The Wild Dark Flowers Read Online Free Page B

looking into that earnest, honest face of hers, seeing those brown eyes gazing back at him with their usual touch of understated humor and kindness. He imagined something he had never done: lifting those same fingers to his mouth, and gently kissing them.
    She might laugh at him if he did that; he wondered if she would. Laugh, and turn away, or make a joke of him. Or perhaps, now, she wouldn’t laugh at all. Perhaps she would turn her down-to-earth look on him, and tilt her face. He would look down on her thick brown hair held demurely at the nape of her neck. He would watch that mobile mouth turn upwards in a smile. Perhaps she would even lay her hand on his shoulder.
    He smiled, despite himself; they would make such an odd couple. It was only that she always talked to him, only that. He liked her voice. He had asked her to write to him, so that he could have that voice wherever it was that he was going. “I shall do that,” she said. “A promise?” he asked. “I don’t say one thing and mean another,” she retorted sharply.
    He pushed back his hair, and the cool breeze of the hills blew over him. Out of his pocket, he took a sheet of paper and a pencil. He had rhymes in his head that were not quite rhymes; he savored the words as if they had a taste, arranged them in his mind, trying to get the feeling of the mountain curled under him like a great dog, trying to get its power, its pulse. He shut his eyes and felt the enormity of the miles ahead of him.
    Opening his eyes, he smoothed the paper on his knee, and began to write.
    *   *   *
    L ouisa Cavendish had been sitting in her father’s library all morning, and had not stirred even to take lunch. Her father was out seeing the estate manager; her mother was shopping in Richmond with Louisa’s sister Charlotte. But she liked her solitariness much more these days: in fact, she enjoyed it.
    She sat back now, catching sight of herself in her father’s little mahogany wall mirror: a slight, fair, rather pretty girl. She wondered vaguely if she looked different since last year. She was nearly twenty; she sometimes felt more like fifty because of her wretched treatment by Charles de Montfort. She put her head on one side, assessing herself. Perhaps her experiences—her being so dramatically jilted—had actually given her a more interesting air? A darkness, a suggestion of character?
    She shook her head and smiled sadly. “You are certainly a ridiculous, silly fool,” she told her reflected face.
    Since she had come back from France in August last year, the library was the place where she felt most comfortable. She had never been a great reader when she was younger; it had all seemed such a waste of time, and she had skipped her schoolwork whenever she could. Unlike her sister, Charlotte, she would happily fling down a book rather than read it, and the learning of French above all had been torture. It was an irony in itself, she had considered since. French was the language of distrust, of despair, to her now. It was the language spoken by liars like Charles de Montfort.
    She would sometimes think of him, when off her guard, in a rather rosy light, as if he inhabited a grotesque fairy story that became more unreal with each telling. He had been handsome—she doubted that she had ever seen a more handsome man—and he had been such fun, so lighthearted. It still mystified her how much she had misjudged him; it made her doubt herself. That, above all, greater even than the whispered scandal and disgrace of having been jilted so theatrically, was the thing that had unnerved her so much. It made her question every opinion she had ever had, and it made her question her own advantages. Because all her popularity and lightheartedness and frivolity, all her good humor, all her prettiness, had brought her to her knees.
    For a long time after her father and Harry had rescued her and brought her back to Rutherford after the debacle of her elopement, she had mistrusted