Page 115 of The Ladies Least Likely
Ren revised his assessment. This girl was no avenging angel but something closer to a hellion.
The white lace tucker at her bodice was askew, her bodice was stained with berry juice, and her apron boasted a long tear.
As she stepped around the bush, the stone in her slingshot still aimed at the boys, Ren detected that she was barefoot. But why was she protecting him?
“Saucebox,” the ironmonger’s son, Abel, roared. “Time you learned your place!”
Ren braced himself as the scrape of stone and brush of leaves told him the larger boy had launched himself toward them.
The hellion curled her lip and released the stone in her slingshot without hesitation.
A thump and a resounding howl told Ren the stone hit its mark.
He glanced over his shoulder to see Abel clutching his shoulder.
Indignation filled the boy’s expression, but also a grudging respect.
“Now tail down and pike off, all of ya, like the jolter heads ye are,” his avenging fury called.
The wainwright’s son lunged up the slope. Quicker than Ren could follow, a stone appeared from a hidden apron pocket and flew at the attacker’s leg. Bram yelped and grabbed his thigh, hopping about in pain.
The slingshot swerved to its third target. “You’re too white-livered to touch a girl, Gil Roper,” she taunted. “I’ve got bigger ballocks than you do.”
Ren held on to a branch for balance and turned to watch his three adversaries retreat down the slope.
Grabbing their fishing poles from the bank, they scrabbled down to the road along the river and set off upon it, the ropemaker’s son blubbering and wailing, and the wainwright’s son limping worse than Ren did.
He turned to face his deliverer. Her hair waved free in the wind, no cap to restrain it, and she pocketed the slingshot in her apron with casual ease. Then she wiped a hand across her cheek, leaving a smear of dirt.
“I w-w-wish I could say I didn’t need a g-gul to potect me,” Ren said. “But it seems I d-do.”
She grinned at him, a wide, gamine grin, and Ren’s humiliation ebbed.
Her eyes took in everything, the way he clung to the branch for balance, his oddly shaped shoe.
She’d heard his speech, but her face didn’t cloud with scorn the way so many faces in the village did.
She merely looked him in the face, bold, direct.
“Give you a hand down, shall I?” she said briskly. “Afore we both go arsey varsey.”
Ren normally went stiff-backed at any offer of assistance.
It was generally offered with pity, or with sly condescension.
It was not the way of the world he lived in that an earl should be a malformed weakling.
But this girl simply stuck out her arm, bent at the elbow, and Ren felt no shame in taking it.
Her arm was thin and strong as the rest of her.
“You certain—” He concentrated. “Certainly have a way with you.” He was astonished to hear all his words emerge correctly.
For some reason he didn’t panic with this girl, the words tumbling out half-formed or confused, or worse yet, not coming altogether.
She had a steady way about her that calmed him.
He could take a breath and that extra half-second to think about how the sounds should feel in his mouth.
“Oh, I’m every bit the ragamuffin they say,” she said cheerfully. “But I’ve run into those boys before. They like to bully everyone. Used to be me. Watch, your lordship, that’s a snake hole! Don’t you put a foot wrong there.”
“I am well accustomed to putting a foot wrong ,” Ren said.
He delivered the line perfectly, without one stammer or halt of his twisted tongue, the first true joke of his life. She tipped back her head and gave a riotous shout of laughter, and Ren could have died with joy right there on the hill above the gentle River Sheppey.
He didn’t know her name yet, but she was his friend for life.
Once they had safely descended the hill and gained the road, she pointed at his shoe. “What’s it, then?”
“Clubfoot,” he said, clenching his teeth.
The late earl had been incandescent with rage at his son’s deformity, insisting the midwife had twisted the boy at birth, marring his precious heir.
The delivery of his sister a few years later with her own abnormalities had rather suggested there must be some stain upon the Earl of Renwick, the sins of the father marked on his progeny, just like the medieval legends.
The countess withdrew into opium and cards, not one to put her own happiness on the line to protect her children from their father.
“Rotten luck,” his new friend said, and that was the end of the discussion. She matched her gait to his as the river dove back into its underground outlets and buildings sprouted along the lanes to town, growing steadily bigger and older.
“You’re the new Earl of Renwick, then? Living in the old Manor House on Leg Square?” She grinned. “Lucky you, with the Blinder Wall.”
The large house was hard to miss, and its location near the churchyard and the center of town meant Ren felt under watch all the time.
He had some protection in the infamous Blinder Wall, a hideous fence of bricks that his ancestor built to keep neighbors from spying on him.
It was rumored the source of Ren’s grandfather’s wealth was not lucrative woolen mills but something darker in character.
“And you?” Ren asked shyly. Etiquette said they required an introduction, but she already felt familiar to him.
It must be her direct, forthright manner that put him at ease, as if they had a long history.
Aside from his secret fondness for fairy tales, he was not a boy given to fancy, or Ren would have thought about kindred spirits, past lives, old souls finding each other in new clothes.
“Harriette Smythe,” she said. “Of Ivy Cottage, over by the cattle market. It’s not ours.
The Demants took kindly to me mum and now she’s companion to Missus Demant.
I was just a babe when Mum brought us to England, and she was knitting stockings to support us when Missus Demant found her and knew she was too genteel for her unfortunate circumstances.
” She said this as if rehearsing a story she’d heard many times.
“She’s the soul of kindness, the missus, to take in me mum and a hoyden such as I am, and to feed me from her table and put clothes on my back. ”
A hard tone entered her voice at the last utterance, and she assumed a defiant air, as if daring someone to challenge her.
Ren guessed that Madame Demant’s Christian mercy was grudging at best. From his own mother’s example he knew there were ladies who preferred not to be bothered with children, which perhaps explained why the sprite next to him was roaming the hills, linens torn, dress stained, feet bare.
Ren was watched with too much care and fretful oversight, and Harriette Smythe had none.
“Nice to meet you, Haow—Haow—” He gulped and stumbled, ashamed that she should see his weakness.
She watched his eyes, his mouth, his eyes again. Her gaze was clear and steady and thoughtful, her eyes a lovely mix of brown and gold and green.
“Call me Rhette,” she suggested.
“And you may call me Ren,” he said, the words for once flowing easily.
“Ren and Rhette.” Her mouth curved in that impish smile that struck him to the core. Every wild, joyful impulse of youth that had been so long stifled stirred and came alive in his chest. “What a pair of odd fellows we are, don’cha think?”
And that was their beginning. The start of a summer of freedom and adventure the like of which the earl’s son had never known, and a friendship that would survive wind and cold and the long ravages of time.
The Earl of Renwick would follow Harriette Smythe into hell if she led him there, and he had no doubt that she would as readily lay down her life and limb if it spared him anything.
Though he hoped the sacrifice would never be demanded, as he wanted her in his life, his steadfast support, his single unending source of joy, to the end of his God-given days, if he were allowed the choice.
Which of course, since he was an earl, he wasn’t.