Page 2
Story: The Lady Makes Her Mark (Goode’s Guide to Misconduct #3)
R oused by the commotion outside his library window, Alistair Haythorne, Earl of Ryland, glanced down in surprise at the book in his hand, as if Observations on the different breeds of sheep, and the state of sheep farming in some of the principal counties of England had been responsible for the noise.
Long ago, he had claimed the room as his sole preserve from a household otherwise overrun with women. The housekeeper, Mrs. Swetley; a cook; maidservants who came and went with the seasons; and his sisters. So many sisters. Seven of them, to be exact. Not that they all resided at Haythorne House anymore. The two eldest were married with households of their own, and some portion of the younger five were sometimes with one of them, or with Aunt Josephine in the West Country.
Still, it was a great deal of ... femaleness for one house to contain, and a man occasionally needed a reprieve from it. A space to which he could retreat for some much-needed peace and quiet.
Peace and quiet which were evidently to be in short supply today.
Another shriek rose from the street, followed by a shouted exchange between two deeper voices. With a sigh, Alistair closed the book on sheep farming and heaved himself from the chair, threading his way across the room to peer through the window. “Let’s see what all the ruckus is about,” he said aloud, though he was alone in the house.
It wasn’t madness to talk to oneself, he reasoned. Only madness to expect an answer. And people rarely listened to him anyway—even if he was the earl.
Below, a woman lay sprawled on the cobblestones, struck evidently by the carriage that now lodged across the road, stopping traffic. Nearby, two men argued—the coachman, by his livery, and a passerby. Beneath his window, a fashionably dressed lady slumped in the arms of her maid, packages strewn about them on the pavement. One of them, he surmised, had shrieked. And a brave lad had taken it upon himself to catch the team of horses by the tack. Still skittish from the accident, they pranced and pawed a good deal too close to the fallen woman.
Then again, perhaps she was already dead.
“What a senseless tragedy.” With a grimace, he let the curtain drop and turned away from the window. Half a dozen crates lay scattered about the floor. He was meant to be sorting through the last of his personal books and papers, determining which would accompany him, which ought to stay with the house or with his solicitor, and which could be disposed of.
As he strode from the room, he tossed The State of Sheep Farming onto the nearest pile, entirely indifferent as to whether it landed in a crate bound for Devonshire or the scrap heap. Downstairs, he snatched his greatcoat from a rack near the door. But he did not don it, though the November air had teeth. From the top step, he once more surveyed the scene on the street. Nothing much had changed in the intervening moments, beyond a slight increase in the size of the gawking crowd.
“Has no one thought to summon a physician?” he called out. Whatever Marylebone’s comparative deficiencies to Mayfair in other respects, it was positively crawling with medical men. Two onlookers accepted the charge and hurried off.
Passing the defensive coachman and the wilted lady, he walked up to the boy, whose arms strained with the effort of containing the skittish team. “You there,” he said to a pair of young bucks standing a row or two back in the semicircle of bystanders. “Help him. Unhook the horses and walk them. Shoulder the carriage out of the way.”
Those orders roused the coachman to his duty and he came to assist, still protesting his innocence. “Came out of nowhere, she did. Darted right under the horses’ noses. Naught to be done—no way I could have stopped them.”
Indifferent to the man’s excuses, Alistair knelt beside the fallen woman, who lay against the cold stone, breathing shallowly. He sent up a silent prayer. Her body was twisted, her right arm tucked beneath her at an awkward angle, her face half-hidden by a tangle of golden-red hair. Her bonnet was nowhere to be seen. A delicate brush of his fingertips revealed a bruise already beginning to form on her temple, a gash along the cheekbone below, skin pale, eyes closed. Her clothes were of modest quality without suggesting poverty. Difficult to determine her age in her current state, but certainly not yet thirty, he thought.
A shadow fell across her face, and he looked up to find the lady’s maid standing over them, a vinaigrette in her outstretched hand. “Will she be all right, sir?”
A hopeful question, and one he could not honestly answer in the affirmative. With a tight smile, he thanked her for the smelling salts, sparing a glance for her employer, who was now slumped weakly against the area railing in front of his house. “You’d best go back. Take your mistress inside to warm herself, if she can climb the steps.” He gave a nod toward Haythorne House, the door of which still stood open.
“You’re very good, sir.”
Once, twice, he passed the small silver vial of hartshorn beneath the young woman’s nose, which was sprinkled whimsically with freckles, their ginger color stark against her pallor. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open. She showed no other signs of rousing. He did not think he dared to do more until the physician arrived.
Carefully he spread his greatcoat over her body, murmuring a string of soothing nonsense, the sort of patter one perfected with five younger sisters who often demanded comfort over one thing or another.
Something familiar about her delicate profile niggled at the edges of his memory. He tried to imagine her face with color in her cheeks and animation in her expression. Had he nodded to her on the street? Or perhaps even met her once?
The arrival of two physicians, from opposite directions, put an end to his speculations over her identity. A quick, assessing scan of the two men decided him in favor of the one more humbly dressed, whose ungloved hands were clean but showed signs of having done actual work. “Do what you can for her,” he demanded.
Then, taking the other physician by the elbow, he led him—older, portlier, almost certainly costlier—up the steps and into his foyer, where the fainting lady sat in the nearer of two Chippendale chairs. The chairs were positioned on either side of a demilune table, over which hung a pier glass already draped in holland cloth in preparation for his departure. The cloth also thankfully disguised a bit of the faded wallpaper behind. The chairs, too, had been covered; one still was. He supposed the lady’s maid had swept the dust cover aside for her mistress’s comfort.
“This lady witnessed the accident and was taken ill from the shock,” he explained to the doctor.
She had recovered enough to be eyeing Alistair with speculative curiosity, making him suddenly aware that crouching over the injured young woman in the street had left scuffs on his boots and mud on one knee of his pantaloons. Doubtless such a sight would have given his valet palpitations.
Fortunate, then, that he employed no such person.
“I rang for tea,” the maid explained. “But no one answered the bell.”
“You’ve caught us in the midst of closing up the house for the winter,” he said. “I suppose, amidst all the bustle, none of the servants heard. Allow me.”
He strode to the back of the house and downstairs to the kitchen, which was empty. The servants had left that morning, the housekeeper and one maid for Devonshire, the rest to other posts in Town. He was meant to follow the next day, with the last of his books and personal things.
But first, he would surrender the key to his solicitor, who had found a tenant for Haythorne House for the winter. And the spring. For as long as they would take it, in fact; Alistair could no longer bear the expense of a London residence.
The tenants were a man—most would balk at the term gentleman , as he had made his fortune in trade—and his wife and their only child, a daughter of eighteen, who was to enjoy her first London Season, “once the house has been fitted up in the proper style,” the solicitor had added rather sheepishly. Assorted craftsmen were to begin work first thing in the morning.
It was unusual, certainly, to allow a tenant to redecorate. But Alistair saw no reason to doubt the merchant’s wife’s taste; anything would be an improvement on the house’s current state of genteel shabbiness.
Alistair’s only hesitation, and it had been a slight one, was whether he mightn’t be better served by staying in Town himself and courting the girl, who was rumored to have the sort of dowry that washed away a man’s troubles and made him forget whence the money had come.
But in the end, he had decided in favor of Rylemoor Abbey with his sisters. Mrs. Swetley, the housekeeper, had protested the thought of his spending even one night in the house without servants. Alistair, who had craved a rare evening of silence, had countered with a promise to dine at a chophouse, rather than light a fire in the stove himself.
Which made the offer of tea rather difficult to fulfill. Less because of the lack of fire than the lack of tea leaves. If Mrs. Swetley had left any in the house at all, she would have left them under lock and key—and taken the key with her.
But Mrs. Swetley, it seemed, had anticipated some sort of emergency. She’d left the tea service on a table in the kitchen, covered by a linen cloth, with a spirit lamp and sufficient tea for two brewings, if he were frugal. And while Alistair was not in the habit of making his own tea, he certainly understood the necessity of frugality.
By the time he ascended the stairs again, tea tray in hand, more than a quarter of an hour had passed. He returned to a foyer not markedly different from when he had left it, although someone had also uncovered the pier glass so the lady could assess whether her faint had done irreparable damage to either her coiffure or her bonnet. Her maid relieved him of the tea tray, deposited it on the table, and poured a cup for both the physician and her mistress.
He had intended the second cup for her, but no matter.
“I say, sir,” said the lady, in a voice whose haughtiness suggested she had fully recovered from her earlier bout of delicacy, “are you alone in the house?”
“What an unusual question, ma’am.” He glanced around the increasingly crowded foyer; in his absence, they had been joined by the coachman and another burly fellow. So much for his evening of quiet. “I hope a gentleman might be excused for wondering what prompted you to ask it.”
That reply earned him a hard look along the not insubstantial length of the woman’s nose. She reminded him of his aunt Josephine. “For one thing, a gentleman does not fetch his own tea.” She punctuated the sentence with the soft clink of china against china, as she returned her cup squarely to its saucer. “And for another...”
The physician, having made quick work of his own cup, was now fastening the clasps of his leather satchel. “It wouldn’t do to leave the girl here unchaperoned.”
“The...girl?”
At that moment, the second physician appeared in the doorway of the library, wiping his hands on his handkerchief. “I wasn’t sure what else to do with her, sir. These two”—he nodded toward the driver and the other man—“helped me carry her in.”
“Were you able to rouse her?”
The younger doctor hesitated for a moment before shaking his head. “Not to speak of, no. She took quite a knock to the head.” Alistair tried to read the man’s expression. Did he have his doubts she would ever come around? Did he expect her brains would be scrambled if she did?
He handed over a small vial, wrapped in crinkly paper that revealed its contents as surely as any print upon the label could: laudanum. “No bones broken, as best I can tell. But internal injuries are more difficult to assess. At the very least, she’ll be sore when she wakes. And likely . . . confused.”
“How am I to—? Surely, you don’t mean to—?” As he dropped the little bottle into his coat pocket, Alistair glanced around to discover that the coachman and the other fellow had slipped out, and the other physician was hard on their heels.
“It’s here or a hospital, sir,” said the younger doctor, pocketing his dirty handkerchief, his voice matter-of-fact. And a hospital, as anyone of sense knew, was as good as a death sentence for an unidentified and unconnected young woman in her condition.
“Who is to nurse her?” Alistair could not keep the note of bewilderment from his voice as he watched the physician slip his arms into his coat, clearly preparing to depart. Alistair was reminded of his own intention—nay, the necessity—of vacating Haythorne House first thing in the morning.
“If, as I take it, you’re a bachelor gentleman, and there are concerns over propriety,” he said as he tipped his head toward the grande dame, “perhaps that lady, or her maid—”
“Certainly not!” exclaimed that lady, straightening her rather bedraggled bonnet. “The gentleman claims to have a legion of servants hiding belowstairs. I daresay they’ll manage.” She took her maid by the upper arm and all but pushed her toward the door.
“Stay a moment,” Alistair insisted, but to no avail. The lady and her maid swept out, and the young physician slipped past him, too, refusing payment for his services. Another moment and Alistair was alone again.
Or as good as. In his library, the young woman lay perfectly quiet, her eyes closed, her head propped on the arm of the worn velvet settee in lieu of a pillow, her body still mostly covered by his greatcoat. The physician had unbuttoned her pelisse and removed her torn gloves and her muddy ankle boots. Her right wrist was bandaged and there was a plaster on her cheek, but he could see little other change in her condition.
A draft of cold air alerted him to the fact that no one had bothered to close the front door. When he stepped to it, he discovered a boy standing on the uppermost step, his outstretched arms sagging beneath an indistinguishable burden. “She dropped these when she, er, fell,” he said, eager to off-load the battered bundle of what looked to be carpet and kindling. “An’ I found these in the street where she’d been,” he added, adding a broken and twisted bit of metal and glass to the top of the pile once he had deposited it into Alistair’s hands.
Spectacles. She’d been wearing spectacles. That shadow of memory flickered across his mind’s eye once again but disappeared before he could prod it into some recognizable shape.
“Wait a moment,” he told the boy, then turned to place what he’d collected on the nearby chair. He fished in his waistcoat pocket, glancing past the lad into the encroaching twilight. Afternoon was giving way to evening. He dropped three coins onto the child’s mittened palm. “Go to the Barley Mow and fetch round some dinner for me. And—and beef tea for the lady,” he added, though it felt like a futile gesture, to provide nourishment for one who thus far had shown no sign of regaining consciousness.
The boy’s eyes widened at the sum with which he’d been entrusted. “Aye, guv.”
Alistair closed the door behind him and leaned against it for a moment, warily regarding the pile on the chair of what remained of her possessions. With something like a sigh of resignation, he pushed himself upright, carried the items into his library and deposited them in the middle of his otherwise empty desk, then set about lighting candles against the deepening gloom. The woman never stirred.
He started with the mangled spectacles, though what they might tell him he could not imagine. One lens was gone, the other cracked, a spiderweb of fractures branching out from the upper-right corner. The opposite earpiece was bent downward, like the handle of a lorgnette. From the lad’s description, she must have landed atop them when she fell.
He held them up, regarding her through the cracked lens, trying to imagine them on her nose, how they might change the look of her face. He raised and lowered them twice, three times, before realizing that the spectacles did not distort his view of her in any way. The glass was—he fetched a book from a nearby crate and studied the print through it to be sure—why, the glass was clear!
Carefully, he laid the spectacles aside, puzzling over why any young lady, especially a reasonably pretty one, would wear them if they weren’t needed, and turned his attention to the next item: a battered carpet valise, which did not look to him as if it had been in the finest shape before the accident. It bore all the hallmarks—scuffed corners, worn handles, a fraying seam—of a bag that had traveled many, many miles. Reluctantly, he withdrew its contents: two dresses, of much the same quality as the one she wore, or as he imagined it had been when she had donned it that morning; undergarments, unharmed but wrinkled, and nothing a man with seven sisters hadn’t seen dangling from the washing line or draped haphazardly over a clothes press; and another, somewhat less practical, pair of shoes.
Thinking the bag empty, he moved to lay it aside. But it weighed more than an empty bag ought. Upon further investigation, he found a small compartment beneath what had seemed to be the valise’s bottom. In it were tucked a letter, obviously old and often read, and a rectangular leather case, like the sort that contained a small picture.
He hesitated over them. These two items were things she had obviously wanted to keep secret, given that they had been hidden. He didn’t like to pry. But until the young lady woke, which he was beginning to doubt she would ever do, he had no other means of discovering anything about her situation or her history.
He opened the letter enough to discover that the salutation had been torn off—a fact that only increased his interest.
He glanced down the page, as if reading quickly lessened the intrusion on her privacy. A letter of parting, full of the sort of regretful effusions that might have some meaning to the person to whom they were addressed, but which told him little enough. A feminine hand, he thought, the ink faded with age. The letter broke off in mid-sentence, as if a second page had gone missing. Nothing to identify either the sender or the recipient, not even a date. Nothing at all to help him in his quest to identify the young woman.
He folded the letter again and set it aside.
Could the picture prove more helpful? With his thumb, he flicked open the clasp on the case to reveal a portrait of a young woman with red-gold hair tumbling over her shoulders. Not a painting of the young woman lying in a similar posture on the sofa opposite, though there was a resemblance.
Enough of a resemblance that a blush heated his cheeks.
The portrait was a nude. Skillfully done— artistic , one felt obligated to say. Though from the way the brushstrokes caressed the woman’s curves, Alistair had a hunch the artist had not been entirely free from lascivious interest in his subject.
He closed the case and laid it near the letter and the useless spectacles.
That left the pile of kindling—which had once been a box, he determined upon further investigation, now spattered with ink. Ruined paintbrushes and glass shards and broken ends of pencils stuck out from the wreckage at odd angles. Evidently it had been a case for art supplies.
So, the mystery woman was an artist?
“Better and better...” he muttered beneath his breath.
He moved pieces out of the way until he came to a stack of partially finished sketches, the uppermost rendered illegible by spilled ink. The next sheet, protected by the first, bore the outline of a pen-and-ink sketch in a style he had seen before. A cartoon, really. A caricature of the fashionable set, contemptuous of their clothing, their conversation.
Just left of center in the scene stood a dark-haired gentleman with a dour expression, ill-suited to the occasion. He looked very familiar indeed, as well he should—Alistair faced him in the mirror over his washstand every morning.
Where and when the artist had seen him in anything resembling such a situation or such a pose, he couldn’t guess. But now he knew when and where he had seen her .
He peered over the top of the paper at the figure beyond, sleeping, perhaps never to wake.
“Miss C.,” he murmured. “We meet again.”