Page 158 of The Ladies Least Likely

“This is a sight harder to do in the dark.” She moved her hands over the front of her gown, pulling out pins, and in a short while she’d freed her black open robe from her stomacher.

Carefully she folded the gleaming black bombazine and arranged it on top of the cape. “The stomacher must go too, I think.”

As she pulled out the pins that held the decorative front panel in place, Ren found his voice. “Where did you find mourning garments?”

“My mother had costumes made when I sent her word that my grandfather the duke had died.” Her voice sounded muffled as she tucked her chin, searching with her fingers in the dark for the last precious pins.

“She had two gowns made up, it seems. Mrs. Demant laid her out in one, and I fortunately fit in the other.”

Onto the pile went the flat black stomacher with its rows of black silk ribbons. “Hold a moment, I’ll take my top petticoat off as well. Black silk isn’t very sturdy. Something about the dying process weakens the fabric, I think.”

“Is that why you smell metallic. Like iron.” He focused on the shape of Harriette emerging in the gloom as she untied the thick silk petticoat, lined with more silk ribbons, from around her waist.

“I use ground bone ash for my black pigments, and sometimes lamp black,” she said, folding the petticoat efficiently.

“But I think for this fabric they used gall nuts and tannins, with iron as the mordant to help it hold fast.” She placed the petticoat atop the pile in his arms. “When this is all over and we have a moment, I ought to visit the dyer’s to see how he does it. I might learn something.”

Ren couldn’t speak. He simply gazed at her over the pile of clothing he held, struck dumb.

Harriette stood before him in shift and stays and underpetticoat, her pockets a fanciful patchwork tied about her waist. Only her black silk stockings and heeled black shoes hinted at the luxury she’d just shed.

And the shape of her in those scanty garments—it defied his meager powers of description.

He wished he had her gift of drawing so he might capture this image and carry it with him always.

“Now put those somewhere, and be prepared to catch me if I go arsey varsey,” she said.

He grinned and found a nearby overgrown flowerbed, the cleanest place he could discern in the dark. Harriette hiked up her petticoat and climbed into the wheelbarrow, placing a hand on his shoulder for balance as she studied the branches of the bird cherry, charting her path.

“You don’t have to do this, Rhette,” he murmured. “We can take shelter in the churchyard, or with the Demants, or?—”

“Now you tell me this, when I’m naked,” Harriette answered.

She tightened her grip on his shoulder as a great crash arose from the prison. It sounded like a gate giving way. A great roar of excited voices, screams, and furious shouts arose, above it the boom of a musket firing.

“I do believe there’s a prison break taking place.” Ren tried to keep his voice calm so he didn’t frighten Harriette.

“And they’ll be headed here, a mob in full force.” She sounded grim, not at all frightened. “We need to get behind that wall. ‘Old still, me ‘andsome.”

Her flippant remark in the area dialect almost, almost made him smile.

Until she set her neat heeled shoe on his shoulder and levered herself up.

The impact made him wince, the sharpness of her heel digging into his shoulder through his coat, her weight driving him into the ground.

He braced his bum leg against the wheelbarrow and for the ten thousandth time cursed the unlucky fate that had made him half a man instead of a whole one.

If he were a man rightly made, he would be the one vaulting the Blinder Wall to retrieve the key, rescuing his lady from the approaching riot.

An explosion of some sort rose from the prison, among more screams, some of fear and anger, some it seemed of pain. These noises were drowned out by the roar of the attacking mob and the whoops of freed prisoners, with more scattered gunfire.

“Whoa,” Harriette shouted as the branch she grabbed for bowed under her weight. “ Whoa! ”

She fell against him, and only because he’d braced himself against the wheelbarrow did Ren catch and stop her without pitching them both onto the ground. Fabric choked his mouth. Harriette’s warm, rounded bottom pressed against his face. Thought evaporated.

He’d barely reached his arms around her when the warm weight lifted and he could breathe again.

“Not that one,” she muttered. “You’ll have to toss me, Ren.

Make a stirrup with your hands, like this—” She turned to stare down at him, linked her fingers and cupped her palms. “And when I say, throw me up.”

“Argh,” Ren said, which was his attempt to say No, and not on your life, and I can’t.

“Yes, you can,” she said. “We girls did it all the time at school. There was this one lovely park where the blighters had built a wall all ‘round it, and this was the only way we could get in.”

His mind didn’t seem to be working in its customary paths.

Perhaps it was the distraction of the mounting noise from several directions now, the scent of riot and fire and the ruinous wrath of the mob coming in their direction from both the Market Square and the prison, and now, it seemed, the churchyard as well.

He’d be crushed and Harriette carried off if the men came upon them here.

He didn’t resist as she cupped his hands as she’d directed, her hands upon his, warm and supple and strong, then with complete trust and fearlessness she placed a foot in his palm.

“Now!” she shouted, and he heaved. He glimpsed black stocking and the fluttering ribbon of a garter against the white of her petticoat, and a square of perfect pale thigh.

Then more than that as she caught herself on her stomach atop the wall and squirmed for a moment, legs kicking.

If it hadn’t been dark, he’d have been granted a glimpse of the God-given perfection that was Harriette Smythe’s bottom.

You’re a randy bastard , Ren informed himself. There couldn’t be a less appropriate time for trying to get a glimpse up her skirts. Yet when else might he have the opportunity?

Harriette grabbed a branch of the tree and hauled her hips atop the wall, then pulled up her legs and swung herself into a seated position. Before he could call out—a warning, advice, anything—she stepped out and the top of her head dropped out of sight.

“Rhette!”

The tumult of noise from behind blocked out any sound she might have made, any call for aid. He limped to the gate, winced as his boot turned on an uneven cobbled gulley that ran along the alley, a drain for spring rains to the river. He pounded on the wooden portal. “Rhette!”

An eternity passed. Light flickered. A man bearing a torch came up Gaol Lane behind him, leading a group of ragged wraiths.

Ren glimpsed men in tattered rags that hardly covered the bruises and sores on their emaciated bodies.

A woman stumbled along holding a child-sized sack of skin and bones.

Another tiny, shrunken ghost stumbled alongside her.

Shepton Mallet prison had disgorged its inhabitants, if unwilling, and its inhabitants had included men, women, and children barely holding body and soul together.

“Right where you said it’d be!”

Ren nearly fell inward as the door in the wall opened with a rusty creak. Harriette held up the iron key with a broad smile. “You toffs don’t fear housebreakers, do you? It was right out there in the open like a piece of ripe fruit.”

“Rhette. Get inside,” Ren gasped. He stumbled to the spot near the wall where he’d left her clothing. He bent awkwardly and scooped up the fabric, hoping he’d caught everything.

She didn’t obey. Instead she stood in the arched gate in her state of undress, watching the small procession make its way up Gaol Lane to Leg Square. “Rhette! In!” he said, strangled, imagining what could happen if these men got their hands on her. He wasn’t strong enough to protect her from them.

“They need help,” Harriette said softly. The flickering torchlight played in her large, dark eyes.

“And the mob is right behind them. In, and we’ll think of something.” He pushed her inside and then swung the gate shut behind him, grabbing the key from her hand and turning it in the lock.

She stood entirely still, staring up at him. Moonlight made a pale canvas of her face, her eyes dark pools with a deep, mysterious glimmer. Her lips parted, and without thinking he bent his head and pressed his mouth to hers, firmly, possessively.

“Get you inside, hussy,” he growled. “You’re completely undressed.”

She giggled and scampered toward the kitchen door at the back of the house.

The Manor House was a chalky white rectangle rearing up out of the earth, its window frames and door sills bare of any ornamentation.

Its red-tiled roof with chimneys at either end had been the epitome of wealth in the previous century, when his forebears first started turning a profit on their cloth industry, but already it looked quaintly old beside the graceful neoclassical mansions rising in Bowlish and elsewhere.

Ren headed inside, sparing a cursory glance for the untended garden about them and the weeds choking the gravel walk.

If he ever located that absent steward… He followed Harriette into the kitchen to find, not the bare shelves and dusty surfaces he expected, but the thick oaken table heaped with food stores, and a tidy stack of wood beside the stove and the brick oven.

She was already laying out cheese and cutting bread. “Did you spend your day shopping, milord?”

“Mrs. Oram must have sent this. I asked her to return to work tomorrow. I hope she can, if the riot doesn’t continue. Are we hosting a funeral feast?” he asked as she observed the size of the portions she was arranging.