The Domino Effect, Chapter Five

Though stunned by the fall, Phyl sensed the man kneeling beside her and fumbling with the clasp on her domino until he was yanked up and backwards. Booted feet and clods of earth flew past her head in a silent scuffle. The man in the domino went down on all fours, then kicked up more turf in a frantic scramble to escape.

A taller, somewhat older man whose figure was not concealed by mask or fancy dress took the miscreant’s place beside Phyl and helped her sit up. His grip was secure, but kind. A horseman’s hands, she thought.

Fireworks exploded, casting the grounds in a pulsing, reddish light that permitted Phyl to perceive that her rescuer, though he retained a head full of long, luxuriant chestnut hair, had enough creases about his eyes and mouth to suggest a mature man anywhere, in her inexperienced estimation, between thirty-four and forty. He reached into a pocket deep in his coattail and withdrew an artist’s pencil and a little booklet in which he wrote quickly. He extended the note in time for Phyl to read in the fading light: “Are you hurt?”

Little thinking of another reason why he would communicate in this fashion, Phyl considered her rescuer was deaf. “I think not,” she shouted, searching in the dark for his eyes, hoping he had light enough to read her lips.

Another burst, this time of green, revealed a fine mouth trembling in an attempt to smother a smile. He wrote quickly: “Please be assured that I can hear you perfectly. There is no need to distress yourself further by raising your voice.”

“So you’re only a mute,” Phyl said softly, still unable to accept the fact that the man could hear. Now breaking into one of the broadest, most good-natured grins that Phyl had ever seen, he issued yet another communique: “May I summon a member of your party?”

“That was a member of my party!”

“Your husband?”

“No! Oh, thank heaven, no.”

“Perhaps, then, it would be best to find your chaperon.”

“Alas, there is no chaperon. Let me explain-please!” Phyl’s despair was such that she placed her hand on the man’s arm to stop him from writing without hearing her out. “Please, listen to me. I have no family in town. I am here on my own, a dressmaker, earning a respectable living, among respectable folk.”

Still, the pencil flew. “Forgive me, madam, if I cannot help but notice this is not a place for respectable young women.”

“You disapprove of the ball? Then allow me to please ask what you yourself were doing here.”

“A stranger tends at times to stumble upon acquaintances that progress beyond what they at first seem. It would appear that the evening’s festivities have been a mistake for both of us.”

“So it would.”

Phyl gave the man her hand, and he steadied her as she stood. The grass beneath her feet felt soft, mushy, uncertain. The hedgy corridor seemed to slope down. Phyl staggered. The man, who, she perceived as tall as a wall, put one hand to her elbow and kept the other above her waist, waiting. Seeing she was stable, he wrote. “May I take you to your home, or to wherever you prefer to go?”

She should have asked to be taken to Penelope’s house, but it was so late, and Penelope would want to know so much, while the unfortunate Philip would want to say so much. Her only recourse was to leave the domino at Ma’am’s door and walk home.

“I can walk to my rooms myself, thank you. The worst is over. That individual would never entertain revisiting me.”

The man wrote that, although he disagreed with her decision, he would gladly walk her to the main road.

Crossing the lawn was an odd trial for Phyl. She could not dispel the feeling of walking downhill on turf packed in tight, uneven mounds, though she knew the lawn was flat and even. Panic twisted her stomach and dried her mouth. “It’s nothing," she told herself. “I’m tired. Shaken. Hungry. I’ll feel better once I reach Ma’am’s.”

Nature, however, had other plans, and within the moment she was praying that nobody from the ton could see her retching behind the tree.

Her escort lifted her as if she weighed no more than a leaf and carried her to one of the carriages that waited on Lady Wilfer’s gravel driveway. With help from the driver, he placed Phyl on the forward-facing seat, then took advantage of the car’s lamplight to scrawl anew: “You shouldn’t be alone. Where are you from?”

She weakly mentioned the borough slightly more than an hour’s drive south of town.

“If not family, do you have friends there?”

She nodded, envisioning the mayor, the vicar and his family, Ronald’s friend Bernard, and so many others, young and old, who had become the happy longings of daydreams.

The man passed a note to the driver and climbed onto the seat opposite Phyl. Feeling too physically miserable and emotionally foul to care what next befell her, she allowed her escort to ply her with brandy from a flask concealed in a box beneath the seat. Warmed and comforted by the drink—and having no doubt that “conversation” with the stranger was impossible, owing to the darkness and the rocking motion of the vehicle—Phyl nestled her head against the back of the plump, leather seat and dozed. She awoke to the familiar silhouette of sycamores lining a lane, and the equally familiar pattern of windows glowing orange in the distance.

Her benefactor had brought her to the estate that she and her mother and brothers had vacated six months ago: the estate which, she had learned only hours before, had been gambled away to a stranger.