make herself believe the entire episode was a figment of her fevered imagination. The betraying kindle in her veins belied her, and she wished fervently she had never conceived the ludicrous scheme to foil Adela’s plans. At this distance in time and events, it appeared to her the madness Delagarde had called it. Would that he had not allowed Lady Hester to overbear his rejection.
Trixie’s entrance gave her occupation to keep the thoughts at bay, and tidings which threw her into considerable disorder.
“Early, m’lady?” she said, upon Maidie’s apologising for calling her at such an hour. “Why, bless you, Miss Maidie, what are you thinking of?”
“Well, it is barely past dawn, Trixie.”
The maid trilled with laughter, and went to fling aside the heavy drapes. “It ain’t dawn, not by a long way. Look! It’s after noon.”
“After noon?” Hastening to the French windows, Maidie stared aghast. The sun was indeed high overhead. “Oh, Trixie, no! Why did you not wake me?”
“I would have, m’lady, only his lordship ups and tells me on no account to disturb you.”
“His lordship?”
“And,” added Trixie, with round-eyed emphasis, “if he ain’t gone and said the same to her ladyship and Miss Wormley both! ‘Don’t you trouble the wench,’ says he. ‘I happen to know,’ says he, ‘as she ain’t slept nowise well last night.’”
“He didn’t!”
“He did, miss. Then his lordship comes right out and says as you ain’t had no sleep in his carriage t’other night to speak of when he fetched you back from running off to Gretna, and losing sleep two nights in a row ain’t good for you, and I don’t know what more besides. Then her ladyship—” answering the startled question in Maidie’s own mind “—arst him how come he knows as you never slept last night, and his lordship colours up something horrible!”
So indeed did Maidie upon receipt of this alarming information. What in the world was Lady Hester to think? The Worm would be scandalised! How could Delagarde be so mad? Or was it merely carelessness? No—worse. She had responded to him with such rapidity he must feel certain of her—despite her violent rejection. Was he still determined to pursue his design to woo her into marriage? Of course he was. The words he had whispered, that had acted on her like a taper to kindling, came back to her with horrible clarity.Shall I keep you? Because he had only pretended to let her go.Shall I make you mine? What, seduce her into submission? Oh, so sure of her as he was, he did not scruple to speak so openly before the household.
Maidie quivered with consciousness. She could not face the inevitable questions. How would she reply? How speak to her hostess of her great-nephew with the disparagement she must use? Could she bear to disillusion Lady Hester as she had been stripped of illusion? Not after her kind affection. There was no confiding in the Worm. Not any more. For the two had become such bosom friends it was but a short whisper from the ears of the Worm to those of Lady Hester. She could not see either of them until she had better command of her emotions. Yet she knew not how to avoid them.
Providence intervened, in the guise of an unexpected letter among the pile of correspondence Trixie had brought in. For want of anything else to do, while she waited for her maid to fetch up some sort of light refreshment for her from the kitchens, she flipped disinterestedly through the several invitations and a few tradesmen’s accounts. Then she came across a sealed missive and picked it up.
