My Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale Page A

quite understand you, sir.”  
    “What time is it?”  
    “It is half past nine, sir.”
    Robert gazed at him. He had hired Lander for his military stance, for his air of pugnacity. He had hired him, frankly, for protection. And now he did not trust the man, though he could not tell why. He wished that he had held the note and examined it in private, to see if the seal had been tampered with, while at the same time his crazy suspicions mortified him.
    “Take the tray,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”
    “Yes, sir,” Lander said. He gathered up the breakfast and carried it through the door, closing it behind him with one hand.
    Robert waited a few moments, and then pulled down books from the shelf. Late in the night, he’d stolen five bottles from his own cellars. He wiped the dust from a brown vessel marked Devonshire cider and pried out the cork. He drank straight from the bottle, tasting the waxy edge, downing the warm sweet gingery liquid with inelegant greed.
    After a few deep draughts, he would have sat down and consumed the cider more slowly, but he did not have time if he was to prevent her leaving before ten o’clock. He upended the bottle, finishing off the drink. He hadn’t drunk cider since he was a schoolboy at Eton; it was hardly common in India, but he thought it ought to be mild and somewhat nourishing. It would keep him alive, at any rate.
    He replaced the books quickly, hiding the bottles behind a set of his Indian diaries. For a moment, he paused with his hand resting on the spines. He remembered Phillippa laughing at him. But he narrowed his eyes and stared hard at the diaries, at their green calfskin edged in gold. Imagination. Imagination. He must control it. God, he hated her.
    He counted the numbers he had inked on the backs of the twelve volumes, one-two-three-five-four-seven...the clock chimed the quarter hour. Robert hastily rearranged the books, glanced around for where he had laid number six—there on his father’s lead-lined chest of drawers. He stuffed it into the space and went to the door.
     

     
    She swept into the room wearing her cloak, facing him with an assumed belligerence. She would not reveal that she was quaking in her boots. It was not as easy as she had determined it would be. The moment she saw him, her stride broke. He stood before the tall windows, too much silhouetted for his expression to be clear, his posture an unyielding stiffness, hands locked behind his back like an officer staring down his troops.
    Folie stopped for just an instant, consciously preventing herself from making an apologetic curtsy, as if she were late to an appointment with the headmistress. She made a brief nod. “Good morning, Mr. Cambourne.” Then she walked to the window and looked out on the gray drizzle, her fingers resting lightly on the sill.
    “You must not leave,” he said.
    Folie turned to him, her eyebrows lifted. He did not look at her, but remained in profile, his gaze fixed on some unknown point in the middle of the room. She could see him more clearly now—his straight solid jaw and high-bridged nose, his hair making black curls against the crisp starch of his neckcloth.
    “Why ever not?” she heard herself say boldly. “I do not feel that I know you. I am uncomfortable here. Melinda is unhappy and anxious.”
    His gaze flickered, as if he were searching for something in the room that he could not find. He frowned.
    “I don’t understand why you wish for us to stay,” she said.
    He moved away. “I wish it.”
    “Do you indeed?” She made a light disbelieving laugh. “I beg your pardon; this is quite confusing to me. I am not a woman of the world, perhaps I know little of society manners, but I have never been so comprehensively ignored by a host!”
    He looked up at her suddenly. “Have you been ignored?”
    Folie met his eyes. They were gray and stern, not so fiercely strange as they had seemed before.
    “Well,” she said, slightly taken aback. “We never