Page 79 of The Ladies Least Likely

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A maranthe was welcomed back to Hunsdon House as if she were the mistress of it.

Mal stopped the carriage before the broad white portico and growled, “Wait!” while he gave the reins to a street boy, circled the vehicle, and held out an arm to help her down.

Ralph opened the front door as she reached it.

“Miss Illingworth,” he greeted her, his expression eager. Ralph would have to work hard to cultivate the classic sneer of the English butler.

“Is Mr. Illingworth here?” she asked, untying her bonnet.

“The library. Mrs. Blackthorn is preparing a tea tray for the young gentlemen. I can arrange for her to make you up one as well.”

Amaranthe handed Ralph her produce and proceeded first to her room, where she would set aside her bonnet and gloves and change into her house slippers. She wanted comfortable shoes while she gave her brother the dressing down he deserved.

Her room. She hauled herself up short. She was already imagining herself conducting staff interviews with Grey.

Settling in the girls who would arrive tomorrow from the Benevolence Hospital.

Part of her brain was thinking about dinner, and who had the key to the house safe where she might store her guineas, and how much to add to Ralph’s wages.

As if she were the lady of the house indeed, when none of this was hers and never would be.

Joseph sat at the large table in the library, explaining a passage in Latin to Hugh. He scrambled to his feet as she pushed open the door. The young duke rose with more dignity and delivered a whack on the shoulder to rouse his brother.

Ned looked up with a cheerful, “Hullo, Miss Amaranthe!” Hugh smacked him again, reminding his brother that a gentleman stood in a lady’s presence.

“Anth?” Joseph’s voice was full of surprise. “What are you doing so splendid? I didn’t recognize you! Wasn’t sure you’d come back here or go home.”

“You and I must have a chat. Can your charges give us a moment?”

“Of course. Lord Edward, continue your translation of Cicero, and show me a clean copy if you please. Hunsdon, finish this chapter and give me an account of the history of Patagonia, the customs of the natives, and Bryon’s experience—oh, never mind, here’s tea.”

Davey set the tray on a delicate cherrywood table while Derwa scampered over to show Amaranthe the violets she’d tucked into her hair.

“Millie’s desperately bored,” she confided.

“She’s been teasing all day about when you’d return.

” Derwa rolled her eyes as if she were the other girl’s senior and had the charge of her.

“We must call her Lady Camilla,” Amaranthe said. “Did you arrange the flowers? They’re lovely.”

A posy of the costermongers’ violets and lavender graced the tea tray, along with orange slices.

Joseph snatched a handful and ate them while Amaranthe poured tea, dispensed seed cakes, and sent the boys off to a corner of the room.

Then she turned to her brother with a stern expression, and his look of enjoyment changed to chagrin.

“What did I do?”

“That.” She pointed to Hugh and Ned relaxed near the standing globe, eating their cakes with the speed and intensity of growing boys.

“Them.” Her throat closed, and she swallowed hard to clear it.

“Joseph, those boys were going hungry beneath your very nose. When they came to our house, they hadn’t had a proper meal in days. How could you not notice?”

She put her hands over her face and sank into a chair at the side of the room, one of the few not mounded with books. Goodness, she was teasy today. Her emotions were in a lather, and her brother’s earnest, abashed face made every raw nerve rise to the surface.

“Gor, old girl, don’t cry! I’m sorry, truly I am. I don’t know how I managed to be so bacon-brained. Days, you say?” Joseph looked appalled.

Amaranthe pressed her fingers to her cheekbones to stop the tears.

“A week at least. Ralph was buying them meals from the cookshop, but he ran out of money. He needs to be paid.” She sniffled and looked up at her brother with watery surprise.

“Didn’t you notice you weren’t receiving your stipend?

Didn’t you notice the duchess had disappeared?

Along with many of the things in the hall and front rooms, and most of the servants? ”

“Er.” He fidgeted with the pile of books on the small table. “You know I’m not very good with those sorts of things. When I’m here, my mind’s on the boys, and when I’m not…well, I’ve had other things to think of, you see.”

Amaranthe shook her head with a sigh. “What’s her name this time?”

Joseph sat in a chair across from her and placed a hand over his heart. “Susannah. Susannah Pettigrew.”

His face softened with wonder, and Amaranthe’s heart thumped.

She was not jealous of her brother’s affections.

She was not one of those deprived women who put all her stock in the male nearest her and doted on him beyond reason.

She adored her brother, but he had his flaws, like any human.

Only there was something in his face this time that made her feel a touch sad and wistful.

She had never inspired that look of wondrous rapture in a man, and never would. Her one proposition had come from Reuben, who made his horrible suggestion about an arrangement if she continued to live under his roof.

She was too dedicated to her work to be available for courting, even if a man wanted to court her.

She was self-sufficient and liked being so, even if, once in a while, she saw a couple pass in the street or heard banns announced in church and thought how nice it must be to have a companion.

An object for one’s affections, and a steady anchor in an unsteady world.

But she had Eyde and Mrs. Blackthorn to talk to, and the girls they sheltered now and again to save them from begging in the streets.

In time she expected Joseph would find a proper young girl to marry and she would have a sister.

Only he seemed to be going about it in just the opposite way he ought, and choosing girls who were outrageously inappropriate and unattainable, wringing his heart, and Amaranthe’s, in the process.

“Joseph,” she said. “Not again.”

“No, it’s different this time.” He munched on a slice of cake. “ She’s different.”

Amaranthe sipped the tea she’d poured herself. Tea, with an abundance of sugar, a guilty pleasure. And twice in one day. It was seductive to live so grandly, and the luxury undermined her ire. “Tell me about her, then.”

Joseph raised his eyes to the heavens with a look of rapture on his face. The ceiling of the library, fortunately, had not given in to the kinds of murals that decorated the ceilings of the state rooms with the doings of lumpy-looking mythical beings awash in clouds. “The face of a flower.”

“Of course,” Amaranthe murmured.

“The voice of an angel.”

“Naturally.”

“Her grace—her form—she is the essence of sweetness. Pure grace.”

Amaranthe nodded. “They always are.”

“Anth! Attend! She is different .”

“Oh? She is not dainty, like a little porcelain figure you can move about?”

He frowned. “No, she’s quite dainty, very small.”

“Not blonde, then.”

“Hair as golden as ripe wheat under the sun.”

“Then her eyes are not blue.”

He shook his head. “Blue as cornflower. As a summer sky.”

“So her family is rich this time.”

“Not in the least, but?—”

“And her family doesn’t have high hopes for her, and aren’t holding out for a title, or at least a gentleman with a fortune, who doesn’t have to work for a living?”

Joseph looked down at his boots. “I could support a wife on what our parents left us. If we lived very modestly. In the country. And if I took in teaching, here and there.”

Amaranthe’s exasperation ebbed as she looked at him.

She glanced toward the boys across the room, slowing down on the cake to enjoy their tea while talking earnestly to each other, and her heart turned over again.

She and Joseph had felt nothing lacking in their childhood.

Raised by the kindest of parents, they had never known excess, but there had always been enough.

She knew now that was because her parents had carefully conserved her father’s inheritance from his father the baronet, money he had been granted from the estate before it went to her uncle, Reuben’s father.

That was the reason Reuben had felt comfortable stealing Amaranthe’s allowance from her when she came to live with him; he’d felt it was due him anyway.

Joseph had managed his way through university on his small allowance and had worked every day since to support himself.

He’d never known, never would know, the kind of luxury and security that surrounded the great.

He worked hard for everything he gained, and all he wanted was someone to share it and his life with.

Though the Delaval boys hadn’t known security, either, Amaranthe had to admit. Neither their name nor their great house had kept them from staring hunger in the face. Perhaps her brother could be forgiven his absent-mindedness. She hoped Malden Grey would turn up the forgiving sort.

“She’ll have to take you in the boots you stand in, do you get turned off here,” Amaranthe said in a quiet voice. “It will be hard to find another position if Mr. Grey doesn’t give you a character.”

Joseph looked stunned. “Has he talked of turning me off? I haven’t approached Susannah’s parents yet. They’re Quakers, and they live in Gloucestershire. I’d like to present myself in person and ask for her hand.”

“Is that what Susannah wants? Miss Pettigrew, I mean.”

Amaranthe shook off another twinge to her heart.

Joseph hadn’t told her before now about the woman he’d decided to marry.

He’d not even brought her to the house so Amaranthe could meet her.

How had she managed to make herself so unavailable to her own brother—who lived with her—about a decision that would impact his entire life?