Lilith ambled gaily beside Lord Charles.
“Isn’t it a lovely day?” she said, looking quite stunning amid the lush grass and pale sky. “I feel as though I’ve walked into a Claude Monet or Pierre-Auguste Renoir.”
“Who is she talking about?” whispered Lady Cornelia.
“Inmates at Bedlam,” he quipped, and then quickly amended, because Cornelia was an innocent civilian in his fight with Lilith, “I believe some people consider them to be artists.”
“To capture such radiance!” Lilith carried on.
“My soul is enraptured,” bellowed Lord Charles, matching Lilith’s jubilance.
“As is mine,” she cried.
“Mine’s feeling right jolly,” added Fenmore.
Lilith tossed her head, her curls flapping under the brim of her floppy straw bonnet. “What about you, Lord Marylewick? Is your soul not enraptured, enchanted, or in Lord Fenmore’s poetic description, ‘right jolly’?”
“Do you even have a soul, old boy?” queried Charles.
“But everyone has a soul,” Lady Cornelia pointed out with puppylike eyes. Clearly she had never experienced a dark night in hers. No battles raged in its shallow depths.
“My soul is rather stoic,” replied George. “It never does anything as vulgar as become enraptured.”
It disturbed George how much Lilith’s honest giggle lifted his spirits. Turn back again, fair lady, let me see that wide grin below the brim of your bonnet. Can you make that errant curl lift in the wind again and blow under your eye?
“Well, my soul is quite vulgar,” Lilith said. “It positively dances in delight. Like a whirling dervish.” Of course she had to whirl to illustrate. Every gentleman turned to witness the spectacle, each receiving a good eyeful of her trim ankles and shapely calves.
Lady Cornelia’s shriek halted the dance. “Get it off me!” she screamed. “Get it off!” She hopped about, brushing at her shoulder.
“No!” cried Beatrice. “It’s a marsh grasshopper. It won’t hurt you.”
Something large and green and red leapt into the air, only to be swatted by Cornelia’s flailing arm. The great insect fell to the ground.
Beatrice gasped and hurried to the massive grasshopper bumping about the ground. “No, its leg is injured.” Beatrice’s chin trembled. She resembled the small child George had held after her father died. “Why did you hurt it?” she demanded of Cornelia. “It had done nothing to you. Now it might die.”
“It’s ugly!” Cornelia cried.
Lilith knelt beside Beatrice. She removed her bonnet and gently picked up the struggling grasshopper. She nestled it inside the bonnet, closed the brim around it, and tied it shut. “Perhaps you can help it,” Lilith said, handing Beatrice the bonnet. “You are so smart about everything.”
George watched Beatrice looking at Lilith, but he couldn’t tell what Beatrice was thinking. He doubted anyone was capable of knowing her brilliant thoughts, but he believed he discerned a bit of awe.
“Thank you,” Beatrice told her sister quietly, gathering up the bonnet. “Thank you.”
The guests sat in clusters on a small hill rising before the cathedral ruins. Lilith struggled to keep up her cheery facade as she found herself having to share a blanket and canvas with Lord Charles and Lord Fenmore, who sat so close her legs and shoulders touched theirs. Her eyes continually strayed to George.
He stood beside Lady Cornelia, studying her adequate composition, and paying trite, polite compliments, which caused the young lady to blush.
Lilith viscerally hated the kind Cornelia. Oh, jealousy was a vile beast.
Would Cornelia be a complacent wife in bed? Would she tempt George? Would she drive him to wild passion? Would she hold him as tenderly as Lilith had? Would she even care to discover the true man beneath the title?
Pick up the pencil, George, Lilith thought, as if by sheer force of her mental powers she could influence his actions. Draw. Free the winged Fancy.
“I adore your addition of the rainbow,” said Charles of their mutual sketch, breaking Lilith’s concentration. “It really draws the eye.”
She turned to her sad rendering. She was a good deal better at drawing than singing, but by no means a great talent. She was proficient enough to appreciate the brilliance of other natural artists like George.
“That’s not a rainbow,” she said. “That’s the arch of the nave. Or rather it’s my impression of the arch as it gleams in the sunlight. To the untrained eye it is a mere rainbow.”
“You are a radical. Let me add some symbolism to our masterpiece.” In a wild stroke, Charles made what appeared to be a bird atop her rainbow arch. “This dove is me, singing of the lovely, angelic Lilith.”
George glanced over with an arched, disapproving brow. Lilith’s heart lifted just from receiving his attention, even if it was in censure.
“This fuzzy blob down here will be me,” Lilith said, milking that attention. “It’s a chicken pecking about the ground.” She had hoped to make George chuckle or even smirk. When he didn’t, she asked, “What about you, Lord Marylewick, perhaps you could add your symbolism to our sketch or Lady Cornelia’s.”
“Please do,” gushed Cornelia. “I will always treasure it then.”
“A miniature copy of your bill in the sketch, perhaps?” Charles suggested. “I might be keener on it if it were presented artistically. You know, touched my aesthetic sensibilities.”
“Because heaven forbid you should use your reason or intellect!” George snapped.
Even over the breeze, Lilith could hear the swish of collars and hats as heads turned toward George. The edges of his eyes tensed, a wince of sorts. She could tell he regretted his hasty words—a tiny chink in the self-control he prided himself on.
George muttered something about seeing to the servants and strode away.
“Did I do something wrong?” Lady Cornelia cried to Lilith and Charles. “Did I upset him?”
“No, I ruffled the old boy again,” said Lord Charles. “Nothing to worry about. ’Twas a daily occurrence at Eton. He never could take a joke, but he’ll be back in spirit soon enough.”
Lilith wanted to run after George and embrace him behind some concealing bush. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t allow herself to get any more attached.
“Go to him, Lady Cornelia,” Lilith advised. Her heart hurt as she watched the other woman hurry off to comfort the man Lilith wanted to hold so desperately.
“I say, Lord Fenmore,” Lord Charles said. “Why do those ladies near Beatrice keep eying you? They’ve been doing it since we’ve been sitting here. Do you think they want something?”
Fenmore glanced over at the attractive women. “By Jove, I should ask.”
“Yes, do be their humble servant and what,” said Charles. He waited until the man had sauntered away and then turned to Lilith. “Fenmore and Marylewick gone. I say, fine work on my part. Now we may enjoy ourselves properly.”
She leaned closer to Charles as if to speak in confidence. “You know Lord Marylewick drives me to distraction. Tell me how you teased him at school. In detail. Please.” Lilith wanted to hear the damage done to George from Lord Charles’s own mouth.
A slow smiled snaked over his lips and then he gazed off, as if remembering some dear nostalgic memory. “It was a game of how far we could push him. But we had to be careful, because he was a marquess’s son.”
Charles told of the cruel pranks he and his friends played upon George, who desperately had wanted friends and to fit in with his classmates. She listened with a rigid smile pinned on her face as her stomach turned. She had experienced the viciousness of other children in her boarding school years, but none to the degree that it had been perpetrated upon George. Charles had made the sensitive boy’s daily existence a hell. Charles chuckled as he spoke, as if the horror he had inflicted was innocent play, no more than a skinned knee.
“For all our efforts, starchy George hasn’t change a bit,” Charles continued. “No one is a better Tory than Lord Marylewick. A true believer in the cause. He’ll do anything Disraeli asks no matter how he is treated. It’s the subject of every other Punch caricature, yet flustering, blustering George still can’t see the joke.”
Though the smile remained on her face, at that moment Lilith loathed Lord Charles. For all his fair looks and pretty words, he was a monster, like George’s father and his mother. So many tormentors of her beautiful George.
“Now, darling, you owe me for this little titillating game of truths,” he said. “There is much I want to say to you. Escape your many admirers and meet me in the gardens after tea.”
All she wanted to do was run as far away from him as she could. And the fastest way to escape was to consent. “Yes,” she said. “Of course. Now I must find my sister.”
Her legs shook as she stumbled toward Beatrice. Where was George? As much as she was jealous of Cornelia, Lilith hoped the lovely young lady was holding him, saying kind things.
Beatrice sat just outside the cluster of ladies whom Fenmore was pestering with his boorish flirtations. She was engaged in creating a detailed rendering of the marsh grasshopper.