The Amours & Alarums of Eliza MacLean. Annie Warwick

      Prologue

      From where he is standing, she looks like a work of art: fair skin, rosy cheeks, and lips stung politely by a small bee with a good sense of aesthetics. Perfection, that subjective and precarious state, has been averted by a few freckles across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Long, black hair falls in curls past her shoulders and settles on her book as she leans over it, absorbed. Stray spirals, refusing to be dictated to, escape to frame her face.

      She has arranged herself on a bench, near the wall on which he is leaning. Perched beside her is a violin, smugly announcing its status as superior to the hapless rucksack on the ground at her feet. Her school does not have Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the prescribed reading list; she has found it in her father’s collection, and disguised it in a dust cover which reads Little Women. Her English teacher, had she seen it, would have been horrified, although not by the title. It is a first edition and has today been stuffed casually in a school bag, there to hobnob with less deserving literature and half a squashed chocolate-chip muffin.

      He has been obsessed with acting for as long as he can remember. He has studied acting, movies, plays and people, and read about psychology for the purpose of improving his acting. By the time he was sixteen or seventeen, he was very good at it, able to convince most people, particularly young women, of whatever he wished.

      At nineteen, he is six feet and one inch tall. A sculptor would judge his limbs to be in excellent proportion, being long and well-shaped, strong, but not bulky. His back and shoulders, straight and broad, provide an excellent frame for the mature musculature to follow, once he has eschewed smoking and taken up regular exercise, apart from chasing women. To females of any age he is considered an attractive young man. The older ones, past aspiring to his seduction, content themselves with risqué remarks to their cronies. The girls smile flirtatiously, and lean towards him, allowing their necklines to speak for them, and all this he charmingly accepts as his due.

      His hair is dark, thick and a bit unruly. His alabaster complexion marks him as a Londoner who makes little attempt to find sunlight, and possibly as someone who spends his spare time in the highly suspect activity of reading. His eyes vary between green and a brownish hue. A litmus test of temper: green is good, brown is bad. Although he has managed to leave his mark on several young men in combat, he has begun to realise that losing control is more painful than productive. He has the scars and interesting bend in his nose to attest to this, however these flaws actually redeem him from mere prettiness.

      His eyes seem often to be amused with some secret delight. His expressive mouth is nicely curved; his smile, usually not far away, appears almost hesitant at first, ready to blind some unsuspecting young woman into believing he might be serious about her.

      He originally took up smoking at sixteen to be cool, but the nicotine has trapped him, and he has gone outside for a cigarette break. Having lit up, and taken the first essential, life-saving drag, he looks around, spots her, and exhales with a faint whistle of approval.

      To his experienced eye, she appears to be about seventeen or eighteen years old, probably in her final year of school. A blazer is draped over the back of her bench, and he recognises the embroidered badge as belonging to a local private school where the posh people send their snotty-nosed kids. His face doesn’t change expression, but internally he sneers with the knee-jerk scorn of the peasant for the aristocracy. Even so, he is quite taken with the scene before him.

      The uniform seems designed to be demure and plain, yet she manages to outwit its intentions. Her modest, schoolgirl’s blouse is so full of promise that when she sighs and turns the page, the fabric pulls with obvious impatience on its buttons. The short grey skirt, hiked up with sitting, reveals most of her legs, slim and shapely, ending in the non-regulation black boots for which she is on her second warning.

      All this he has taken in and analysed in a split-second. The conclusion, in Binary, is a resounding 1. The conversion to young-man-speak may have been Whoa, or Oh Yes, however he is silent, still exhaling.

      As he studies her, she becomes aware of him. She glances up, her left eyebrow raised, perhaps as a deterrent. Snooty, he thinks, but instead of looking away and knowing his place, he continues to hold her gaze a few seconds longer than is socially appropriate, a practised smile of seduction forming. He removes himself from the wall, covers the short distance between them and says hello. She, unsmiling, not to be intimidated, holds his impudent gaze, but her eyes, large and blue, suddenly open wider, become intent. They stare at each other for a long moment.

      * * *

      So it was that they met again. The unselfconsciousness of childhood had gone forever. Billy felt as though he had been hit savagely in the chest by a speeding porcupine, one which was unusually heavy, and recently manicured, leaving him bleeding, bruised and breathless. His heart was having trouble remembering which beat it was up to. Eliza’s initial impulse – to leap to her feet and throw herself at him with a squeal of delight – was inhibited by a strange reserve accompanied by elevated blood pressure. She blushed, probably for the first time in her life.

      “Lizzie?” he said, uncertain because it had been three years. There was a pause, during which she managed, after a short skirmish, to seize her composure in both hands and drag it back from the squalid depths where it was being held captive, no doubt expressing its indignation in a well-bred fashion.

      “My Prince!” she said, facetiously.

      They both laughed. There may have been a faint whirring sound, indicating that their respective information networks were being updated, with new and most interesting data.