A Respectable Female, page 5
As he struggled to hoist the girl over his shoulder, Hector heard a shriek. He spun around to see a plainly dressed, dark-haired Fury bearing down on him, the basaltware bust raised high above her head.
Chapter Nine
Lamplight cast flickering shadows on the bedroom wall. The small chamber was comfortably furnished with wardrobe and chest, dressing table and marble-topped washstand, two mattresses atop a mahogany four-post bed. On that bed lay Pen, a cloth again draped across her brow.
She heard the door open. Footsteps crossed the wooden floor, the rug. Footsteps too heavy to be Izzy’s, which was a good thing. Toward that young woman, Pen wasn’t feeling charitably inclined.
The mattress dipped as her visitor sat down on the edge of the bed. Pen immediately knew who it was. She didn’t need to see him, or smell him — impossible to smell anything beyond the oil of roses and juice of sicklewort with which Izzy had liberally anointed her temples and brow — to be aware when Beau Loversall entered a room.
She tossed aside the cloth; squirmed into a sitting position; recalled that she was wearing next to nothing, and pulled the bedclothes up to her chin. “Have you spoken with your niece?”
“I have,” Beau said. “I gave her a stern scold. She earnestly assured me that she’ll cause no more trouble for anyone.”
Pen snorted. “I threatened to dose her with Daffy’s Elixir. Izzy suggested that I might like some lettuce water to cool my brain. At least she didn’t blithely go off with a stranger. Even if he did tell her that her father is anxious to speak with her.”
“Why was that?” Beau wondered. “How did they come by a diagram of the house? That must be what he had, and not, as Izzy insists, a floor plan of the British Museum. I hear you assaulted the intruder.” Faint amusement glimmered in his eyes.
“None too successfully, I fear.” Pen touched her head, and winced.
Beau leaned closer. His fingers moved gently through her hair. Pen was suddenly aware that, while she wore only a chemise made of cotton so finely woven it was almost sheer, he was fully clothed. Hessian boots and stockings; form-fitting inexpressibles; waistcoat and coat; fine linen shirt and elegantly tied neck cloth; knee-length cotton drawers, with an opening in the front. She imagined herself peeling off his layers, one by one.
Pen had spent no little time perusing her brother’s anatomical texts.
Beau touched her cheek. “You’re flushed.”
“Um.” He was so close she could feel the heat of his body. Prickles of awareness danced down her spine.
Firmly, Pen redirected her attention. “One doesn’t water a camel with a spoon. Or so your niece informs me. Maybe you can tell me what she meant.”
“She believes you should have been better prepared when you went to her rescue, the ungrateful little wretch.” Beau lowered his hand. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
She would be better if he put his hands back on her. Pen marveled at the far-reaching effects of a blow to the brain. “I’m not a faint-hearted sort of female. Surgeon’s sisters seldom remain squeamish long. I did refuse to tend to the colony of leeches that live in a covered, water-filled glass bowl, so evidently some delicate sensibilities remain.”
Beau settled more comfortably against a bedpost. “I couldn’t make any sense of Izzy. Tell me what took place.”
He was perfectly at ease, sitting on her bed. And why, considering the man’s vast acquaintance with ladies’ bedchambers, should he not be?
Pen strove for equal nonchalance, no easy thing when she was so vividly aware of being alone (and barely dressed) in her bedchamber with a notorious Lothario. “I suspected your niece was up to mischief. Primarily because she had been trying so very hard to convince me she was not. When I went to check on her, I discovered she wasn’t in her room. Maybe you might try tying her to her bed.”
Maybe Beau might tie her to the bed. Pen felt her cheeks flame.
Hastily, she added, “I set out for the gaming rooms, and came upon that man dragging her down the hall. Izzy had refused to go with him. He knocked her unconscious—”
“—and you rushed to the rescue, brandishing the bust of Voltaire.”
“Is that who it’s meant to be? I bashed him with the bust, and then he bashed me with it.” Pen grimaced. “He was stronger than he looked.”
“How did he look?” asked Beau.
“Ordinary. Short and stout and balding, his remaining hair dyed black. I’m sure I’ve not set eyes on him before.”
Idly, Beau smoothed his fingers over the counterpane. “That sounds like half the gentlemen of my acquaintance. How did he escape?”
“I doubt most ‘gentlemen’ go about hitting people over the head with basaltware busts,” Pen responded wryly. “We caused such a commotion that people rushed into the hall. While everyone was fussing over me and Izzy, mostly Izzy, our villain escaped through a side door.” She pushed herself further up among her pillows. “I hadn’t previously realized how uneventful a life I’ve lived. In the past few days I have run away from home, and been dosed with laudanum, and assaulted. I only regret that I failed to witness Izzy’s encounter with Mr. Tremaine.”
“As did I,” admitted Beau.
“You were off being knavish,” Pen consoled him. “I’m sure it was more fun.”
“I wasn’t being knavish,” Beau said, ruefully. “You may find this difficult to believe, but I haven’t been knavish for some time.”
He was right; Pen didn’t believe it. The man was devastating at a distance, let alone in such close proximity. He could, had he wished to, have charmed her right out of her chemise.
Were she not a paragon. Dull as ditchwater, in other words.
But he had once mistook her for a bit o’ muslin. An embraceable female. Due to a deficiency of eyesight, according to his niece.
It occurred to Pen that the bedchamber was dimly lit.
She took a deep breath. “About that night at Vauxhall— I have changed my mind.”
He eyed her, warily. “You have?”
“I have.” Pen let go of the bedclothes she’d been clutching to her chest. “You may kiss me now.”
This could hardly be the first time Beau had been thus addressed by a nearly-naked lady. Nonetheless, he seemed stunned. “Consider it in the nature of an experiment,” Pen added. “How am I to understand you Loversalls if I have never been kissed?”
He was staring at her as if she spoke some unknown language. Pen moistened her lips. His eyes lingered on her mouth.
Was he wondering what it would be like to kiss her? Pen prayed he was. Her heart was hammering in her ears, and her skin felt clammy, and she had the oddest conviction that if Beau refused to kiss her, she would never be kissed at all.
His expression altered. Pen realized, to her horror, that she’d said this last aloud.
Pen had never been kissed? Beau was shocked to his boot soles. He had envisioned kissing her more than once, most recently mere moments ago, because her cheeks were rosy, her hair tousled, her eyes bright; and he was a man alone with a woman in her bedchamber, after all.
Pen crossed her arms and scowled at him. “You want me to understand your niece, do you not?” she asked.
Beau, in that moment, could have cared less about Izzy. Mad, he berated himself; mad as a March hare. But he had glimpsed the swell of one sweet breast when she dropped her coverlet, which had much the same effect as waving a red flag at a turkey cock, and so—
He reached out, threaded a hand in Pen’s hair, tilted her head back; brushed his lips against her soft, thick lashes; followed the curve of her cheek to the corner of her mouth; touched his lips to hers in a feather-light caress. And then, having delivered the chastest kiss of his entire life, he drew back.
Rather, he attempted to draw back. Pen moved with him. He found himself leaning back against the bedpost with an armful of fragrant female lying across his chest.
If he had been disinterested in such things of late, he was definitely interested now.
She wriggled closer. Her mouth was warm and sweet against his. Abandoning his good intentions, he coaxed her lips apart. Her fingernails dug into his skin. Beau’s hand slid down her side to the curve of her hip and back up again. His fingers hesitated on the ribbon at the gathered neckline of her chemise, grasped it and tugged. The fine fabric parted. His fingers rested against soft flesh.
Pen gasped and sat abruptly upright, clutching the garment to her bosom. She wore a dazed expression. Beau was feeling rather dazed himself.
He leapt up from the bed as if he had been spider-bit, and fled.
Chapter Ten
Sunlight stole into the private garden behind Moxley House, tiptoed along high leafy branches and lower branches that bore no leaves at all, the trees having been stripped of vegetation to the height of a man’s head. Wisteria drooped forlornly over tall stone walls. The skeleton of an orange tree protruded from a neoclassical urn.
Young Mr. Tremaine’s boot soles crunched in the gravel as he paced in an agitated manner around the shell-shaped bench where Izzy perched. “Someone tried to remove you from Moxley’s? Unconscionable! Is that how you came to the bruise on your cheek?”
Izzy nodded. “And not only that.” She pushed out her lower lip so he might see how it had been cut.
Mr. Tremaine gaze lingered on her mouth a little longer than it should have. “Unconscionable,” he said again. “Your family must be mad, permitting you to reside in a gaming hell. Forgive me for speaking so bluntly. I have no right to do so. If only I were in a position— But, alas, I am not.”
Izzy peered at her surroundings. She didn’t want this conversation to be overheard. Difficult for an eavesdropper to hide behind a naked honeysuckle bush, however. Or amid the ruins of morning glory and camellias and various shrubs; the patch of bare earth where herbs had once grown.
Spleenwort was good for melancholy people; as were peony, and fumitory, and feverfew.
And if one tied sow thistle around a cat’s neck, the cat would become a better mouser. Sow thistle also cured the Black Plague.
What ailed Mr. Tremaine was not so easily remedied, alas.
“I came as soon as I received your summons, Miss Kilpatrick. Tell me how I may be of service to you.” He ran a restless hand through his wavy hair.
Izzy had some notions along those lines. Mr. Tremaine made a splendid figure in his buckskin breeches, Hessian boots, and dark green double breasted coat. She admired the intricate manner in which he’d tied his cravat. His hair was dark as a raven’s wing, one lock flopped forward on his brow in a most poetical manner; his eyes as green as— Emeralds? Izzy had never seen an emerald, and so discarded that comparison. His eyes were as green, she decided, as springtime grass. Izzy had often stolen peeks at the young men in her grandpapa’s congregation, some of whom had dared in turn to cast shy glances in her way; but they could no more compare with this Adonis than pigeons with a peacock.
He was waiting for her answer. “It’s not what you can do for me, but for yourself! I have been teasing myself with thoughts of how you may be extricated from your predicament. It has me quite in a puzzle, I confess. I did think that once you explained the whole to Miss Liliane she would forgive the debt, but I’m told that is not likely to be the case.”
Mr. Tremaine resumed his pacing. He paused by the ancient climbing roses which had fared better than the other vegetation, being liberally festooned with huge thorns. “I doubt that anything I do will cause Miss Liliane to look more kindly upon my debts. It should surprise no one that I’m fit to stick my spoon in the wall.”
“I suppose not,” admitted Izzy, “but suiciding oneself is a cowardly act. Moreover, suicides cannot be buried in hallowed ground, or so my grandpapa said when Mr. Pennyfeather jumped from the top of the clock tower after Mrs. Pennyfeather ran off with the blacksmith and took all the money they’d saved up.” She caught the young man’s wrist as he passed by her and tugged him down beside her on the bench. “You must not lose heart. ‘A bare foot is better than none’, you know. And ‘Every herring must hang by its own gills’. It is shockingly forward of me to ask, but— Are you married, sir?”
“Who would marry me,” he muttered, “the pickle that I’m in?”
Mr. Tremaine was looking more morose with every passing moment. Izzy must elevate his spirits. A pity she wasn’t wearing another of Miss Liliane’s garments instead of this demure dress of spotted cambric with its high waist, puffed sleeves and prim flounced skirt, gentlemen being susceptible to the teeniest hint of bosom, or so she had been told. Perhaps a glimpse of ankle would suffice?
Surreptitiously, Izzy rearranged her skirts. “I doubt that I shall marry,” she confided. “Being as I have tainted blood.”
Was he peeking at her ankle? At any rate, his head jerked up. “Miss Kilpatrick! You must not speak so of yourself.”
“But it’s true!” insisted Izzy. “Mama said I must try prodigious hard to be good. I don’t feel wicked, but that may mean she was right. All the family craves excitement, and I have lately discovered an appetite for adventure in myself. I understand your urge to gamble. To stake all on one more fling of the dice.”
Mr. Tremaine clutched her hands as if he expected her to momentarily hop up off the bench and set off down the pathway to perdition. “Promise me you will do no such thing.”
“Of course I won’t!” Izzy assured him. “I only meant that I understand how someone could. Now we must determine how you are to pay your debts.”
“I don’t know why you should care what becomes of me,” the young man sighed. “I have been the worst kind of fool.”
“Why shouldn’t I care?” Izzy asked him. “ ‘Every path has a puddle’. Perhaps you could work off your debts?”
“Doing what?” Mr. Tremaine relapsed into gloom.
“ ‘Ill goes the boat without oars’,” Izzy told him, sternly. “I have heard of people making fortunes on something called the ‘Change.”
He looked even more dejected. “One must have funds to invest. And wait for the investment to pay off. If it pays off. In short, one needs money to make money, and I have none.”
Izzy disliked to see him so disheartened. In search of a solution, she surveyed her surroundings. “Could you be a gardener? Miss Liliane needs one.”
Mr. Tremaine slumped lower on the bench. “I can’t tell duckweed from dandelions. What happened to this place?”
“A previous owner of Moxley’s used to accept pledges of good faith. One such pledge was a goat.” Pensively, Izzy nibbled at her lower lip. “You might give Miss Liliane some item in lieu of monies owed. And then, when you have the money, you could buy it back.”
“If ever I had the money,” Mr. Tremaine said glumly. “At the moment, I own naught but this.” He pulled off one glove to reveal a heavy gold ring. “It was on a string tied round my neck when I was left on the orphanage’s front step.”
“Oh! You are an orphan! How very sad.”
“Is it? I can’t say. I don’t know who my parents are, or were. I only vaguely remember my mother, and my father not at all.”
Izzy’s tender heart was touched. “It may be for the best. “No sooner did I meet my own papa than he sold me to my Uncle Beau.” Mr. Tremaine was no less handsome, she noted, when his eyes were starting from his head. “That man who tried to snatch me said my papa wished to speak with me. It was when I said I didn’t wish to speak with my papa that he tried to drag me outside.” She gestured at the bruise on her pretty chin.
Mr. Tremaine might not have heard the latter part of her explanation. “Your own uncle? That blackguard!”
Recalling Miss Liliane’s explanations, Izzy realized she’d omitted a few details from her account. “I didn’t mean that Uncle Beau— Because he didn’t, and he wouldn’t, at least I don’t think he would with me— That is, you mustn’t think I’m that sort of female.”
“Nothing of the sort,” stammered Mr. Tremaine. “I’m shocked that you would think I’d think — because I’d never — Your uncle is a curst rum touch.”
“Because he bought me, you mean?” asked Izzy. “But if he hadn’t, someone else would have and so Uncle Beau saved me from a fate worse than death — although what might be worse than death, I cannot conceive! Maybe Papa means to sell me again. It’s difficult to say, because if he’s been drinking, and Papa is always drinking, he might try anything.” Mr. Tremaine possessed a truly splendid profile. “How pretty you are.”
He turned quickly toward her, a becoming flush staining his cheeks. “Never say so, Miss Kilpatrick. I’m not half as pretty as you are.”
“Oh, do call me Izzy. And I shall call you—”
He blushed all the harder. “Tristan.”
“Tristan — Tristen — and I am Iseult! I believe this must be fate. We shall be buried side by side and have trees planted above our heads.” Mr. Tremaine was looking fairly horror-struck and Izzy quickly added, “But not for a long time yet. I have an idea.”
Before Mr. Tremaine could inquire as to the nature of that notion, footsteps sounded on the gravel path. Into view came Miss Liliane, accompanied by Samson and the footman Figg, who was wearing a queer costume of white cotton drawstring trousers and matching jacket, a black belt tied tight around his waist. Izzy adopted an innocent expression. Mr. Tremaine rose quickly to his feet.
“Zut alors!” muttered Liliane. If ever two people looked as if they had been caught doing something they should not. She wondered how Beau would react to the intelligence that his niece had excited the admiration of a young wastrel who lacked even a pot in which to piss.
To Mr. Tremaine she said, “You, go and find my money.” When the young man proved reluctant, Samson took firm hold of his arm and led him away. Mr. Tremaine cast a wistful glance over his shoulder at Izzy, who gazed with equal wistfulness after him.
Liliane reached out and pinched Izzy. “Listen to me, miss. I have changed the locks and put the staff on guard. But in case that doesn’t serve—” She beckoned to the footman. “Figg is going to introduce you to the Art of Yielding and Pliability, otherwise known as Japanese jujutsu.”
