Judith Ivory by Untie My Heart Read Free Book Online

blew in that she could feel all the way across the lobby. It preceded two footmen in umber wool with greenish gold braid, the colors of the Viscounts Mount Villiars for centuries. These servants battled the heavy doors, holding them open as through the entranceway passed a parade of men: the first two in bowler hats, the next in a top hat, the three of them stomping their somber shoes, yet unable to stomp off the mien of solicitors; it was all over them. Two more men entered behind them, both sporting hamburgs, one with a foreign-looking mustache; they carried the sort of leather folders that accountants liked to cart about, or have someone cart for them. Two younger men came in behind them, then another young man, hurrying.
    There followed a small space of time, a few heartbeats, before a presence—there was no other word for him—walked into the doorway: He took over the doorway, in fact, in his tall top hat and billowing greatcoat.
    After months of trying to see him, there was no doubt: Stuart Winston Aysgarth, the Right Honourable the Viscount Mount Villiars, la la, she thought, and all those other titles . Yet, despite herself, Emma could not hold down a certain amount of awe. And surprise. What was she expecting? Not this.
    The viscount stopped in the doorway, head bent, the round oval of his top hat gleaming, as he wiped his feet. No somber shoes for him: He wore high-polished black boots reminiscent of Hessians, as shiny as black mirrors, fitted, foreign-looking. Then he looked up, pausing to stare outfrom the shadows of the brim of his top hat, leisurely—one might have said lordly —perusing the bank’s vast gallery, as if to decide whether the place were worthy of entering.
    He stood there a long moment: Stuart, she reminded herself, trying to recapture—ground herself in—her own disrespect. Yet he wasn’t at all what she’d imagined: tall, slender, broad-shouldered, and younger somehow than she’d concocted in her imagination. She realized the boy who lived on the hill, taken away by his father at six, had been near her age at the time, which would make him presently one-and-thirty. His tailored form now, backlit against a sunny white afternoon, made the colors of the street behind him seem flat. Two half-timbered storefronts with swinging signs, a fading, out-of-season Christmas wreath under a doorway, all of it obscured by flurries: unreal. He looked for a moment as if he inhabited one of those children’s globes, the updrafts and downdrafts of rotating flakes as chaotic about him as though someone had shaken the town of York with his being the only fixed piece.
    He stepped forward. Behind him, his footmen won over the heavy doors that closed with the swooshing finality of an airtight vault. And the Viscount Mount Villiars—the recluse who raced along country roads, the expatriate come home, the surly correspondent and careful, private, quarrelsome man Emma had not been able to get near till now—began toward them across the long lobby at a kind of march.
    Within half a dozen steps, smartly clicking till his footfalls struck the carpet, he reduced the whole place to utter silence. Customers turned at the teller windows, gape-jawed. Employees tiptoed from the back only to stop dead in their tracks.
    He strode beneath a long dark greatcoat that flapped close to the ground about his legs, trimmed at the hem, cuffs, and lapels in silver-gray fur as thick and dense as batting. Amazing fur; she’d never seen anything quite like it. It lay, silveryand smooth, against vast amounts of dark wool. A simple style, yet…more somehow than most Englishmen would wear. Likewise, the coat was longer, more tailored across his broad chest and wide shoulders, narrower to his waist than English tastes allowed, while being oceans more voluminous about his long-striding legs.
    Clothes. He was all clothes, she realized. She couldn’t honestly see him. Still. She found herself turned in her chair, craning.
    The chair down