The Wicked Marquess

by Maggie MacKeever

  Carefully, Miranda closed the old book. Was Benedict still angry with her? She could not tell.

  At any rate, she was still angry with him. She had done as she intended, had plunged feet first into the scandal-broth, and what must the wretch do but pluck her out again? “I hoped you were a ghost,” she said.

  Benedict moved further into the room. “You’ve heard about the family shades? My favorite is Lady Dulcibella. She plunged to her death from the battlements some two hundred years ago.”

  Had Lady Dulcibella also been held prisoner? “Poor woman! Was her family unkind? Did she put a period to her own life?”

  Did Miranda feel that her own family was unkind? Benedict hoped she wasn’t considering the battlements as a potential avenue of escape. “It was not Lady Dulcibella’s family but her husband who was unkind. Whether she fell or jumped or was pushed, we are unlikely to discover at this point in time. Are you disappointed that I am not a ghost?”

  Miranda was uncertain what she felt. There had been no kisses, of either the chaste or carnal variety, for many days. Granted, this omission might have been influenced by Miranda’s determination to avoid her companion, and her tendency to, when she could not avoid him, act like a brat. “I have been behaving badly,” she admitted. “I’m surprised you are still speaking to me.”

  Benedict was surprised at himself. He had vowed to keep Miss Russell at arm’s length, yet here he was, standing so close that he could smell the floral fragrance in her hair. “It is you who have refused to speak to me,” he pointed out.

  So Miranda had. In this moment, it no longer seemed important who had led whom astray. “Kenrick is determined that I must marry you, and it makes me very cross.”

  It made her cross, did it? How did she think this business made him feel? “You would prefer Lord Wexton?” Benedict asked, as he plucked a dangling cobweb from his hair.

  “Lord Wexton is a prig. I am not going to marry either one of you, no matter how Kenrick may scold.” Miranda watched the marquess move around the chamber. “What have you done with Nonie and my uncle? They would not approve of us being alone together like this.”

  Benedict paused by the ancient globe. “I have exhausted them with an inspection of the Abbey. They are resting in their rooms. It was the only way I could contrive to have a few moments’ private conservation without the pair of them watching us like hawks lest I further taint your innocence.”

  He was still angry. “I’m not so innocent as that. Certainly I am not as innocent as I was, which I do not mind in the slightest, because I liked being made less innocent very well. I was sorry when Mr. Pettigrew interrupted us, because—” Miranda frowned. “Why did you say you wanted someone else to seduce me, my lord?”

  “I don’t think I said that, exactly.” Benedict intensely disliked the thought of anyone else touching Miranda, though he knew he should not. “All is not yet lost,” he added. “We need only wait a suitable period of time, and then you may say we will not suit.” Which was no more than the truth, so why did it irritate him to say the words aloud? “It may be a nine days’ wonder, but no one will be surprised. You will not emerge unscathed from the business, but such is my reputation that I will be held at fault.”

  Yes, but Miranda was to blame, at least partly, for his reputation. And even as Benedict said they were not suited she realized that they were, which was the exact opposite of what she had been telling herself for the past several days. “Oh, perdition!” she wailed.

  “Do not take on so, Miranda.” Benedict did not trust himself to keep a proper distance were she to burst into tears. “This imbroglio is less your fault than mine. I made a byword of myself before you were born. Although my alleged transgressions to date have not included the destruction of a young lady’s good name.”

  He was not so old as all that, was he? Miranda calculated sums in her head. If Benedict was aged five-and-thirty, when she was born he would have been as old as she was now. Or almost was. Which didn’t signify.

  Seventeen was very young to set out on the pathway to perdition. Or perhaps it wasn’t, because Miranda wished to travel that road herself. With Sinbad. To whom she had gotten herself betrothed.

  “What a predicament,” she sighed. “It is very difficult to be so young. When I come of age, I will permit no one to tell me what I must and must not do.”

  Benedict did not point out that Miranda was unlikely to acquire her longed-for freedom, even if she managed to remain unwed. “I have been married,” he said.

  Married? Miranda should have realized before that few gentlemen of Lord Baird’s position attained the age of five-and-thirty without acquiring at least one spouse. “You don’t have a wife now. Do you?”

  Benedict unrolled an old map. “Her name was Elizabeth. She died in childbed.”

  “Oh,” said Miranda, wary of his cool tone. “Did you love her very much?”

  Benedict surveyed the map as if he were preparing to set out on a voyage. “I did not.”

  Miranda nibbled at a thumbnail. The marquess refused to speak further of this Elizabeth. Perhaps he had cared for her more than he wanted to admit.

  And perhaps he had not cared for her at all, which was often the way of marriages arranged among the ton. It hardly mattered at this point. Here Miranda was, again closeted with her favorite rakehell, and he showed no more inclination to embrace her than of allowing her to embrace him. Miranda’s gaze lingered on his hands.

  He rolled up the ancient parchment. “Tell me, how do you like my abbey, brat?”

  No young lady with a sense of adventure and an appreciation of the fanciful could fail to accord the place full marks, even without taking into consideration the gardens, which were a marvel in themselves. “I like your abbey above anything,” Miranda replied. “You are very fortunate to own such a wonderful place as this.”

  Benedict had never dreamed the abbey would someday be his. “Could you live here, do you think?” he asked and then broke off, appalled by his own words. No sooner had he informed Sir Kenrick that Miranda must be allowed to cry off than he decided she must not, which is yet another excellent example of that maxim every female knows: the male of the species is temperamental, and quixotic, and prone to change his mind.

  If not for the fact that she must never marry, Miranda could have happily lived at the abbey for the remainder of her days. With the abbey’s owner. She was not so great a pig-widgeon as to tell him so. “You do not truly wish to marry me, my lord. You consider me too young.”

  Of course she was too young. Benedict should thank her for reminding him of it. “Men of vast experience do not make good husbands. We are overly accustomed to variety, and to indulging our own whims. As Elizabeth could attest.”

  Miranda suspected Elizabeth had been yet another young woman lacking in resolution. “It seems to me that a gentleman of vast experience would make a very satisfactory sort of husband. Being as he would know all manner of interesting things.”

  Things he might be persuaded to share with a curious young woman to whom he’d gotten himself betrothed, she meant. “Would you not dislike it very much if your husband paid his attentions to another woman?” Benedict inquired.

  Miranda had disliked it very much when Benedict paid his attentions to Lady Cecilia. “That is beside the point. I am not going to marry you, my lord.”

  She was determined to hammer at the subject. Benedict didn’t trust himself to speak. He strode toward to the chimney. The secret panel slid shut behind him with a distinctly irritated thud.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Next to arrive in the neighborhood that Lord Baird had mistakenly considered so remote would be not another pugilistic enthusiast; although so foul was Lady Darby’s temper that she was fit to engage in fisticuffs herself.

  The journey to Cornwall had not been a pleasant one. Odette did not often venture far from London. Travel exacerbated her gout as well as the aching in her other joints.

  If travel she must, she did so in a carri
age drawn by four horses and accompanied by two postilions. The burgundy-upholstered interior was equipped with a table containing drawers and a clock, a portable stove and a wine cellar. A chandelier hung from the ceiling.

  In the carriage, along with Lady Darby, rode her abigail Meggs and Chimlin the cat. Lady Darby had chosen for the journey an old-fashioned riding-coat dress complete with jacket, waistcoat and petticoat, and a ruff around her neck. Over this, she’d thrown a fur-edged pelisse. Atop an elaborate white wig she had placed a beehive bonnet, and on her raddled face a great deal of paint and rouge. Meggs was clad in a rather more modern carriage dress of serviceable dark bombazine, a cottage bonnet, and an expression of long suffering. Chimlin wore a collar of fat pearls.

  “Mind your eye!” snapped Odette, as Chimlin hunched over and gave a loud mournful meow. Meggs snatched up the cat and deposited him on papers spread over the floor. Chimlin managed to rake her with his claws before he wheezed and hacked and spat up a hairball. “How we apples swim!” Odette observed.

  Meggs dealt with the mess. Odette resettled the cat on her lap and gave him a comforting pat. Meggs would have also appreciated a comforting pat. During this past hour alone she had been denounced as a lollpoop and a fuddle-cap, both of which epithets were unfair, since she was neither a lazy idle person nor a fool.

  Her ladyship had been peevish ever since receiving Lord Baird’s note. The marquess had never before, to Meggs’s knowledge, begged assistance of his aunt. And so here they were, the three of them, as snug as bugs in a rug. Meggs crossed her eyes at Chimlin. The cat hissed.

  Lady Darby scowled at her traveling companions. The pair of them were feeling out-of-sorts? No one could feel as out-of-sorts as Odette. She gazed out the carriage window at crosses dating from the sixth century onward, inscribed sepulchral stones, oratories placed always near a spring. Along this road, footsore pilgrims had once trod to St. Michael’s Mount, where dwelt a giant with a habit of wading across to the mainland to steal cows.

  Cornwall was inhabited by giants and piskies and mermaids; knockers and Jack O’Lanterns that appeared the Cornish tin miners who worked next to naked deep below ground; spriggans or Cornish fairies with whom it was unlucky for mortals to meddle, which were found around cairns and barrows and detached stones. Lady Darby leaned back in her seat. She had seen so much scenery in her long life that such stuff no longer held allure.

  The country claimed a hundred or more saints. Odette’s favorite was St. Neot, reportedly only fifteen inches tall, who spent the day immersed up to his neck in water, praying in his holy well. She felt in need of prayer.

  She also felt in need of physic. Upon arrival at the abbey, she would seek out the gardener. If she would not allow Colum to apply bruised snails to her afflicted knee – Odette refused to ever again set eyes on one of those slimy creatures, or any portion thereof, in any guise whatever — she would be grateful for a preparation of caranna to apply to her aching and swelling joints.

  She glanced again at the window, looking not at the countryside but instead into the past, when a different nephew had loved the abbey well. As had Odette loved that nephew. Perhaps Marcus had interfered with the spriggans, and brought down upon himself their bane.

  At last, the abbey loomed up in the distance. It was, to Odette’s eyes, a splendid sight. Parts of the sprawling structure were so ancient as to have been documented in the Domesday Book. Odette felt ancient enough in this moment to have been mentioned in the Domesday Book herself.

  The carriage rolled through the abbey gates, and came to a stop. Ominously, Chimlin belched.

  * * * *

  The late afternoon sun shone softly on the abbey gardens, where Miranda and Colum were involved in a horticultural experiment. They were getting along well. Between them they had dosed the little parlor maid for a sore tooth, and Jem for indigestion resulting from overindulgence in Cornish pasties filled with beef and potato and onion — Jem enjoyed the local cuisine, from pasties and heavy cakes to pilchards and cream, all of which Cook was expert in preparing, even in a kitchen that dated back to Elizabeth times. In regard to the lead groom’s headache, however, Colum and Miranda were at odds. Miranda preferred a poultice of violets, to be set upon the afflicted brow. Colum favored meal of rye, moistened with a little vinegar and put between a double cloth, then heated in a pewter dish placed over coals and bound to the head while it was hot.

  The stricken groom was currently uppermost in neither of their minds. Colum was fixing a primrose upside-down in the earth, his intention to obtain a flower shaped halfway between a primrose and a cowslip, of maroon color with a deep yellow eye. Fresh cow droppings placed atop the plant, he insisted, would guarantee success. A watering of urine was also considered helpful, he added, and then fell mute. Miranda eased his embarrassment by means of a receipt for a plague cure that involved a series of cock chicks whose rumps had been plucked bare. Colum countered with a remedy for nosebleed that involved hanging a dried toad around the victim’s neck. Miranda supplied a remedy for convulsions made from powdered dried moles. Colum topped this with a remedy for pleurisy that contained six ounces of fresh horse-dung.

  He looked over his shoulder as a travelling carriage, piled high with an extraordinary assortment of luggage, lumbered into view. The vehicle rolled to a stop beside the house.

  The carriage door flew open. A middle-aged, bombazine-clad female tumbled out of the conveyance and deposited a feline, none too gently, on the ground. The cat promptly vomited all over her shoe.

  Behind them, in the open door of the carriage, loomed an elderly woman.

  “You, gel!” she announced, upon espying Miranda. “Come here at once.”

  Miranda hesitated. She recognized the grande dame who had accosted her in Oxford St. Had the old witch followed her here? And if so, why?

  Colum was standing behind Miranda. He gave her a little nudge. She frowned at him. He jerked his head. Reluctantly, Miranda approached the berlin.

  The witch descended from the carriage, expertly managing both hoops and quizzing glass. “So you’re the flibbertigibbet Benedict has got himself betrothed to. Demned if you ain’t your mother all over again.”

  Miranda studied the greatly magnified eye. “I’m told there is a resemblance. And who, pray, are you?”

  The quizzing glass trembled. “Impertinence!”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Madam Impertinence.” Miranda bobbed a curtsey. “Gracious, but your face is red. Are you going to have an apoplexy? I advise a good dose of camphor water. It is an excellent remedy for nervous complaints.”

  The ancient lady’s cheeks puffed up in an alarming manner. Colum hurried forward, a concerned expression on his face.

  Concern for the newcomer whom Miranda had treated so rudely, that was. No one had any concern for Miranda herself. She spun round – and walked smack into Lord Baird.

  He put out a hand to steady her. Miranda shrugged him off. The marquess watched her disappear into the depths of the gardens and then turned back to his aunt.

  Servants bustled all around them, unloading the boxes and bundles and various paraphernalia without which Lady Darby refused to budge. Meggs handed Chimlin into the care of an unenthusiastic footman and brushed cat dander off her dress.

  Odette sank her bony fingers into her nephew’s arm. “You’ve properly landed yourself in the scandal broth this time, my boy! What are you going to do about that rag-mannered saucebox?”

  Were Benedict the stuff of legend, he would whip out his magic teleporting tapestry and whisk both Miranda and himself away. But he was not, and there was nothing heroic left in him, if ever there had been anything heroic in him at all. “I am going to try and do as little damage as possible,” he replied.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Bent over in the posture so favored by gardeners, Miranda grubbed in the dirt. She was enjoying a few precious moments of solitude. Colum was in his workroom, beating the roots of sciatica cresses into a salve that, mixed with hog’
s grease into a poultice, would be applied to Lady Darby’s gouty knee. Two hours later the afflicted areas would be bathed again, this time with wine and oil mixed together, then wrapped with wool and the victim left to sweat.

  There was no reason for Benedict’s aunt to approve of her, but the old witch might have been civil, even though it was as clear as the nose on Benedict’s face that he did not want to be betrothed. Not that Miranda wanted to be betrothed, either; or if she did, she shouldn’t, because of her mama and her grandmama and the rest; and it was doubtless most unchristian of her to long to wring her progenitors’ collective faithless necks. Yet she could not break off the betrothal without further tarnishing Benedict’s reputation, and she was furthermore surrounded by people determined that she should, unlike Tipoo Sultan, live a lamb-like life.

  Miranda felt as though she were pinned beneath one of Tipoo’s tiger’s paws. She wondered how many ladies had dwelt in the sultan’s harem. Didn’t foreign potentates have a great many wives?

  Rumor claimed that Benedict had visited a harem. Miranda sank back on her heels. There must be some way to persuade him to embrace her again. Perhaps Colum had a plaster for young ladies who ached to be kissed.

  “Well met, Miss Russell,” came a voice from behind her. Miranda turned to find Mr. Hazelett gazing down on her. “How fortunate I am to stumble upon you here.”

  Was the man attempting to get up a flirtation? Miranda rose stiffly to her feet. “You are trespassing again, I see.”

  “I hoped to further increase my knowledge.” Mr. Hazelett glanced around. “Where is Baird’s gardener?”

  “He will be back shortly. Which do you prefer, sir? Nature untrammeled or Nature restrained?”