Chapter Three
How loud her heart beat in her ears. Her fingers would be shaking if she hadn’t curled them around the teacup in front of her.
Sabine kept her attention fixed on the leaves clinging to the interior of the marquess’s teacup and wondered how much Lord Foye knew about her. Safest for her to assume that the man sitting across from her had heard every boast Lord Crosshaven had ever made concerning her, all of them lies, whether said in relative private to his cronies or pronounced at some assembly to which she and her uncle would never have been invited. Lies to which a rebuttal proved impossible.
How many thousands of miles from England did she have to go before she could live without fear of being thought a whore? Or would Lord Foye, whom she had not met when she and Godard were in London, be like the others who had assumed she was now fair game for seduction? She flicked a glance at him, resentful and apprehensive at the same time. He might do her a great deal of damage if he desired. Better she find out now than later.
He was a physically formidable man, which she did not care for. Not only tall but muscular, with broad shoulders and chest, and thighs shaped by vigorous activity. And unlike Godard, she was well aware that his clothes were exquisitely made. He probably did spend hours before his mirror.
Lord Foye was head and shoulders taller than she. His hair was dark, not quite black, and quite willful in its curls. His eyes were the same blue as the Mediterranean. His nose was hooked, and the remainder of his features were set irregularly in his face, as if someone had put the parts together and then given him a hard shake before everything had quite settled into place.
She had, in her life, never met a peer until she and her uncle went to London where he was knighted. The aristocracy she’d found terrible in the extreme. They were a proud lot, too aware of their consequence and too overbearing in their expectation that she would be transported by the honor of an introduction.
Her mistake in believing the same of Foye became clear the moment he sat down to have her read his tea leaves. Not so much a proud man, she decided, as reserved. His consequence fit him like his clothes: exquisitely and without ostentation, but underneath there ran a river too deep to sound.
No one could spend five minutes in a room with the Marquess of Foye and not understand that here was a man to be reckoned with. Despite his title, despite his connection to Crosshaven, and even despite that he quite obviously knew every word that had been said about her, Sabine wanted very much to like him.
She was no longer so willing to believe the best of anyone.
Lord Foye sat sideways on his chair, one leg crossed over the other. When she looked up, he caught her glance. She’d been silent in her thoughts for too long.
“You have a complicated future,” she said.
“Take your time,” Foye replied. He had a deep voice. He spoke quietly, sure of himself, with a fullness of tone in his words that suggested nothing but that he hoped to be amused. There was no mistaking his voice for anything but that of a mature man, which, to be honest, was a pleasant change from the eager young soldiers and sailors she found so tiresome. “I should like my fortune read properly, Miss Godard.”
She returned her gaze to his teacup. “I endeavor, my lord.”
Lord Foye was not a handsome man. She had, in fact, been watching him since the moment he came in, even before she knew who he was. How could one not? He was tremendously tall, and, as Godard had so baldly pointed out, not very handsome. If one felt inclined to generosity, and she had not yet made up her mind on that account, one might call him an arresting man.
“You will take a journey soon,” she said.
He leaned forward to peer into the cup with her, a motion that put their heads close together. He smelled slightly of sandalwood. “What tells you that?”
“This arrangement here.” She pointed to the place she meant. “Three horseshoes in near proximity to each other. Nearer the handle than farther, so the time of your journey is closer to the present than it is distant. Your more immediate future.”
“Those are horseshoes?”
“Yes.” By now, she didn’t care what shapes the tea leaves made, which in the event was nothing much at all. This was, indeed, complete nonsense. She could no more tell someone’s fortune with tea leaves than she could detect a scoundrel before it was too late to avoid making his acquaintance. The clumps near the handle of the cup were vaguely U-shaped; therefore, she styled them horseshoes.
Her idea of reading tea leaves seemed an unlucky decision now. She’d thought to amuse herself and perhaps a few others, that was all, not find herself cornered by some crony of Crosshaven’s. “Horseshoes arranged just so signify you will soon go on a journey.”
And may it be soon, she thought. She wanted to be nowhere near Lord Foye. She wanted nothing to do with anyone who knew Lord Crosshaven.
“I am on one now,” he pointed out.
She glanced up. “The tea leaves do not tell your past.” His eyes were guileless, completely clear of any salacious motive concerning her. Some of the tension in her shoulders fell away. But not all. He had been careful to make sure she knew of his acquaintance with Lord Crosshaven, and now she must work out why he would have done so, if not to suggest his willingness for an affair. He would not be the first man to make her such a proposition. “The leaves show only the future as it might be at the time you overturned your cup, my lord.”
He waved a hand. His fingers were long and slender. He did not wear any jewelry. “Do carry on.”
“You will journey through rugged terrain, as you may see from the lines surrounding the horseshoes.” She improvised, as she had during all her readings so far. “Mountains, I suspect. The second horseshoe implies your journey will be a pleasant one, but I think—” She tapped the tabletop with a fingertip. While she did not believe in fortune-telling, she saw no reason not to attempt to follow the geometrical logic. She found it a rather stimulating exercise. “With the mountains surrounding, one should interpret this as an arduous journey successfully made. Yes, I think that is the correct divination.” Travel in Turkey and the Levant was never easy, so she took no great risk there. “Now, this third horseshoe portends a woman.”
Lord Foye looked uninterested in that possibility.
“Lady Foye, perhaps?” she said in a sweet voice.
“No,” he said after too long a silence. “There is no Lady Foye.”
She looked up, interested more by his flat tone of voice than by his declaration of bachelorhood. He wasn’t looking at her. His attention was interior, on some deep and private pain. She hadn’t expected to see anguish; yet that was what she saw in his eyes, and her heart pinched a little on his behalf.
“Another woman, then,” she said. Looking at Lord Foye, with his irregularly put together face, was suddenly too intimate an experience. His eyes were too raw with loss. Had she inadvertently reminded him of a lost love? “Someone who will love you, my lord. Exactly as you deserve.”
Without thinking, she leaned forward, peering into his face. Foye’s gaze came back to the present. Their eyes locked, and with no warning, her breath caught in her throat. Her skin prickled up and down her body, all in pointed awareness of the man sitting across from her. He wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t at all. But Sabine’s heart beat hard against her ribs as if he were.
She leaned away, still struggling to get enough air into her lungs. She felt she had not moved soon enough, that she had unwittingly allowed an intimacy she would never permit in actual fact. A spark of fear settled in her chest because even with the distance between them, she remained lost in his eyes. Lost.
It was Foye who broke their gate. “What else do the tea leaves predict?” he softly asked.
Sabine thought that in all her life she’d never heard a more seductive voice. But her lesson had been a harsh one well learned. Her own future did not include love or marriage. She returned to his tea leaves. “Here,” she said, pointing. “A dragon.”
His expression was remote. Distant but pleasant. She was reminded that he was a great deal older than she. This was not a man to be bothered with young ladies. If he happened to be looking for a lover, she suspected he would prefer a woman older than her twenty-three years. And a woman with some independence as well. She knew how things were done, if he was discreet. A married woman. Or perhaps a widow. Someone closer to his own age.
He leaned forward again and frowned. “A dragon, you say.” He squinted and tilted his head. “Are you certain it’s not a snake? Or a stick. Or even nothing more than an accidentally formed clump of leaves clinging to the inside of a cup?”
“Oh,” she said, laughing. His mouth twitched, too, and she felt another breath hitch in her chest. “Accidental? Impossible, my lord.”
“Why ever so?”
She flicked a look in his direction. “Why, because then we would be wasting our time over this when we could be speaking of politics or mathematics or Newton’s first law of thermodynamics.”
Lord Foye sat back and crossed his hands over his very flat stomach. His eyelashes, she noted, were very thick and dark. “What a great many words just came out of your mouth. My head swims with all those syllables.” That wasn’t a smile, not precisely, lurking around the edges of his mouth, and Sabine waited breathlessly for one to appear. “I prefer that you tell me of this dragon in my tea, Miss Godard. What is it doing there, and what does it portend?”
“That’s easy enough to divine. A snake signifies misfortune, and I see no misfortune in this cup. As for a stick, I assure you, there is never anything so mundane as a stick in one’s tea leaves. No, I am quite confident this is no snake but a dragon, and it portends change. Typically with the dragon, the change is sudden and unexpected.”
“And how is that different from the unfortunate snake?”
“Change isn’t always a misfortune,” she said. The more she looked at him, the more she itched to pull out her sketch pad and take a likeness of him. He was possessed of a fearsome intellect, and sooner or later, intellect always affected one’s impression of a man’s appearance. Lord Foye probably did quite well with the ladies, if he was a man inclined to dally. She peeked at him. Yes. He was a dangerous man.
And what a fascinating face he possessed. If she were to force herself to select Foye’s best feature she would have to choose his eyes. They were lovely. Deep set, wide, and blue, with his lovely, thick, dark lashes. As for the rest of him? Quite unlovely. And unconscionably large. Not just in height but in sheer mass, and he was not in the least fat.
“Are you thinking of dragons?” he asked with a wry twist of his mouth.
“Oh dear.” She felt her cheeks flush. “I have been caught out.”
“In what transgression, Miss Godard?” His voice went low and inviting, and the sound made her shiver inside. My heavens, yes, he was dangerous. “Something amusing, I hope,” he said in that tone of warm silk.
“Not very, I fear.” She licked her lower lip. “I was thinking that Edward IV, the Black Prince, was said to have been six feet and three inches.”
“I am taller than that by three inches.” He held himself quite still, but his focus—and she was not mistaken in this—was on her mouth, and that made her anxious and something else as well that was not entirely unpleasant.
“Is it inconvenient to be so tall?” The words were out before she could stop them. How trite, she said to herself. He must think her a fool.
“There are advantages,” he said. The edges of his mouth tensed, and some of the warmth vanished from his eyes. She was sorry for that. Somehow, she had lost control of the conversation.
Sabine glanced away to hide the flush she knew was coloring her cheeks. “Forgive me, my lord,” she said. “I have been rude. You must hear such questions far too often.” With regret for the loss of even a hint of a smile from him, she clasped her hands on the table in front of her. “I am five feet and three inches tall. Provided I stand very straight when I am measured. A full twelve inches shorter than the Black Prince. And, my lord, because I know you are far too polite to ask, yes, it is often inconvenient not to be taller.”
He didn’t smile, but he did incline his head, and she was actually relieved to have succeeded even a little at smoothing over her blunder with him.
She pushed aside the teacup. “There. We are even, my lord. Now, tell me, after Constantinople, where will you travel? Have you an itinerary?”
“I’ve plans to visit Maraat Al-Numan, Palmyra. Damascus, of course.” His near smile returned and without thinking, Sabine smiled back at him. He cocked his head to the side, a thoughtful look on his face. “But I am ever in pursuit of recommendations. You and your uncle have been in the country for a while. What should I see, Miss Godard?”
She pushed his teacup another inch closer to him. “We were in Egypt until recently. Before that, Greece and Crete. Macedonia because I was intent on seeing the home country of Alexander the Great.”
“And in Minos did you find the labyrinth or the Minotaur?”
“No sign of either, I’m afraid,” she said. “And Egypt was—not comfortable for us. We arrived shortly before Ibrahim Pasha’s massacre of the Mameluks. After that event, the army was everywhere and the soldiers quite tense.” Lord Foye was easy to talk to, and even though she knew it was unwise to speak so unguardedly, she did. He was not trying to flirt with her for one thing, his reference to Crosshaven notwithstanding, nor did he speak as if her gender required platitudes or meant she lacked a subtle mind.
“I’d heard something of that,” Foye said. “You and your uncle were in Cairo at the time?”
She nodded. “Godard and I were glad to leave. Even here they whisper of another march through the desert. There was some talk of Turkish reinforcements. I convinced Godard we would be more comfortable farther from the troubles in Egypt, so we came here to Constantinople.”
His eyes stayed on her, and she could not for her life be sure of what she saw there. Curiosity? Admiration? She knew men often admired her looks. But his regard of her was not what she’d come to expect from men. There was so much more to see in Lord Foye’s visage that she felt out of her depth where he was concerned, and that was a rare thing for her. Men did not often disconcert her.
“What have you seen that you would recommend?” he asked.
She considered whether to answer honestly or offer some polite and not very useful response. Before Crosshaven, she would not have hesitated to give her opinion. Until London, she hadn’t known just how peculiar a woman she was, or what the consequences of that would be.
“Your honest opinion would be appreciated,” he said.
Sabine was not entirely blind to her faults, and yet she did not want him to think her odd when he must already believe the worst of her morals. “Godard toured the mosque at Topkapi Palace, which I would heartily recommend to you.”
Lord Foye remained leaning back on his chair. His face was remarkably fluid. There were fine lines around his eyes, but they added character rather than detracted. “What of the sultan’s Seraglio?” He grinned at her, and her heart skipped a beat. “I think I should like to visit the sultan’s personal harem exceedingly well.” He touched his teacup and gave her an innocent smile. “Perhaps my pleasant and successful journey will be to the Seraglio.”
Sabine pulled his teacup back to her. “I see no portents of death or dismemberment in here. You will not visit the Seraglio, my lord.”
“A very great disappointment, to be sure.” He shook his head. “Or perhaps not.” He shifted his long legs. “How long will you and your uncle stay in Constantinople?”
“I can’t say,” Sabine said. She glanced at her uncle. “Before much longer we’ll head north to Kilis. Nazim Pasha has invited us to his palace there. Godard is quite keen to go.”
“Kilis?” Lord Foye said. He turned to Godard and waited until he had her uncle’s attention. “Are you certain that’s wise, Sir Henry? To travel through the north of Syria? So many unpleasant stories of the Wahabi rebellion emanate from there.”
Godard lifted a hand from his lap and let it fall back. “If we go, when we go, we shall be perfectly fine, my dear fellow. We will be the honored guests of Nazim Pasha. We could hardly be safer.”
“Nazim Pasha.” Foye grimaced. “An infamous man by all accounts.”
“We shall be perfectly safe,” Godard said.
That, as it turned out, was not the case.