Then he gave his head a slow shake, like a man who was had just learned his ultimate fate and was peacefully content to submit to it.
“Yes, of course you are enchanted,” he managed, finally, with a certain amount of bravado. His voice was graveled. “But have you thought of a word forme?”
They smiled at each other.
Earlier that week she’d stood with her father in the garden during that deep blue hour between sunset and nightfall, admiring the sharp, dark outlines of the first swifts to arrive that spring from wherever they wintered in some sunnier clime. They soared and circled and dove, clearly exhilarated to be alive.
“Did you know swifts almost never land?” her father told her absently. “They do nearly everything in flight.”
And that was what falling in love with Jacob Eversea felt like to Isolde.
The cow was justas spectacular as Jacob promised, and it was the beginning of what would be the best season of her life so far. Jacob had a talent for organizing expeditions and a dilettante’s spirit of adventure. The Sylvaines were his willing lieutenants, and so off they went on excursions.
He took them to all of his favorite places in Pennyroyal Green: mysterious fairy-ring clearings in the woods, ancient stone bridges, up rugged paths into the hills behind Miss Marietta Endicott’s academy to a place where a cluster of willows nodded over a magical sun-dappled ponds where all the little creatures of the woods, the ones that flew or hopped or padded around on all fours, seemed to convene. They visited neighboring towns. They brought picnics, and sometimes Jacob’s little nephews, too. They fashioned and then raced little boats on the river; they played Pall-Mall in the clearing in front of the folly.
On days when no excursions were planned, Maria and Isolde occasionally cajoled Jacob and George into joining them in acting out scenes from Shakespeare plays orLa Morte d’Arthur,tales of King Arthur. And while George’s facility with a soliloquy boded well for his future as a courtroom barrister, Jacob delivered all of his lines with stentorian gusto, to great comic effect, and his version of Romeo died with such flamboyant groaning and thrashing that the girls collapsed with shrieks of laughter.
“It’s just that I think Romeo could have easily handled it all better,” Jacob said with mild indignation, later, only partly jesting. “He was a bit of an idiot.”
Often Jacob called upon them in the evenings, too, and stayed a few hours to chat comfortably with Mr. and Mrs. Sylvaine or play a round or two of whist or chess. He obligingly sang when one of the ladies of the house or a visiting neighbor sat at the pianoforte. No one was excluded from his regard.
But the true reason Jacob visited the Sylvaines was clear to all. He was not fundamentally enigmatic, and his expression when he looked at Isolde required no interpretation.
He didn’t send over hothouse flowers, or pay formal calls to sit in the parlor over tea while her mother hovered nearby, or any of the other things that typically announced a Courtship with a capital “C”. But he gently captured little frogs and placed them in Isolde’s palm for her to admire before they leaped away, or told her which flowers she ought to eat if she were ever lost in the woods alone. He braided celandine into a crown and gave it to her to wear when she played Titania in a scene on their Folly Stage. He was always the perfect gentleman, in manners and bearing, even when he teased. Everything was proper when he was about. They were never, ever alone, and always adequately chaperoned.
But the two of them had secrets.
Like a pair of pickpockets, they stole vanishingly swift touches, every one of them seemingly innocent, yet every one of them erotically charged. Each accidentally-on-purpose brush of skin against skin rendered them mute for long seconds. When he stood behind her and helped her perfect her aim during archery, his hands lightly, briefly guiding hers, or when she crossed a swift creek on stepping stones and he tucked his hand beneath her elbow just as she was about to slip—a quicksilver rush of longing stole her breath. Especially when he was close enough for her to smell. He smelled marvelous. Like grass and horse and boy and clean clothes.
And on these occasions, she’d seen hot spots of color rise his cheekbones, as if he was withstanding the impact of her nearness.
Then there came the day when they were walking along with the group and he halted abruptly. She turned, surprised, to find him holding out the corner of her shawl to her, laughter in his eyes.
She still had a grip on one side of it. She hadn’t even realized that she’d dropped the other.
“Thank you! How on earth did you know I dropped?—”
He said very evenly, as though delivering important information, “Because when you laugh, your eyes light and your whole face goes brilliant and your head tips back, and you often give a single happy clap. And nearly every time all of that makes you lose your grip on your shawl. I knew you were about to drag it on the ground.”
She stared at him, breathless.
He might as well have said “I love you”.
Because it was clear he’d memorized the details of her, cherishing them the way she cherished details about him.
When their knuckles lightly brushed as he handed the dragging end of her shawl to her, Jacob’s shoulders moved in a long, steadying breath.
“We’ve been seeing quite a lot of young Eversea,” her father mused after Jacob departed their house one day, about a month after his first visit. He’d brought a bottle of brandy to Mr. Sylvaine as a gift. “This is the kind of brandy only a very rich man could afford.”
Her father seemed unusually pensive, dryly amused, as he rotated the bottle on the table in the candlelight.
The entire family was sitting about, actively perceiving the table so that it wouldn’t disappear, enjoying slices of ginger cake.
“Ah, but the Eversea’s fortune is self-made, father,” George said. “You admire that sort of thing, don’t you? You’d best, as I intend to be rich and self-made and all that, too.”
Their father snorted softly and leaned back in his chair, thoughtfully drumming his fingers. “As a schoolmaster I had the pleasure of meeting men from many walks of life. Fathers of pupils, mainly. Funnily enough, there’s often almost an innocence to the titled ones who are born into immense wealth. They are content with themselves and their place in the world. They needn’t make any effort toconnive, as it were, or struggle. It simply wouldn’t occur to them to do it, because everything is comfortable for them at all times. And just as often there’s a certain ruthlessness to the self-made types. The men driven to become something much grander than the lot to which they were born. They are never quite at ease, and men like that always seek a solution to their discomfort. Both conditions have their, shall we say, pitfalls.”
His family was quiet.
