Chapter 2

CHAPTER2

“Mrs. Brightmore . . . ” My voice trailed off. It was patently not Mrs. Brightmore. It was someone tall and trim and most definitely male.

“Not Mrs. Brightmore,” the man said, echoing my thoughts. I raised the small lamp, throwing his face into the light.

A square jaw with a straight nose and clear green eyes. A high forehead and a wide, sharp-cornered mouth. The dark stubble on that sunkissed jaw and his tousled hair told me that he’d been traveling; the silk waistcoat and well-worn riding boots told me that he was a gentleman.

He had to be Mr. Markham, yet surely the country gentleman Solicitor Wickes had described was much, much older.

“Sorry,” I said. Apology seemed like the best course of action here. “I was having trouble sleeping and . . . ”

He didn’t answer. He walked over to a low buffet in the corner and rang a bell. A quiet but uncomfortable minute followed where I wondered if I should speak again, if I was in some sort of trouble, and then Mrs. Brightmore appeared, holding her own lamp with her bloodless mouth already puckered in displeasure. She saw me first and her eyes narrowed, clearly assuming that it had been me who had roused her so imperiously from her bed, but then the gentleman stepped into the lamplight.

“Mr. Markham!” she exclaimed. “But we weren’t expecting you home until next week.”

“Change of plans,” he said shortly. His voice had a hint of a rasp to it, a huskiness that set it apart from the normally smooth and polished voices one heard in large houses. Only the barest trace of a Yorkshire accent spoke to his roots here. “A fire, Mrs. Brightmore. Supper too.”

“Of course, sir,” she said. “Cook is probably asleep and we dined several hours ago . . . ”

“I’ll wait,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” With a serrated glance at me, she left the doorway.

Within minutes a fire was lit by a servant, a handsome young man I hadn’t seen before. He smiled at me before he left the room. Mr. Markham poured himself a glass of port at the buffet.

“Care for a drink?”

A lady would say no. But I’d spent these last years unchaperoned and as my own mistress, drinking brandy in bed and hauling bottles of champagne into treetops so I could taste the sweet fizz at sunset. I was accustomed to drinking, and on a chilly night in an unfamiliar house, a glass of port sounded like perfection.

“Yes, please,” I said. He turned to pour another glass and then handed it to me without a word. There was no judgment or reprobation in his face, but there was something. Curiosity, perhaps.

He settled himself in a chair across from me, his long legs stretched out, his face reflective. “I imagine you are my late wife’s cousin.”

Here was my chance to get it done and over with, the great thanking endeavor, which my lack of social grooming almost ensured I’d be clumsy at. Yet it had to be done. “Yes, sir?—”

“Don’t sir me,” he said darkly.

“I apologize?—”

“Don’t do that either. Are you Ivy Leavold or not?”

“Yes, Mr. Markham. And I wanted to give you my most sincere thanks?—”

“I don’t want your thanks. This is not going to be an easy place for a young woman to live. It’s dark and hardly modern, and I’m afraid that grief and isolation have turned me into a rather primitive being, not capable of entertaining young ladies and certainly not capable of polite company.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “My condolences for your loss.”

He leaned forward suddenly, eyes glittering like glass. I noticed his port was drunk; I raised mine to my lips and savored the sweet, spicy taste. “Did you know her well?” he asked. “My late wife?”

“No.”

He leaned back in his seat. “I see.”

“We met as girls. I remember her being lovely and . . . vivacious.” That was the word for girls who smoked cigars and kissed village boys, right?

He stood abruptly, going to pour himself another glass of port. “Vivacious. Yes. She was that.”

“Mr. Markham, please allow me to express my gratitude for your hospitality. Were it not for your kind offer, I would have nowhere to go.”

“No other family at all?”

“There was talk of an aunt in India, but she never answered our letters and it wasn’t known if she was even still living. At any rate, I’d never met her and she didn’t know me from Eve. I don’t know that she would have taken me in even if she were still alive.”

He sat again. “So you would have had to work.”

No sense in dissembling. “Yes.”

“As a governess?”

“Yes.”

“And would you have hated it?”

I took another sip. “Possibly. But not for the reason you are thinking. I am not afraid of work, but I am afraid of being trapped.”

“Trapped?”

I made to answer, but then Mrs. Brightmore entered again, clad in a nicer, newer dress. In the better light, I could see that she was younger than I originally supposed; like Mr. Markham, she seemed to be in her early or mid-thirties. It was the severity of her mien that made her seem older.

“Supper is ready, sir,” she said.

“I’ll take it in here.” Mr. Markham kept his eyes on me the entire time he spoke. For some reason, I felt pinned by that gaze, unable to move or look away.

“But, sir?—”

“In here, Mrs. Brightmore.”

She glared at me, as if Mr. Markham’s dinner preferences were somehow my fault, and left in a swish of starched fabric.

I found my port glass refilled.

“So, Miss Leavold. You would feel trapped by employment?”

“I didn’t mean to make myself sound indolent. It’s only that I’m used to keeping my own hours, my own company. Living my life at the whim of another would be almost unbearable.”

“And yet there are those who find solace in such arrangements. In certain kinds of imprisonments.”

“Show me such a person,” I protested, then stopped. Here I was, only a few moments into meeting my benefactor, and I was contradicting him in precisely the sort of way that used to vex Thomas so.

“Is not marriage like this? Strictures and bindings that can become pleasurable?”

“Are you comparing love to imprisonment, Mr. Markham?”

Something stirred in his eyes.

“For some, perhaps.” He reached across the low table between us and grasped my wrist. His fingertips were surprisingly rough for a gentleman’s, but the feeling of them against the thin skin of my wrist left me agitated somehow, as if he had trailed hot coals across my flesh instead of his fingers.

“Here,” he said quietly, “I have your wrist captured in my hand. You cannot move it unless I let you, you cannot touch it unless I let you. Complete confinement. But . . . ” His fingertips made light circles—swirls, eddies—around my wrist, skipping lightly over the pale blue veins and the delicate tendons, drifting from my palm to the edge of my sleeve. He slowly unbuttoned the buttons of the sleeve, sliding it up past my elbow. Gooseflesh rose on my arms, on my neck, even on my breasts under the thin wool of my dress. It felt so close to being undressed, to being exposed.

His fingers continued their work all while he stared intently at me. “And how does this constraint feel now, Miss Leavold? If I allowed you to withdraw your wrist now, would you?”

“No,” I said, my breathing coming faster. “I would not.”

He bent low, as if to study my wrist, except his mouth was so very near my skin, and then I was suddenly aware of my pulse pounding, of my lips parting, of the flush that was spreading on my face.

“Your supper, sir,” Mrs. Brightmore said, entering the room. The handsome servant wheeled a tray behind her, and the covered silver dishes and glassware rattled as he rolled it across the thick carpet to the armchair where his master sat. Mr. Markham didn’t let go of my wrist at first—I tugged and he arched an eyebrow, and I tugged again and he finally let it drop.

Relief thrummed through me. And disappointment.

“Is there anything else, sir?” the housekeeper inquired. Her words dropped like acid, singeing the air as they fell.

Mr. Markham ignored her, staring at me instead. She left after a minute, her quick footsteps and irritated manner making her feelings clear.

The servant winked at me before he left.

Mr. Markham opened his mouth to speak again, and then shut it, his eyes alighting on something behind me.

“Are you hungry, Miss Leavold?”

I wasn’t, strangely. I felt too agitated to eat.

“I am not.”

He rubbed at his forehead. “Then you should go to bed,” he said.

“Sir?”

“I told you not to sir me, at least not now. Get to bed. The hour is too late for young women to be about. Even those accustomed to keeping their own hours.”

I wanted to protest; I never retired before midnight at home. But I reminded myself that home had been sold to satisfy my brother’s grasping creditors. Markham Hall was my home now. I would do well to make myself agreeable to my cousin’s widower, no matter how much I inwardly thrashed against it.

But perhaps I would grow used to it. What had he said? Strictures and bindings that become pleasurable . . .

I touched my wrist without meaning to. “Good night, Mr. Markham.”

He didn’t answer, and it wasn’t until I lay in bed, watching the candlelight flicker on the ceiling, that I remembered what had been directly behind me in the parlor. The painting of my cousin Violet.

His dead wife.