Page 8 of My Lady Melisende (Ladies Least Likely #6)

CHAPTER SEVEN

M elisende . Philip’s blood went cold, the surprised, painful cry echoing in his head. Someone had hurt her.

The shriek came from Angel Court, the alley beside the bookshop. Philip plunged into the narrow passage without a thought.

Stacks of wooden crates on both sides barred his way immediately, deliveries for the Golden Lyon on one side and no doubt the bookshop on the other. He tripped over a protruding stone, meant to serve as a doorstep to lift the entrance out of the dirt lane that the morning’s moisture had turned to muck. His silk shoes sank with a squelch.

At the end of the short passage, a high iron gate walled off the garden that lay behind the fashionable shops and houses facing Pall Mall. Beneath a hanging wooden sign, advertising a business Philip couldn’t guess at with a symbol he couldn’t make out from beneath the grime, a man and a woman struggled. One of his fists sank into her powdered curls, the other tugged at something she held in her hands, obscured by the sweeping sleeves of her open robe.

“Ger off me, ye thievin’ curber! Filching napper!” the woman cried.

“You heard the lady.” Philip reached for his sword.

He was fond of this sword, and it would be a shame to stain it with actual blood. The grip and pommel were of Italian design, an intricate silver carving, and the blade was Spanish steel. It was almost as light and lethal as the épée Melisende had given him to use during their bout, and the hilt slid easily to his hand. The steel hissed as he withdrew the blade from its leather scabbard.

The thief pushed the woman into the wall of the building and she stumbled backward with a yelp, clutching her head as her wig tilted sideways. The man released her and whirled. Head down, he charged Philip with a guttural growl.

“Devlin!”

He could have blocked the man and downed him with one blow, damn it, but Melisende’s cry pulled his head around, seeking her, and the thief plunged past him, ducking his sword. The swish of air wafted old onions and foul sweat to Philip’s nose as the thief lunged straight at Melisende.

Or rather, the small embroidered bag she carried, strings looped over one delicate wrist.

“Stop, thief!” Philip bellowed, knowing the hue and cry would alert those on the street. “Melisende! Run.”

She turned, but the heel of her shoe slid in the mud and she stumbled. The man caught her roughly and flung her toward a stack of crates. Philip clenched his teeth, feeling the jar as she crashed in a sprawl of silk and brocade, the wood creaking as she struck, the thick fabric at the back of her gown rising briefly like a bird’s wing.

The thief lifted his arm, light glinting off the blade of a knife.

“Let her go!” Philip leapt forward, lifted by rage and the fear that he wouldn’t reach her in time.

Melisende rolled to her side and kicked, her foot colliding with the thief’s knee. He stumbled but recovered, throwing himself forward, knife raised.

“Toss the bag!” Philip bellowed the words. He moved through treacle, his limbs unable to obey him, his body a dead weight. If she threw the bag, she’d divert the thief, and his knife. She’d give Philip a moment to reach the man and run him through.

She didn’t listen. She pulled the bag to her chest, against her body, and the thief’s blade came straight at her heart.

Philip drew back his arm and fired his sword like a javelin, hilt first. He was too late. The knife fell; Melisende screamed; a blur of red and brown, and the thief ran, bag in his hand. Philip was only a second behind him, but a second too late. His sword sailed through air, nearly beneath Melisende’s nose, and clattered off the side of a crate.

“Are you hurt? Did he strike you?”

She was alive, breathing heavily, her eyes huge and full of fight. So was he. She clasped one gloved hand to her forearm, covering a smear of blood.

“He took my bag. Cut the strings.”

And her arm, by the sight of it. She caught her breath as Philip slid his arms around her, lifting her from the crate. “Anything else?”

“My back— ah! ”

A long rent showed in the back of her gown, torn open by a nail or the wooden edge of the crate. Her boned stays showed through the gap, also torn, but the cut had not penetrated her skin. Not so the top of her shoulder, where blood leaked through the embroidered linen of her fichu. Philip balled the fabric beneath his hand and pressed the wound.

“We have to get you home. You’ll require a surgeon.”

“No surgeon.” She breathed heavily, leaning against him. “I detest your English leeches. They are ever letting blood, for any reason.”

A crowd of curious onlookers clustered at the head of the court, blocking their passage to King Street. Bruyit stood head and shoulders above them, his face grave and fearful.

Philip met his eyes. “The Lady Melisende’s carriage.”

Bruyit nodded, a muscle in his jaw flickering as his gaze swept over his mistress, firmly encased in Philip’s arms.

“What happened?” The Duchess of Hunsdon pushed out the side door of the bookshop, where Melisende had exited and put herself in the path of a thief.

“A thief stole her reticule,” Philip said, the words clipped. He couldn’t leave Melisende, but his blood was up, urging him to give pursuit. “Did anyone catch him?”

“I sawr ’is face, the prig.” The other woman, the first he’d attacked, stepped forward. She’d reapplied her wig, though it sat slightly askew on her head. “All stub-faced and scarred ’e was, like the pox had ’im. ’Ope it does ’im in.” She spit in the dirt.

“Your highness?” the duchess questioned.

“I’m fine.” Melisende’s voice shook, and she drew a long, steadying breath. “Devlin will escort me home.”

“He came from the garden,” Philip said to the duchess. “Behind the gate.”

“But thas locked, it is,” the street woman said, confused.

“I will look into it. And he wanted your—purse?” The duchess met Melisende’s eyes in some unspoken understanding.

“But that is all, and I am fortunate for it.” Melisende leaned into Philip’s arms, her breath still unsteady. “Devlin, will you want your sword?”

One of the street boys leapt to retrieve the sword and wiped the muck off the blade, using his breeches for the office. Philip slid the blade into its sheath with the promise to tend to it later. The intricate carvings of the hilt would require cleaning, but he could wish the thief’s blood had stained it after all. Melisende had brought him as protection, and what good had he been?

And what threat had she expected, to test his skill and mettle, then employ him as a second bodyguard?

He’d walked into danger unknowing. And she had led him there.

Melisende grunted slightly as, with Bruyit’s assistance, Philip lifted her to the high seat of the phaeton. “I can’t drive from this side,” she said.

“If I can’t handle your high steppers, then you’ve leave to run me through with my own sword,” Philip said, hauling himself into place beside her. “Much good it did otherwise. Bruyit?”

“Aye, sir.” The springs sank as the other man took his perch, and Philip nudged the horses forward in a walk.

The matched grays pranced and shied, nervous from the recent upheaval. “On, ye drummers,” he murmured to them, and beside him, Melisende shifted.

“Are you insulting my horses?”

“These bonesetters? Not I. How d’ye fare?”

“Is this your Irish coming out? I’ve been wondering why you hide it.”

He usually did, mimicking the clipped consonants of the British upper class, blending in with the nobs. He had learned to guard himself, but when he didn’t, the native rhythms and intonations slipped free.

“What did the sneaking budge nab from ye?” he asked, testing her. Among the upper class British, an Irish accent was the surest way to earn a snub. Melisende gave him a strained smile, determined to let no one watching them detect that anything might be wrong.

“What did the thief steal from me? A book. The one I’d newly purchased from the duchess, a small text on basic household remedies. I hope it serves to fix the boils I wish my curse will bring to his posterior.”

Philip didn’t laugh at her jest. She’d made a purchase, though she’d learned what she needed inside the bookshop. A decoy? Had she anticipated trouble? Had she known they’d be attacked?

The open street wasn’t the place to demand an accounting. She sagged against him on the bench seat, her breathing uneven, one hand still clasped to her forearm, and her shoulder no doubt still bleeding.

His chest heated. His skin bore the impression of Melisende in his arms. It hadn’t fully registered at the time, there being no call to revel in the holding of a woman when she was hurt and in danger. But now that the danger was receding, the sensations lingered on his hands and muscle, memories teasing the raw edge of his mind.

She’d duped him, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to wrap his fingers around her throat or yank her into his arms and steal her breath with kisses.

He was tempted to do both.

He halted the phaeton before Fauconberg House and jumped down, trying not to give the appearance of distress, but there was no chance Melisende’s equipage, and the sight of the grand duke’s daughter within it, would not draw attention. He held out his arms and gathered her into them as she descended. A small oof of surprise escaped her.

“I can walk,” she murmured.

“And I can walk faster.” Even carrying her. She wasn’t a small woman, but she filled his arms perfectly, her chin at the level of his shoulder, the scent of her, spiced honey, rising to his nostrils. Frau Gamper betrayed a flicker of concern when she opened the door, her eyes widening, a muscle jumping along her temple, before she clamped a stoic expression onto her face.

“This way,” she said, and led Philip upstairs as if she were used to conducting gentlemen to her lady’s chamber, even when they carried her lady, bleeding, in their arms.

“A street thief did this? A surprise attack?” she asked as they wound their way up the marble stair.

So the housekeeper spoke English after all. Philip wasn’t the least surprised.

“Came at us from the alley. Didn’t see ’is face, an ’e was past and gone afore I could collar ’ im.” Bruyit clenched his hands into fists, hovering beside the bed while Frau Gamper threw a linen sheet over the beautifully embroidered bedspread. Philip caught a glimpse of flowering lilies and slender, crane-like birds before the maid tugged the sheet to the corner, protecting the delicate fabric. Bruyit watched as if he thought Philip’s arms might give out as he gently set Melisende on her feet.

“He came from the locked garden,” Philip said. “I want to know who let him in, and who let him through the gate into the alley. You must remove her robe and stays so I can see how far this cut goes.”

The housekeeper turned to her lady, ignoring Philip. “ Ein Doktor ?—”

“No doctor,” Melisende said weakly. “Just a small cut. A scrape, really.”

The maids fussed over her, unpinning the stomacher and peeling off her robe. Philip strode into the adjoining chamber and looked around, opening the tall wardrobe, peering behind the tall curtains.

“Are you spying?” Melisende asked as he returned to the room. Her stays were a brilliant red, padded linen with slender channels holding whalebone ribs that curved over her ribs and breasts. Philip looked away as the maid lifted the garment from her, exclaiming over the rent in the fabric.

“Making certain you won’t be attacked here.” The duchess might ask around, but Philip would make inquiries of his own, as soon as he had settled Melisende. He twitched aside a drapery and glanced out into the square where a few dozen people milled about, going about their business, catching the hour or so of sunshine before the afternoon rains began.

“That is unlikely. That someone would come—oh!” Melisende gasped again as Philip scooped her up and carried her to the bed. She was right; she could walk. But for some reason he wanted his hands on her.

The housekeeper unlaced Melisende’s soiled shoes, giving Philip a pointed look.

“Oh, I’m not leaving.” He tugged at the lace fichu that had clotted to the cut in her shoulder. “Not before the lady explains one or two things to me.”

Melisende gritted her teeth, still holding her arm, and struggled to sit up. Philip tucked one of the satin-clad pillows behind her good shoulder. “I was attacked in Angel Court. I think that much is obvious,” she said.

“Did you know you were walking into a trap?”

Her gaze flickered past his shoulder, he guessed at Bruyit. He turned to catch the other man shaking his head.

“Of course not. If you’re thinking I set you up, you are wrong.”

“Oh, you set me up, but you were the one with the book. The decoy you bought from the duchess because you had a suspicion that someone might try to steal a book from you.”

The maid set a basin of warm water on the small table beside the bed, and Philip reached for the cloth, wiping his hands. “Another,” he said. “And soap.”

“Do she need the sweet-smellin’ stuff, then?” the maid whispered.

“Strong soap, the kind for cleaning,” Philip said. “The wound will heal better. Don’t ask me how I know.” He lifted Melisende’s hand and gently scrubbed at the clot of dried blood on her arm. She sucked in a breath.

“It isn’t deep. You shouldn’t need sutures, nor for the one on your back. Just a good bandage.”

“I do want to ask how you know this.” Her gaze rested steadily on his, but her cheeks had paled. Her fear response was fading, shock setting in. He knew the feeling.

“I’ve had some experience. More than one duel that I shouldn’t have fought, and more than my share of brawls. Frau Gamper, would you bring the lady some schnapps?”

Frau Gamper had a sharp response in German to this request.

“He’s right,” Melisende answered, still holding Philip’s gaze. “I owe him an explanation.”

Philip moved to sit behind her, pushing her gently forward to examine the wound on her back, where an ugly cut, wide but not deep, marred silky skin the color of safflower oil. “I am listening.”

“I don’t know what’s happening anymore than you do,” she said.

He wiped away the blood with gentle daubs. “You don’t need me to get you into London’s drawing rooms, not when you’ve a grand duke on your calling card. You wanted a second bodyguard, a swordsman to pair with Bruyit’s fists. You knew to buy a decoy book. You expected trouble.”

“I hoped there would not be,” she said softly. “I didn’t expect a knife in an alley and a robbery in the open street. I thought he—whoever he is—would be more subtle.”

“Short of breaking into your house?”

“It is not easy to break into this one.”

Philip looked around. The bedchamber was large and high-ceilinged, with two sets of windows facing the square, one in the boudoir and one in the powder room next door, a chamber nearly as large. The fantastical embroidery of the bedspread continued in the canopy covering the four posters of the bed and the draperies that swept from the ceiling to the floor. The furniture hailed from early in the century, few pieces but well-made, and bas relief carvings stood out against the walls and ceilings, replacing the need for paper or more intricate designs. The room was all subtle elegance, like the house, and guarded with nothing but the arrogance that its owners, wealthy, titled, should be untouchable.

“I could crack this crib in five ways and need less than a minute for each of them,” Philip said. “Ladder at the window, hide a boy in that wardrobe there, and be out the door with all your gowns and jewels in the time it took you to walk up that grand staircase.”

Her eyelids flickered. “I don’t have any jewels worth stealing.”

“Who else wants your book?”

She winced as he applied the cloth to her shoulder. “Who told Viscount Rudyard there was a treasure map inside it?”

He sat back, and she glanced over her shoulder with narrowed eyes, studying his face.

“That is an excellent question. I should pursue this conversation with him,” Philip said.

“Someone already has. How did the duchess know the book was stolen?”

“I doubt Cadmus kept quiet about it. Told me he’d lost it that very night at cards. He’d think the whole thing uproarious fun, even if he did find out I took it. Great one for a lark, my friend Cadmus.”

She grunted. “It makes no sense to steal a book you can’t read.”

“But if there’s some value in it to another, that is all that matters to a thief.” He slid a finger beneath the ruffled neckline of her shift. “Forgive me, but I need to see the whole of this.”

Her skin was the texture of clotted cream, silk beneath his hands, as smooth as fired porcelain. The wound. He was examining her wound.

“How many people know about this book? Or that there are several of them?”

She dug her fingers into his arm as he probed. “Only the family know what it means. Only the family ever knew how they were distributed, or what was hidden within them.”

Philip, pointedly, made a slow perusal of the room: Bruyit, Frau Gamper returning with a tray and glasses, the two maids bustling about ferrying out the dirtied water and bringing in fresh, smelling of freshly shaven soap.

“I could get what I wanted out of your maids with a bauble or a few sweet words,” Philip said. “And don’t be too certain I couldn’t beat information out of Bruyit, with the right tactics.”

Melisende closed her eyes. “We only speak about it in German where we know we won’t be understood. Father and I in Ladin, where we must.”

She let her head fall forward and the unguardedness of the gesture, from this cool and self-possessed woman, slid beneath Philip’s skin like a blade. Someone wanted to hurt her, and he didn’t know who, or how to stop them.

He cleared his throat, his voice gruff as he pulled away to tend to the cut on her arm. “So the question now is, who else knows? And what will they do to obtain the full set?”

“They only need the remaining volume,” she said in a low voice. “None of the others have held the document.”

Her hand rested lightly on his knee, fingers twitching as he scrubbed at a sore spot. “Then we call on the Earl of Aldthorpe as soon as you feel able.”

“We?” she whispered.

He glanced at her face. A mistake. Her eyes were huge, the deep brown flecked with gold, and that sleepy, seductive slant to them was misleading, for her gaze fairly crackled with intelligence. A flush touched her cheeks, her color returning, and her lips, slightly parted, were red as newly turned apples. That Cupid’s bow curve of her upper lip, the way it jutted slightly over her full lower lip, was going to destroy him. This woman would be his undoing, and he knew that as clearly as if he were in a satirical print and someone had unrolled a speech banner above her head. Beauty Conquers the Rake.

He dropped his gaze and wrapped a length of cloth around her arm. “Just as well you’re not left-handed.”

She flexed her fingers. “Perhaps we should duel again tomorrow, to keep me in shape.”

Philip pressed her toward him and poured a splash of schnapps over the cut on her shoulder. She shrieked, but bit it off quickly. Fierce woman.

“Torturing me because you think I led you into a trap?” She spoke through clenched teeth.

“Ssh. Trust me when I say this is the best way I know to keep away infection.” He never thought he’d use the knowledge gleaned from brawling in rookeries and more than one seedy pub in an aristocratic lady’s boudoir, but Melisende of Merania was not in the usual run of aristocratic females

“Perhaps I should have let the surgeon try to kill me.” She hissed as he pressed a folded length of cloth over the wound on her shoulder, then wrapped it to her by winding a strip of cloth under her arm.

“I’m not going to bleed you, so there’s an improvement. Drink up.” He held out a glass with another splash of schnapps poured into it.

“You couldn’t give me this first?” She jerked back her chin and emptied the glass as if she’d been bolting spirits in public houses all her life.

“Good girl.” He made the mistake of staring into her face again, her heavy-lidded eyes, that mouth. The room tilted, her face coming toward his. Or his lowering to hers.

He stood quickly. “Rest tonight. I’ll make some inquiries. We’ll call on the Aldthorpes tomorrow. What did the duchess tell you of the family?”

She poured herself another small dram of schnapps. “The countess has a young daughter and a babe, less than a year in age, I think. Both children are in town with them while the earl is seated—he’s MP for someplace in the East Midlands, where the Aldthorpe estate is located. I assume that’s a courtesy title, since he’s heir to the Marquess of Langford?”

“Langford has a seat in the House of Lords, but his son will be a commoner until he takes the title,” Philip said. “It’s an English custom.”

“Hmm,” Melisende said. “There may be nephews staying with them as well. It’s a lively family, though I’m told his lordship still mourns the marchioness. This would be the Guiseppina who had my book. I wonder how she came by it.”

“Perhaps you are some distant relation. Another Italian princess in your family tree.”

“We have an abundance of titles, and no land.” Melisende yawned. “I hope my robe can be mended. That stomacher is my favorite.”

And perhaps she did not have that many gowns, living in exile, moving from house to house as she hunted down and assembled her family’s one remaining legacy. The luxury of her surroundings, and the well-trained staff, hinted at means—another maid had come into the room to bank the fire—but Philip wondered how long the novelty of his title and circumstance could prove currency for the grand duke to live on.

“Do you wish me to send for your father?” Philip thought to ask.

“Gin will have gone already, and taken great delight in being the bearer of bad news. There’s no hope of keeping this secret now.” She leaned back against her pillows with a small grimace. “And your name will be attached to it, I’m afraid.”

“Not the first time I’ve been embroiled in a fight.”

“It won’t imperil your sister’s marriage preparations, will it?”

Aha. She’d made inquiries about him. Philip knew better than to be flattered.

“Anything else you’d like to ask about my family?”

She didn’t betray the slightest sign of dismay at his tone, tight and clipped. “When do I get to meet them?”

“When the threats to your well-being have ceased. I’ll hardly invite an attacker wielding a blade into my mother’s drawing room.”

She met his stare with a level gaze. “I warned you he will stop at nothing.”

“I’m not surprised,” Philip said. “Neither do I.”