Miss Determined, page 29
Purvis clenched his walking stick before him, as if he were menaced by footpads rather than the truth of his own misdeeds. “I will not stand here and be insulted.”
“You were happy to insult me,” Lissa said. “You certainly took a few shots at Lord Phillip. You’ve been none too kind toward Miss Brompton.”
“Whom,” Trevor said quietly, “you will never bother again, Purvis. She has no use for me as a suitor, but I’m happy to serve as her champion. One word of gossip in the clubs about her or her family, and I will go to the authorities.”
Kettering opened the file bearing the record of Jerome’s expenses. “Please do. This is precisely the sort of evidence the Old Bailey delights in. Forged invoices, forged records of payment, Purvis’s signature on nearly every page. The bank records will dance step-by-step in accord with this file, and every single farthing ended up in Purvis’s account.” Kettering beamed at the documents. “A public hanging is all but guaranteed.”
“Because he,”—Purvis jabbed his walking stick toward Trevor—“lied to me. Fed me a false premise and urged action on me at every turn. When no expenses showed up, I merely sought to… to—”
The fellow who’d been reading his paper folded it down. “Do go on.” He rose, leaving the newspaper on the bench. “I thought I was the professional thespian in this crowd, but your performance shows some promise. Such sincere, spluttering outrage, while you clearly battle the urge to run all the way to Dover. Well done.”
“Gavin?” Lissa had to lean on Trevor lest her knees buckle. This was not the same Gavin who’d left Crosspatch two years ago. Even his voice was different, more resonant, more cultured. He’d put on muscle and gravitas, and his attire was ever so subtly less staid than that of the other gentlemen.
Mama went hurtling past to wrap her arms around her son. “You are alive. You are alive and well, and oh, I could spank you, Gavin DeWitt. Where have you been?”
“Purvis knew my itinerary,” Gavin said, gently hugging Mama back. “I sent it to him town by town, quarter by quarter, along with playbills, programs, and newspaper articles critiquing my performances. He always knew precisely where I was. I labored under the impression—the carefully crafted lie—that all the correspondence I sent to my family, care of my solicitor, was being passed straight on and probably read in the common of the Crosspatch Arms on darts night.”
“You were on the stage?” Lissa asked, still not sure this handsome, self-possessed gentleman was her younger brother.
“I have always wanted to act professionally, but at every turn, I was told that Papa had not freed us from the shop just so I could tread the boards. I am respected in my profession, and I have enjoyed every performance—almost every performance—but to have not one letter from home in two years? I suspected that silence was my family’s way of shunning me, and Purvis’s notes only encouraged my misperception.”
“We feared you dead,” Mama said, hugging him tightly. “That strutting viper told us nothing and lied about making efforts to find you. All of Crosspatch has missed you, and I daresay you have stories to tell. All that matters—”
Gavin shook his head. “Not all. Purvis led me to believe you ladies were having a fine time, racketing from London to Bath to Crosspatch to Lyme—thus he graciously agreed to serve as my post boy—and buying out the shops wherever you went. Had I known… Had I known that he begrudged you even adequate pin money, I would have come home in a week flat.”
The only thing that kept Lissa from whacking Purvis stoutly across the cheek was Trevor’s grip on her hand.
“Giles Purvis,” she said, wishing she’d thought to bring a parasol, “you wrong everybody foolish enough to trust you. You steal every groat left unguarded in your presence. If Lord Tavistock says you will return the funds you stole from his tenants, then you will make that reparation. You can never repay my family or his lordship’s for the harm you’ve inflicted, but you can at least return the coin you’ve purloined.”
“Or we can,” Trevor said, “send you to Newgate. Those are your choices. You will not pollute the Continent with your crooked presence. You will stay on home shores and suffer the brunt of the public opinion you were so eager to turn against people who meant you no harm.”
Purvis looked from Trevor to Kettering, who’d rolled up Jerome’s file and was slapping it against his palm.
“I will not be hanged,” Purvis said.
“A pity,” Phillip murmured. “You deserve at least that.” He bowed to the company, walked away, and climbed into Miss Brompton’s coach, which wheeled away from the square at a dignified pace.
“Purvis,” Trevor said, “you will go with Kettering and attend a discreet meeting with the bankers. My funds are being transferred to the Wentworth institution, where you will be forbidden to set foot after today. You will execute bank drafts repaying the tenants before sunset. I’ve made arrangements for each one to be delivered by express.”
Purvis nodded once. Sycamore, Casriel, and Kettering formed an escort on either side and behind him, and he was more or less marched off to another coach.
Mama linked her arm through Gavin’s. “You are coming with me, prodigal prodigy. A career on the stage, of all things. I blame those blasted pageants. You always did fancy playing the hero.”
“I am not the hero today,” Gavin said. “Tavistock tracked me down. My troupe was playing a circuit in East Anglia—scenes from the Scottish play—when his letter found me. I nearly killed my horse getting to Town.”
“You nearly killed me with your mad scheme,” Mama said. “Come along. Lissa and her marquess will doubtless want to share an ice where all can remark their foolishness.”
Mama and Gavin trundled off just as the clerk from Purvis’s office marched up, bearing an ice. “Beg pardon, my lord, Miss DeWitt. Have you seen Mr. Purvis?”
“Yes,” Lissa said, “and thank the merciful powers and my darling intended, I will never have to see him again.”
Jones considered a bowl of melting sweetness. “One applauds your good fortune, Miss DeWitt. Tell me, will I have to encounter Mr. Purvis again?”
“Not likely,” Trevor answered. “He’s resigning from the practice of law effective today. Kettering will assist with any adjustments the firm needs to make going forward.”
“Worth Kettering?”
“The very one.”
Jones sank onto the bench. “Thank you, sir. Thank you most… most sincerely.”
They left him sitting in the spring sunshine, smiling dazedly and nibbling on his ice.
Chapter Twenty
“How did you find Gavin?” Amaryllis posed the question as Trevor led her up the steps to the Tavistock town house.
“You gave me all the relevant clues.” He bowed her through the door, nervous to at long last welcome her into a place where they might soon dwell together. “Gavin loved telling stories, loved playing the hero, loved to get the elders yarning on. He decamped for the north, where the provincial theater troupes are more likely to take on new talent. Shrewd of him. Showed patience and planning.”
“Those were clues?”
“He also retreated from the very obligations that you, my dearest, took on so courageously. Where better to hide than in plain sight?” Perhaps in plain sight on the Continent?
Amaryllis took Trevor’s top hat and set it on the sideboard. She lifted her chin, indicating that Trevor was to have the honor of untying her bonnet ribbons. The courtesies were mundane, but they stirred in Trevor a sense of sweetness and joy.
“Gavin shirked duties, such as swanning about Town?” Amaryllis asked as Trevor carefully removed her millinery. “Doing the genteel bit, trying to ignore all the whispers about the smell of tallow and the reek of trade?”
“Those duties,” Trevor said as a surprised butler ascended the steps from below. “Feeney, a tray in my sitting room, if you please, and I am not home to any callers save family.”
The butler looked a trifle confused, and too late, Trevor realized what he’d said. “Lord Phillip, assorted Dornings, various DeWitts, Sir Orion and his lot, our dear Miss Brompton if she takes a notion to drop by, Kettering… anybody hailing from Crosspatch Corners. Family.”
“Very good, my lord.”
“Some sandwiches, too, please,” Amaryllis said. “His lordship has just vanquished a nasty old dragon, and that is hungry work.”
Feeney bowed and withdrew, looking as pleasantly befuddled as young Jones had.
“The great slayer of dragons is nervous,” Trevor muttered when he was certain of privacy. “This house doesn’t feel like my home, but it’s where I grew up.”
Amaryllis glanced around the soaring foyer: white marble flooring, fluted pilasters, a circular skylight allowing beams of sunshine to bathe enormous ferns in copper pots.
Elegant, chilly, intimidating. Jeanette had not been permitted by the old marquess to make changes, and after his passing, she’d limited her influence out of deference to Trevor’s prospective bride.
“Lovely ferns,” Amaryllis said. “The place could do with some flowers, a padded bench or two for those of us who like to sit when we remove our spurs or change from boots to house slippers.”
“Consider it done.” Trevor wanted to be away from all the gleaming marble and shining brass, and away from anywhere a curious maid or footman might find him. “The family parlor is this way.”
“Don’t show me the family parlor just yet,” Amaryllis said. “Show me the place you like most in the whole house.”
“My study.” Trevor wasn’t about to sit with her out in the garden, where neighbors, gardeners, and assorted housecats could spy on them. “Jeanette insisted that if I was to be educated at home, a schoolroom would not do. The future marquess needed a quiet place to advance his education, a place worthy of his standing. The tutors agreed—the schoolroom is frigid in winter and stifling in summer—and thus I became the only ten-year-old in Britain with his own study.”
“Gavin’s bedroom had a sizable dressing closet,” Amaryllis said as Trevor escorted her up the curved staircase. “I heard him in there, memorizing the great soliloquies by the hour. I should have known he longed to take to the stage, but even if I had, I lacked the means to search for him.”
“I haven’t those means either, but I recalled that Kettering has connections to various opera dancers. This way.” He led Amaryllis past marble busts of philosophers, kings, and consuls, past Gainsborough landscapes and a pair of Reynolds portraits of scowling ancestors.
A museum of lordly consequence, not a home.
“What sort of opera-dancer connections does Kettering have?”
Woe betide poor Kettering if they were the wrong sort. “He handles their finances, gets ten of them together to buy one share of a promising venture, manages the accounting, finds a replacement investor if somebody needs to sell her portion.”
If Amaryllis was overawed by the splendor of the house, she was doing a good job of hiding it.
“Opera dancers,” Trevor went on, “know actors and actresses. They have family on the stage and backstage. Theater folk wash about between Paris, Dublin, the shires, Edinburgh, London… Kettering put the word out, and somebody eventually recalled a very attractive male lead playing east of Town. The fellow was down from Derbyshire and had true talent. Styled himself Galahad Twidham, and that was too much of a coincidence.”
“Mama will never stand for Galahad pursuing a life on stage.”
Trevor paused outside the door of his study. He’d peeked in since returning from France, but only that. “Will you stand for it? You know what it feels like to be forced onto a path you dread.” And so do I.
“You approve of Gavin’s aspirations?”
“I approve of allowing people to pursue their dreams. A good play makes us think, laugh, forget our troubles or view them in a different light. Where is the harm in a talented young man pursuing a vocation that does all that?” Amaryllis’s answer mattered, and not simply to Gavin’s prospects.
She opened the door and preceded Trevor into the only sanctuary he’d had as a boy. “Will you approve of Phillip hiding away in the shires for the rest of his life?”
Phillip had grown very quiet since leaving Lark’s Nest and had not ventured from the town house other than to sit in the nearest park by the hour.
“I doubt Phillip sees caring for his estate and assisting his neighbors as hiding away, and yes, if that’s what he wants to do, I approve heartily.”
Amaryllis picked up a small telescope and peered through it out the window. “You could inspect every corner of the garden with this.”
“I took it with me everywhere until I went off to university. Jeanette gave it to me.”
Amaryllis went on a slow tour of the room, which was all of twelve feet square. She studied the history books and travel logs, Caesar’s Gallic letters, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels. She opened the last of Trevor’s botanical journals.
“Are you certain you aren’t a Dorning of some sort? These sketches are quite good.”
“I got away with drawing flowers in the name of science. Papa would not have stood for it otherwise.”
Amaryllis put the journal aside and bent close to the world map framed above the desk. She peered at the leviathan rampant in the southeast corner.
“Hic habitant monstra,” she murmured. “The real monster was your own father, and you have been trying to leave his realm since boyhood. Are we to dwell in France, Trevor?”
He closed the door, and not only for privacy. “I thought we might dwell in Berkshire, at least some of the time.”
Amaryllis began opening and closing the desk drawers. “Berkshire is hardly fashionable.”
“Berkshire is beautiful, and it’s home to an expert on growing hops—or at least a well-informed source—who happens to be my only living brother and my heir. It’s not that far from my step-mother’s various in-laws, or from her. My prospective in-laws dwell in Berkshire, and I can purchase good land there at a reasonable price.”
Amaryllis ceased inspecting empty drawers. “I am very nervous about becoming a marchioness, Trevor. I am not grand. I have no airs and graces adequate for such a lofty status. I laugh too loudly. I wanted to swat Purvis with my parasol, except that I am not fashionable enough to have remembered to bring a parasol.”
She sat on the desk, an informality that would have driven the late marquess to strutting lectures and profanity. Trevor perched beside her—the desk was a sturdy old article—and took her hand.
“I want to make beer, Amaryllis. I want to see to it myself, and if I’m successful, then I’ll have managers and whatnot, but I want to build something with my own native wit, experience, and determination. Something good and affordable and English. It’s not done for a marquess to be in trade. It’s not done for him to turn his back on Town and take up village life. It’s not done, but—”
She kissed him. “But it shall be done, if that’s the sort of marquess you want to be. I am glad now that you didn’t use the title when you first came to Crosspatch. I learned to respect and admire the man rather than scorn the peer. I will marry the man—though you have yet to propose to me, sir—and the marquess will simply have to manage as best he can. My husband’s happiness matters to me. His title, other than the responsibility it brings, does not signify.”
“You’re sure? The gossips can be awful, Amaryllis. They will blame you for turning my head. They will castigate me for disrespecting my birthright.”
“Your birthright,” Amaryllis said, laying her head on his shoulder, “was a lot of loneliness, posturing, and arrogance. I don’t want that for you or for our children. We had best prepare to endure market-day squabbles, trysts by the Twid, and Roland’s good digestive health for some years to come—assuming you eventually propose to me.”
“I am entitled to court you first. I thought we might discuss the particulars of that undertaking in my bedroom.”
Amaryllis hopped off the desk and seized him by the hand. “You thought correctly.”
“I never thought I’d miss market day in Crosspatch,” Gavin DeWitt said, sinking onto a bench on the terrace of the Arms, a pint of Pevinger’s finest in his hand. “Did not think it possible to miss Vicar’s little homilies or Diana’s infernal sonatinas.”
“But you did,” Phillip replied, taking the place beside him. “I thought a few weeks in Town would part me from my wits.” He’d kissed his mares upon returning, foolishness nobody need ever know of, but the sight of them, foals gamboling in the sunshine, the green grass springing up from the good earth…
Somewhere in the vast and stupid lexicon of rules known as proper deportment, an edict had doubtless been inscribed that full-grown courtesy lords were forbidden to cry with relief to be home. The list of inanities required by proper deportment beggared description.
“I missed Pevinger’s ale,” Gavin went on, taking another sip.
“You missed Pevinger’s daughter.”
Gavin saluted with his mug. “The fair Tansy did not miss me. Told me to get my handsome arse to London if Crosspatch was a such a penance, try my luck, and quit complaining. She imparted that wisdom with the air of a woman who’d given the speech on previous occasions.”
Phillip had nothing to say to that. He understood flirtation in a limited sort of way. He understood procreation as both a man and a farmer. Women as a species, though, were wondrous, confusing, and best left to fellows with an overdeveloped taste for adventure.
“Tavistock is truly putting Miller’s Lament into hops and barley?” Gavin asked.
The marquess himself was halfway across the crowded green, in earnest discussion with Granny Jones, who stood about as tall as his elbow. Mrs. Raybourne was getting her oar in as well, and Mrs. Dabney was poised to join the affray.
Talking beer recipes, no doubt.
