Octavius and the Perfect Governess: Pryor Cousins #1

by Emily Larkin

  Ned snorted a laugh, and Quintus grimaced.

  “Vigor?” Octavius said, willing to be distracted by whatever oddity this was.

  “It’s what everyone’s calling Dex,” Sextus told him.

  “They are? Why?”

  “Vigor, but no finesse,” Quintus said.

  A vague memory stirred in the recesses of Octavius’s brain. “His last widow said that about him?”

  Quintus nodded. “You can imagine how everyone took it up. It’s the latest on-dit.”

  “It’s a good thing he’s in Hampshire,” Sextus said. “He wouldn’t want to be in town right now.”

  “That bad, is it?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s a laughingstock,” Quintus said. “But . . . it’s close.”

  “Seventy-two,” Ned said, then yawned loudly. “I counted yesterday. Seventy-two times I heard someone mention it.”

  Octavius pulled a face. Seventy-two? That was much worse than he’d thought. “Damned good thing he’s in Hampshire, then.” With any luck the beaumonde would be sharpening their tongues at some other poor sod’s expense by the time Dex came back to London. He might be an annoying son of a bitch, but he was an excellent person to have at one’s back. Together, he and Dex made a good team.

  It suddenly occurred to him that all five of them would make an even better team.

  Octavius let his gaze rest on his brother for a moment, on Sextus, and lastly on Ned. “Have you ever considered that the five of us, with our gifts, could . . . do things?”

  “You mean, like paint the statues on top of Spencer House bright pink?” Ned asked. “I was thinking that just the other day. Dex could levitate me up there and—”

  “No, you idiot. I mean help people. Use our magic to right wrongs. Like what Dex and I are doing in Hampshire.”

  All three of them gaped at him. Ned was the first to recover his voice. “You mean . . . you want us to be like the Knights of the Round Table? Dashing off on white chargers and rescuing maidens from villains? With our magic?”

  Trust Ned to turn it into a joke. Octavius felt his face flush. “Why not?”

  Ned gave a hearty guffaw. “He wants us to be heroes!” he crowed.

  Octavius resisted the urge to box his cousin’s ears. He looked at his brother instead. Quintus was wearing one of his frowns, the one that was both worried and dubious at the same time. He’d been practicing it as long as Octavius could remember, because dukes’ heirs took life very seriously.

  Sextus wasn’t frowning. He was looking at Octavius, his expression partly surprised and partly something else that Octavius couldn’t quite identify, but that he thought might possibly be approval.

  “I say we should do it!” Ned declared loudly. “Quintus can scry for villains, Dex, Otto, and I can rescue the maidens from their clutches, and once they’re safe, Narcissus can make their teeth whiter or their eyelashes longer or whatever gift it was that he chose.”

  Sextus didn’t rise to the bait; he merely said, “Glossy hair,” and smoothed one hand over his undeniably glossy hair.

  Octavius had a very good idea what Sextus had wished for on his twenty-fifth birthday and it wasn’t glossy hair, but if Ned hadn’t figured it out yet, he wasn’t going to tell him.

  He watched the two brothers exchange barbed smiles and wished, not for the first time, that Ned wasn’t such a blazing idiot and that Sextus wasn’t quite so touchy.

  “What shall we call ourselves?” Ned put his feet on the rosewood sofa table again. “How about The Heroic Pryors?”

  Octavius didn’t bother to respond to that suggestion. He merely kicked his cousin’s feet off the table again.

  “The Dashing Pryors!” Ned said, and then, “No, we should be knights, don’t you think? And we need to have a table of our own.” His gaze landed on the sofa table. “The Knights of the Sofa Table!” he cried, and then, “No, that doesn’t sound right. How about . . . the Knights of the Oval Sofa Table? The Knights of the Mahogany Sofa Table?”

  “It’s rosewood, you idiot,” Octavius told him.

  “Even better! The Knights of the Rosewood Sofa Table!” Ned grinned hugely. “Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

  The best strategy when Ned was prattling nonsense was to ignore him. Octavius turned his attention to his brother. “What else has happened in town?”

  “Not a lot.” Quintus shrugged. “Grantley got drunk and challenged Fasthugh to a duel, and Fasthugh chose feather dusters as the weapons.”

  Octavius uttered an astonished laugh. “He what? Why on earth is everyone talking about Dex when they should be talking about that?”

  “Because the duel never took place. Grantley said Fasthugh was mocking him—which he was—and he flew into a pelter and went off to Brighton.”

  Octavius snorted into his wine. Grantley might be an earl, but he was also a short-tempered fool. “What else has happened?”

  “There’s a new opera dancer that everyone’s talking about.”

  Octavius shook his head, uninterested in opera dancers. “Anything else?”

  Quintus shrugged. “Southport swears his house is haunted. That’s about it.”

  “Haunted?”

  “He says he hears footsteps in empty rooms.”

  Octavius glanced at Ned, sitting sprawled on the sofa alongside him.

  “What?” Ned said. “It’s not me.” Then he grinned. “Although it’s not a bad idea.”

  “It’s a terrible idea,” Quintus said, aiming a frown at Ned. This one was his “the earl does not approve” frown.

  “It’s a fantastic idea. Let’s be ghosts!” Ned leapt to his feet. “In fact—I know!—let’s resurrect the Ghostly Cavalier of London.”

  “The Ghostly Cavalier of London?” Quintus repeated, looking pained.

  “The ghost our fathers invented. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten!”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Quintus said. “Nor I have forgotten that Grandfather forbade it.”

  “He forbade them; he hasn’t forbidden us.” Ned was practically bouncing with excitement.

  “He would if he thought we had the least intention of—”

  “Oh, come on, Quin, don’t be such a stick in the mud!”

  “Grandfather would not be pleased—” Quintus began pompously.

  “I bet the costume’s in the attics at Hanover Square. Do your thing and see if it’s there!”

  Quintus shook his head. “No.”

  Ned made a sound of disgust. “Aren’t you in the least bit curious to see it?”

  Octavius was a little curious. He wouldn’t mind seeing the infamous costume, if it still existed.

  “Let’s just see if it’s in the attics,” Ned wheedled. “Come on, Quin. You know you can do that in two minutes.”

  “The costume will have been eaten by moths years ago,” Quintus said.

  “Maybe,” Ned said. “Maybe not. Let’s just find out. Pleeease.”

  “Not if you’re going to put it on and sneak around London scaring people.”

  “I just want to see it,” Ned said, bouncing on his toes, looking like a six-foot-six, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound child. “Come on, Quin! Don’t tell me you don’t want to see it?”

  Quintus heaved a put-upon sigh, but he must have been a little bit curious about the costume because he went to the sideboard and fished out the silver bowl he used for descrying. He upended the decanter of claret into it, then gazed into the dark pool of liquid.

  Ned waited, still bouncing on his toes.

  After half a minute, Quintus said, “It’s in the Hanover Square attics.”

  “I knew it!” Ned punched the air with one fist. “Where in the attics?”

  Quintus sighed, and said, “South-west corner. In a trunk.”

  “Can you find the trunk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go then!”

  Octavius saw the conflict in Quintus’s face. Sometimes his brother didn’t want to be a dutiful duke’s heir
. Sometimes he just wanted to have fun.

  “No harm in looking at it,” Octavius said mildly. “It’s probably moth-eaten, after all.”

  Quintus glanced at Sextus, who could usually be counted on to side with him, but Sextus must have wanted to see the costume, too, because he shrugged and said, “Why not?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The attics of the family castle in Gloucestershire were cavernous, the sort of attics one could get lost in for days. The attics of the townhouse in Hanover Square were much smaller and surprisingly bare. There were a number of trunks and hatboxes, two old mirrors, a couple of paintings under Holland covers, and a stack of chairs that were no longer fashionable. Quintus went unerringly to the trunk containing the costume. It was in the farthest corner, behind the chairs, the mirrors, and the paintings. “Looks as if someone was trying to hide it,” Sextus observed.

  Octavius thought so, too.

  They unfastened the buckles and lifted the lid. A choking scent of camphor rose from the trunk. Ned gave a loud hoot of delight. “Not moth-eaten!”

  The trunk was full to the brim. Octavius spied velvet and lace and an ostrich feather before Ned started hauling out clothes. The first item was a blue velvet doublet trimmed with gold braid. The second was the bodice of a woman’s dress.

  “That’s for you, Otto,” Ned said, flinging the bodice at him. “You can be a lady ghost.”

  Octavius threw the bodice back, hitting Ned in the face. “No, thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I loathe being female.”

  Ned shrugged and tossed the bodice on the floor, then went back to pawing through the trunk, but Sextus said, “Loathe? That’s a strong word.”

  “Loathe,” Octavius repeated. “Being female is simply awful. You’ve no idea.”

  “What’s awful about it?”

  “Everything.”

  Quintus sneezed, and looked up from examining a wide-brimmed cavalier’s hat with a curling ostrich plume. “Everything?”

  “I’ve been a female half a dozen times now, and there is not one single good thing about it.”

  “There must be,” Sextus said, as Ned pulled a wig with long, flowing black ringlets from the trunk.

  “There isn’t.”

  “Breasts!” Ned said, putting the wig on his head. “That’s a good thing, that is.”

  “For us it is,” Octavius said, unearthing a cavalier’s boot from the trunk. “Not for women.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because men touch them all the time.”

  “There must be some benefits to being female,” Sextus said, as tenacious as a terrier at a rabbit hole.

  “Breasts,” Ned said again, fussing with his ringlets.

  Octavius decided to ignore him. He examined the boot. It had an elevated heel and large shiny buckle.

  “Women don’t go bald?” Quintus offered, and then sneezed again.

  “And they don’t have to shave every day,” Sextus put in. He rummaged through the trunk and pulled out a pair of breeches made from the same blue velvet as the doublet.

  “Ha! I’ve got one,” Ned said. “They don’t have to worry about getting erections in public.” His smirk was very like Dex’s. “That’s a big advantage, that is.” And then he added, “But I still think breasts are the best thing they have going for them.”

  Octavius threw the boot at his head and missed. He looked in the trunk for its mate, but instead found a petticoat. He tossed it on the floor and rummaged further, finding what was surely the cavalier’s cape—but when he shook it out it was a woman’s skirt. He folded it up again, and while he folded he thought about the times he’d been female, and he thought about Miss Toogood, and then he thought about his cousin, Phoebe, and about his mother and his aunts and his grandmother. “In all seriousness, though, do you think there are any advantages to being female? Because if there are, I can’t think of ’em.”

  “In all seriousness?” Sextus asked.

  “In all seriousness.”

  Sextus took off the cavalier’s gauntlet he was trying on and frowned.

  Octavius tried to articulate his thoughts. “Seems to me the biggest difference between us and them is that we were lucky enough to be born male and they were unlucky enough not to.”

  “Unlucky?” Quintus said, and sneezed for a third time.

  “You don’t think so? You think there’s even one good thing about being born female?”

  Quintus rubbed his nose.

  “They’re smarter than us,” Ned said.

  Everyone turned to look at him.

  “What?” He emerged from the trunk, holding a wide lacy collar. “They are.”

  “Smarter than us?” Sextus said.

  “Well, maybe not smarter than you, but most of ’em are a great deal smarter than me, and they’re at least as clever as Quin and Otto here.”

  Everyone stared at him.

  “If you went out and found the thousand most intelligent people in England, I bet at least half of ’em would be females, and the shame of it is that they can’t go to university or vote or— And that’s another thing! I wager that if it was the House of Ladies, not the House of Lords, there’d be fewer wars.” Ned waved the lacy collar to emphasize his point. “Stands to reason, don’t it? They’re less bloodthirsty than we are. They’d rather talk than kill people.”

  There was a long moment of a bemused silence. At least, the silence was bemused on Octavius’s part.

  “What?” Ned said. “I might be stupid compared to Narcissus here, but I’m not that stupid. Females are clever. At least as clever as men, if not more so.” He took off the wig and put on the lace collar instead. “They’re more cunning than us, too.”

  “Cunning?” Octavius repeated, blankly.

  “They have to be, don’t they?” Ned said, arranging the collar at his throat. “If a female wants to get ahead, she’s got to know what to say and how best to say it.”

  “Manipulative?” Quintus said, his brow creasing into a frown that could only be called bewildered. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Cunning, manipulative, persuasive.” Ned shrugged, and put the wig back on. “Doesn’t matter what you call it, but women are better at it than we are. They have fewer opportunities to advance themselves, so they get what they want by words rather than by brute force.”

  There was a rather long moment of silence, which was broken by another of Quintus’s sneezes.

  Octavius looked at Ned in his wig and lacy collar and thought that his cousin might be an idiot, but he wasn’t completely stupid.

  “Women would make better spies than men,” Ned stated, turning back to the trunk. “If I was England’s spymaster, I’d be recruiting females for the job. There’s only one boot in here.”

  “The other one’s on the floor behind you,” Quintus said.

  Ned sat on the dusty floorboards and tried to take his own boots off. They were too well-fitted. “I say, Otto, give a fellow a hand.”

  Octavius crouched and tugged his cousin’s boots off. “So . . . you think women are better with words than men?”

  “Of course,” Ned said, as if this was blindingly obvious.

  Octavius looked at Sextus, who shrugged and said, “The wittiest people I know are women.”

  Octavius thought about this, and realized that the wittiest people he knew were women, too. “What else are women better at?”

  “Well, they’re more observant than us for a start. Notice all the little details.” Ned climbed to his feet and paced up and down in front of the trunk. “Ha! These fit.”

  “They’re more intuitive than us,” Sextus put in, reaching into the trunk and pulling out a leather baldric.

  “More compassionate,” Quintus said, winding a wide satin sash around his waist. “Kinder.”

  “More practical and commonsensical,” Ned said, placing the hat with its curling feather atop his wig. “And definitely more organized. Far more organized.”

  O
ctavius considered these suggestions, and nodded. “What else?”

  “They’re more patient than we are,” Sextus said. “In general that is, and I think . . . they endure better.”

  “Endure?” Quintus said. He tied the sash in place, and sneezed loudly again.

  “Remember when Dex and Phoebe got sick last year? Who complained more?”

  “Dex,” they all said.

  Sextus shrugged, having made his point, and rummaged in the trunk. “I say, look at this.” He pulled out a sheathed sword.

  “Let me see that,” Octavius said, appropriating the sword and wrenching it from its scabbard.

  It was quite blunt, and also very badly rusted.

  He handed both sheath and sword back to Sextus, disappointed. “Women might be more patient than us, and wittier and more organized and whatever else, but I still don’t want to be one. The advantages are all ours.”

  “Of course they are,” Sextus said, sliding the sword back into its sheath. “It’s a man’s world. We have the power. Women are treated little better than children.”

  “That’s a bit harsh,” Quintus objected.

  “You think so? Look at Phoebe. She’s what, twenty? Think about what Dex was allowed to do at that age and what Phoebe’s allowed to do.”

  Octavius picked up the petticoat and folded it, and thought about Dex at twenty. He’d had no restrictions on his behavior. None of them had. They’d stayed out all night if they wanted. Caroused and got drunk. Driven their curricles to Bath and back on a whim.

  Phoebe couldn’t do any of that. Because she was female.

  “But she’s not treated like a child,” Quintus said.

  Sextus shrugged. “Can’t say I’d want to have m’ father manage my money and make my decisions for me.”

  “Uncle Deuce doesn’t make all her decisions for her,” Quintus protested, and then sneezed again.

  “No, only the important ones.” Sextus put the sword back in the trunk. “And her husband will do the same once she’s married.”

  “She’ll be allowed to choose who she marries,” Quintus pointed out. “That’s an important decision.”

  “Phoebe will get to choose, yes. But a lot of women don’t.”

  Octavius thought about the painting hanging in Baron Rumpole’s gallery—Amelia Rumpole with her husband and stepson. The baron would have controlled every aspect of Amelia’s life. If he’d wanted to beat her, he could have. It was his right, by law. Just as he’d had the use of her body whenever he wished.