Lord Crensford was beginning to despair of ever being free of Angela Wickenham. Certainly his mother would see to it that he squired her everywhere during the remainder of their stay at Rotherham Hall. London and freedom seemed a long way off both in time and space. He had a horrid and gloomy premonition that he would never reach either again.
The morning had been bad. Miss Wickenham had expressed a desire to see the castle again, and what Miss Wickenham desired she got, it seemed. It did not matter at all that Russell and Barbara were also bent on going there and that Michael or Lester or Allan might easily have been persuaded to escort Miss Wickenham. Oh, no, he had to be the victim.
"You know the place like the back of your hand, Ernest, dear," his mother had said. "You really must go along to show the others."
It would have been hopeless to argue that there really was nothing in the castle that was not obvious to the eye and that everyone had seen it before, anyway. It would have been hopeless to explain that he had been planning to invite Diana to look through the greenhouses with him. Her morning had been planned too. She was to practice for the evening concert—with Jack, of course.
She had told him when he had expressed his concern to her privately that it was quite all right. The marquess might be all that Ernest had said, and he might be obnoxious, but he was not dangerous. She could handle him quite well. If she only knew! And she had added that she was sorry she had begged him a few days earlier to stay close to her. He must not feel obliged to do so. He must enjoy himself
with companions of his choice.
And that left him with Angela Wickenham.
He glanced at her as they crossed the bridge, followed by four other couples. She was looking about her with bright enthusiasm and met his glance with that smile that always crinkled her nose.
She was extremely pretty, he had to admit that. A vast improvement on the way she had looked four years before. She looked perfectly harmless. If one did not know differently, one might think her a quite normal young lady. One would not realize that she could be such a little pest.
All she had been able to think of that morning was climbing. While Barbara had been content to stroll about the courtyard and around the castle on the arm of Russell, as any sedate young lady would, Miss Wickenham had darted from one tower to the other, and he had had to be quite firm with her so that she would not climb any of the spiral staircases. They were altogether too dangerous for such a little
and delicate young lady.
"But this one looks quite safe," she had said, coming to the final round tower and setting her foot on the bottom step, which was admittedly intact. "Do let us go up, my lord. You can go first if you like. And I will hold tightly to your hand if you wish. Please!"
"For the last time," he had said, thoroughly exasperated, "I will not take you back to your mama with a broken head. You can see quite well from down here. There is nothing whatsoever up there."
"But I wanted to see where that girl fell from," she had said, looking up at him with large dark eyes which might work on some men, but would certainly not on him. ''I want to know exactly how she must have felt just before she jumped."
"That is just a story Mama likes to think is true," he had said. "You aren't going up there anyway. I'm not going to have you share her fate."
She had turned sharply away from him and had kept her face averted for the rest of the time they had spent in the courtyard.Pouting, of course.Hoping he would give in. Just like a spoiled child. Wickenham probably did spoil her too. She was several years younger than Claudia. And he supposed it would be easy to spoil someone so small and dainty and pretty.
"The trees are beautiful here," she said now. "They are very old, are they not?" She stopped to touch the bark of an old oak tree, whose branches spread low to the ground.
Lord Crensford stopped politely at her side, his hands clasped behind him, while the other couples strolled on past.
Angela sighed. "I love trees," she said. "They reach so much closer to the sky than I can."
She finally moved—but not straight ahead as any normal young lady might be expected to do. She hitched her skirt to well above the ankles and began to move vertically. She started to climb the tree. The pestilential little hoyden!
"Hey!" Lord Crensford called. "Come down from there before you fall or get hurt."
She smiled cheekily down at him. "Make me come down," she said, and went on climbing.
Lord Crensford muttered a word that he would not normally say in a lady's presence and went after her. It must have been fifteen years since he last had climbed a tree. And a tight coat from Western's and tight pantaloons and Hessian boots were not quite the outfit one would choose to climb trees in if one had a choice.
Of course, he had no choice. The chit would fall and break a leg, and he would be blamed.
She was sitting on a stout branch, her back against the trunk, her knees drawn up against her, and her arms circling them when he finally came up to her. She was looking as comfortable as if she were sitting on a sofa in a private parlor. Her head was thrown back and her eyes were closed. She looked as if she felt perfect bliss.
"Don't you just love climbing?" she asked.
"It's my favorite activity," he said. "I have to sneak away from the house twice a day to shin up a couple of trees to satisfy my craving. I'm surprised you had not noticed."
She giggled merrily. "You are always so cross," she said. "One leaves the world and all its troubles behind when one climbs. I wish I could go on and on climbing right into the sky, right among the stars. Don't you?"
"It would be damp among the clouds," he said.
She laughed again. "There would be no clouds above my tree," she said."Only endless and deep blue sky."
