The Slightest Provocation

Chapter Twenty-four

Their meeting in the forest-her very unladylike hands, not to speak of the guilty frisson of being spied upon-had inflamed his imagination again.

He grinned, quite forgetting that he was being shaved at the moment.

“Careful, my lord.” Good luck that his valet hadn’t been holding the razor a quarter inch nearer his cheek, or Kit would finally have something like the dueling scar he’d once coveted, when he was too young and stupid to know better.

“Sorry, Belcher. My fault entirely.”

Neat and decent at last, dressed and shaved for a day’s travel. A pity, he thought, to disturb the excellent knot in his cravat-or to crease his linen or possibly to tear a button from his waistcoat. A pity, and the sooner the better too.

He was still grinning while he helped himself to a quick breakfast and bade good-bye to the family group around the table.

But in the unwieldy, inevitable way of these things, his mood took a precipitous shift in direction during the minutes it took him to quit the house. And now that he stood poised to step up into the traveling coach, his thoughts were a muddle of obscure anxieties and simple annoyance.

Must they have that grinning idiot Frayne up there on the box? Alas, it seemed that they did. Kit had requested the other, politer coachman, but the man had gotten a cold.

Frayne would have to do.

“We shall be taking the north road to Wakefield,” Kit told him. Blandly, patiently. “But first we shall be stopping at Beechwood Knolls.”

A gleam stole into the coachman’s eye.

No need to speak a warning-just to look one was quite good enough; Kit had learned that much, at least, from the old Eighth Marquess of Rowen. Gratifying to watch the coachman shrink down into his multiple capes, shivering in the chill of Lord Christopher’s glance, even as his brow grew moist in the morning sunlight. Sometimes one needed to manage one’s coachman, rather as one’s coachman managed the horses.

And as one wished one could manage one’s dreams.

For the quaint yet oddly disturbing dream he’d had last night had come back to haunt him. He’d found himself in a large, crowded room-or was it a street?-surrounded by Britons of all sort. Somehow, he knew that there were seventy thousand men present, most of whom appeared to be bleeding. (There’s violence already-Lord Sidmouth had suddenly appeared, whispered this to him, and disappeared back into the crowd.) But even as they bled, it seemed that all seventy thousand men were pointing, whispering, and laughing at Lord Kit, while Mr. Oliver stood on a podium and delivered a Latin oration.

Absurd. Meaningless.

But if one must dream…

For he’d also had some very pleasant ones last night. Think of those. Ah yes, as he slid onto the padded and tufted blue velvet upholstery. Dreams and memories too of past carriage journeys, the more recherché positions one could assume, as they had assumed during some well-remembered rides. (Times during the first year of their marriage, when the Curzon Street furniture had become too tame for them.) The positions worked better, though, with the help of extra carriage robes and cushions, particularly for tired knees on the jolting floor of the coach.

Good, excellent-Belcher had already laid the cushions and neatly folded blankets on the backward-facing seat.

Yes, let’s go, tell Frayne I’m ready. The valet nodded. Kit leaned back; Belcher climbed up to take his seat next to Frayne. The carriage jolted slightly and started down the avenue.

But he still wasn’t quite at his ease. Because they hadn’t undertaken this journey merely for its erotic possibilities. The aim of this journey was a serious one.

To find out more about the dangers threatening his nation-from a man he’d sworn never to speak to again.

Still, Mary was right. He owed it to himself to speak to Morrice. Could the London radicals really call out such large numbers of men?

And if Morrice appeared to be lying, if he really was as vile and low a person as Kit had been trying to convince himself he was for the last nine years…

Well, nothing would be lost, would it?

Except, perhaps, a sneaking hidden hope he’d barely admitted to himself of a possible reconciliation. Ah, well, if such a thing were impossible, better to know now.

Just get all the information. Understand the situation. Easier that way to follow orders. No doubt in the end he’d do exactly as he’d been told. Wait until the moment arose, then call out the militia, suppress the rebellion, arrest the Williamses and the Mertons, the Turners and the Watsons and the Weightmans (no surprise how well he knew their names by now).

Difficult but necessary. Banal, ordinary, clear, and inescapable as the day. Duty wasn’t a problem.

It was honor that presented more of a challenge. Honor and its Janus face, betrayal.

He’d promised Mary that he’d confront the man who’d betrayed him.

They passed through the gates of the park at Rowen. The gamekeeper saluted him from the side of his lodge.

He’d promised her… Not in so many words-but wasn’t that the curse and the blessing of loving an intelligent woman? He knew, and she knew, and she also knew that he knew that she knew… Yes, all right, enough of that-each and both of them knew perfectly well what he’d promised her.

Which was to confront all the betrayers in the case. Including the betraying little wretch that had been his younger self.

… Cheating and lying, whoring and not touching me for weeks… ignoring Richard just as you’d been ignoring me…

Yes, quite possibly one could count some of that as a betrayal of those one loved. A betrayal of oneself too, not to speak of the friend he’d… oh, all right, he had loved his friend Richard, even if it wasn’t so easy to use the word about a boyhood companion.

Betrayals all round. How cruel their younger selves had been.

Perhaps, he thought, we owe a debt of honor to our poor, flawed, frightened and deluded younger selves, to become the people we should have been, if only we could have.

The carriage had entered the gates at Beechwood Knolls.

Stupid name, the old marquess had sometimes muttered, Beechwood bloody Knolls. Even if it were merely a brewer’s holiday villa, purchased a scant three generations ago, one ought give it a more venerable name.

Never mind (as Kit had been astonished to learn, when Mary had taken him to be introduced to her parents) that they liked it just as it was.

“Well, it’s not exactly a country house.” Mrs. Penley had had an enchanting smile, and an intimate, confiding way of taking the arm Kit offered, even while he’d felt her husband glowering at his back when they went in to dinner. “Even with the wings and ells we’ve added onto it, it’s really only a house in the country, you see.”

He’d been charmed, but not convinced.

What a humorless young dunce I was, Kit thought: serious, ponderous, proud, and yet absurdly impatient, and about all the wrong things. Though hardly alone in that-damn it, Mary hadn’t had the patience either to listen to him, nights he’d spent wondering who his real father was and simultaneously fearing it above all things. Which anxieties, he supposed, hadn’t helped him stand up to the idiots at White’s.

The real wonder, it seemed to him now, was that they’d come as far as they had-that they’d be traveling together and stopping at an inn tonight, openly, as Lord and Lady Christopher. Still, given their past-and the unclarity of their present-he could only shudder at what the outcome of this journey might be.

The Rowen carriage had passed beyond the hedge. He could see the house in its entirety now-simple, rambling, inviting, and comforting as usual.

A comfort as well, her silhouette against the grayish bark of the giant tree as she rose to greet him. Looking far prettier (as the coach came nearer) than in last night’s dreams, or even than she had this morning.

Or was that how love worked itself out over time? Did familiarity have its own charms? Or was he simply growing old, staid, and avuncular as the young people at the assembly last night had made him feel?

Not old at all. And he’d prove it too.

Which led him nearly to tumble out of the carriage in his haste to grab her up, hand her in, get away and onto the road as soon as they could.

As though he could have cut short Mrs. Grandin’s polite inquiries as to his family’s comings and goings- because of course Elizabeth had reported Gerry and Georgy’s attendance at the assembly. And then one had to make all the happily optimistic responses (thank heaven he could speak them truly) to Mary’s sister’s well-meaning hopes for the present marquess’s health.

Neighborly. Civilized. And in Kit’s current state of confusion, nearly unbearable, until at long last her things were packed, she seated, their final good-byes made, he and she side by side, surrounded by all that padded and tufted velvet, Mary seeming every bit as befuddled as he.

Quite as though she hadn’t pawed so deliciously at him this morning, she now appeared shy and oddly formal. The few inches of space between their bodies might have been the Channel at Dover.

Most distressingly, she was quite uncharacteristically tongue-tied. Which didn’t do much for his own loquacity.

“Your sister is looking well,” he managed finally.

She nodded, evidently grateful that he’d thought of anything at all to say.

“You noticed, then. Yes, she’s very happy-and I am too, for her. Her daughter, Elizabeth, had a wonderful time last night at Cauthorn, and, mirabile dictu, she wanted to tell Jessie about it. Jessie’s been floating on air ever since.”

“She’s quite the little flirt, the pretty daughter.”

Mary raised her eyebrows. “Really. Perhaps Jessica ought to have accompanied them. But we thought that with Miss Kimball there…”

“Oh, not a very bad sort of flirt. No need to worry; she kept it all within the bounds of propriety. A little giddy was all-a bit overwhelmed, having just learned the effect of her looks on a large number of young men simultaneously.”

“Did you dance with her?”

“Once. She didn’t dance much. Spent most of the time promenading about with Gerry.”

“Which couldn’t have pleased her ladyship your sister-in-law. I should imagine she has higher aims for him.”

“Actually, Susanna confided to me that if the presence of so pretty a girl could keep him at home for a while, she’d have no objection to a possible attachment. She quite likes your niece, you know, having worked so hard to transform her into less of a Penley.”

“I see.”

“But in truth, I think it’s your niece who’ll object to a too-hasty disposition of her affections. It looks to me that she’s set upon having a brilliant season next year and enjoying every minute of it. Though she does need to become a little more subtle in her flirting.”

“Like her cousin Fannie.”

“Really?” He shrugged, since for his own part he’d found Miss Fannie Grandin not at all a flirt, but on the contrary quite artless and sincere. Still, they’d fairly exhausted that conversational gambit. For how much could one say about a pair of green girls, pretty as they might be?

A bit of a relief, that, she thought. Silly, no doubt, to have worried about it.

Her turn now, to offer a topic of conversation.

“We’ve got a nice day, anyway, for our journey. There will be some more rain later in the week, they say, but…”

She heard her own voice fade in midsentence; the sudden dismayed realization on her face must have been all too patent. Had they truly been reduced to discussing the weather?

His laughter boomed out through the carriage.

“Do you remember how shy you were,” he asked, “our first time after the marriage ceremony?”

She nodded, smiling despite herself. “Such as it was-the ceremony, I mean. I don’t think we vowed to anything except that we were ‘joined in the heat of the moment.’ But yes. I was seized by a terrible fear that now I should have to do it properly, like a married woman. Whatever a married woman actually did with her husband.”

“Yes, it must have taken me… oh, a good twenty-five minutes to convince you that you were quite acceptable as you were.”

“You’re wrong. It took you an hour, at least.”

“If you insist, but it’s not true. I remember expressly.” She shrugged her shoulders.

“Of course,” he continued, “we have all day before we arrive at Wakefield.”

“Yes, obviously.”

“We could entertain ourselves by betting on it. Oh, just to pass the time. To see if Lord and Lady Christopher, public and peaceable as we are today, would take as long as an hour, to… well, to do it properly, or at least acceptably…”

“An hour, you say.” She fumbled for her reticule, to retrieve the timepiece within it.

“I’ve got a better one.”

“I noticed, a rather showy thing you must have bought to replace the one the girl pinched in Calais… oh, Kit.”

For the watch he’d pulled from his fob wasn’t at all the dreadful one of too-yellow gold that he’d used to check the time in the cottage.

This one was smaller, made of white gold and platinum and done in a quaint, old-fashioned design. She’d agonized for hours about which of the timepieces displayed upon black velvet would be the thing for his twenty-second birthday. And then felt even more of a goose after she’d chosen it. He’d had so many pocket watches stolen in the rough neighborhoods he frequented; this fearfully expensive one would probably be gone within the week. Anyway, she’d supposed it was silly to buy a gift mostly for the words she wanted engraved upon it.

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did, till we loved?

Unsigned, for she hadn’t liked to put her own name where the poet’s should be. (Her papa hadn’t had the faintest idea how the obscure book of sonnets had gotten into his library. No doubt as part of some job lot, he’d surmised, to flesh out the collection-someday he must catalog what was on the shelves and clear out the rubbish too. She’d been lucky, she thought now, that he’d evidently never opened the volume; if he had known the cast of the poet’s mind, he’d have snatched it out of her hands.)

Kit had laughed exultantly a decade ago when he’d read the inscription.

“It’s a good-luck piece,” he’d exclaimed, “I can feel it.”

Not that his luck at the gaming tables had improved any. But there must have been some charm about the object, for its having eluded the fingers of so many pickpockets-until Calais, at any rate.

“Thomas,” he told her now, “caught sight of a fellow selling it in the street-in Paris, of all places. He asked the dowager marchioness whether she might not like to buy it back for me. Odd, isn’t it, the way fenced goods sometimes make their way to quite distant places?”

She nodded. And equally odd how lost things sometimes made their way home again.

She might have wept that morning at Calais when he’d told her the girl had taken it-or shed a few tears simply to learn that he’d kept it with him it during all the years intervening. She might have-if she hadn’t been so determined not to allow him to provoke her.

And now that he had it back again… typical, she thought, to find herself quite without a handkerchief.

“But that’s not at all the response I’d hoped for,” he protested. “Here,” he said, “use mine. If you must cry, Mary.”

“It seems that I must.” Barely able to speak for the superfluity of tears slipping down her cheeks.

The inches of space between their bodies had melted away. His arm tightened around her shoulder while she whimpered, wiped, and sniffled; sobbed, blotted, and wiped her face again, at last tossing away the handkerchief and drawing him toward her for a very long, moist kiss.

She turned away now to fumble with the knotted shawl on the backward-facing seat.

Fixing his eyes on the hills and meadows out the window, he tried to ignore the busy little noises issuing from her side of the coach. Rustle of fabric. Slosh of liquid. A cork prised from its bottle.

And now the familiar, piquant vinegar smell. He’d always been curious. Sometime (if there were to be a sometime in their future) he should ask her exactly what she used to douse her sponge with.

Or perhaps not. Women’s business.

Of course, she’d been using it in the cottage too, quite as maddeningly insistent upon it as ever. But it felt particularly outré here in the carriage.

The smell wasn’t exactly unpleasant. In truth, it rather provoked the imagination. Exciting in its way, a bit disturbing. Images wafted toward him on currents of air-pretty white fingers moving upward past her long white thighs.

Upward. Inside her. Ah.

Even if it did rather interrupt the moment’s spontaneity.

She has every right, he reminded himself. Of course she has.

And if she hadn’t known to do it back then? Well, that would’ve put us in a pretty fix, the two of us being hardly more than children ourselves.

What would they have done so long ago if they’d conceived a child?

He’d always wondered what it might have looked like.

Presentable enough, he supposed. While as to the matter of its character? Willful and demanding, without a doubt. Disobedient? Yes, without question.

Stubborn.

But hardly stupid or insipid.

A challenge, rather.

He jumped at the sudden sharp tapping on his shoulder. Her voice came throaty, amused, close to his ear. “Have you lost interest, darling?”

Woolgathering, while he should at least have been unbuttoning himself. He laughed and made short work of it now. “What do you think?”

He’d show her whether he’d lost interest. “Come here.”

Rising, turning, and moving to straddle him-naturally, she’d chosen the very instant when the coach had begun to pitch about, tossing the both of them forward and bidding fair to bump the top of her head against the ceiling, which might be covered with padded velvet but which (as he knew from experience) could be bloody uncomfortable to crack one’s pate against.

He held her tightly against that possibility, as she clambered atop him and both of them struggled to maintain their balance.

No, she hadn’t bumped herself.

“Thanks,” she whispered, and kissed him again, her hands clasped tight about the back of his neck.

No more pitching about, it seemed; at least for the moment the road below them had smoothed itself out. He slipped his hands under her gown, cradling her arse, caressing her with his fingertips-stroking one careful finger along the crevice and then between her legs where she was just beginning to moisten. She closed her eyes. And when she opened them, her gaze had softened.

“Thanks again.” Her voice came more faintly now, rough, unsteady, her body swaying, trembling beneath his hands.

He touched her near the small of her back, just below where the stays were tied. Fascinating to feel the play of little muscles there as she lowered herself onto (no, he corrected himself, it was around him; no, onto him). Well it was both things, wasn’t it? Even if she would insist on being so bloody slow about it.

She liked to test herself, to see if she could reserve control-to take him at her own pace and as she would, inch by fraction of an inch, opening, softening, and then grasping, engulfing him. Well, almost engulfing him, for he’d continued to grow, to lengthen and thicken as she made her leisurely way downward.

Teasing him, ceasing to move for moments at a time, bracing herself on her knees, having her own subtle pleasures along the way. “Selfish,” he whispered once. And “you’ll pay for that later…” hissing at her, with knit brow and reddened face. She kissed him lightly. He caught her lower lip between his teeth; she could feel the pinch of it.

But it’s his own fault, she thought, for continuing to grow as he enters me…

Wasn’t there a mathematics for this sort of thing? Perhaps if she found the right equation, moved with some precise degree of slowness, they could go on forever, never…

So much for mathematics. Damn the vile coachman anyway; they’d hit another bump in the road and were suddenly thrust hard against one another. Not even air between their flesh-their sweating bellies and thighs slipped and slapped against each other-Lord, she hadn’t prepared herself to be filled so deep; skewered, she expected, was the ungraceful word she wanted. In up to the hilt, the sort of masculine metaphor that would doubtless appeal to him.

Indeed. For he was chuckling with pleasure, bouncing her on his knees with great gusto, thrusting up and into her and glorying, it seemed, in every bump and jolt, every rock-hell, every stone and pebble and rut in the road.

Wasn’t this supposed to be a well-sprung coach?

Ah, well, subtlety wasn’t everything. Finesse had its limits.

She giggled and gave him a few good bounces back.

He’d buried his face in the spaces above her clavicle. Something pricked his face-an errant pin, he supposed, at the neckline of her dress. He moved his tongue upward now, along the sinews of her neck; he could hear the pulse in her throat, sense the tremors in her belly. Feel all the glorious clutchings inside of her, where she held him so tightly and warmly and suited her movements so sweetly to his.

Followed his movements-there, is that really so difficult, Mary?

She’d thrown her head back, spine taut as a bow-string (Mary Artemis, goddess of the hunt-I think her name is beautiful, your lordship), movements fast and fluid; he thought of silver sunlight on swiftly moving water, a few yellow leaves of autumn poplar swept dizzily along by the current. Lovely to watch her slip into her ecstasies, mouth loose and careless, loud cries and even a low laugh bubbling up from deep in her throat. Her face glowed; he licked the sweat from where it had pooled in the hollow below her plump lower lip.

But when had the brook become a rushing river? How did it come to exert such force, gathering him up, pulling him along? Her eyes keen, bright, happy, amused.

Catch me, Kit, take my hand. Too stubborn? Well, then I shall wait for you on the other side.

He swam, he leaped, shimmering like a brown trout in sunlight-his vision a rainbow of fragmented color, quick, bright, dazzled but safe at home within her, falling into her and out of consciousness for a moment, even as he clasped her into the circle of his arms and felt himself engirded by her thighs.

Thus intertwined, they must have slid down off the velvet seat cushions, almost to the wooden floor, jolted and tossed about by the wheels and the springs and the rocks and the road and…

“Kit, darling…”

“Ummmm…” There was a fierce cramp in his left leg, an ache somewhere below his left buttock, and some throbbing where his shoulder had been torn during battle.

“My love.” Her whisper somewhere between amused and urgent. “Do you suppose we could get back on the seat? Your bum’s very heavy on my fingers, and I’m quite bruised at my right hip…”

No serious harm done, they decided, each and both of them breathing deeply, testing and trying limbs and digits, groaning about bumps and bruises to the trunk, the bum and hips, and each of the extremities. He rotated his shoulder-anxiously at first and then with greater calm as the throbbing began to subside.

No blood except a tiny drop of it, she told him, on his exquisitely shaved cheek. “Let me lick it off. No, it didn’t stain your linen. But I do apologize, for being such a pincushion.”

“Don’t apologize. Quite fun in its way…”

“In its way, yes.”

“Exciting. Challenging.”

“An experience, one might call it.”

“Hardly subtle, though.”

A contemplative silence followed.

“There’s a bottle of wine in the basket, if you’d like any.”

“Thanks, not so early in the day.”

“Springwater?”

“Yes, that might be nice.”

Jessie had packed a couple of pewter plates and cups. “You don’t mind drinking it from the bottle, do you? I’m afraid I might spill it.”

“The bottle’s fine. Give it here.”

They drained the bottle, moving closely and silently together on the seat while they watched the hills and fields and the bright blue sky with its fat clouds slip by, until very softly at first, they began to laugh.

More loudly now. Raucously. Helplessly.

“I can remember when it was nothing to us…”

“Easiest thing in the world, step into a coach, slam the door behind, and go at it for hours… twisting and turning like gimlets… the longer the journey, the better.”

“Yes, and the rougher the road as well. With you sometimes suspended in the most extraordinary attitude between the seats…”

“Before I got so bashed up, I’m afraid, in battle. And you, fairly somersaulting… or is that simply a latter-day fancy of mine? Did I dream it sometime during the time we were apart?”

“No, it really happened. I was quite balletic; I could do splits like an opera girl. Once…”

“… upon a time.”

Another silence.

A long, gentle kiss, eyes opened very wide, in a shared effort to see each other as they were now.

“But you won’t object, will you,” she whispered, “if we wait until we’re in an actual bed tonight…?”

“Actually, I was going to suggest a very similar course of action. Mary?”

“Ummm?”

“What else is in that basket? I’m excessively hungry right now.”

Bread and meat, strawberries and Stilton, eaten from each other’s fingers. The fields and meadows, grown greener since the recent rainstorms, slipped by outside the carriage window. Stone walls separated the fields; hawthorn grew in profusion alongside. The landscape growing hillier, more picturesque as they proceeded; limestone would give way to gritstone, meadow to moor, as they made their way north toward Wakefield, in Yorkshire.

Her head on his shoulder, they peered together out the window, at the blues and greens, browns and grays, ubiquitous creamy hawthorn and occasional brilliant sprinklings of late spring flowers.

“ ‘… Till we loved.’ ” She murmured the words from the poem. “ ‘Were we not wean’d till then? But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?’ ”

He stroked her hair.

“ ‘For love all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere.’ ”

Even a room that jostled and jolted on its springs, rolling over a country road that (at least from the point of view of a pair of travelers forced to admit themselves indisputably past their first youth) could well do with a bit of improvement and repaving.