He was glad he had sent André away.
“Absolutely,” she said. “The church congregation must be rescued from being rained upon. Besides, I am partial to sparkling jewels. Let us see if there are any diamonds among them. Large diamonds.”
The former Lady Riverdale being lighthearted? Actually joking? This was intriguing. He raised his eyebrows but made no comment.
There were diamonds and emeralds and rubies and sapphires. There were topazes and garnets. There were silver and gold. And there were pearls. All of them large and sparkling—even the pearls—and perfectly shaped. All of them unutterably vulgar and not even convincing fakes. He decked her out in some of the more ostentatious of them and paid three times what the two flustered ladies who ran the booth asked of him. She glittered and sparkled at ears, bosom, wrists, and fingers—and admired the effect and preened herself under the admiration of the two ladies and the small crowd that had gathered about at a respectful distance to watch. There was a smattering of admiring applause. She thanked him and told him she would have considered the sapphire bracelet too if only she had one more wrist.
“An ankle?” he suggested, looking down toward the hem of her dress.
“Ah, no,” she said. “One would not wish to look overdressed.”
She had set aside at least some of her legendary dignity, it seemed, in favor of something approaching gaiety, and he was enslaved. She did not immediately snatch off the jewelry as soon as they were out of sight of the booth and hide it away in the darkest depths of her reticule. Rather, she kept fingering it and admiring it.
They had their portraits sketched in charcoal by a bearded, wild-haired artist who made Marcel look like a cadaverous devil minus his pitchfork and Miss Kingsley like a moon-faced ghost with a pearl necklace. They bought two iced cakes after the baking had been judged and they had been awarded third prize. They were as hard as granite.
“But very pretty with their twirled icing, you must admit,” she said when he grimaced.
“I might,” he said, “if I did not feel as though every tooth in my head had just snapped in two.”
“But not by the icing,” she said.
“But not by the icing.”
“Well, then . . .”
They watched the wood-sawing contest, in which a group of brawny, sweating young men with shirtsleeves rolled well above the elbow showed off their muscles and their prowess for a gaggle of giggling village maidens—and for the two of them, the visitors, the outsiders. They examined—at least she did—the needlework stall after the judging had been completed, and she bought him a man’s coarse cotton handkerchief, across one corner of which a large L had been embroidered in the midst of curlicues and stemless, leafless blossoms. The handkerchief had not placed among the winners—one fact that impelled her to buy it, he suspected, the other being that the L could stand for Lamarr. She seemed not to know about his marquess’s title.
He bought her a crocheted drawstring bag in a hideous shade of pink—also not a winner—in which to keep all the jeweled finery now bedecking her person.
“I will treasure it all,” she assured him, and he wondered idly if she really would. He considered how long he would keep the handkerchief. He suspected that he would keep it, though he would never use it and thus display it to the shocked eyes of the ton.
They watched and listened to the fiddle contest. He refrained from tapping his foot or clapping his hands in time to the music, as most of the spectators did, but she did not so refrain, he noticed. She appeared to be genuinely enjoying herself. As, strangely enough, was he.
They watched a singing contest for little girls and one boy soprano, who had somehow escaped the dreadful fate of being a member of the church choir, before moving on to watch the archery contest and then to have their fortunes told. He was to expect long life and prosperity and happiness. No surprise there. Did fortune-tellers ever predict anything different? He did not know what she was to expect. She did not tell him.
They drank weak, tepid lemonade from a table run by a Sunday school class. It must be many years since he had drunk any sort of lemonade. It would be many more before he would indulge again.
She became more lighthearted as the afternoon wore on. But she did not flirt with him. And that surely had been part of the attraction when they were younger. Although he had wondered too about the possibility of hidden passions; maybe he had seen in her a potentially steadying influence as his life had careened more and more out of control—and even as he had flirted outrageously with her. And even as he had known she was married and therefore out of bounds for anything more than dalliance. It had not occurred to him at the time that just maybe he could have made a friend of her.
But he did not make friends with women. Or even with men for that matter. Friendship involved a certain degree of intimacy, an opening of self to another, and he chose not to share himself with anyone.
She was not married now. Ironically, she never had been.
And he wanted her. Still. And he wondered still.
They watched a dancing contest about the maypole that had been erected in the center of the green. Two teams had come from other villages to challenge the dancers from this village, and crowds gathered around to cheer on their favorites and to applaud appreciatively every intricate move in which the colorful ribbons twined themselves about the tall pole in seemingly hopeless entanglement while the dancers who held them were forced closer and closer to it and to one another—and then smoothly extricated themselves, weaving in and out as they circled to the spirited scraping of the fiddles until each dancer held an unencumbered ribbon and the maypole was bare.
“The maypole is like a symbol of life, is it not?” the former countess said at the end of one such dance, and he turned an inquiring gaze upon her. She was flushed and bright-eyed—not just from the wind, he guessed—almost as though she had been out there dancing herself.
“It is?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Around and around,” she said, “seemingly getting nowhere but becoming more and more entangled in troubles and cares, not all of them of one’s own making.”
“That is a gloomy assessment of life with which to entertain yourself on a festive afternoon, Lady Riverdale,” he said.
“But the maypole dances do not end in chaos,” she said. “And I am not the countess. The Countess of Riverdale is married to the present earl and is a friend of mine.”
“I will not be distracted with trivialities,” he said. “Complete your analogy.”
“Everything works out,” she said. “If one faithfully follows the pattern of the dance, it all works out.” She was frowning.
“But what would happen,” he asked her, “if just one of the dancers bobbed when all the others weaved? The whole pattern would be ruined, all the ribbons would be hopelessly tangled with one another, and all the dancers would be doomed to weave and wander in eternal befuddlement. I am afraid your analogy is a naively romantic one, Miss Kingsley. It is simplistic. It suggests that there is such a thing as happily-ever-after if one but lives a virtuous and dutiful life.”
“Very well,” she said. “It was a foolish and impulsive idea, and it has annoyed you. I am sorry.”
Had she annoyed him with her oh-so-simplistic suggestion that unwavering virtue was always rewarded? By God, she had. But how could anyone in her right mind believe even for an impulsive moment that life turned out right if one but followed the rules? Especially when such a belief depended upon the companion theory that everyone else in one’s orbit could be relied upon to do likewise. How could she of all people believe it?