The Emerald Swan by Jane Feather Page B

aware that the sheet was tangled around his thighs, leaving the best part of his body exposed. He tugged the covers up to his waist and lay back against the pillows waiting for his heart to slow and his ragged breathing to ease.
    “Did I wake you? Forgive me,” he said after a minute.
    “Robbie had dreadful nightmares, too, so I’m used to it,” Miranda said, hovering by the bed. “Is there something I can get you?”
    “In my saddlebag … a flagon of brandy…”
    Miranda went to the corner to fetch the saddlebag.
    “My thanks.” He unscrewed the top and put the flagon to his lips. The fiery liquid burned down his gullet and settled warmingly into his cold belly.
    “Do they happen often?” Miranda asked softly.
    “No,” he said curtly. He put the flask to his lips again.
    What could this fresh-faced innocent know of a woman’s madness, of all-consuming sexual appetites that had to be satisfied just as the body needed food and water to go on living? Miranda could never know what it had been like to watch helplessly as the cruel sickness destroyed the woman he had once loved … what it had been like to know that only Charlotte’s death would free him.
    What could Miranda know of such things? And what could she know of the dreadful moment when his cold, purposeful hands had felt for and failed to find the pulse of life and he had wanted to shout for joy that this beautiful, vibrant young life had been extinguished? How could she judge a man who had prayed daily for his wife’s death to free him from torment; who knew whose violent hands had answered hisprayer? How could she judge a man who intended to take that secret knowledge to his grave?
    Miranda turned aside to pick up Chip, who was still looking alarmed on the windowsill. If Lord Harcourt didn’t wish to talk of his nightmares, so be it. Maybe, like Robbie, he didn’t understand them or know what caused them. Robbie could never even describe them afterward. All he could ever say was that he’d fallen into a black hole. She leaned out of the window to breathe the freshness of the night air, observing the very faintest pearly shadow in the east. “It’ll soon be dawn.”
    Gareth set the flagon on the table. “I’ve a mind to try for an hour’s peaceful sleep, then. Do you do the same, Miranda.”
    Miranda stayed at the window for a minute longer, then she returned to bed. But she was no longer sleepy and lay watching the darkness beyond the window lighten slowly, listening as the dawn chorus heralded the new day with all its jubilant song. Where would she be at the end of this new day? In some palace in London in a world she knew nothing about … a world she had never expected to know anything about. How could she possibly expect to play the part of this London lady, Maude? She was a strolling player, an acrobat. It was ridiculous to think she could pretend to be someone so very different from herself. But the earl seemed to think she could do it.
    Chip, with a low chattering, jumped from the bed to the windowsill and vanished into the spreading branches of a magnolia tree.
    It was no good, she was not going to be able to sleep again. Miranda flung aside the covers and stood upwith a luxurious stretch. She dressed quietly then glanced around the chamber. Milord’s clothes lay scattered on the floor, some half on, half off the chest at the foot of the bed where he’d thrown them. She bent to pick them up and her nose wrinkled at the familiar odor clinging to his doublet and shirt. It was one that clung to Raoul after one of his nighttime forays into town. He’d come back bleary-eyed, loose-lipped, disheveled.
    “You smell like a whorehouse, Raoul,” Gertrude had complained one morning when the strongman in a fit of alcohol-induced benevolence had attempted to lift her in his powerful embrace.
    Men and whorehouses were one of life’s natural conjunctions, but Miranda was oddly disappointed to think milord had taken comfort there.
    She shook out