tawny cap of curls that barely brushed her ears. Oh, dear, he'd never imagined…
With shaking hands, he began searching the pockets of his ill-fitting jacket until he finally pulled out a much- abused scrap of paper. With his index finger, he shoved his glasses back on the bridge of his nose and consulted the paper.
'I'm looking for Miss Pope.' His voice cracked like a pubescent choirboy's. Mortified, he tried again, but with little improvement. 'I'm looking for Miss Dorian Pope.'
Noelle suppressed a smile. 'I'm Dorian Pope.'
'Well, if you are M-M-Miss Pope, I think it is only I-I-logicai to conclude that I am to be your new tu-tutor. That is to say… I'm Percy Hollingsworth, instructor in history, geography, government, and ma-ma-mathematics.'
Remembering Constance's instructions from the day before, Noelle glided toward him, her hand outstretched. 'I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Hollingsworth,' she carefully articulated.
Crimson crept up from his collar; he stepped backward. Recovering, he braced himself and took her hand only to feel his knees turn dangerously weak at the touch of her warm flesh.
Noelle's amusement was tempered with curiosity. Was it this easy to make a man behave like a fool? It was a new idea-an intriguing one.
Percy Hollingsworth proved to be an able, if somewhat unorthodox, instructor. Although he had had every intention of proceeding with Noelle's instruction in an orderly and sequential manner, she would tease him and torment him so that when the subject was not to her liking he soon abandoned the effort and let his student's natural curiosity and keen mind guide their lessons.
She returned from a walk, her magnificent eyes full of the beauty of a wildfiower she had discovered, and the lecture he had planned on ancient Greece was abandoned in favor of perusing
She learned that Benjamin Peale had been with the Duke of Wellington at Quatre-Bras. The next morning she entered the library and presented her tutor with a handful of pebbles, ordering him to reenact the Battle of Waterloo on the library carpet. Constance, seeing the two of them sprawled so informally on the floor as she passed the door, had rushed into the library only to find herself ordered to take charge of Napoleon's main forces.
All in all, Percy Hollingsworth and Noelle were well satisfied with each other, and Constance was delighted with both of them. She was far from delighted, however, when a hastily scrawled note arrived one day from Simon:
My dear Constance,
I have just received word that there has been a fire at the American shipyard. If you will remember, I told you that Quinn had some trouble with a man named Luke Baker before he came to England. Baker may have been involved. At this point, I have no report on the extent of damages, but, regardless, duty dictates that I return home with all possible speed.
It is with regret that I leave my work unfinished here at the London office, but I trust you understand that I have no other recourse.
My warmest regards to Noelle. I have placed ?500 in your name in the company account so you can administer her salary until my return.
Simon
Furious at the impersonal tone of the missive, Constance tossed it in the fire.
As the days went by, callers continued to arrive, more and more impatient to catch sight of the mysterious Miss Pope, but Noelle always managed to avoid them. At the first sound of carriage wheels crunching on gravel, she would seal herself in her room with her studies or slip out the back door and into the countryside.
With Christmas came another tutor to instruct her in piano and voice, as well as dance. It was at the latter that she excelled. Her step was light and fanciful, and it was not long before she outgrew her instructor.
Each day, Constance found time to instruct Noelle in the social graces. She learned to pour tea without spilling a drop, play whist, and use a fan. She could also effect a proper introduction and curtsy gracefully.
Noelle decided making polite conversation was, by far, the most difficult of the skills she had to learn until the time came when Constance told her she must be able to embroider. After a week of crooked stitches and tangled threads, Noelle uttered the foulest of oaths and tossed the wretchedly abused piece of fabric into the fire, declaring that she would begin to wear her knife again if she were forced to sew another stitch. Constance hastily surrendered.
Her progress with her studies was remarkable. Although Percy Hollingsworth was not an experienced tutor, even he recognized that she was an extraordinary student with keen insight and an exceptional memory. She spent all her spare time reading- devouring books, one after another.
The modern poets captivated her, and she loved to read their poems aloud to Constance. Her voice was low with a trace of huskiness that was appealing and strangely compelling. 'The Prisoner of Chillon,' 'Endymion,' 'Kubla Khan'-they all whispered to her of mystery and beauty, and she would lose herself as she read.
She was living in a silken cocoon, and it was only in the darkest core of night that the careful insulation sometimes fell away, and the past crept upon her. When the nightmares plagued her, they were inhabited by the haunted phantasms she had left behind: the children, the withered old hags of the alleys, the poverty, stench -and, sometimes, the face of the man who was her husband.
She spent one February day studying the legend of Agamemnon, the king who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods, only to be murdered for his deed by his wife, Clytemnestra. When night came, she paced the floor of her bedroom until she was exhausted, knowing that a nightmare lurked on the other side of her consciousness.
Finally she sat at her desk and tried to put into words what churned inside her. She wrote:
Hatred coils inside my heart; Untempered by sunlight, it is wedded to my spirit, Waiting like vengeful Clytemnestra for the time When, unfettered, it will be set free to play its part.
When she finally fell asleep, it was only to become a victim of the nightmare she had feared. But, instead of the avenging Clytemnestra of her poem, she was Iphigenia, the virgin sacrifice, clutching at the robes of a faceless father, only to be torn away and held aloft over an altar. As her robes were ripped from her body, she felt herself being lowered to the altar. But in her dream it was not cold stone that met her naked flesh. It was a cloying, enveloping softness that sucked her into its depths and held her limbs captive. Helplessly she watched a swarthy figure approach her, his eyes of bitter black pushing her deeper into the suffocating mass. And then he was beside her, spreading gold coins on her body. Across her lips, her nipples, her stomach…
'One hundred pounds,' he sneered, 'one hundred pounds for the virgin.'
She jolted awake, sweat drenching her body. The poem she had written was lying on the carpet. Springing from her bed, she tore it into tiny pieces and buried her words in the ashes of the fire.
Chapter Eleven
Watching from her bedroom window, Noelle saw the trim carriage come into view around the curve of the driveway. A sharp gust of April wind, reluctant to abandon the bite of March, threw itself against the rig, making it shudder as it approached the house. Inside the carriage were three people Noelle had never met: Mrs. Sydney Newcombe, her daughter, Margaret, and her son, Robert. Today, more than a year after Noelle had arrived at the white stone house, she was to take her first tentative steps into the world of the fashionable by having tea with Constance and the Newcombes.
'I confess that Mildred Newcombe is not my favorite acquaintance,' Constance had said when she issued the invitation, 'but she'll do very well for our purposes. She is so taken with her own opinions that she rarely notices anything else. So, if you do make a slip, it will undoubtedly pass her by. I've observed that her daughter is cut from much the same cloth.'
Of course, when Constance had extended the invitation, she had not realized that Robert Newcombe, whom she had never met, had arrived from London to visit his mother and would be accompanying her here today. Still, Noelle knew she could not seal herself away forever. A disconsolate Percy Hollingsworth had left last week to take a new post; it was time for her to put to use what she had learned.
From below, she could hear the sounds of the Newcombes alighting from their carriage. To bolster her lagging
