Page 22 of The Lover’s Eye

By the time Marriane and Isobel reached the upstairs drawing room, Isobel felt herself being smothered.

The pressure in her head had grown to unbearable intensity, a constrictive band that refused to relent.

Facing the close room with its choking damask curtains and high-stoked fire only intensified the breathless sensation.

Isobel put a hand to her forehead, wavering in the doorway. “Dearest, I think I’ll retire early. I’ve got quite a megrim coming over me.”

Marriane sank into her favorite spot, her pallid skin turning orange by the flames leaping from the grate. “Are you concocting a tale? Like you did when you wished to beg off the Sempills?”

I really must stop divulging my every thought , Isobel thought morbidly. “No. I assure you this is in earnest.”

?

Rather than take their port at the dinner table, Pemberton proposed the men retire to his study. “I am not yet ready to go up to the ladies,” he said with a groan, downing his glass and sitting in one fluid movement. “I shall have to muster the courage.”

Giles mimicked this action, his lips seeking his glass far more hungrily than was his usual habit. “Tell me, why is Miss Ridgeway so adamant to have a come out? That was all they spoke of tonight.”

“God, I am so thoroughly sickened of hearing the subject.” Pemberton massaged the skin around his eyes with one hand. “By the by, it was my wife doing a considerable bit of that talking. As it always is.”

Pemberton reached for the decanter at his side, speaking as he poured. “In truth, I don’t know what all the devil is afoot with those two. Marriane is determined to give her a Season, but Isobel only has a singular aim: she refuses to marry Sempill.”

Pemberton leant up, offering Giles a fresh pour from the decanter. He accepted, though the brandy’s scent was unpleasant under his nose. A strange feeling of foreboding was gripping him, and he took a large gulp.

“Marriane had the gall to ask me if she could go to London with her, but the fact is, there is no way in hell my wife is travelling such a distance in her feeble health. I’m like to never get my damned heir as it is.”

“Will anyone else even be a willing sponsor? The Season started nigh on two months ago.” Giles took pains to keep his ravenous curiosity from his voice.

“Only God knows. One has already refused, but my wife can be awfully convincing.” Pemberton cocked his head to one side, shrugging his shoulders lightly. “I should only be too delighted if you’d take the problem off my hands and offer for the girl.”

“I’m afraid the idea wouldn’t appeal to her,” Giles mumbled into his glass.

She seemed loathe for him to be in her company tonight.

It was killing his confidence, even as he admired her, drank in the privilege of being near her.

She was even more beautiful than he remembered, the elusive silvery shade of her gown making her eyes sing.

Pemberton chortled. “I don’t expect she’s picky, after the way Sempill behaved with her.”

The glass almost slipped from Giles’s clammy fingers. Pemberton met his gaze and acquiesced his visible interest. “Captain Sempill took liberties with her.”

Giles’s stomach churned. He thought he might cast up his accounts on the plush Turkish carpet, but managed to swallow once, now twice. “Do you mean to say she was hurt?”

The careful regulation he’d had on his voice was lost. He sounded weak, but that vulnerability was braced against an undercurrent of fury.

“Not so serious as all that,” Pemberton said with a flap of his hand. “Sempill found her walking alone and held her against her wishes. He did nothing more than kiss her—nothing the rest of us haven’t done in our own courtships. The only difference being she didn’t welcome his advances.”

The only difference. Giles could have choked on the vastness of that diminution. “Surely Miss Ridgeway did not confess this to you directly?”

A wicked smile stretched one corner of Pemberton’s mouth, and he swirled his nearly empty glass. “Does my wife look capable of keeping secrets to you?”

“What little I know of Lady Sempill, it’s a wonder she hasn’t forcibly demanded an engagement,” Giles said, speaking in part to himself. Many people would see such an act as rendering Isobel’s virtue irrevocably compromised.

Oh God. Lord Ridgeway seemed like just the sort of old-fashioned man to think that way. Was that why he’d turned Giles away?

“The old tabby knows how to play the game,” Pemberton said. “Though it seems she’s growing impatient. She tried to create a scandal at the Everly’s ball.”

Giles forgot he disliked brandy. The liquid raced down his throat with dry, numb heat as Pemberton explained what had happened. He knew he hadn’t been kind in the village this morning, but now he understood the full, horrid weight of his words. They swirled in his head with nauseating force.

Unless your betrothed deems it necessary for propriety’s sake.

No wonder Isobel wanted to keep her distance from him! That foolish comment had been made in a moment’s reaction; a combination of shock and hurt and envy. He’d had no idea what hardships she had been facing.

He tried to present a mask of calm indifference as he followed Pemberton up the stairs to the drawing room, but his vision flicked a shade slower than the movement of his eyes and he gripped the banister with damp palms. He felt the effects of the drink in his veins, and the full shame of his actions pulsed along with it.

How was he going to enter the room and sit near her?

How was he going to smile and play some trite game, when all he wanted was to have her to himself and beg her forgiveness?

The task before him was daunting, but when he entered the room and did not find Isobel there at all, he unearthed a new depth to his hopelessness.

“She wasn’t feeling well,” Marriane said, her voice a bit like an echo chamber in Giles’s head.

He endured a few games of Vingt-un, losing pitifully each time.

Words seemed to be a near impossibility, and smiling was a complete one.

Pemberton’s revelation had reduced him to two things: thinking about Isobel and looking for her.

His eyes spent more time on the drawing room doors than they did on the cards laid before him.

When his host and hostess were at last ready to retire, Giles insisted he could show himself to the door. The time spent in that hot room, paired with his overindulgence, had made him perspire, and he wiped his face with a handkerchief before descending the steep staircase.

It seemed the cruelest thing in the world to leave Shoremoss now. He had been lucky Pemberton accepted his forwardness with so much grace and he had gotten to share dinner with her. It was not a trick he could repeat again so soon.

As the footman returned with his hat, coat, and gloves, Giles was struck by an idea. “Might I have a piece of notepaper and a pen?”

The footman stared at him blankly before gazing over his shoulder and up the stairs, as if he expected conflicting orders from Pemberton. Giles sighed, wishing the Shoremoss servants were as sly as his own Mr. Finch. He pulled a coin from his purse and pressed it into the footman’s hand.

“A piece of notepaper. And a pen.”

Perhaps they weren’t sly, but at least they were susceptible to being greased in the fist. He was led to a small desk to dash off his note in blurred haste.

Miss Ridgeway,

I must beg your pardon for my harsh words this morning. I misunderstood your circumstances, but that will be an issue no longer. I have not earned your favor. I do not deserve it. But—

Say you will see me again.

Come to Cambo House and see the gardens in bloom, just as we spoke of in winter. Allow me to prove my worth to you.

Trevelyan

“Take this to Miss Ridgeway,” he said, depositing the meticulously folded notepaper into the footman’s hand. “I’ll wait here for her response.”

The young man ducked his chin and took off for the stairs with dizzying speed. Either he was anxious to earn another coin, or it was Giles’s head that was swimming from all the port and brandy in his gut.

As he waited, his impatience grew to gnawing strength. His tapping boot heel dispensed echoing clicks on the tile, and the swinging weight in the grandfather clock made him want to punch someone—himself, of course. Elias Sempill would also have sufficed.

No. He wanted to kill Elias Sempill.

After several minutes, he began to fear Isobel was truly ill, indisposed beyond the point of writing. He had the strange and impetuous compulsion to race up the stairs and open each door in search of her, when the footman reappeared.

Giles swallowed. There was something white and square in his left hand. “Here you are, sir.”

The white notepaper was warm in Giles’s hand. Logic told him that sensation had been lent by the timid servant standing before him, but he wanted for all the world to imagine the heat had been transferred from Isobel’s own body.

He cleared his throat, placing another coin in the footman’s palm. “Thank you for your discretion.”

The man disappeared, leaving Giles alone with Isobel’s missive. His heart pounded as he opened it along the paper’s crisp folds.

I feel it necessary you include my brother and sister. As for myself—

Saturday. 11 o’clock would suit.

Giles crushed the note in his fist, his hand convulsively closing in mingled joy and relief.

?

Isobel stared at the note in wonder. It did not assuage the pain in her head, but bewildered her enough to distract from it.

When she heard a faint knocking at her door, she had expected Marriane, or perhaps Betsey. When the person had not responded to her entreaties to enter, Isobel had begun to suspect something was afoot.

Wrapping a large, concealing night rail about herself, she had opened the door to a timid footman. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, miss,” he’d said in a whisper. “I’ve a message from Lord Trevelyan.”

Isobel’s body had frozen, her hand wavering over the bright paper being extended toward her. She had managed to take it, and began easing the door closed. “T-Thank you.”

“Miss?”

The footman’s voice had been high with anxiety, an appeal to keep the barrier open between them. But the line of connection was truly threading between her and Trevelyan, not the downcast servant doing the earl’s bidding.

Isobel had paused in closing the door. “Yes?”

“He is downstairs. He awaits a response.”

The encounter had been hours ago now, if the mantel clock held true, but Isobel found herself unable to think of anything else.

Moonlight streamed in through the window beside her bed, falling over the notepaper and making it glow blue-white between her fingers.

What had possessed him to make such an intimate gesture?

She could assume he’d learned of her ‘circumstances’ from Pemberton. How much did he know? Did he know what Elias had done to her? Did Pemberton even know as much?

Would they share her father’s opinions, and attempt to force her into marriage with the man who had harmed her?

Heat rose up her neck, making her feel more exposed than the thin fabric of her nightdress did.

The idea of Trevelyan’s guilty conscience was permissible to Isobel’s logical mind; his urgency in writing an apology note less plausible, but not impossible.

It lay in her hands, after all. But her brain wrestled to believe the rest. His entreaty for her to join him at Cambo House, another reference to her impromptu stay there in winter, and his doggedness in demanding a response while he waited below.

The footman’s nerves had been palpable. Isobel wondered how insistent Trevelyan had been when he’d asked for a reply.

As she’d hurried to jot down a reply, she told herself it was only polite to submit to Trevelyan’s wishes.

She would like to see the gardens at Cambo House, after all.

But now that she was alone, lying in bed with nothing for company but his letter, she felt the low thrum of attraction in her body, the same sensation he’d coaxed from her months earlier.

Isobel knew she had said yes because of him. Yes to him, however foolish she may be.

Allow me to prove my worth to you.

She found her eyes tracing those curvaceous ink marks more than all the rest. She had not expected that phrase from his cool, distant deportment, but then again, she acknowledged she knew so little of him.

Whatever strange intimacy they shared remained largely unspoken, communicated through invisible threads and earnest gazes.

When sleep at last found her, Trevelyan’s note was still clasped in her hands.