The Secret Pearl(61)

They raced recklessly across the smooth miles of the park. Her mare was no match for Hannibal, of course, but sometimes he allowed her to draw level with him and nose ahead before surging into the lead again. She knew his game very well but would not give in to defeat. She was laughing.

He veered off to his left suddenly, heading directly for the ivy-draped wall that divided this southern end of the park from a pasture. Yes, there it was—the gate. It was a dangerous game. He knew it even as he committed both his own horse and hers to it. But he was in the reckless throes of a race.

He eased back on Hannibal’s reins as soon as he had cleared the gate and watched the mare soar over with a clear foot to spare, Fleur bent low over its neck. She was no longer laughing as she slowed the mare with expert hands and brought it alongside Hannibal, leaning forward to pat its neck. But her face was glowing with a beauty and an animation that had his breath catching in his throat. She wore no bonnet. Most of the pins that had held her hair back in its usual neat knot seemed to have been shed along the way. Her head seemed surrounded by a golden halo.

“You have gone down to ignominious defeat,” he said. “Admit it.”

“But you chose my mount,” she said, “and deliberately picked one that is lame in three legs. Admit it.”

Touché,” he said, laughing. “We must call truce. You have a splendid seat. You have ridden to hounds?”

“No,” she said. “I always felt too sorry for the fox or the deer. I ride only for pleasure. There is a great deal of open country about Her—” She stopped abruptly. “About the place where I used to live.”

“Isabella,” he said softly.

Her eyes flew to his face, and he wished instantly that he could recall the word. It was as if a door had closed across her face. The magic, the insane magic of the past half-hour, was gone.

“My name is Fleur,” she said.

“Hamilton? Is that questionable too?” He watched her with narrowed eyes.

“My name is Fleur,” she said.

“Since you have only a slight acquaintance with Lord Brocklehurst, then,” he said, “it is understandable that he misremembered your name.”

“Yes,” she said.

“And remarkably surprising that he would use it at all—on such slight acquaintance,” he said.

Her eyes looked haunted, as they had the night before when he had come upon her at the bridge. And he hated himself and what he was doing to her. Was it any of his business? Even if she had some mysterious past, even if she was living under an assumed name, was it any of his business? She was doing superior work as a governess and seemed to care for Pamela.

But Isabella? He did not want to think of her as anyone else but Fleur.

Their horses were walking slowly along beneath the wall, turning with it as it ran parallel to the lake a mile to the north.

“You know him very well, don’t you?” he said.

“Scarcely at all,” she said. “I did not even recognize him until he presented himself this morning.”

“Has he harassed you in the past?” he asked. “Are you afraid of him?”

“No!”

“You don’t need to be,” he said. “You are on my property and in my employ and under my protection. If he has harassed you or threatened you, tell me now, Fleur, and he will be gone before nightfall.”

“I scarcely know him,” she said.

They had reached another gate in the wall. He leaned out from the back of his horse and unclasped it. He closed it behind them again when they were back inside the park, amongst the trees that extended to the lake on its south side.

“Have you seen the follies here?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He pointed them out to her as they rode past, a triumphal arch leading nowhere, a sylvan grotto that had never housed either nymphs or shepherds, a ruined temple.

“All of them afford a picturesque view of the lake when you stand close to them,” he said. “Mr. William Kent had a sure eye for effect.”

As they rode slowly back to the house from the lake, he found himself telling her about Spain and about the army’s crossing over the Pyrenees into the south of France. She was asking him quiet and intelligent questions. He was not sure how the topic had been introduced.

He was more sorry than he could say that those magic moments had been so brief. He wished he could have curbed his curiosity about her identity and history, or at least put it off until another time.

For that half-hour he had felt happier and more carefree than he had felt for years. And she had looked more beautiful and more desirable than any woman he had ever known, her face glowing, her untidy red-gold hair framing her face and half-loose down her back. And her looks and her smiles had been all for him.