Storming the Castle

Page 11

“Ah, but the cheese in that mousetrap was irresistible,” the prince said politely. “If you’ll excuse me, dear aunt. Miss Damson, Wick. I believe my turn has come.” With that, he left.
“You’d better stop looking at that wiggle-eyed gal,” Princess Sophonisba said, waving another chicken bone at Wick. She didn’t seem to expect an answer because she turned about and started haranguing a footman.
“Wiggle-eyed?” Philippa asked.
“She means velvet,” Wick said. His smile was—well—it should be outlawed. It made her insides feel hot and yielding.
“Velvet eyes?” Philippa said, pulling herself together. “I think I prefer wiggle.”
“Smoky,” he offered.
She wrinkled her nose. “I sound like a brothel, all velvet and smoke.”
“And what do you know of brothels?” he asked. His smile made her heart pound.
“Nothing,” she admitted.
“Well, I can tell you this,” he said, leaning toward her. “There are no doxies with smoky sea-green eyes nor hair the color of pearls.”
“Not bad,” Sophonisba barked from across the table.
Philippa jumped. Caught by the sultry tone in Wick’s voice, she’d forgotten all about the princess.
“You’d better look out,” Sophonisba said to her, using a half-eaten chicken leg as a pointer. “The man’s a devil, of course. His brother was the same. Do you think the princess had a chance once Gabriel had her in his sights? Not a chance!” She snorted. “I almost had to give up my brandy, but he ended up marrying her.”
“Brandy?” Philippa repeated, completely bewildered.
“Don’t ask,” Wick murmured.
Sophonisba had apparently reminded herself of the drink; she was now demanding some to accompany her chicken.
“You seem remarkably unscandalized by the knowledge of unseemly circumstances of my birth,” Wick said. “I’m still waiting for you to shudder and avert your eyes.”
“Have people shuddered in the past?” she inquired.
“Ladies have.” There was something uncompromising in his voice. A little bleak.
“I am no longer a lady,” she said, shrugging. “Though of course, one must distinguish among bastards.”
“Must one?” Wick asked.
“Absolutely,” she said firmly. “There are those who earn the appellation, by their behavior, and those who are merely given it by circumstance. Besides, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what it means to be a lady.”
“I suppose your altered circumstances lead to such philosophical thoughts,” he asked, his eyes laughing again. “Because true ladies never contemplate the question. So what qualities did you conclude were necessary? Elegance, culture, discernment? Or perhaps the ability to live in luxury is enough?”
“Sacrifice,” she said flatly. “And sometimes, it just isn’t worth it.”
She thought his eyes . . . what she saw in his eyes couldn’t be respectable, or true, so she devoted herself to her roast beef.
Chapter Five
In the next weeks, Philippa’s life took on a rhythm. Every time Kate nursed Jonas, he would cry bitterly for hours. Philippa and Kate took turns walking him, rocking him, massaging him . . . none of it really seemed to help his aching stomach.
But, as Philippa pointed out with somewhat immodest pride, he was growing plumper, without the castor oil and emetics the doctor had prescribed. In fact, when she reached the end of her second week in the castle, Jonas’s improvement was undeniable. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Philippa crooned to him in the middle of the night after Kate had fed the baby and handed him over to her now-indispensable nursemaid. Jonas blinked up at her. His eyes fluttered, and he almost, almost went to sleep, but then another pang must have caught him because his face twisted in anguish, and he pulled up his legs and cried out.
“Poor baby,” Philippa said, kissing his cheek. then popping him up on and over her shoulder in his favorite position. It meant that he hung gracelessly down her back, rather like a sack of beans, but it worked. Unless she stopped walking, of course.
She decided to take him to the portrait gallery because she had walked around and around the nursery earlier in the evening, and she felt that one more turn around that well-worn path would drive her mad.
The castle was warm and dark. She descended a level and made her way to the portrait gallery to find that moonlight was streaming in the windows there, its color as pale and chilly as the white gooseberries she used to gather as a child. She didn’t stop for long before the portraits, just paused to examine how moonlight made the be-ruffed gallants look like faded copies of their daily selves.
She knew the moment Mr. Berwick—or Wick, as he’d insisted she call him—entered the room. It was as though the air changed somehow. He always found her in the middle of the night. He’d look for her in the nursery, or the gallery, and walk with her. When they encountered each other during the day, usually at dinner, they talked courteously enough of Jonas, of the castle, of whatever . . . but never of their nocturnal rendezvous.
All of that polite daylight conversation and observance of convention melted away in the soft glimmer of moon and candle. It was as though the obscurity of the night gave them sanction to be their true selves. The way he looked at her was nothing like the way Rodney used to look at her. Oh, Wick desired her. She could see a demand in his eyes, a hunger that he couldn’t mask.
But more than that . . . he liked her. He thought she was funny. He actually enjoyed listening to her. It was intoxicating, it was bewitching, it was everything Rodney had never demonstrated and never could.
Philippa turned around to see Wick walking toward her, his step unhurried. He was smiling, that lopsided grin that made her feel warm all over.
“How do you manage to always look so impeccable?” she asked, when he was near. “Do you never sleep?” She wore a nightdress and a wrapper, and her hair tumbled down her back every which way. After the first night or two, when the baby had cried all night long, she’d stopped worrying about what she looked like at night.
“I don’t sleep in my livery, if that’s what you mean,” Wick said. “How is our princeling tonight?” He peered at the baby’s little head. Seeing that he had a new audience, Jonas let out a howl but quieted again.
“I think he’s better,” Philippa said, rubbing the baby’s back. “He won’t let me sit down, though, or even stop walking.”
In the last nights, they had talked about everything from Shakespeare (she liked Romeo and Juliet; he thought Romeo was a tiresome melancholic) to lawyers (she thought they ought to donate their time to poor widows; he thought that was unlikely) to dissections (she found the idea disturbing; he was of the opinion that it was the only way to really identify the kind of illness a patient had suffered from).
Now he picked up their conversation directly where they’d left it the night before.
“I thought of another reason that dissection is important. How else are we to learn of the body’s systems if we don’t investigate them thoroughly?”
“I wouldn’t want to learn about the body if it required cutting one open,” she said with a shudder.