Barbara Samuel Lucien's Fall (pdf)

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the call of a rake s lost soul, sensibly concluding it was a loss of his own making.
And after all, saving souls was for the vicar and the church and God. She made no
pretension to being any of those.
He d met difficult cases before. There was always a weak point, and a clever man
could use such a point to gain a woman s trust.
Lucien observed her.
She was not invulnerable to him. A pulse in her throat beat faster when he smiled
at her, and her pupils grew larger, her lips softer women gave themselves away with a
hundred tiny details.
Mornings were invariably spent in her gardens as long as she dared, for he also
learned it was not a pursuit Juliette particularly approved. If Madeline had been ladylike,
taking a bonnet and gloves and prissily clipping a flower here, a flower there, it might
have been all right, but as with everything else she did, Madeline took to the gardens with
a wholehearted gusto Lucien found surprisingly erotic. Such passionate attention in the
bedroom might be interesting indeed.
From the garden, Madeline changed and ate with whatever guests happened to be
present in the dining room, sampling tidbits from the constant feast laid out at the
sideboard kidneys and eggs and rashers and bread. Afterward, she escaped to her
greenhouse if she possibly could, otherwise she allowed herself to be drawn into
promenades about the grounds or she read in the study or she played the spinet in the
music room.
The greenhouse was her first choice, however, and he watched her through the
windows as she made notes like a scientist on various plants she grew. At such times, she
donned a pair of spectacles from her pocket.
She posted a great many letters, and Lucien bribed a servant to learn where they
were going. She carried on a lively correspondence with several renowned naturalists,
and exchanged chatty letters with two friends, one in London, another in a hamlet to the
north; girls she d evidently met on her travels. Another correspondent was less clear: a
Sir Julian in London. He waited to see what that might mean, but Lucien thought it must
be another of her botanical friends.
At night, she played the piano and sang a little with the others, politely laughing
and conversing; at such times she seemed the very epitome of the graceful lady her
unruly hair neatly tamed and dressed with ribbons or jewels, her creamy bosom proudly
displayed in one dazzling gown after another, her cheeks dusted with a discreet brush of
rice powder. The powder amused him. For all the care she took with her hats and long
sleeves, her skin had taken on a ruddy warm glow from the sun, and bright streaks ran
through her hair like veining in black marble.
In those lazy evening hours, he admired her, and amused himself with pleasant
images of disrobing her. Over the festive suppers at which Lucien found himself always
seated very far from Madeline and very close to Juliette he toyed with images of kissing
a particular freckle high on her left shoulder.
But for all that she was enchanting in the evenings, it was the mornings he
awaited with eagerness, when she came from the gardens after her early work. Her hair
was mussed, falling loose from her cap, her clothes askew, her hands dirty. Often she
smelled of light sweat and the earth and a peculiarly arousing perfume of sunlight that
seemed to come off her in waves. He wanted her deeply at such moments, and did not
want to take her comfortably in a bed or after she d washed he wanted her just like that:
musky and overheated and tasting of her work.
The power and violence of his wish surprised him. It should have warned him.
It did not.
&
Madeline told herself she should be wary of the cheerful Lord Esher when he
joined her at five of a drizzly Friday morning. He was dressed for working in a pair of
scuffed boots and sensible woolen trousers. His head, predictably, was bare, showing the
wealth of thick, dark hair that adorned his well-made head. She thought he might be vain
about his hair, the way he never covered it.
"Good morning!" he said in greeting.
Madeline glanced up, as if she d just seen him. "Good morning." She was
working in the rose gardens this week, going from the middle outward, clipping rose hips
and dead blooms and pruning out deadwood. It was her third day at the chore, and she d
only managed to make it to the middle pink tones. "What brings you out here so early?"
"I m here to help you," he said, spreading his hands.
"What do you know of gardening?"
"Nothing at all." His grin was crooked and unrepentant. "But I m easily bid. Tell
me what you need done, and I ll do it."
"Why would you drag yourself out of bed so early to do such a thing?" She
brushed a lock of dampening hair from her face so she could see to cut a withered stalk
from the middle of an ancient bush. "It s tedious work and not to most people s liking."
"True," he replied, "but I m here to win your good favor."
Madeline paused. For a moment, she took his measure, from the top of his head to
his boots. "I suppose it doesn t matter what your motives are. I am not foolish enough to
dismiss help when I can get it." She pointed out a pair of pruning shears. "Take those. But
watch me first. I don t want you butchering the good wood."
Agreeably, he picked up the shears and watched carefully as Madeline illustrated
the process of pruning. "If you ll cut off the dead branches, I can trim away the rose hips
and old blooms."
With a neat precision she would not have expected, Lord Esher did as she d
shown him. "Like so?"
She smiled her approval. "Yes."
They quickly developed a pattern: Lord Esher trimming the bush of its worst
deadwood and old branches, Madeline following behind to neaten the overall appearance.
She was glad of his help; the work was less tedious when there was someone to talk with,
and whatever else his failings, he was an intelligent man.
They chatted lightly about books and horses and dinner parties. Madeline learned
he like poetry, and that his taste ran to the lusty works of a hundred years before, but he
didn t like the current crop of romances.
"Why not?" Madeline asked in challenge. "One is just a longer version of the
other love and drama."
His crooked grin flashed. "And carefully described moments of passion."
"Sex you mean."
"Yes" His dark blue eyes glowed with approval.
"Still, I think those poems appealed more to men, less to women, as novels appeal
more often to women than men."
"Perhaps."
It surprised her that he didn t seem to need to be proven right on every statement.
In that way, he was unlike most of the men of her acquaintance.
"I like this one," he said, touching the velvety blossoms of a dark rose bud, still
curled tight and beaded with silvery rain. "The color is extraordinary."
"Yes. I like it, too. It s particularly compelling in this light. I m not sure why, but
there are some of them that seem to have greater intensity in lower light. This cloud cover
brings out the vividness."
He wrestled a thick, dead branch from its stranglehold. His mobile mouth turned
down at the corners. "Hmmm. Perhaps it s like your theory of Pompeii."
"I don t understand what you mean."
"A field of some sort, that has a vibration influenced by outside factors. One must
be of a certain nature or frame of mind to perceive the vibrations at Pompeii, and with the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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