Duchess By Night

Page 28

When they reached the beginning of the road, Strange rose slightly in his stirrups, bringing his horse to a trot. Harriet eyed him from behind, and revised her opinion. What she felt went beyond attraction.
She felt almost helpless in the face of the desire she felt. It was…ravenous. As if she would do anything to caress him, to touch him.
And never mind the fact that he thought she was an effeminate male whose company he could hardly stand.
She gathered up her reins and urged her horse to a trot. Not to put too fine a point on it, the first blow of the saddle as the horse started trotting made her want to scream. But she wedged her boots into the stirrups and tried to hover above the saddle. It worked—kind of. It was much better once her horse lengthened her stride and started galloping. She bounced along in opposite rhythm to the horse and it wasn’t nearly as painful.
In fact, she actually found herself leaning over the horse’s neck and beginning to enjoy herself, barring the icy wind whistling in her teeth and squealing in her ears.
Strange waited for her at the end of the road. Harriet pulled up her horse, her chest heaving.
“Better,” he said. He wheeled his horse and started back the way he came.
“For Christ’s sake,” Harriet muttered, staring after him. Didn’t he say yesterday that the horses needed to walk after a gallop? Finally she took out after him. If she paused even for a moment, the cold ate at her bones. The ground whirled by at her feet, frozen clods of brown earth flying from the horse’s hooves, thin ice cracking.
It felt wonderful.
Her heart was pounding, blood thumping through her veins. She suddenly realized that she hadn’t felt this alive in—oh—years.
Since Benjamin died, perhaps before Benjamin died. It was as if she had been living in cotton wool, and suddenly the wooly blanket lifted and the world flared out around her, brilliant, full of life, color, and movement. A jay started out from a bush; she caught the tail of a rabbit bounding under a hedgerow.
At the entrance to Strange’s drive, she hauled on the reins. Her mare had enjoyed the run, and slowed to a walk with a few graceless, stiff-legged movements that jolted every one of Harriet’s bruises. But she was too interested in Strange’s house to do more than wince.
It was the first time she’d really looked at it. It was a child’s drawing of a country house, a castle and a house in one. Part of it gleamed in proper Portland stone, but the bit to the right looked like the left-over parts of a medieval castle without a turret.
Then there was a wing extending to the left that sprawled low to the ground, with greenhouses sprouting from it like spokes on a wheel. And finally there was a tower-like affair that must be the famous reproduction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa—except she didn’t think the famous Italian tower leaned quite this much. It was made of brick, with a little brass peaked hat on top.
It looked dangerous.
A smoky voice said, “You’re frowning at my tower. Would you like to see it?”
“You really did design that?”
For the first time since she’d met him, Strange’s eyes lit up with something more than lazy appreciation or sarcasm.
“Let’s take a look.” And without waiting for an answer, he directed his horse through the archway.
Harriet shook her freezing fingers and picked up the reins.
Up close, the tower was made of bricks, with a wooden door. It leaned in an alarming fashion. In fact, it didn’t exactly lean: it toppled. It looked like a tree forced out over the edge of a cliff by repeated winter storms. It looked like a drunk man falling to the ground.
It looked, in short, like certain death.
Strange was already off his horse and unlocking the door when Harriet arrived.
“Come on,” he said over his shoulder, disappearing inside.
Harriet looked down. She had never dismounted without assistance. Ladies didn’t. And Nick, her favorite groom, who had boosted her into place with plenty of whispered bits of advice that morning, was nowhere to be seen.
Grunting a little from her sore muscles, she pulled her right boot out of the stirrup and tried to slide to the ground.
She ended up falling with a wallop onto the frozen ground just as Strange came back into the doorway.
She quickly scrambled to her feet.
“You’re the worst horseman I’ve ever seen,” he said, in a not unfriendly tone of voice. “And yet you ride quite well in a neck-or-nothing sort of way. Didn’t your mother let you on a horse?”
“My—” Harriet said, before remembering that Villiers had given her a sickly mother in the country. “My mother is afraid of horseflesh,” she said. “What shall I do with the reins?”
“Just put them down. My horses are extremely well trained. You see how my horse is simply waiting for me? Yours will do the same.”
Harriet put the reins down and stepped back. Her horse, being no fool, instantly decided that she would rather be in the nice snug stables, and set off in that direction.
In a hurry.
Harriet didn’t see any need to comment on it, so she walked past Strange, leaving him muttering some interesting curse words behind her.
She stopped short inside the tower. It was one round room, and rather than having floors, the ceiling simply receded and receded, so Harriet felt dizzy when she looked up and saw the roof veering off to the left.
The room was hung with great swaths of watered apricot silk. It had only two pieces of furniture: a large bed hung with matching gauze, and a solid oak desk piled with papers. It looked like an odd cross between a Turkish harem and the chambers of a solicitor.
Her mouth fell open.
“Isn’t it interesting?” Strange said, appearing next to her. “I pressured the vector to the most extreme that it could manage in terms of weight-bearing.”
“It’s like looking up a crooked chimney pipe,” Harriet said, ignoring the bed and looking upward again.
“If you calculate the angles, Cope, you’ll see that I achieve around a sixty-three-percent lean by fifty percent of the extension. What do you think?”
“I think it’s dangerous,” Harriet said bluntly.
“It’s not dangerous. I calculated the weight of the bricks very carefully against the slant of the tower.”
“I’m sure you did. It’s dangerous.”
“It’s not dangerous,” he said in a controlled voice that told her other sensible souls had pointed out the same thing. “The servants don’t like to come near, and so I allow them their foibles. But any educated man has to recognize that the science of engineering dictates exactly what a building can and cannot do, in terms of angles.”
“No windows?” Harriet enquired.
“They altered the weight-bearing properties of the bricks.”
In other words, Harriet translated, the whole thing would have collapsed into a pile of dust.
“The tower in Pisa has been standing since the 1170s,” Strange said. He strode over and struck a flint to light a lantern hanging from a little hook. It cast a golden light over his shoulders that served to remind Harriet how cold she was.
When she didn’t say anything to affirm his brilliance in tower-building, he added: “In the summer, Eugenia and I often picnic here.”
She swung around from examining a couple of bricks she was sure were about to crumble into each other. “You shouldn’t do that.”