Pennyroyal Green: The Legend Of Lyon Redmond Part 14

And how his dear, strong face would look when he saw her in the dress.

Perhaps her heart could not see anyone else. Perhaps her heart had indeed been permanently blinded.

But she had decided that making someone else happy was the next best thing to being happy, and she knew she could do it.

And perhaps one day she would not be able discern Landsdowne's happiness from her own.

About five years earlier . . .

ANNIE, JENNY, PATRICK, MAEVE, Jordy, Christopher, Michael, and the baby, who likely had a name, but was a girl and would be called "the baby" until another one was born, which, given that these were the Duffys, was an inevitability.

Lyon knew the names and all their little dramas by heart.

Rather the way he'd come to know his ceiling at night.

For almost three months he'd met Olivia just once a week, for just shy of two hours, unless one counted church, where he could hardly look at her, let alone speak with her. He didn't even make excuses anymore. He simply disappeared from the house about the same time every Tuesday. He hadn't tried very hard to be convincing, but he'd managed rather skillfully to dodge his father, the only person he truly needed to convince.

He knew she liked marmalade better than blackberry jam, that she preferred coffee to tea unless the tea was very black indeed, and she didn't take sugar in either of them, just like him, and that she preferred to take breakfast in the kitchen rather than the dining room because she liked the way the sun came in that particular window in the morning, gauzy and bright, and that she yearned after a pair of white kid gloves trimmed in gold that were in Postlethwaite's window. He knew that she'd had a kitten who'd died when she was nine years old and she'd never forgotten him, and that she was worried about her brother Chase, who seemed rather quiet lately, and about Colin, who was conducting quite the stormy and obvious courts.h.i.+p of Miss Louisa Porter, that her favorite flower was red poppies, that she had named the immense holly tree outside her bedroom window Edgar, because it seemed to fit, that her heroes were Mrs. Hannah More, Zachary Macaulay, and Mr. William Wilberforce, who were pa.s.sionate, tireless abolitionists and crusaders for the poor. And, of course, Mrs. Sneath.

His ambition was to be her hero, too.

He admired her almost helplessly. It was the first time in his life Lyon had felt he'd needed to earn anything. Sometimes when he was with her he felt as though he were walking a narrow fence rail, arms balancing him, worried that the next moment would be the one she decided he was unworthy.

But his native confidence always returned.

It was so very clear she felt the same way.

Conversation spilled from them, sparkling and effortless, ricocheting from topic to topic. They found each other an infinite source of delight.

But every moment with her seemed to enhance his awareness of her, until it was so acutely sensitized he found the smallest things erotic. The bend of her elbow. The skin of her wrist when she turned it up. He longed to trace the faint blue veins with a single, delicate finger, and press his lips against her pulse. That shadow between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s that made his head light, because all it did was make him imagine them bare. The pale, tender strip of skin between her bound-up hair and the collar of her pelisse. The way her slim back flared into her hips. The whorl of her ear. He imagined tracing it delicately with his tongue, and how she would moan softly. When they stood near each other the s.p.a.ce between them pulsed with heat, until it seemed patently absurd that she wasn't pressed against him.

And he lay awake and suffered.

This kind of consuming want was entirely new to him. He was accustomed to appet.i.tes, not obsessions, and there was usually an aristocratic widow available to satisfy an appet.i.te. And he certainly knew how to satisfy himself alone in bed at night. But he could do neither, because they were so far from what he really wanted it would have been like eating wood shavings simply because no food was available.

His restlessness had driven him out to the Pig & Thistle at night, where he watched Jonathan win dart games, and had begun conducting a halfhearted flirtation with a charming teacher from Miss Marietta Endicott's Academy who took some dinners at the pub. It distracted him slightly, but alleviated nothing.

Lyon simply wasn't a rake or a rogue. One didn't seduce well-bred young ladies, particularly one's neighbors, and most definitely not an Eversea, if one was a Redmond. Even stealing a kiss from her was fraught with a statement of intention.

But the silences between their giddy rush of conversation had begun to grow longer and more tense. They stole little touches here and there-a brush of their fingers when he handed off a handkerchief, or when she slid the basket onto his arm to hold. It was so absurdly not enough that it bordered on torture.

He understood why Romans didn't feed the lions before they set them upon the Christians. Hunger made one furious and untenable.

He was off for a good gallop one morning after a sleepless night, when he slowed his horse to a walk and then pulled him to a halt in front of Postlethwaite's. He stared at the window.

Then slid from his horse's back and tethered him.

He hesitated briefly. Then he pushed open the door, and the bells danced and jingled merrily. This morning the sound shredded his nerves.

"Why, Mr. Redmond, good morning!" Postlethwaite bowed. "What brings you to my fine establishment?"

"Good morning, Mr. Postlethwaite. I'd like to purchase the white kid gloves in the window. The ones trimmed in gold."

He was conscious that he was speaking in a rush and perhaps too adamantly.

"A gift for a lady in your life, eh, Mr. Redmond?"

Clearly Postlethwaite was familiar with the syndrome.

Lyon said nothing. His nerves were wound too tightly and he needed this transaction to happen very quickly indeed.

Postlethwaite was pulling them from the window and reaching out to hand them to Lyon to inspect when the bell of the shop jingled again.

Lyon pivoted.

And froze.

There stood his brother Jonathan, just as frozen as Lyon.

Jonathan's gaze darted from Lyon. To the gloves. To Postlethwaite. Back to Lyon.

A d.a.m.ning little silence ensued.

"I saw Benedict tethered outside," Jonathan ventured, quietly.

Lyon found he couldn't speak. He could only imagine what his expression was, given the three hundred things he was feeling at once. He couldn't seem to arrange mild disinterest over his features.

"I won't say anything," Jonathan said quietly and surprisingly gently.

Lyon couldn't even nod.

"I'll just wrap those gloves for you, shall I, Mr. Redmond?" Mr. Postlethwaite said discreetly.

"Thank you," Lyon said stiffly. Still looking at his brother.

Neither he nor Jonathan had yet blinked.

"Now, young Mr. Redmond," Postlethwaite said brightly. "Are you looking for something, too?"

"Thank you, Mr. Postlethwaite, but I was looking for my brother. Father wants a word with you immediately. Something about London?"

SHE LOVED HOW he spoke of his family: the warmth in his voice when he spoke of his sister, Violet, who was about Olivia's age and was quite a handful. His admiration for his clever, quiet brother Miles and his affection for Jonathan, who was rather like a puppy but who looked so like Lyon that Olivia knew he would someday be devastating. She knew his horse was named Benedict, that he had once rescued and raised a baby sparrow, that his favorite color was blue, like her eyes and his, that he'd won the Suss.e.x Marksmans.h.i.+p Trophy three years running and a half-dozen fencing compet.i.tions at school. He was left-handed. He had two middle names, Arthur and James, which she'd discovered when he'd handed her a handkerchief one day to clean off a bit of jam, and she'd rubbed her thumb over his embroidered initials. As if she could imprint them on her soul that way.

She learned that he loved scones, very strong unsugared coffee just like she did, and reading while stretched out in chair farthest from the fire in their main room, because he could tip his head back and see, on clear nights, the Starry Plough, and she knew that he had accidentally shot the foot off the statue of Mercury in his father's garden when he was a boy. He read and read and reread Marcus Aurelius, and sometimes he read to her from it as they walked, when she asked. His favorite quote was "Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart."

How she loved that sentence. Love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart. And she loved the little silence that followed when he'd read it to her, because she knew he was thinking about her, and wanted her to know it.

He was relentlessly, fiercely intelligent, and willing to rousingly argue in a way she found exhilarating, since she was so accustomed to being cleverer than nearly everyone, and he would not simply let her win. Not even when her temper flared.

Though he was delighted when she did win.

Every new thing she learned about him was like being handed a jewel, which she would turn round and round in her hands, studying its every facet.

She wanted to trace with a finger the lines of his face, his lips, his jaw. To slide her arms around his waist and tilt her head up and touch her lips to his. To breathe him in. Sometimes he would say something, or the light would catch him just so, and just like that her throat would knot and she would lose her ability to speak, as if everything she felt had rushed her senses all at once.

And then he would fall silent, too.

She knew his reciprocal silence was recognition. And if she burned, she could only imagine how he burned. For of course he knew much more about such matters than she did. Her pillow was probably shocked at the attention she lavished upon it at night.

She occasionally regretted he was a gentleman. The fact that he was meant she was safer, and luckier, than she deserved to be.

But it all meant she felt faintly feverish much of the time. It was a pleasant sort of sick that apparently left her looking even more beautiful, or at least more interesting.

"You look as though you're in the throes of an opium dream, Olivia," her brother Ian accused over breakfast, four weeks after Lyon had first joined her on her walk to the Duffys. Her parents had breakfasted hours ago. Olivia, who had tossed and turned and scarcely slept for weeks, was late to the table lately, so she usually breakfasted with whatever brother happened to be home and slowly recovering from a night of doing too much of everything, primarily drinking.

"How on earth would you know that? And what's wrong with it, if I do?"

"Interesting," Ian mused. Studying her curiously.

"What is?" she said irritably.

"You just responded to me in full sentences. I haven't heard one of those from you in a while. And you're so very fond of sentences."

He was teasing her, but Olivia was startled. She was vaguely aware her conversation had become somewhat drifty and monosyllabic lately. It was just that conversation that wasn't with Lyon suddenly seemed a waste of time. She'd talked to these people her entire life. She was only able to talk to him for about two hours every week.

All her senses seemed forever occupied with him, but she had gone so long unable to talk about him that a hair-fine fissure of something she couldn't quite identify-it felt a bit like anger but might also be fear, or frustration, or some blend thereof-had opened up in her joy. She was swept up in a current and forever adjusting her sails.

But both she and Lyon knew this could not go on forever.

Olivia, who never could bear to be told what to do, knew he would need to dictate whatever happened next. And Lyon was so much more comfortable treating the future like a plaything, for speculation was how men like him and his father grew wealthier.

"How on earth would you know about opium dreams, Ian?" she countered swiftly.

"Er, just a guess," Ian said hurriedly. "Reached for a metaphor. You forgot to correct my grammar a moment ago, so I wondered if something was amiss. You seem a bit distracted lately." He pushed the coffee over to her. "This ought to help."

Olivia poured some coffee and closed her eyes and inhaled its heavenly vapors.

When she opened them again Ian was frowning at her. "If I didn't know better I'd say you were nursing a brute of a whisky headache."

She snorted. "Naught is amiss. Perhaps I've simply given up on correcting your grammar, exhausted from the fruitless effort."

"Ah, Olivia," her brother teased. "Never give up on me."

She smiled at him then and he pushed the marmalade over to her so she could set about painting her bread with it.

Suddenly Genevieve darted into the chair opposite her, startling both her and her brother. "Olivia, will you come with me to Tingle's today?"

"Er . . . Oh. Um. I cannot. I must to go to the meeting of the Society for the Protection of the Suss.e.x Poor, and then to the Duffys. It's Tuesday."

A little furrow appeared between Genevieve's eyes. "But that's not until one," she pointed out gently.

"I've things to do until then," she said swiftly.

An interesting silence ensued, and Olivia realized that Genevieve and Ian had gone still and were studying her unblinkingly.

"Like . . . gazing dreamily off into s.p.a.ce?" Genevieve exchanged a swift speaking glance with Ian, who ducked his head. Perhaps suppressing a smile.

Olivia scowled. "Correspondence," she said loftily. "Regarding my pamphlet."

She had, in fact, started a letter to Mrs. More some time ago, so this wasn't entirely a lie. She might even finish it this afternoon.

"Very well," Genevieve said at last, still frowning a little. Less daunted by the word "pamphlet" than Olivia would have preferred.

Another funny little silence ensued.

"What's that in your hand, Genevieve?" Ian gestured with his chin.

"Oh, it's a broadsheet from London." She brandished it. "I thought I'd read it whilst I had a cup of coffee."

Ian tipped the pot and a sad brown trickle dribbled into Genevieve's extended cup. Genevieve eyed it disconsolately.

"We can always get more," Ian said complacently, and the housekeeper was moving to bring in another pot as he said it. "What's the latest gossip?"

"Why, are you wondering whether you're in here?" Genevieve fanned the broadsheet open.

"I shouldn't be," he said vaguely. "This month anyway."

Olivia cast her eyes heavenward in mock dismay. In truth, she enjoyed all her siblings thoroughly, though of a certainty her household was more anarchic than the Redmonds. She also knew instinctively it was a happier one. How fortunate they were to sit here together and laugh and talk and know they "could always get more," more coffee and marmalade and conversation that would amuse and irritate, such a contrast from the terrifying squalor in which the Duffys lived.

All at once it seemed freshly inconceivable that she couldn't tell her siblings about Lyon, because sharing the things she loved with people she loved was not only of the chief pleasures of her life, it was fundamental to who she was.

How odd that Lyon could make her world feel so infinite and simultaneously shrink it.

This paradox had begun to feel just a little bit like a vise.

Genevieve cleared her throat and crackled the paper as if preparing to orate.

"Let's see . . . Lord Ice-that's what they call the Marquess Dryden, isn't that funny?-is said to be searching for four black horses with white stockings. How very dramatic of him. The Silverton sisters have returned after a season abroad and are cutting quite the social swath . . . And Lady Arabella, Hexford's daughter is supposedly about to become engaged, and she's been in London for a round of social engagements. We saw her once, do you remember, Olivia? She's blond and so pretty."

"Better a Redmond leg-shackled than one of us," Chase said with near-religious fervor, around a bite of fried bread.

Olivia slowly lowered her coffee cup to the table. As if she were suddenly falling and falling and afraid it might shatter when she landed.

"Does it say to whom Lady Arabella will wed?" She could scarcely feel her lips form the words. They sounded bright and brittle in ears.

"All I can tell you is that the betting book at White's has it that it's Lyon Redmond," Ian said, on a yawn.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.