A Duke in Shining Armor

Lady Olympia took the letter from him. She seemed calm, but for the faint flush along her cheekbones. She adjusted her spectacles, though they couldn’t be straighter, and opened the letter. She moved a little nearer to the window to read it, and Ripley found himself eyeing the latch, and wondering if it would offer the same difficulties as the one at Newland House . . . if she decided to make a run for it.

But why would she do that? She had nothing to run from. Ashmont was safe away in London and Uncle Fred, diabolical as he could be under the smooth surface of urbane good breeding, wasn’t proposing to take her back with him.

Well, his lordship couldn’t, could he? Aunt Julia must accompany her, or another respectable lady—or her mother. In any event, if Lady Olympia wanted to go back to London she would, and if she didn’t she wouldn’t, and none of it was up to Ripley, was it?

In that case, you could marry me.

How will you feel in a year, in five years?

Ripley was dimly aware of Lord Frederick moving to his aunt’s side, and taking a chair nearby, and murmuring something, and Aunt Julia making some sort of answer. But that was the background, and they might as well have been the paintings hanging on the wall.

All Ripley truly saw was Olympia, her head bent over the letter, adjusting her spectacles from time to time. Her hair was not falling down, exactly, but it wasn’t nearly as neat as it had been when she’d come into the library before . . . before . . . before . . .

Not so neat as before he’d kissed her and done more than he had any right to do, than was honorable to do though it was so little, not nearly enough . . .

You could marry me.

How will you feel . . .

At last Lady Olympia refolded the letter. The elders in the room must have been watching her without seeming to, because they fell silent.

She set the letter down on a table near the door.

She went out of the room.

Chapter 13

For what seemed like a lifetime, nobody said anything.

Ripley blinked, wondering if he’d dreamed what had happened. When he opened his eyes, he thought he might see Olympia reappear in his line of sight, still holding the letter, or looking up and straightening her spectacles before she spoke. But she was gone. He heard her quick footsteps retreating through the passageway leading to the Great Hall. He caught the sound of a door closing.

He started toward the doorway she’d gone out of, but Aunt Julia got in the way. The mechanical chair, not being as flexible as his body, prevented his squeezing by.

She snatched up the letter and unfolded it. “What on earth did he tell her?”

Lord Frederick moved to her, creating a larger obstacle in front of the doorway. “Only what he ought,” he said.

“Only what he ought!” Aunt Julia echoed. “And what was that, pray tell, and how much do you know of it? Was this your work?”

“Will you get out of the way?” Ripley said. “I’m not interested in the letter. I need—”

“‘You suppose my sentiments have changed,’” Aunt Julia read, “‘and you are right in that, but not in the way you assume. My feelings for you have only grown stronger, as has my dismay at the prospect of losing you.’”

“I need to—” Ripley tried again, but his aunt went on reading, and while he tried to maneuver around her and Uncle Fred, he couldn’t help hearing.

“‘—destroyed my peace and obliged me to examine my behavior, as I admit I ought to have done long ago, before asking you to take the very great step of entrusting your life to my keeping. The past few days have caused me to think, and these thoughts have ranged over my faults and misdeeds. I understood these were more than trivial, else they would not have raised doubts and fears in your mind great enough to drive you to a desperate course of action. You write harshly of yourself, but my feelings toward you are far from harsh. I can only admire your courage and daring, and beg you to forgive me for causing you to take a risk that ought not to have been necessary.’”

Not Ashmont’s style of writing but his sentiments, yes. Of this Ripley had no doubt, as he had no doubt of Uncle Fred’s turning those sentiments into something rather more articulate than Ashmont’s usual careless and all-but-incomprehensible style.

The night before the wedding . . . the things Ashmont had said about her. The soft, wondering way in which he’d said, She was kind.

But he’d said much more: about her grace and intelligence and liveliness and humor, and about her hiding her light under a bushel. How clever she was, and handsomer than others realized—as though spectacles could turn a pretty woman ugly. But it was all to the good, nobody realizing, because another fellow would have snatched her up by now.

Aunt Julia read on, and the letter grew more passionate and compelling, but Ripley, moving toward the door, barely heard above the noise in his brain, where a battle was going on between right and wrong, honor and desire, You Must Let Her Go and You Can’t Let Her Go.

He heard his aunt say, “This is monstrous unfair, sir.”

And Lord Frederick said, “To whom?”

That was the last Ripley heard as he wheeled himself through the passage and into the Great Hall, where he snapped at the footman Tom, who hastily opened the door for him.

“Which way did she go?” Ripley said.

Tom pointed. “Down the path to the right, Your Grace.”

The path was gravel, not the easiest surface to negotiate in a mechanical chair, as Ripley had discovered earlier. But if his grandmother could do it, he could. This awareness made the experience no less frustrating. On foot—on two good feet, that is—he might have caught up with Olympia easily, though at the moment he couldn’t see her. Still, she couldn’t have gone far in the few minutes he’d been delayed.

He went on, and came to another set of pathways, these simply packed dirt. He spotted one of the gardeners not far away and called to him.

The man, one of the older staff—Hill, was his name—hurried to him, cap in hand. “Your Grace.”

“The lady, Hill,” Ripley said. “Which way did she go?”

Hill scratched his head and looked about him, frowning. “Hard to say exactly, Your Grace, but she looked to be going southward, toward the river.”

Ripley wheeled himself along the garden path, through twists and turns among plantings and statuary that reduced his view of his surroundings to what lay directly ahead, and then only a small distance ahead. At times, the world opened up, but it was a while before he finally spied her, a tiny figure in the distance.

As he left the large, formal gardens, the relatively flat landscape about the house’s immediate environs gave way to the park’s gently sloping ground. He caught a glimpse of her, moving in the direction of the fishing house where he and his friends and sister had spent so much of their time in years past.

Ripley made slow progress. Though he traveled slightly downhill now, the ground was rougher and more overgrown. Meanwhile, the bushes and trees along the twists and turns of the path blocked his view. Now and again he caught a glimpse of Olympia, not so tiny a figure as before, and he remembered the day in the Newlands’ garden—was it only a few days ago?—when he’d followed the flashes of white through the shrubbery. Now it seemed to him as though he’d been chasing her for all his life.

He should have chased her before, years before. He’d known she was there, among the wallflowers and hens and feeble old men. He’d never wondered why. He’d taken it for granted she’d always be there. He’d never given it any thought. Had he somehow assumed it was for his convenience? Had he assumed she waited, like some lady in her castle, for him to come riding up, like the knight in a romance, to take her away? When he was good and ready?

“Thinking,” Ripley muttered. “Stop it.”

The vista opened up a moment later, and he saw her, closer now, within hailing distance. “Olympia!” he shouted.

She gave a start and turned.

“Go away!” she cried, and marched on, at n

o slow pace. He bumped along, twice into trees. The day, which had dawned relatively fair, had grown cloudy, and the warmth had become oppressive. His sweating hands slipped on the handles, causing the chair to veer off the path.

“Dammit, Olympia!”

“Go away!”

“I need to talk to you!”

“No!”

She stormed on.

He struggled with the chair, which more and more objected to the terrain, the wheels not cooperating fully with the winches and rolling him into bushes. He bumped against small rocks, and the slope, gentle as it was, still drew him down faster while he fought to stay on the path.

She kept on, and it ought to have been easy enough to follow, but the path grew rougher still. Trees and shrubbery, which hadn’t been cut back, apparently, for the past year or more, encroached. Apparently nobody had bothered, either, with clearing away the various pebbles and nuts and other debris that had rolled or washed into it.

Though the chair supposedly worked smoothly in any terrain, it hadn’t been designed for wilderness travels. Ripley was trying to steer it while preventing its yielding to gravity and rolling headlong down to the river. To do this, he needed three hands. Having only the usual pair, he had his left hand on one winch and had to manage the right side with his right elbow while his right hand remained on the rod that stopped the wheels, which wasn’t working as well as it might.

He was only about twenty yards behind his quarry when his cramped, sweating hand slipped from the brake handle. Before he could regain control, the chair rolled forward. He turned a handle to one side, to go off the path, where the undergrowth would slow him, but the chair bumped on a rock. The right handle came off in his hand, the chair wobbled sideways briefly, then bowled down the path, straight toward the water.

He looked at the useless handle in his hand.

He threw it aside.

He let go of the other handle.