Page 68 of The Ladies Least Likely

“Somehow I believe you could master anything you set your mind to, Miss Illingworth. Including Flemish.”

“It is close enough to Dutch that I was able to make it out, once I found someone who speaks Flemish,” she said.

“Either your chandler has been overcharging your housekeeper obscenely, or your housekeeper has been pocketing a profit margin on the household’s purchase of candles.

I’ve noted an absurdly high price for several other items as well.

Also recent entries for mourning clothes, yet I notice you and the children have put off mourning. ”

He stiffened. Was that a reprimand? He was not here to take reprimands from Miss Illingworth, as much as he might require her help.

“I noticed a similar inflation of prices in the butler’s books. Wine seems to have been extortionately expensive of late.”

She put down the small glass of Canary wine that she had just raised to her mouth. Mal noted the shimmer of liquid on her lips and tore his mind away. He was not here to catalogue Miss Illingworth’s anatomy, though he was noting new points of interest with every glance.

“I’m told it is common in wealthy households for the servants to line their pockets,” she said. “A housekeeper selling the candle stubs or cast-off rags as a perk, for example. But I wonder if your steward was aware of the extent of the skimming.”

“He was in no position to scold, given he was robbing from the estate, or planning to.”

“And Her Grace?” She turned to the last page of entries.

“Don’t Grace her,” Mal snapped. “She’s Sybil. A name synonymous with witch.”

She gave him a level look. “The Sybils were oracles of the Greco-Roman world. Their prophecies were considered divine revelation.”

“My father thought Sybil a divine revelation when he found comfort in her arms, though she was but a viscount’s widow, and he was not done mourning his first wife,” Mal said.

“Turns out the comfort Sybil took was in having a high title, a country seat, and a townhouse in London, as well as a great increase in her pin money. I expect she and Popplewell have been pocketing the estate’s profits for some time, though our solicitor can tell us for sure. I’ll meet with him tomorrow.”

“And I shall give you the direction of the Sisters of Benevolence Hospital for the Relief of Orphans and Distressed Women,” Miss Illingworth said, closing the book as if the conversation were finished.

“They are not a regular agency, but they engage frequently in the placement of servants. Anyone they recommend will be trustworthy and grateful for the work. The matron will recognize my name.”

“Surely, if that is the case, you are in the best position to discuss orphans and distressed women with her?” Mal said with alarm.

He could only imagine how he, with his disastrous luck, would be met in such an endeavor.

The care of his wards, or soon-to-be wards, was at stake.

“More to the point, I don’t have the least notion how to go about staffing a house like this one. I don’t even employ a valet.”

“A chambermaid to tidy?”

“Arranged by my landlady, and I pay for the service with my rent.”

Again those brows raised. Miss Illingworth managed to convey much with just a few twitches of a facial muscle.

This one said she found him a useless dandy, which he preferred to admitting that, due to his rebelliousness as a youth and the position of entrenched resentment he had maintained toward his father as an adult, he knew as much or less than she did about running a ducal house.

“I can inquire at the Hospital, but I should think you would rather see the back of me,” she said finally.

If he longed to see the back of her, it was so he might examine her from that angle as well.

The brandy had left a pleasant burn in his belly, the warmth spreading to regions lower the longer he sat with her.

He had the unadvisable urge to touch her, to settle once and for all whether her hair was comprised of clouds or fairy dust, and whether her skin was silk or velvet.

Whether, if he dipped his finger in the brandy and drew it across those plum-colored lips, she would rear from his touch like a frightened horse. Or if she would bite his finger and suck it inside her clever mouth, warm and wet and?—

Mal wrenched his mind from the tightness that suddenly filled his groin.

“You cannot abandon us now,” Miss Illingworth,” he rasped. “The children have thrown themselves upon your mercy, and I do as well.”

She drew back as if she feared he meant to literally launch himself. He reined himself in. The set of her eyes, that canny way she looked at the world, suggested she was not entirely an innocent, but that didn’t mean she was open to an interlude with a duke’s bastard son. Or anyone.

What he would give, though, to have her look upon him with longing. To see desire in those deep, veiled eyes, a pout of want on her prim lips, to have her turn to him with a sultry invitation and?—

“My brother, Joseph, could make the necessary arrangements. I cannot think you welcome me poking my nose in your business.”

He wanted her nose and every other part of her in his business. No. Mal struggled to cut through the haze clouding his thoughts. No, he did not want her prying into his affairs, as attractive as her nose was.

“Your brother does not seem to have been aware of what was going on here any more than I was,” Mal managed to point out.

A small line appeared between her deep-set, altogether too perceptive eyes. She pressed her hands together as if she were a medieval nun at prayer.

“Things have been deteriorating for some time, from what Ralph could tell me. I cannot say how long it’s been since the children had a proper meal. Their nurse left days ago. Yet my brother noticed nothing.”

“The boys would have too much pride to tell him anything was wrong,” Mal said. A new, heavy weight on his chest pressed those snaking tendrils of desire into their proper place. “Ever since their father died…”

He studied the amber liquid in his glass, avoiding her gaze.

“I suspect things have been deteriorating at least since then. Sybil would have had nothing but contempt or neglect for them until she saw Hugh’s inheritance as a way to enrich herself.

And when she set herself against me, she restricted my access to the house and to them, which is why I had no notion she’d abandoned them to the servants, and the servants had abandoned them as well. ”

Mal looked at her in appeal. She couldn’t blame him any more than he blamed himself. He’d gotten so caught up in his own concerns that he neglected to look in on the children he meant to make his wards. Children who shared his blood.

He saw no contempt in her expression, only a look of puzzlement as she studied his features.

“He was your father too,” she observed. “You must feel his loss in some way.”

Mal upended the last of his brandy. “I feel the loss of his attempting to make up for the circumstances of my birth with his money,” he said shortly.

“His passing brought a period to a bitter life that in the end descended to madness. It was a relief, if you must know. He was never a happy man. He told me once, in a maudlin fit, that my mother was the only person he ever loved, and when his father forced them apart, his life held no real satisfaction for him thereafter.”

“That is a heavy burden for him to lay upon you,” she said quietly.

Mal stared at the leather surface of the table, marked with small cuts and tobacco stains. Miss Illingworth was alarmingly easy to confide in. No wonder the children had unburdened themselves to her at once, when they came to enlist the aid of her brother and found him not at home.

And why had they not come to Mal? That omission stung more than being left without the funds to support them. Or himself.

She picked up a small portrait that sat on a delicate table placed between two chairs. The face of a hauntingly lovely woman with delicate features and clouds of hair stared distantly from the frame.

Mal stared back. His mother had always been half-angel to him, fragile and luminous from the illness that eventually claimed her life.

All the times his father had called him into this study for a raking over about his wild ways and unknown future, Mal had never seen this sketch. He wondered who had done it, and when.

“Was this her?” Amaranthe questioned. “I see a resemblance.”

“Yes, that was my mother. Marguerite.”

She startled and nearly dropped the silver frame. Her fingers were graceful but strong like the rest of her, with ink staining the tips and a streak of gold along her thumb.

“Would she have styled herself Lady Vernay, by any chance?” A light blush touched her cheek as he stared at her. “I came across a book once with the name Marguerite, Lady Vernay inscribed in it, and I was curious about her. I am sorry to pry.”

“Where did you find this book?” His voice abraded his ears.

“It was an old manuscript in my—a place I lived for a time. In Cornwall. I don’t know where it is now.” Her eyes fell, but not before he glimpsed the shadow that crossed her expression.

So many things she was hiding from him, but he was caught in the sweep of her eyelashes as she studied the table.

Miss Illingworth had the same subtle, ethereal beauty that his mother had possessed.

Not the kind of assertive handsomeness that announced itself, or the kind of astonishing beauty that smacked a man across the face.

Rather, she was a small, willowy shadow that stepped into a man’s fractured world and, by the time she came into focus, she had somehow, magically, made everything right and calm and beautiful.