The Countess Read Free Page B

imagine.”
    I leapt from the floor and hurled myself at him. Luckily for me, he did raise his arms in time to catchme. I kissed his face thoroughly, even his earlobes. “You’re home,” I said in his ear and kept kissing him and hugging him.
    He was laughing as he hugged me back. Finally, he set me on my feet and held me back from him. “You’re looking well,” he said at last, and I knew a lie when I heard it. I looked white and thin and had eyes that were so shadowed they could scare children away from the door on a sunny day.
    I kept rubbing my hands up and down his arms, wanting to reassure myself that he was really here, with me. “Why are you here? I didn’t expect you. Oh, goodness, is something wrong?”
    Peter dropped his arms. “I won’t be here long,” he said over his shoulder as he walked to the sideboard and poured himself a brandy. “I must return to Paris soon.” He held up the decanter, and I nodded. He poured me a bit in one of grandmother’s magnificent crystal snifters.
    We clicked our glasses together and drank. I realized then that he was angry. How very odd to see his movements so measured, to see how he was holding himself in. I stepped back and waited. I hadn’t seen him for six months. He hadn’t changed, save he was perhaps more handsome now than when he’d left England the previous May to go to Brussels. I’d never prayed so often or so rigorously in my life as in those weeks before the fateful Battle of Waterloo. Peter was Grandfather’s heir, son of Rockford Wilton, who had died, his wife with him, when Peter had been only five years old. He’d been nominally raised in my parents’ household until Grandfather deemed Peter ready to go to Eton. I remember that Peter hadbeen fond of my mother. I had no idea what he had thought of my father.
    Peter reminded me of that man, John, a man I still didn’t know even if I had seen him on three different occasions.
    That last time had been three months ago. Time had dragged. It was now in November, cold and damp, not a glimmer of sun to be seen for days at a time. I hated it. The air was thick with smoke from too many coal fires. White wasn’t the color to wear during a cold London autumn and winter.
    I wanted to go to the country, where the air was clean and fresh, but Miss Crislock wasn’t well. I couldn’t very well demand that she travel for four days—at least not now.
    Grandfather’s study was warm, the draperies drawn against the cold gray late afternoon. “Sit down, Peter,” I said at last, still drinking in the sight of him, “and tell me why you’re angry.”
    â€œI’m not angry,” he said in an amazingly clipped, hard voice that could shatter the glass I was holding.
    I realized then that Mrs. Pringe, my grandfather’s housekeeper for many years longer than I had been on this earth, was standing in the open doorway, watching us, one of her thick black eyebrows arched upward a good inch.
    â€œI should like some tea, Mrs. Pringe,” I said, nodding to her. Mrs. Pringe was a large lady, larger than Grandfather had been, and she always wore heavy bombazine violet gowns. I could tell she didn’t want to leave, bless her. She’d known both of us forever. She wanted to know what was going on. She wanted to fix whatever was wrong. And she’d always scented when something was out of kilter. I,naturally, had a very good idea why Peter was here and why he was angry, but still, I figured I had the right of first hearing, without Mrs. Pringe hovering with pursed lips and patting hands.
    But Peter just stood there, staring at me as if I were a soldier in his unit and I had sent my bayonet through a friend rather than a foe. Too handsome for his own good, Grandfather had always said. Too much hair, more than a young man needs or deserves, he would howl. There was no justice in life, none at all.