Last Night's Scandal (The Dressmakers 5)

While he concentrated on the familiar task, confusion and frustration abated.

And during that time, he now discovered, the Olivia whirlwind had changed the landscape. She, the embodiment of disorder, had created calm.

The servants had settled into a proper routine, and in a matter of hours, the castle had begun to look like an abode instead of a desolate fortress.

Looking about him, Lisle saw peace and order. He’d forgotten what that was like. The meal had had a mellowing effect, and the wine, naturally, made everything pleasanter. Even the Harpies were more amusing and less exasperating.

At present they were drunk, but that was normal. For the moment, they were quiet, because Olivia was reading from one of Cousin Frederick Dalmay’s histories of Gorewood Castle.

The histories included the requisite ghost stories. There was the usual body inside the wall—this one a traitor who’d been tortured in the dungeon. He haunted the basement. There was the usual murdered pregnant serving maid. She appeared in the kitchen passage after weddings and births. There was a lady who appeared in the minstrels’ gallery when she felt like it, and a knight who on certain feast days haunted the second-floor chapel.

Now Olivia had come to the ghosts who loitered about the roof.

“ ‘Seven men accused of plotting the heinous murder were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered,’ ” she read. “ ‘Loudly protesting their innocence, they demanded a chance to prove it through trial. To everyone’s surprise, Lord Dalmay agreed. He had the villains taken up to the top of the south tower, and invited them to prove their innocence by jumping across the gap to the north tower. Any who succeeded would be proclaimed innocent. Some of Dalmay’s followers protested. His lordship was overly merciful, they said. No one could make the leap. They’d plummet to the ground and die instantly. For what they’d done, these men deserved a slow, agonizing death. But in Lord Dalmay’s realm, his word was law. Thus, one by one, the men stood upon the battlement. One by one, they sprang toward freedom. And one by one, six men fell to their death.’ ”

“Six?” Lisle said.

“ ‘One man did not die,’ ” Olivia read, “ ‘and Lord Dalmay abided by his judgment. The man was declared innocent and allowed to go free.’ ”

Lisle laughed. “The fellow survived a fall of one hundred six feet?”

“No, he made the leap,” Olivia said.

“Must have had prodigious long legs,” said Lady Withcote.

“You know what they say about long-legged men,” said Lady Cooper.

“That’s not legs, Agatha,” said Lady Withcote. “It’s the feet. Big feet, they say, big—”

“It’s physically impossible,” Lisle said. “The man would have to sprout wings.”

“What’s the distance between the two towers?” Olivia said. “Are you sure an agile man couldn’t make the leap?”

“There’s nothing like an agile man,” Lady Cooper said reminiscently.

“Remember Lord Ardberry?”

“How could I forget?”

Lisle met Olivia’s gaze. She was biting back laughter, as he was.

“Made a study of it,” said Lady Withcote. “From the time he was in India. Some sort of secret book, he said.”

“I thought it was a sacred book.”

“Maybe it was both. In any case, that’s why he learned Sanskrit.”

“Not that one needed to read anything in any language. You saw his collection of pictures.”

“Worth a thousand words, every one of them.”

“Quite as entertaining as Eugenia’s engravings.”

Lisle saw it in his mind’s eye, as clear as if he had the writing paper in front of him: Engrav One of Olivia’s provocative, crossed-out words.

“What engravings?” he said.

“Did you never see them?” said Lady Cooper. “I thought all the Carsington boys discovered them at one time or another. Highly educational.”

“I’m not, technically, a Car—”

“Really, Agatha,” said Lady Withcote. “As though Lord Lisle needs to be educated. The young man is nearly four and twenty, and he lives where girls dance naked in the street and men keep harems. For all we know he’s got a harem, and has tried all four hundred positions.”

“Millicent, you know perfectly well there are not four hundred. Even Lord Ardberry admitted that numbers two hundred sixty-three and three hundred eighty-four were physically impossible for anybody with a spine.”

Lisle looked at Olivia. “What engravings?” he said.

“Great-Grandmama’s,” she said in a bored voice. She put her book down, and rose from the chair.

“I’m going up to the roof,” she said. “I need fresh air. And I want to see how wide the gap is.” She collected her shawl and sauntered from the room.

It was most unfair.

She’d studied Great-Grandmama’s pictures. They were highly educational. She’d looked forward to experiencing those activities. But she’d kissed some men and allowed a few minor liberties and it had been disappointing. A little titillating—but that was mainly because of knowing she was misbehaving.

Then Lisle had come back, a fully grown man who’d probably learned kissing from oriental experts. He would go to an expert. And practice. Diligently.

Now she understood why the ladies talked so much about it and why Great-Grandmama had loved her one and only husband so much and why she’d been such a merry widow.

Not titillation.

Passion.

It didn’t require love, Great-Grandmama said. But love made a delicious sauce.

That was all very well, but passion had a nasty way of making one restless and vexed for no reason. Since Olivia had been so unlucky as to experience it for the first time with Lisle, she had to cope with balked passion, and that was most unpleasant.

She climbed up and up, wondering where all the cold air had vanished to. The wind wailed in the stairwell but it was about as cooling to her emotions as a hot desert wind.

She climbed round and round, up and up: past the second floor, then past the third floor, once the garrison’s quarters and now the servants’. Farther up she went, one last flight, then through the little door, and onto the roof at last.

She walked out to the wall, set her hands on it, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. The air was cool, beautifully cool, and it was quiet here, far away from all the talking.

She took another deep breath,

let it out, and opened her eyes.

Stars and stars and stars.

All around her, above her.

She’d never seen so many. And there was the moon, high and bright, approaching the full. It was so beautiful, this wondrous place.

“What engravings?” came a low voice behind her.

She did not turn around. “Oh, you know,” she said carelessly. “The naughty pictures they sell from under the counter at the print shops. Along with the ones Great-Grandmama collected when she traveled abroad. Everything from Aretino to the latest illustrations for Fanny Hill. She and the Harpies still cackle over them.”

“I guessed it was something of the sort,” Lisle said. His evening shoes made almost no sound on the stone floor, but she could feel him approaching.

He came to a stop beside her, nearly a foot away, and set his hands on the wall. “But you never told me. You raised the subject in a letter, then crossed it out, in that provoking way you have.”

“I can’t believe you remember that.” She stole a glance at him, and that was a mistake. Moonlight and starlight streaked his hair with silver and made polished marble of his profile.

“Of course I remember,” he said. “It was particularly aggravating at the time. I was—what?—fourteen or fifteen? Naturally, I was dying to see them, and furious with you for teasing me. ‘Ha, ha, Lisle,’ he said in singsong. ‘I have dirty pictures. You don’t.’ ”

“You didn’t need dirty pictures. You had dancing girls.”

He turned fully toward her and leaned his elbow on the parapet. He studied her face for the longest time.

She let him study her. She was a card player, a good one. No one could read her face.

“The dancing girls trouble you strangely,” he said.

“Of course they do,” she said. “Look at me.” She made a sweeping gesture, over the swell of skirts and ballooning sleeves.

“I’m looking,” he said.

“Me, in all this. Corseted and petticoated and hemmed in on every side.”

“That seems to be the fashion,” he said.

“They dance in the streets,” she said.