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Chapter Four

I solde considered it a striking coincidence that dancing alone in her night rail had indirectly led to meeting Isaiah Redmond.

Because she’d been dancing by herself when she’d first seen Jacob Eversea, too.

Nearly three years ago, when Isolde’s father inherited the money and property in Sussex that would transform him from schoolmaster into gentleman, he moved his family to Pennyroyal Green at once.

Whereupon the Sylvaines cheerfully threw themselves into local society: they volunteered for church committees and sewing circles; they attended social evenings at The Pig they invited their new neighbors to tea and dinner and for evenings of music and games.

They learned the main sources of local news and gossip: Smithfield Curtis, the tobacconists, The Pig he soon had a number of pupils. Clever George, to everyone’s delight, was sent to Cambridge thanks to the inheritance; he was going to be a barrister.

The Sylvaines were pronounced good company by their neighbors and considered a happy addition to the town. Soon their house was a lively place.

The Sylvaine siblings had been delighted to discover their property included a crumbling folly built to resemble an open pavilion.

It was surrendering without a fight to the encroach of nature: ivy laced around its pillars and wildflowers nodded from fissures in the flight of five steps which led to a railed mezzanine of sorts.

A grassy meadow unfurled before it—“perfect for Pall-Mall and cricket and fencing,” George enthused—and a row of oaks and hedges divided it from the narrow path that curved off the main road and meandered up to their house.

Their father hoped to one day widen it to make the passage easier for larger carriages.

Isolde and Maria immediately put the folly to use as a besieged castle, Juliet's balcony, and most often, a stage from which to orate, sing, and practice their rigadoons, chassés, pirouettes and all the other steps in the day’s popular dances.

The meadow often rang with their laughter and squabbles over whose turn it was to play Titania or Lady Macbeth.

On this fateful day, Maria had been compelled to redo her French lesson, which, according to their tutor, was “Shocking. Honestly, Miss Maria, we both know you’re not a halfwit.”

As Isolde’s lesson had passed muster and she wasn’t needed anywhere else, she slipped out of the house with her sketchbook and dashed out to the folly to enjoy the last of the day’s warmth.

It was the first time she’d ever had the entire meadow to herself.

Late afternoon sunshine had turned the dandelion fluffs into tiny, glowing lamps and painted a bright rectangle from the meadow all the way up the folly’s steps.

Isolde scrambled up it and performed an exuberant pirouette on the stage, followed by a frisky demi-jeté, pretending she was one of Shakespeare’s wild, earthy, elemental creatures.

So when an urge to belch overtook her, she opened her mouth and tossed her head like a bugling buck just for the pleasure of hearing it echo in the clearing. Just like she’d heard George do many times before, because boys could get away with anything, it seemed.

“And that concludes my performance,” she told the dandelions, as she dipped a graceful curtsy.

When she was upright again, she staggered backward with a gasp.

A man was watching her from the road.

He was mounted on a black horse. They had paused between the trees, and both man and horse were motionless.

For a blessed instant she thought he might be—she prayed he might be—merely a trick of shadows and light.

His light eyes glinted bright as arrowheads in the lowering sun.

For as long as it took her heart to thud five or six times, they regarded each other.

And then he flashed the brightest, boldest, wickedest smile to ever curve a man’s mouth, doffed his hat and bowed in the saddle with an ironic flourish. His hair was black.

Seconds later he was gone, leaving behind only the echo of hoofbeats.

She would soon learn that Jacob Eversea went nearly everywhere as fast as he could, as if his very spirit resented being confined to a mortal costume made of mere skin and bone, and had instead been born for soaring.

Two hours later she found herself sitting across from him at the dining table.

Her family was entertaining the vicar and his wife for dinner, and a few more neighbors were expected to arrive later for some casual, lighthearted music and dancing.

And it seemed that Mr. Jacob Eversea himself had seized the need to return a book he’d borrowed from George as an opportunity to gallop his new mare to the Sylvaine’s house. They were both home from university.

And as Jacob was already acquainted with the vicar and his family—the Everseas owned the living in Pennyroyal Green—he cheerfully accepted an invitation to stay for dinner.

Whereupon Isolde’s mother spirited their everyday candelabra away from the dining table and whisked their one fine silver candelabra into its place, exchanging a wide-eyed, wondering glance with her husband as she did. They hadn’t even known that the Eversea heir and George were acquainted.

The flickering candlelight revealed to Isolde that Mr. Eversea sported a little cleft in his square chin and that his thick, black brows were what made his blue eyes seem unusually brilliant.

He was in fact so arrestingly good looking that Isolde felt she had only two options: to stare in bald fascination, or look determinedly away in order to preserve her composure.

When Mr. Eversea’s head was turned toward her father, she stared.

If he recognized Isolde as the dancer at the folly, nothing apart from perhaps a certain amused crinkling at the corners of his eyes when they were introduced betrayed this. Then again, she’d changed out of her day dress and apron into her pink silk. Perhaps it was as good as a disguise.

It soon became clear that Mr. Eversea had no airs at all. His charm filled the room like sunlight.

He complimented the food and their décor with such sincere warmth her mother blushed like a girl, and he respectfully, almost diffidently asked her father for advice on a rare and costly book called Poisonous Plants Native to Sussex he was considering acquiring from Mr. Tingle.

This was so precisely the way to get her parents to like him it was like witnessing a magic trick.

Isolde was touched and amused, particularly because her instincts told her that Mr. Jacob Eversea didn’t have a diffident bone in his body.

This theory was supported by the fact that every time Mr. Eversea glanced in her direction during dinner his pupils flared like a candle flame caught in an updraft.

And every time they did, Isolde’s heart skipped in a painfully thrilling way.

“Jacob is always doing that,” George told everyone, as he accepted the gravy boat from the vicar. “Dragging me into tiny, cave-like bookshops so he can buy orphaned books emblazoned with long, eccentric titles.”

This made her father prop his head on his hands and beam fondly at the two boys, as if he could not imagine a more delightful pastime.

Isolde was happy and proud for George, because his easy, teasing rapport with Mr. Eversea suggested their friendship was genuine and equal, despite Mr. Eversea's heady social stature and the fact that the Sylvaine house could fit inside the Eversea house four times over.

He seemed perfectly comfortable to be dining in a house where the food was passed around from hand to hand, rather than served by footmen.

“I’ve been looking in particular for books about China. My plan to is to spend a year or so there when I finish my education,” Jacob volunteered. “I’ve been preparing for it for quite some time now. I hope to be leaving in a few months.”

Devastation jolted Isolde. Just the journey by ship to China would take a year.

It seemed sickeningly inconceivable that this evening could very well be the last time she ever saw him.

“I believe I might be able to recommend a book or two on the subject of the Orient, Mr. Eversea,” her father mused. “We’ll have a look at my library. How did you and George happen to meet?”

“We’ve taken to studying in a little coffee house near university,” Jacob told her father. “As it so happens, we got caught up in a philosophical discussion because of a book I’d found. Us and Wyatt Neeley—you’ve met him—and a few others.”

“It was written by Reverend George Berkeley,” George confirmed. “He has some interesting ideas. Or mad ones, depending upon whom you ask.”

“Berkeley? I don’t think I’ve read him.” Her father sounded surprised, as his habits with regards to books were awfully similar to Jacob’s.

“Berkeley suggests something to the effect that objects exist only when they are perceived,” Jacob explained. “He used trees as an example—do they exist only because we look upon them?”

A little silence ensued as everyone pondered this absolutely astonishing possibility.

“Fascinating,” her father breathed finally, and Isolde knew he meant it because he was leaning forward on his elbows in the way he had when he wanted to plunge into a topic.

“If I’m understanding you correctly…he’s positing, for example, that this dining table only exists because we’re all currently perceiving it? That our perception creates reality?”