Page 70 of The Ladies Least Likely

CHAPTER SEVEN

H olding her chamber candlestick steady in one hand, Amaranthe pressed lightly on the paneled door to the library.

The polished wood swung inward, revealing a long, narrow room that appeared much more frequently inhabited than the rather bare study in which she’d found Malden Grey.

She guessed the study had been the duke’s private retreat, while the library was considered a more social space.

The halo of light, as she moved it about, glanced on books heaped about chairs, piled on side tables, and lying open upon the great table that dominated the room.

This would be where Joseph spent his time with his charges, or so she guessed from the hastily erased slates, stacks of parchment, and tightly stoppered jars of ink that entered the soft circle of light as she approached.

Joseph tended to forget everything else when he was working.

Mrs. Blackthorn made it a point of pride to concoct treats that could lure him to raise his head from a book when he was lost in thought.

It was not beyond the realm of belief that he would simply fail to notice that his charges were not being supplied with luncheon, he being more accustomed to a hearty breakfast and substantial early dinner to tide him through the day.

But he dismissed them for a reprieve and a light meal at some point, didn’t he?

How had he not seen that they returned to him as hungry as before?

Scouting out Joseph’s error was not her purpose here; she would take the matter up with him tomorrow. Rather, the silent house, with everyone else abed, gave Amaranthe the perfect opportunity to walk through the library at her leisure and see what she could find.

Her own servants wouldn’t question her curiosity, and there were no Hunsdon servants about save Ralph, whom she had already sent to bed.

Dear, stout Ralph, the one soul who had seen the children had no one and stayed to look after them.

She must see that he was duly rewarded. Grey’s suggestion that he be promoted had so naturally followed her own thought that she’d gone silent with surprise.

She had not expected she and the blustering, menacingly tall Malden Grey would be of like mind on anything.

The exchange in the study had unsettled her. He’d not at all been the rude, demanding man who swept into her house and accused her of kidnapping. At dinner, he’d been an excellent host, the gentlemanly bon vivant keeping the conversation afloat.

He’d heaped her plate with oysters as if he’d discerned her fondness for them.

And in their conference in the library, he had looked at her, more than once, as if he were trying to see below the surface. Past the Amaranthe Illingworth who made it a point to be unprepossessing and close-lipped, so she did not intimidate gentleman who might commissions copies from her.

Gentlemen did not approach her for other reasons, and men not gentlemen did not approach her at all, as she gave them no opportunity. Yet sitting so long near Malden Grey made Amaranthe feel she’d swallowed ink and it sat in her belly, heavy and thick.

Slightly galling, as if her stomach hadn’t settled for the food she’d introduced. As if she wanted a taste of something different, but knew not what.

A shiver of guilt edged her shoulders, and Amaranthe shrugged it off.

She was not lurking about uninvited. He’d allowed her to stay.

She had an excuse ready if Mr. Malden Grey came upon her and demanded to know why she was making free of the house.

She was in search of something to read. The day being somewhat stimulating, she wished to soothe her nerves before bed. A perfectly reasonable request.

The ducal library had been built for a larger collection than the family had thus far acquired.

The sturdy shelves reached to the ceiling, but the books did not.

Several shelves showed large gaps filled with plaster busts or covered by watercolor landscapes not of the best execution.

Nor were the rows tidy, with books leaning upon one another or piled in haphazard stacks.

She doubted any of them were organized or catalogued.

She moved the small pewter saucer that held her candle before a range of calf leather-bound books, and the motley assortment of titles proved her suspicions correct.

Don Quixote next to Ovid next to Hume’s Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding , followed by a treatise on botany and assorted, non-sequential volumes of The Tatler.

Half sideways leaned a Latin edition of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England , beside a Latin-English dictionary, like a disliked project abandoned and shelved.

Beneath this was every issue to date of The Lady’s Magazine . Her Grace must be a subscriber. Her instinct for order made Amaranthe long to put the volumes in sequence, but she squelched the urge. She was not here to sort and catalogue, nor to do Sybil any favors.

Her candle teased the deep pockets of shadow in the corners of the room.

Here and there on a chair back and on the standing globe she detected traces of dust. Joseph wouldn’t have noticed that, either.

She inspected the books heaped upon the table for an insight into the kind of lessons he held, hoping in that, at least, her brother was performing as well as could be wished.

If Malden Grey released him from this position, Amaranthe could support her brother in modest style.

But if he left without a good reference, he would have difficulty finding a new post, and without a post, he would not be able to marry and support a wife, which Amaranthe knew was Joseph’s most cherished goal.

The heavy worktable held the account of the travels of the Honourable John Byron, the open pages illustrating the commodore’s travels through Patagonia and his encounters with its natives.

Near it lay a copy of Artidemorus’ book on the interpretation of dreams, in Greek, with a painstaking translation in English tucked between the pages.

She spied a slender volume on The Pythagorean Diet of Vegetables Only tucked under Benjamin Franklin’s observations on electricity .

One side of the table was predominated by several volumes of Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England—someone, it seemed, was doing legal research.

Grey? But he had said Sybil barred him access to the house.

The shelves yielded only one interesting find: George Bickham’s The Universal Penman.

Bickham was considered Britain’s greatest calligrapher and engraver, and this volume laid out the scripts Bickham had himself designed along with every other script currently in use among printers.

It would be extraordinarily useful to her, but given its folio size, she could hardly slip it in her pocket.

Perhaps there was a way she could ask Joseph to borrow and bring it home on some pretext.

Aside from the fashion magazines, the library’s tomes offered an assortment of classics and instructional nonfiction, exactly what an upper-class gentleman would be expected to display on his shelves.

Tucked away in one corner she found a few novels, among them Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple .

Amaranthe’s good reverend father had frowned upon novels, but her mother had managed to hide her copy of David Simple beneath a pile of quilts in an old cedar chest, and Amaranthe had snuck it out to read several times during her youth.

She had been particularly struck by the heroine’s arguments about the strength of women’s intellect and the benefit of gentlewomen earning their own living.

Her mother’s book, like everything else Amaranthe had brought with her from the first home she’d ever known, was at Penwellen, lost in Reuben’s clutches.

With a pang of longing and grief she slipped the novel into the pocket of her bedgown.

She’d return it, of course; she wasn’t a thief.

But the book made her mother feel close.

How she missed her guidance, her warmth, her calm.

What would her mother think of the means Amaranthe had hit upon to support herself, Joseph, Eyde, and Derwa?

She knew what her father would say. His moral code was strict and without grey areas.

Her father had been an intelligent and gifted man, Scripture his guide for human relations, and its requirements were very clear.

Amaranthe lingered before the fullest set of shelves, heavy with books on medical lore, cures, and treatments, as well as witchcraft, mysticism, and several slim volumes on the beneficial uses of opium.

One of the dukes had had rather arcane tastes—or a desperate interest in curatives?

She had not thought to ask what the late Duke of Hunsdon had died of.

She combed this section carefully, but all the books were cheap and recent, with half-calf bindings and fading ink, paper already browning at the edges.

The tome Joseph had mentioned wasn’t here, and neither was anything else that could be called valuable or rare, at least not upon first perusal.

She would have to return during the light of day to inspect the drawers and cabinets, and to do so she would need to find some pretext that did not strain credulity.

Malden Grey had already proven suspicious of her.

With good reason, she had to admit.

Malden. She said the name to herself as she quietly pulled the door closed and stole down the darkened hallways of Hunsdon House in what she hoped was the direction of her chamber. Now here was a puzzle as well.

The duke’s illegitimate eldest son spent his days in the dissolute pursuits of a gentleman.

From what Amaranthe gathered, studying law was for most young men a thin veil of respectability pulled over a generally riotous lifestyle of funded leisure.

Most would be called to the bar as it suited their relatives and patrons, the ancient ritual of British preferment at work.

Once gowned and wigged as a proper barrister they were at liberty to hire out their work to clerks as much as they wished.

Seated as judges, they became the guardians of English law and precedent, holding intact the ages-old class structures and customs that kept people carefully slotted into their station and obedient to the rules governing their class and sex.

Yet Malden Grey was a bastard, his illegitimate birth barring him from what otherwise would have been an impressive inheritance and unchecked influence. He lived among the highest, yet he had to survive by his wits. Just as she did.

He had seemed genuinely distressed when he discovered the predicament the children were in.

It was more than outrage that Sybil had robbed him of his means of financial support.

For a dissolute gentleman, he seemed devoted to his half-siblings, making a bid to be their legal guardian.

Nothing obliged him to do so, and few men in his situation would.

Yet he had accepted without question his responsibility for them, and she had seen his guilt that he had not noticed their predicament.

That was not the gesture of the callous, self-interested dandy she had taken him for.

Amaranthe undressed and dispensed with her evening routine with efficiency, then nearly groaned as she climbed into the large bed.

The feather mattress had been plumped and Eyde had slipped a warm brick between the sheets, a greedy comfort.

She blew out the candle and watched the shadows of tossing tree limbs twist across the papered walls of her luxurious room.

Favella would eat her heart out to see the luxury of this place. Amaranthe almost wished she could invite her cousin’s wife to visit, just to see the pleasure that vain Favella would take in everything. But of course that was impossible, because Reuben could not know where she was.

Someday, Amaranthe would return to Penwellen—someday when she was in a position to demand that Reuben return her things.

She would find that manuscript, her Book of Hours, the keystone of her collection.

She would demand the return of everything her cousin had taken from her.

Someday her whole body would not go over cold and sick at the memory of him touching her—of what he had threatened before she left—and she would have the courage to face him.

Tomorrow she had a problem to solve, and she was stimulated by the challenge.

She was stimulated, also, by the conundrum of Malden Grey.

His presence called her nerves to alertness, sharpening her wits and making her blood hum.

His power, from his position and the fact of his large, very male presence, put her on her toes.

She would relish resolving his difficulties and putting him in her debt.

He was the man the likes of which she did not encounter in her day-to-day life; he was more like the hero of a stage play, debonair, destructively handsome, bigger than life.

He had stared at her in such an unsettling way over dinner, and then again in his study.

His intense focus raised nervous sensations in her belly and across her skin, like the lifting of hair when one sensed danger.

It was well he did not know why she had agreed without argument to accompany him to Hunsdon House.

His look of curious fascination would turn to scorn and rejection.

It might be base and an indication of feminine vanity, but she wanted to enjoy his interest as long as she could.