Season For Desire Read online

  “You asked me to wait to return to England—my wife’s final request—until Sarah was engaged to be married, and I did. Now they’re all building their own lives, Giles. All of them except you, and if you had your way, me. But don’t we all deserve better than a dreamless life?”

  “We support one another,” Giles ground out.

  “Support or shackle?” The smile disappeared from Richard’s features, the smile that customers at his paper mill and shop liked because it made them feel that Richard cared about them and not only how much paper they ordered. Without the smile, he looked far older. Worn and tired. “Son, I love you, but you mustn’t think I don’t know why you’re here. You didn’t want to see the land of your mother’s birth; you didn’t want to meet relatives and old friends. You wanted to keep watch over me and make sure I didn’t do anything reckless.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t worry yourself; I’m not angry in the slightest. You might grumble and grouch, but you do it out of love. And I wanted you to come along. Because whether you intended to or not, now you have seen your mother’s birthplace, and you’ve met some of her friends. And now you know where I intend to live. Giles, I never wanted to work with paper. I always meant to be a jeweler. That’s why I wanted you to do it so much—so you would know that it was possible.”

  He sighed, and the smile flickered back for a gray moment. “You want a father’s guidance? Here it is. Go home, Giles. Go home whenever you’re ready.” Another chuckle. “Maybe we can work together. Your designs and my execution, what do you say? We could be the first trans-Atlantic jewelry firm the world has seen.”

  There it was, like a wall. A smiling, oblivious stone wall with a mouth full of candied orange peel. For Richard to pursue his dream, Giles had to return. To be his proxy in America. “I don’t want to work with jewelry, Father.”

  With an effort, Richard swallowed the tough citrus. “You may think so now, but you’ll say something quite different after a few years working with paper.”

  “But I do want to work with paper,” Giles murmured. Not for its own sake, but because it could hold folded dreams: the furled plans for a home or a warehouse or a shop or a church. Anything. Paper could hold the design of a future hope. Paper was a springboard.

  Paper could become a spring. He smiled, thinking of Audrina’s absent hand gestures that turned flatness into a toy. Thinking of Audrina’s drawing of Castle Parr, which was nearly, tantalizingly close to what he wanted to do.

  “You want to run the mill?” Richard’s brows furrowed; dark brows so unlike Giles’s features. “I’d be glad for your brothers to have the guidance, but I’ve never heard you say so before.”

  “You didn’t hear me say so now, either.” Not for the first time since arriving in England, he felt he was speaking a different language from the people around him. This was the first time he’d had that impression with his father, though.

  He didn’t want to pursue this stone wall of a conversation anymore. Richard was sure everything would work out, because . . . well, for no good reason. Just because he wanted it to. Because that was the sort of person he was: He could cross an ocean for an apprenticeship, then cross back with a marquess’s daughter. Then cross it again for an adventure.

  Really, Richard was right. Everything did seem to work out well for him. Maybe because someone else was around to tie up the loose ends he left behind.

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t been here to open the puzzle box?” Giles tried to match his father’s calm.

  “But you didn’t open it.” With a smile, Richard topped his citrus tower with a curl of candied ginger. “Miss Corning opened it. And she’d have done that whether you were here or not.”

  “Assuming you were here at Castle Parr.”

  “Why wouldn’t I have been? I’d have met up with Lord Alleyneham eventually, and he and Lady Irving would have directed me here.”

  “Not necessarily. Remember, Lord Alleyneham’s family is unraveling on a precise schedule.”

  “They needn’t be.” And with a shrug, he indicated that he was done with the topic. Simple as that. If they don’t want to be torn apart, they needn’t be. Maybe he was right, but it was still infuriating. More so because Giles felt the same way about their own family.

  “If you loved it so much in England, why did you ever leave?” Giles hardly expected an answer. It was one of those questions asked out of annoyance, the main purpose of which was to let the other person know how unfathomable their actions were.

  Of course, Richard answered at once. “When it came time for a family, my best prospects were in America. I couldn’t support a marquess’s daughter in England.”

  “Why not finish your apprenticeship first? Why the urgency to start a family?”

  Richard raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, good God,” Giles groaned. “Are you serious?”

  Richard raised his other eyebrow.

  “The puzzle boxes with the bits about the Nativity—the elopement—Mother was with child?”

  Richard tipped his head. “It happens to the best of us.”

  “Not if you don’t—ack. Never mind. I don’t want to hear any more about that.”

  Giles knew that two older siblings had been lost: a sister and a brother, not much more than babies when illness took them. He shouldn’t have been the oldest child at all.

  But he had never known before that his mother left everything she knew, including her own parents and the native land that valued her blue blood, for the sake of her child. A child who would never be accepted by the ton that had birthed her, because of its father.

  Giles had thought her adventurous—and yes, she had been. But she’d been more than that. She’d been brave.

  For the thousandth, millionth, infinitely numbered time, he looked at his hands. So much of him was a legacy from Lady Beatrix.

  And she had left one last legacy in the form of these puzzle boxes. A mystery, an impossible adventure. Richard loved that nonsense. Maybe that was part of why Lady Beatrix had done it: She’d known that nothing would capture her beloved’s imagination like a mystery.

  But the answer slipped away like air. Always, there was another gasping step, and another. Giles was damned tired. His dreams were in pieces, scattered about Philadelphia and New York.

  And York, too?

  No, no. Nothing tied him here except a thread of fascination with an aristocrat’s daughter. Quite a family tradition the Rutherford men had.

  An ancient dream was better than nothing, and he couldn’t take that from his father. He couldn’t break that spirit of adventure. In a way, it had given Giles life.

  “I’m sorry, Father. I’ll help you wrap this up. For Mother.”

  Then Richard could do what he liked. Giles’s place was clear—and it was half a world away, picking up the pieces others had left behind.

  After Giles left him behind in the dining room, Richard toyed a bit more with the candied citrus peel. He knew he ought to let the servants get on with their work. The rest of the party had long since found their way to the drawing room—and judging from the jingling heard through the open doors, at least one of the dogs was in there, too.

  Good, good. Lord and Lady Dudley seemed to enjoy having company about, whether human or canine. But Richard wasn’t quite ready to be a part of it. My God! The span of one day had brought him the solution to one puzzle box, then had introduced and solved another he had not known existed. Then introduced a third.

  After three years’ wait, this was the end of his quest—or the beginning of the end, at least.

  Richard rather liked thinking of this time in England as a quest.

  On a quest, he had traveled to England thirty-five years before, to apprentice to the watchmakers and smiths who created art in precious metals for Rundell and Bridge. His nation’s independence was new and rough, and there were some things the English did better.

  Ignorance was bliss, in some cases. In Richard’s case, it had be
en. Because when he dared look at the marquess’s daughter who called at the shop, she had looked right back at him. Her frank blue eyes, her freckled sunniness, her free laughter were irresistible to a young jeweler’s apprentice who had no right to raise his eyes so high.

  When Beatrix had agreed to marry him thirty-five years before, she had left behind the glittering court of King George; her sisters, brothers, parents, dowry. She and Richard had taken one another with nothing but health and hope and humor, making their way across an ocean. There he had assumed control of his family’s paper mill in Philadelphia; they had built a comfortable fortune, had raised children and lost children, too.

  Beatrix had still been young when the pains began; sharp in her hands at first, and only in the mornings. But then they spread to more of her joints, to more of the day, until she never had a moment in which her body didn’t feel wracked and torn.

  Though her health slipped away, she had never lost that wry edge. At the end, she had even laughed at death. “My love for you is not such a paltry thing that it can be dissolved,” she whispered. Though their six surviving children surrounded her, Giles alone ducked close enough to hear along with Richard. “I could not bring a fortune to the New World, so I left it behind. Perhaps enough time has passed that you can reclaim it. My puzzle box . . .”

  Giles had found the item to which he believed she referred: a neat creation of wood that he and his younger brother Alfred had fitted together with bated breath and careful hands. Puzzle boxes had been a tradition with her family, Beatrix had told them, ever since her Dutch ancestor had traded with Japan and brought back treasures never before seen.

  “No,” she’d breathed. “In England. You must find it in England.”

  Giles had thought it madness. A fool’s quest to cross an ocean. But what was foolish about believing in Beatrix’s last words? At that moment, she’d told them the most important thing on her mind: She had wanted to see to it they didn’t lack for anything.

  The loss of Beatrix had faded over the past three years, a wound knit and scarred over. A happy marriage left a permanent mark on a man. Richard was glad Giles had come with him, no matter the reason. Being apart from all of his children at once, he would miss them as though part of his world had gone silent.

  Richard was determined to see Beatrix’s wish granted, to give their children a fortune beyond paper-mill dreams. Paper was as nothing, flat and dull, compared to the luster of the unknown. A mystery. A puzzle. An adventure!

  One diamond parure wasn’t enough to change all their lives—but it was enough to begin with.

  And he and Giles were two-thirds of the way to finding it.

  A smile slipped over his features, comfortable as being wrapped in a blanket before a fire, and he rose to join the others in the drawing room.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wherein Sheep’s Guts Hail Souls Out of Men’s Bodies

  For the next four days, Audrina had nothing to do but wait.

  Oh, she actually had much more to do than wait. Now that the puzzle boxes had been opened, there were also codes to play about with. Audrina wrote the letters on slips of paper, and she and Giles arranged and rearranged them atop their familiar table in the drawing room. There were far too many Q’s to make any sense of the message, which they both realized almost at once, but it was pleasant to sit together, to talk and not kiss and to talk about not kissing.

  She also had many things to try not to think of, such as whether Llewellyn was threatening her father or her sister, or whether Walpole might have called off the wedding entirely. She knew nothing, nothing at all, of what was passing in London.

  It was an agony and a relief at once—and with relief came guilt. The feelings warred, with relief being defeated day by day as the wedding grew closer. Four days before Christmas, and Audrina’s every emotion was heightened.

  Lady Irving wandered into the drawing room, intercepting Lord Alleyneham’s footman as she did. “Ah, Jory. Is that the post you’ve got there? Glad to see the mail’s getting through again. I know we’re at the end of the earth here, but the Royal Mail shouldn’t be stopped by a little thing like that.”

  After handing over his fistful of letters, Jory straightened his wig. “Yes, my lady. Right you are.”

  Lady Irving meandered over to Giles and Audrina, who had just spelled D-O-G with her letter slips in a vain attempt to feel some sense of progress.

  “How sweet, Rutherford. Are you teaching each other to read?” Lady Irving flipped through the letters with narrowed eyes.

  “Au contraire, my lady. We’ve put together this little primer for you. Since it seems you can’t read ‘Lord Dudley’ on a letter that’s clearly not for you.” Giles’s smile was a predatory affair of bared teeth.

  Audrina had to smile at what was an undeniably amusing—if rude—reply, her feet fidgeting in their slippers at his quick defense of her. She could like him far, far too much.

  Or was this kindness at all? Did he see her, again or still, as weak? How could one tell? She had few examples on which to base a guess.

  “Aha!” Ignoring Giles’s response, Lady Irving pulled free one sealed paper and dropped the rest of the post on the floor. “This one’s for Miss Corning. How about that, Rutherford? News at last.”

  She shoved the paper in Giles’s face. A twitch in his jaw was the only sign that he did not enjoy this experience. “Yes. I see that clearly. Thank you. Shall we notify her?”

  “If I don’t find her in three minutes, I will open this letter myself.” And in a cloud of scarlet and blue, she whirled and left them.

  “A letter for Miss Corning.” Audrina met Giles’s eyes. Her heart picked up its pace; somehow, she had become invested in this hunt she had joined only as a happenstance. “Shall we go see it read?”

  “We certainly cannot let my father and Lady Irving read exciting news without our steadying presence.” He held out a hand. “Princess.”

  This was only a game, which made it safe. And therefore it was safe for her to lace her fingers in his as they followed Lady Irving from the room.

  After scooping up the fallen post for Lord Dudley, of course.

  They found Miss Corning in the library, where she was paging through a novel. Sophy was, as usual, jotting something at her secretary desk. Both women regarded the arrival of the letter as unexpected, though as Miss Corning noted, “A York postmark. This one had not far to go.”

  She slit the seal and skimmed the lines in a few seconds. Then, with a trembling smile, she extended the letter to Sophy. “We’ve found our Maria—or actually, her daughter.”

  It took seventy-five years, or so it felt, before the letter made its way from Sophy to Lady Irving and Richard Rutherford, through the Dudleys, and finally to Audrina and Giles.

  The note was brief, dashed off in a hasty clotted hand with many abbreviations. The paper was so cheap and thin as to be brittle.

  Dear Miss Corning,

  My mother passed on last yr, but I blv she was the Maria you seek. I inherited a sandalwd box frm her. Shd you wish to buy it, I will be at the Goat & Gauntlet on Dec. 23. As you are in Yorkshire, I hope this will be conv.

  Yrs & c.

  Mrs. Dan’l B——(Kitty)

  The last name was an illegible thread.

  “‘Should you wish to buy it?’” Richard Rutherford said. “Of course I’d like to buy it, but how could she sell such a treasure?”

  “Is that what caught your attention?” Giles folded up the paper. “I’m more startled by her reference to the Goat and Gauntlet. It’s not as though I’ve had fantasies about returning there. Is it the only inn in all of York?”

  “No, but it is the northernmost one. Perhaps she wanted to pick a place convenient for us.”

  “But—the twenty-third?” Lord Dudley shuffled to a chair near the library fireplace; Sophy hopped up to ease him into the seat. “No, you had much better tell her to wait a few more days. The box has waited all these years. Could it not wait until after Ch
ristmas?” His voice was plaintive; his heavily veined hands gripped the arms of his chair tightly.

  The Rutherfords looked at one another: father and son, so different in appearance, but with identical expressions on their faces. I hadn’t thought—well, maybe—if it’s all right with you . . .

  “No, my lord.” Audrina spoke into the fraught pause. “I am sorry, but it cannot wait even a single day more.”

  She said this not for their sake, but her own. Each day that fluttered by left her more distant from Charissa, her chance of returning to London more impossible. From a post-house, she could make her way back to London somehow: either with the Rutherfords, or Lady Irving, or even a hired maid.

  Sophy was the first to reply. Her pince-nez hid her eyes, but her mouth was an understanding curve. “Well, then, we shall have to celebrate while you are all still here.”

  The contrast between Audrina’s most recent London ball and her last evening at Castle Parr was so extreme that they seemed almost on different planets. This was Saturn, maybe; soft and beringed as she had seen through Sophy’s telescope.

  Her favorite part of a ball was mixing, dancing, laughing, making it seem as though she was everything proper and delighted—and then slipping away for her own secret purpose. Once upon a time, with Llewellyn. More recently, she had fallen into the habit of leaving alone, just to see if anyone would notice and come looking for her.

  No one ever passed this test.

  Tonight, she felt no urge to slip away. She sank into the moment, this warm evening gathering in the drawing room where she had spent so much time. It stabbed at her with pain and spice and sweetness, knowing that it would soon end. That she needed it to end. And yet while it lasted, it was good.