Love’s a Stage Read online

  “We’re what? Adrift?” she whispered. Zephyr, rapidly diminishing to doll size, was shouting at them through cupped hands, while Rivington and Giles waved their arms and Annonay stared up openmouthed. Frances looked in front of her to see a huge tree branch poking for them and then falling away beneath as the balloon cleared the treetops. She wavered a bit, and closed her eyes; then opened them to see before them, at a distance that was being rapidly closed, the crest of a craggy hill spiked on the top with a lightning-blasted oak tree. She grabbed for a basket suspension cable.

  “Oh, Lord! Help!” exclaimed Frances weakly, between shock-numbed lips. Then, “What are you doing?”

  Landry was leaning perilously over the side of the gondola. He deftly snapped open a knot and a large sandbag fell from the gondola to the ground, far, far below. “Dropping ballast,” he said, his voice strained and muffled.

  Frances watched him in a stunned way, grateful merely that something was being done. Her relief evaporated as they shot higher into the air with each dropped bag. Confused, staring at Landry, Frances said bemusedly, “But why?”

  “To lose weight so we can rise, unless you want to throw out a sheep,” he answered her.

  “Rise?” said Frances, catching on to the one word, convinced that the altitude had affected his senses. “We want to go down!”

  He was working at another knot, his shining hair profiled against the bright-blue sky. “Not just yet, my love. The hill—the forest ahead—you see them? There’s not a chance we can land before we get there, so we’ll have to pass above them.”

  “No!” said Frances. “No, steer it back!”

  He was leaning out of the basket, nearly doubled, his strong hands working rapidly. The words that came back to her were a little breathless, though there was a laugh in them as he said, “Frances, one can’t steer a balloon. It goes with the wind. Don’t you listen to anything Captain Zephyr says?”

  He let go a string of four sandbags and the balloon took a great leap, giving Frances visions of them rocketing into the upper ether. She announced in an ominous tone, “Don’t dare lose another of those things. I forbid it; I refuse to go higher!”

  He bent up to look at her, and she could see that he was laughing. “We’re caught in a gust! Did you ever see anything hit a tree at forty miles an hour?”

  The author of their predicament had been perched on the edge of the gondola, watching the proceedings with a jaundiced eye. As though he understood the import of Landry’s words, Mr. Bilge gave a deafening scream and sailed off to where they had left the ground, which looked like a small patch of open terrain punctuated by four dots.

  “That’s all very well for you,” Frances called to Mr. Bilge. “I don’t have wings, you odious creature!” She watched the receding stick figures below, realizing there could be no help from them, and turned to Landry. A feeling of unreality swept her; again she must look to this brilliant amoral man for assistance.

  The sheep had been peacefully chewing their fodder as though nothing a bit out of the ordinary were taking place. Frances felt a tug on her skirt and looked down to see that her hem had become entangled with, and mistaken for, the proper diet of the sheep. She gently freed her hem from the working mouth of the ewe and knelt to put her arms around its neck.

  Landry was leaning far out of the gondola, unknotting the last sandbag. “There!” Frances felt the balloon take another upward leap. “Thank God Annonay was stupid enough to overfill us. We’re going to make it over,” Landry continued, and straightened and turned to see Frances kneeling, white-faced and clinging to the sheep. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut; she was therefore unable to see the sympathetic speculation on Landry’s clear, sculptured features. A sparkle made a glamorous light in his vivid eyes. How well he knew the quickest way to revive her.

  “When Jeffries was making his first Channel crossing, his balloon lost altitude so quickly that he had to dump everything, equipment and all—in fact, they came so close to plunging into the water that he and his assistant began to remove their clothes and jettison them as well. I think you should prepare yourself for the possibility that if we come to another hill we may have to strip!”

  Such was her disorientation at finding herself flying in a gas balloon with Lord Landry that she responded to this blatant provocation only by staring up at him in a numb way and saying, “That was a joke, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Miss Atherton,” he said, his eyes shining humorously. “It was a joke.” His back was braced against a suspension cable attached to one corner of the gondola; he reached out his hands to her. “Come and stand up beside me. The best part about this is the view.”

  Other than to shake her head vigorously, Frances moved not a muscle. “It’s too high, we’re too high now. All I want is for you to make this thing go back to the earth.”

  “I can’t now; there’s the Epping Forest beneath us. There’s no clear place to come down. Come beside me; see England as the hunting eagle sees it.” She still hesitated, so he said gently, “Don’t be afraid—I won’t let you fall.” He knelt beside her and slipped his arm firmly under her shoulders, slowly helping her to stand. “It’s all right, Frances. Do you want to stand by yourself? No? Then settle back against me.”

  As Frances leaned her back stiffly against the hard length of his body, he shifted his weight slightly to accommodate her and lifted his arm from her for a moment. Suddenly insecure, she cried out:

  “Don’t, don’t, please! Hold me!”

  His arm slid quickly around her waist and held her securely, a secret smile playing at the corners of his lips.

  “What do you think?” he asked her. “Do you like it?”

  “I do,” Frances admitted in a shaky voice, “but I try very hard not to. I’d never let you do it, you know, if I wasn’t so scared of falling out of this balloon.”

  Her answer startled him into a delighted laugh. “Frances! I meant the view!” She felt his breath on her cheek as he leaned forward around her to look in her face. “Child, you’ve got your eyes closed! Open them,” he admonished her softly.

  She did as he asked. It proved to be a simple motion that revealed to her a perfect England she had never seen before—an England so well formed and appealing, so spotless and pristine, that she could only gasp in amazement.

  “How beautiful!” she whispered. A sensation of height was nonexistent, and it looked as though she could bend down and rearrange, if she desired, the scenery beneath, as if it were spread before her on a garden path. The undulating, sensuously curving hills were broken by dark footpaths and frosted with new green grass. Following closely the swirls of topography were forests misted with minty spring buds, and a broad glassy serpent that Landry identified as the Roding River twisted away to meet the horizon. She pointed happily as they slowly passed over a village, a tiny cluster of cottages surrounding a massive, unadorned Norman church tower, which looked sturdy and friendly from the air, rather like a large gray mastiff. Then they were over a country manor looking like a gingerbread dollhouse surrounded by fields, some newly plowed, some yet containing the stubble of last year’s planting. The horizon seemed directly in front of them, a curved line of a light, creamy blue like a robin’s egg, rising to a deep purple above their heads, marbled occasionally by a gathering of pure white clouds. And to add the final note of utterly impossible beauty, the landscape seemed to sparkle, a diamond flash rising and disappearing almost instantaneously from random points. Landry was aware of her disbelief at this almost gratuitous display of scenic perfection and volunteered:

  “Those pinpoints of light you see are caused by the sun reflecting from a window or a pool of water far beneath, and it seems to flash because we are moving past it so rapidly that the angle of reflection is extremely short-lived.”

  “Are we moving rapidly?” Frances breathed in wonder. The enchantment had so overcome Frances that she lay back, relaxed, dreamy, against Landry, as innocent and unaware as a child. “It seems as though we are suspe
nded and the earth is turning beneath us. It’s so still here. Why can’t I feel the wind?”

  “We are the wind.” He settled her languorously closer to him. “As the breeze goes, we go, moving at the same speed and not fighting it, as you would walking on the ground.”

  The air was pure at this altitude, without taint, and to breathe it was to give a rest to the lungs. Frances breathed through parted lips, and her eyelids grew heavy. She was in a waking dream, and as Landry’s arms gathered her, she felt curiously united with him, wind-bound and harmoniously one.

  Frances’ mood was no mystery to her companion, and he knew, even if she did not, how quickly her newly discovered sensuality could shift to another, more adult arousal. She would be as easy for him as the answer to an oft-repeated child’s riddle. He wondered briefly what the Academy of Science would make of making love at two thousand feet. Damn the sheep! The humor of it struck him and he laughed quietly.

  Frances twisted slightly to turn her hazel eyes inquiringly toward him.

  “It’s nothing,” he told her, not wanting to disturb the unselfconscious happiness of the slender girl who lay against him so trustingly. Women by the dozens had come and gone in Lord Landry’s life. His inamoratas ranged from the most gracious of the great London hostesses to the most sought-after actresses of the London theater. He had been with women more beautiful than Frances, certainly, and far more accomplished, far more educated. But Frances, without accomplishments, without social rank, had held his attention long after he might have expected to become bored by a merely pretty provincial. Memorable was the ungainly pride that could lead her into disaster or crumble into honest self-awareness in a moment. There was a freshness about her, a charm free from art under the prudish exterior to which she clung as to a lifeline. Painfully virtuous, at once gullible and skeptical, with a curiosity and a streak of common sense that was as likely as not to manifest itself in the most whimsical manner, the parson’s brat had caught Landry’s promiscuous interest and held it.

  The wisps of water vapor that had added a creamy texture to the sky’s blue had begun to coalesce with the few clouds into a gathering gray mass to the northeast, which, although it could not presently be called ominous, gave some indication of becoming so. Storms could come up so quickly. He hoped that, if there was to be a squall, they would be somewhere less exposed by the time it hit. Glancing down at Frances, he realized with amusement that she was so involved in her present euphoria that she had forgotten the dangers of their situation. Or perhaps Captain Zephyr had never told her that the landing was the most hazardous part of any flight. He wondered how to keep her from becoming frightened, and decided he had better make her angry. Landry studied the horizon and then remarked casually:

  “We’re beginning to drop, I think.”

  “Are we?” asked Frances, drowsily, turning to look at him.

  “The balloon isn’t gas-tight and the hydrogen leaks gradually.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it? Won’t the balloon come gently to land?”

  Landry took his arm from her waist and transferred his hands to grip her shoulders. “Yes, indeed! And while I don’t have the equipment to make any accurate measurements, judging from the approximate speed of the wind, relative to the velocity of our descent, I estimate that, barring any mishaps, we ought to touch down somewhere in the middle of the English Channel.”

  Shock exploded her trance into a thousand fragments; the sleepy content was blown back into the recesses of her mind. “Barring any mishaps?” repeated Frances. “You don’t consider that a mishap? Do you mean to stand there at your ease and tell me that we’re going to land miles out at sea?”

  “I’m not exactly standing at my ease. In fact, it’s all I can do to hold you still enough to keep us from capsizing. If you were a teapot, Frances, I swear you’d be steaming.”

  “I’d like to know why I shouldn’t be! You’ve had the effrontery to encourage me to gaze at the scenery like a bank clerk on a day excursion when our very lives are in peril!”

  “That was bad of me,” he conceded soothingly. “I’m sure you would have found it much more satisfying if I had whipped you into a state of hysteria.”

  Any charity she’d been foolish enough to feel for Lord Landry evaporated on the instant. She recollected suddenly that he was the most odious, hateful man she had ever met. “I suppose,” she said bitterly, “you will let me drown as well.”

  Observing that Frances seemed by now to be quite able to keep her balance in the lightly swaying basket, Landry released her. Then, stepping carefully over a sheep, he reached to a cord that was connected to the neck of the balloon’s silk bag and wound around a support rope to a point accessible to passengers in the gondola. He began to disentangle it.

  “Good thing for you I’m too gentlemanly to point out that it wasn’t my parrot that chewed through the tether,” he said, not looking at her. “Look there, Frances . . . where this cord leads? That’s the valve—a very delicate piece of equipment. If we can find a stretch of bare land between here and the Channel, and if the valve doesn’t stick open and release the gas so quickly that we sink like a skyrocket, and if we can find something sturdy enough for the grapnel to hold, then we may survive in spite of all.”

  The entire experience seemed not to have altered Lord Landry’s serene good humor so much as one whit.

  “Lord Landry,” Frances ground out, “there are times when I find you excessively amiable. Why is it that you didn’t add, ‘if we aren’t struck down by the lightning storm brewing to the northeast.’ Had you not noticed the clouds?”

  “I had, but I didn’t want to frighten you,” said Landry with unabashed cordiality.

  Chapter Nine

  The forest beneath them became laced with swamp, the reflecting tendrils of water snaking in among huge ancient oaks. Oxlip and orchids provided brilliant splashes of color accenting among the brown and gray. Their hope that the swamp would border an open, grassy area was not borne out, and Frances watched disappointedly as the water disappeared and the swamp changed into thick, dark forest. Then the wind veered and they were sent scudding in a new direction as if by an unseen hand. The sudden switch sent Frances grasping for the side of the gondola.

  “The wind’s shifted; we’re going south,” said Lord Landry. He smiled at Frances. “It might be good.”

  “If,” said Frances, through gritted teeth, “a woodpecker doesn’t drill a hole in the balloon silk and drop us like a shot.” She hadn’t finished speaking when, in the far distance, a green open chase peeked through a break in the forest line. “There!” she shouted, pointing.

  Lord Landry had seen it already. He was gazing at it intently, shading his eyes from a shaft of sunlight. “I wish I could see how far the flat stretch reaches.” He looked at Frances. “We have to make a decision right away; we’ll have to start losing altitude immediately if we want to land in the open area. Do you want to sport canvas?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Frances, “if you mean, do I want to take a chance. I’m not familiar with a lot of horrid boxing cant.”

  “So I observed.” Landry smiled and added the cordial hope that he could put the thing down without killing them. “Only consider the chagrin of our surviving families should our corpses be discovered entangled with a couple of deceased blackface sheep.”

  Frances knelt and looked at the approaching landscape, her knuckles white on the gondola’s edge. Over her head Landry manipulated the valve, and she heard strange hisses and whistles as the toy trees grew larger and developed distinct and very jagged branches, which reached up to snare them. The gondola began to sway under the balloon as they lost altitude, and the ropes to twist and shimmy.

  There was a drop of perhaps a hundred feet that left Frances gasping, and the balloon swung wildly to the side, skipped over a knoll, and dropped rapidly on a collision course with the great ruin of a Palladian manor house, which seemed to erupt from the hill’s flank. The balloon dived and swung at the mercy of the win
d, and the great walls of the burnt-out manor loomed closer. Frances’ heart pounded like a blacksmith’s hammer as she waited for the jolt.

  The gondola cleared the wall by inches, and Frances found herself looking into a hollow interior filled with sooty flame-blackened timbers. She pressed her palms over her eyes.

  “We’ve cleared the manor!” Landry called to her encouragingly. “I’m going to toss out the grapnel and see if we can anchor.”

  “What’s down there?” she asked, not daring to look.

  “An overgrown garden.” There was a loud, brittle crash from below. “That was a statue of a nymph holding twin bear cubs. We’ve just lopped off her head. I think we’ll catch on this dusty wreck of a fountain. It has a sea serpent in the middle and we may grip on the coils. The force of the snag will bring us to earth in a hurry! So—Frances, what are you doing? Stay down!”

  The blind suspense was too much for Frances, and she had braced herself against the side of the gondola for a look at their circumstances. Landry caught her in a steel arm precisely the moment the grapnel caught with a spine-jarring jolt. She surely would have been thrown from the gondola had he not had the presence of mind to grab her. The violent arrest of the balloon’s rapid forward motion caused the balloon and gondola to come whipping to the ground through a white wood arbor festooned with dead vines. The gondola made matchsticks of the delicate woodwork, and Frances had a quick impression of splinters of white wood flying everywhere and the mad, flashing colors of red, blue, and gold silk leaping wildly around them. The breath was sucked from her lungs as the gondola collided with the ground, and the rope suspension cables became a thrashing prison. The sheep abandoned the gondola immediately, their little sharp hooves running painfully over Frances’ compressed stomach as she lay half on her back; then she was half lifted, half dragged by Lord Landry over a bed of crushed rock, away from the fretting, bounding balloon.