Shining Threads Page 22

  ‘Oh, do forgive me. May I introduce an old school chum of mine . . . well, we were at the same school though Robby was at the end of his learning as Johnny and I were just beginning. He was somewhat of a god to us, I can tell you. He has come up for the . . . Oh, I do beg your pardon, Tessa, here am I rattling on . . .’ To tell the truth Nicky was quite bowled over by young Tessa Harrison’s striking beauty. He was accustomed to seeing her in her riding outfit, mud splattered and a bit of a tomboy, really, and now here she was looking as elegant and . . . well, there was hardly a word to describe her radiance as she waited for him to complete his introductions.

  ‘May I present Robby Atherton? Robby, this is Miss Tessa Harrison . . .’

  ‘Miss Harrison.’

  ‘Mr Atherton.’

  He bowed over her hand, his manners exquisitely good humoured, his education obviously expensive, as the Squire’s son’s had been, his air superior but his impudent smile irresistible.

  ‘. . . and her cousins, Drew and Pearce Greenwood.’

  For several moments there was well-bred confusion as introductions were completed and it was perhaps this which kept concealed from Drew and Pearce the attraction which had flared up between their cousin and the gentleman to whom they had just been introduced. The polite conversation, the charming smiles and meaningless small-talk, hid the tension. Then Mr Atherton turned courteously to Miss Harrison, drawing her a pace or two away from the rest.

  ‘You have been acquainted with Nick and Johnny long?’ he asked her, placing a confident hand beneath her elbow, leading her even further ahead of the others with the manner of a gentleman who has the perfect right to do so if he wishes, but without being in the least discourteous.

  ‘For quite some time, Mr Atherton. Squire Longworth has been kind enough to allow my cousins and myself to join his hunt.’

  ‘Really? They are a charming family. Mine have been on friendly terms with them since before I was born, I believe, though this is the first time I have visited this part of the world.’ But it certainly will not be the last, his admiring eyes said. I have never seen such beauty, such style, such splendour and having found it I do not mean to give it up lightly.

  ‘Oh, and why is that, Mr Atherton?’ She could feel the excitement effervesce inside her, foolishly perhaps, even dangerously, for such headlong and immediate attraction could not possibly survive, but when had Tessa Harrison ever considered danger?

  ‘I have been in the army, Miss Harrison, and away from home since I was eighteen. A death in the family, my father’s brother, brought me home and I was compelled to give up my commission. The estate, you understand.’ He shrugged his shoulders on which, his manner said, the whole burden of his family inheritance now rested. He was sure she would know what he meant. ‘And then there is the hunt in Leicestershire, and my own in Cheshire. The grouse, of course, and we have a lodge in Scotland. Deer stalking, you know?’

  Oh, yes, she knew, for was it not the life she herself admired and should she not have known that this man was the kind to lead it? He was so amazingly handsome with his long and elegant mouth and that whimsical half-smile lifting the corners, the smiling brown gaze from eyes that said everything his words, so polite, so correct, could not say, not to a lady such as she was.

  ‘My word, you must lead an active life.’ Her own trite answers were just as hidebound.

  ‘And you, Miss Harrison? What do you do with yourself? I know you ride to hounds for you have just told me, but surely that does not occupy all your time?’ So could not you and I be somewhat more enjoyably employed away from these people, somewhere quiet and sun-filled, song-filled, and suitable for the delights we could show each other? But naturally, a gentleman conversing with a lady to whom he had just been introduced could not speak the words out loud.

  Her smile was dazzling. ‘No, indeed. I fill my days most pleasurably.’ But not, of course, as they were meant to be filled, the slanting, cat-like grey of her eyes told him.

  ‘I’m sure you do. Painting and fine embroidery.’

  ‘Not particularly.’ Her eyes dropped of their own volition to his curving mouth.

  ‘My word, Miss Harrison.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Atherton?’ she said breathlessly.

  ‘If we carry on like this for much longer I swear I shall be forced to believe you are as foolish as the rest of the young ladies whose aims and conversation are all the same and to whom I have been introduced by the score, and I know you are not. So why are we conversing in this absurd manner, do you think?’ He grinned down at her engagingly, wickedly, then winked and her heart soared with delight for it seemed his wit matched his looks and breeding.

  ‘You are teasing me, Mr Atherton.’

  ‘Am I, Miss Harrison? I believe I am, but please, my name is Samuel Robert Atherton, Robby to my friends and if I may I shall call you . . . ?’

  ‘Tessa.’

  ‘Tessa . . . Tessa, may we pretend we were introduced, let’s say three months ago, and are well acquainted. So well acquainted your cousins are looking at me with the obvious intention of calling me out or beating me to death with their bare fists . . .’

  She turned, startled. ‘Drew and Pearce?’ Why should they be concerned since she was so evidently accompanied by a gentleman of the highest pedigree, a friend of the Longworth family and surely in safe hands? Then her enchantment with this new feeling was too strong to let her attention wander for another moment and she turned her brilliant smile back to him.

  ‘. . . but I’m sure they will not mind if I snatch you away and escort you round the fair. Now tell me what you would like to see first, Tessa . . .’ His voice deepened on her name and his eyes assessed her in that completely male but gentlemanly fashion he had been brought up to assume with a lady. His admiration was very evident. He was quite old, she thought, twenty-eight or nine, with wide shoulders which fitted his elegant coat with that perfection such English gentleman seemed so easily to achieve. His face was finely chiselled and his body delicately balanced, every portion of him matching exactly every other. Moulded by the same culture as Nicky Longworth to repress embarrassing emotion, nevertheless his interest, his approval, the warm excitement with which he regarded her, the open-hearted, light-hearted charm, a touch perhaps of complexity, a boyish air overlaid with the maturity of an experienced man, was overwhelming.

  ‘Tessa,’ he said again, quite urgently, ‘call me Robby. Say my name.’ She knew precisely what he meant.

  ‘Robby . . .’ Her eyes smiled into his. Then, for the first time in her life, Tessa Harrison looked shyly away from a man.

  ‘We are to dine with the Squire tonight, Tessa,’ Drew said casually the next morning but his eyes were careful and Pearce’s, who had followed him into the breakfast room, were the same as though, curiously, they were both waiting to judge her reaction.

  She kept her face somewhat averted, pretending a great deal of interest in the fruit on her plate, making a determined effort to calm the tumult of her nerves, the exultation which surged through her at the thought of seeing him again so soon. Of course, this was his doing, she knew it. It was he who had instigated, somehow, this invitation to the Hall, and though the three of them dined there quite often, the suddenness of this command had surprised Drew and Pearce.

  ‘Well, and I may not be able to attend,’ she said airily, foolishly, for nothing in the whole world would keep her away, she knew, so why had she said it? She could find a dozen reasons to stop her from going, couldn’t she, she asked herself, for even now something inside her called to her to halt this startling thing which had happened to her. It told her to be patient and wait. Yet it was not like her to hesitate, to be cautious, particularly when it was something she wanted so desperately. It had caught her off guard, probably because it was so soon after Will, she told herself, and really, should she not restore her heart to a sound and carefree condition before risking it again?

  No such thought was in her head as she sat next to him that evening. Though they were
the conventional distance apart at the dining table she could feel the warmth of his body strike hers, smell the fresh, lemon-scented aroma of his shaving lotion and was acutely aware of the texture of his brown skin, the movement of his muscled shoulders beneath the well-fitting evening coat, the shape of his smiling mouth from which came the courteous and correct words a dinner guest is expected to address to another and the fierceness of his desire which lay deep in his brown eyes.

  They met again the following weekend when the Squire ended the season with a hunt ball to which Miss Harrison and her cousins were invited.

  She had marked time all that week, chafed by her need to see him again, to see if he was as she remembered him, consumed by the span of the days which dragged from second to everlasting second, from hour to endless hour. She had been unable to sit still for longer than thirty seconds, to sleep for longer than an hour, her mind dwelling on the colour and shape of his eyes, the tilt of his eyebrows, the soft brushed gold of his hair and the absolute certainty that when his mouth found hers, as she knew it would, she would know the absolute and supreme truth of life itself. She rode for hours on the tops, demanding of her mare impossible speeds, then standing, shivering, as the animal did, in a fit of remorse. She could not understand the way that she felt, nor, if she was honest, did she care to wonder about it since it could not be altered by wondering and marvelling. She fretted through every long hour which kept him from her.

  She wore an evening gown of stark simplicity, a sheath of poppy-red taffeta, cut so low there had been a murmur as she entered the ballroom between her cousins. She wore no jewellery though it was known there were many fine pieces in the family, owned by her aunt, and her aunt’s mother, Hannah Chapman. Since Drew had cut her hair so dramatically, it had grown again and she wore it now low on the nape of her neck in an intricate coil in the centre of which was one enormous red silk poppy. Drew and Pearce were elegant at her side in their black evening attire, handsome and superior as thoroughbreds and glaring about them, those in their vicinity declared, as though they might strike any man who so much as spoke to her, though why they should since they were known to be light-hearted themselves, was quite an enigma. But it was agreed that they made a most arresting trio as they stood at the top of the Squire’s splendid staircase waiting in line to be received by him and his lady, their commercial background scarcely showing.

  He was at her elbow almost before her hand had been released by the Squire’s and for the next three hours, to the chagrin of every lady present, to the swelling, dangerous, and surprising resentment of her over-protective cousins, and to the mortification of the Squire’s lady who could not understand how a gentleman of such impeccable breeding could be so ill-mannered as Robby Atherton, they danced every dance together, ate supper together; bemused, bewitched, the Squire’s lady said acidly to her husband, raising pained eyebrows as they floated past her once more, and, really, if her husband did not intervene and remind their weekend guest of his obligation in return for their hospitality, she would.

  13

  She thought about Will in those weeks of enchantment more than she had ever done since their last bitter quarrel and she wondered on the reason for it. Was it because in this new and rapturous love, this giddy joy she knew each time she and Robby Atherton met, she could at last understand what Will had felt for her and, in a strange way, sympathise with him? How would she feel if she were to be deprived of the man, the handsome, complex, lovable man who was Robby Atherton? Would she not have felt and acted in exactly the same way? Would she not have been empty of hope and joy, as Will had been? Would she not have been angry and bitter because the love which had filled her days, and her life, had been savagely ripped away from her? As Will had been. But surely Will must have known that eventually what they had must end, for how could he, an employee in her family’s mill, hope to become the husband of one of its daughters? He would have known in his head, where reason and logic was, that one day she would marry one of her own class, or even above it, for she was a woman not only with physical attraction but a splendid dowry which would be enough to earn her a grand catch in the marriage market She was, if not by name then by birth, a Greenwood, a member of a family which had clawed its way from weavers’ cottage to what it was today, and certainly she could not be expected to go back a step, which was what she would do if she married Will. That is, if she had wanted to!

  She looked back curiously to that period in her life, no longer than three or four months really, in which she had been bewitched, she could think of no other word, by the splendour, the hard masculine beauty of Will’s body. Though she tried to tell herself that it had been no more than the awakening sensuality of young womanhood – since she knew about that now – an inherited recklessness which all the Greenwoods seemed to possess and which she had been unable to deny, she was honest enough to admit that it had been more than that. True, she had been delighted with the amber glow of his smooth skin, the steady gaze of his smoky brown eyes, the warm strength of his firm mouth. She had desired only to be across the threshold of his cottage with the door shut firmly behind her; shut herself and Will Broadbent on one side of it, leaving on the other reason and sanity; shut out the world which, she admitted to herself, she wished to remain ignorant of what she did with a man who was no more than her uncle’s overlooker. All she had wanted, desperately needed, was to have her arms about his neck, to be clinging to his strong shoulders whenever they met. It had been a folly in which she had indulged herself a folly she had thought never to undertake. She had wanted him. She had wanted his brown and muscled body, the hard yet tender love he had offered her. She had wanted it and she had been prepared to do, or say, anything to have it.

  But there had been another side to their relationship and she must not scorn it. Will Broadbent was a man who had been given the ability to sharpen his own intelligence. He was keen, shrewd and with a warm spirit to add balance. He had possessed the knack of giving her, as she knew he gave others, not self-esteem exactly, since she had that, but a worth which had nothing to do with how she looked or who she was. He had argued with her, naturally, since they were both stubborn with a belief in the rightness of their own opinions, but he had given her the realisation that her mind and her emotions were as important to him as her line body. He had made her laugh, his wit often audacious and irreverent. He was well read and had told her tales she had never heard from Miss Copeland, adventures of men like Columbus and Marco Polo and more recently of the great David Livingstone and his discoveries on the continent of Africa, holding her in his arms in the deep feather-bed until other, more pressing matters had overtaken them.

  So, a man worthy of loving was Will Broadbent, but not to be compared with the dazzling splendour of Robby Atherton.

  He called the following Friday, giving the appearance of a man who has been hard pressed to contain himself for the required period polite society demanded of a gentleman, arriving in the Squire’s carriage which he had borrowed, he told her, since he could hardly carry ‘these’ on his roan. ‘These’ were roses, masses of velvet-textured, heavily perfumed buds of every shade from the palest cream through delicate pink to deepest scarlet, a carriage-full begged, he said ruefully, from the Squire’s garden. Not to be compared with her velvet-eyed beauty, of course, his eyes told her, smiling down at her with that easy, lounging charm she found so irresistible. She was so indescribably happy she could barely speak.

  ‘I know I should not have called unannounced but I thought if your mother was receiving . . . well, I would dearly love to . . .’ he shrugged his shoulders, telling her without words that her family was of the utmost importance to him now. As the astonishing image of her mother ‘receiving’ slipped in and out of her mind, the roses were placed carefully in her arms, thorns catching in the fabric of his superbly cut, superbly tailored coat and in the soft ivory muslin of her afternoon gown, fastening them together for a breathless moment, his mouth close to hers, his hands hovering as he delicately disentan
gled them.

  ‘My mother is not at home but I believe Laurel . . . my cousin . . . is receiving callers. That is if you would not mind . . . well, there are other ladies . . .’

  ‘I should be delighted to meet Laurel,’ he said gravely.

  ‘The ladies, wives of manufacturing gentlemen, naturally, for Laurel had not yet been successful in enticing those from the gentry on whom she had set her heart – the Squire’s lady, Mrs Celia Longworth, related to a minor earl, it was said; Sir Anthony Taylor’s wife, Lady Prudence, a lady in her own right – were flung into an absolute turmoil of genteel confusion at the arrival of such an obvious member of the ruling class. So well mannered, they observed, so well bred, so patently interested in Jenny Harrison’s girl it was almost indecent. And would you look at her with her arms full of roses and her eyes with stars, and which way was the wind blowing there, they wondered to one another.

  ‘Laurel, may I introduce Mr Atherton? He is a guest at the Hall.’

  At the Hall! Did you hear that? The ladies were positively agog, casting sidelong, knowing glances as he bent his head courteously over each hand. As for Laurel Greenwood – well, if she had been a dog she would have wagged her tail, so great was her satisfaction. He sat amongst them, perfectly at ease as he balanced a fine bone-china teacup and saucer in one hand, a fine bone-china plate on which Laurel had placed a dainty macaroon, in the other. He listened to every word they each addressed to him. They were delighted with him and his pedigreed presence in their midst and when he begged Tessa if he might be shown the gardens, they watched, with sighing regret, as he went down the steps from the drawing-room and on to the wide green lawn.

  Tessa felt her face soften with blissful satisfaction. She had known from the first, of course, but it was miraculous to realise that her instinct about him had been right. He was not only handsome and charming, he was amiable. He was kind No sunshine had ever been so warm and bright, dancing on her skin as she walked beside him on that afternoon – a bright blue afternoon shading into a golden evening and the dazzling prospect of what was waiting for them, though not to be spoken of yet, naturally. How did she know? What was it about him that was so in tune with her, with the intricate bone and muscle, tissue and nerves of Tessa Harrison? Why did she feel so at one with him? She neither knew nor cared. It was there, it had happened and why should she question it? What did they talk of that afternoon, she wondered later? They laughed at the same absurdities, she did remember that, until, with a suddenness and a fierceness that surprised her, Drew and Pearce were there, like two boisterous, roistering, foolish schoolboys, or so they seemed in contrast with the complete man who was Robby Atherton. They invaded the magic circle which had wrapped itself around them; became surly when she was disinclined to notice them, her haughty manner telling them quite plainly to take themselves off, for could they not see that just for this one time, this enchanted moment, she could well do without their presence?