She flinched.
“Now leave, and tell your real brother if he violates our arrangement once more, using you or another one of your . . . sisters or his henchmen to do his work for him, I’ll take you all down.” His in-laws’ earlier recriminations flooded forward. It was just something else they’d been right about.
Edwin had stomped over to his desk when he registered the absolute silence—more specifically, the lack of retreating footfalls.
He turned back.
Miss Diggory jutted her chin up defiantly. “No one sent me, my lord. I am here of my own volition.”
He chuckled, that rusty, ill-used laugh more a growl than anything that could ever be confused with a real expression of mirth. No one came here of their own volition. As a rule, the world avoided him.
Shifting direction, he returned to the stubborn chit’s side, and leaning down, he placed his mouth close to her temple once more and fought the maddening pull of whatever damned perfume she dabbed behind her ears. “Do you think I’m foolish enough all these years later to believe a lie dripping off a Diggory’s lips?”
The young woman’s back moved up and down, an indication of her rapid breath. Of her fear. A lifetime ago, he’d have sooner chopped off his left hand than deliberately taunt a woman and take pleasure in her fear. No longer. That pathetic excuse of a man who’d gotten his wife and babe killed, and the other son snatched, reveled in this woman’s unease. “Hmm?” he prodded, and she jumped.
“I have no reason to lie to you, my lord,” she said calmly, and as she spoke, her breath, containing a whispery trace of honey, filtered from her lips and fanned his mouth. Another unexpectedly sweet scent, at odds with her past and name and sins. It enticed, drawing his gaze to her mouth and holding his focus there, mesmerized. “There is nothing I want, need, or desire.” She darted her tongue out and traced the plump seam of her lips. And God forgive him, his gut clenched. For even as self-loathing spiraled through him, something far worse, far more perilous and viler and more treacherous, held him in its snare: desire. “The only reason I’ve come . . . the only worry I had . . . was for Stephen.”
Stephen.
That single name, spoken aloud, snapped whatever siren’s trap she’d sucked him momentarily into. “August.” Had there ever been a doubt as to his insanity, this quixotic fascination with the woman’s slightly too-full mouth as she spoke was evidence enough of it.
She tipped her head, and one of the few brown strands that had managed a curl bounced at her shoulder.
Edwin flared his nostrils. “His name is August Rudolph Thadeus Stephen Warren, the Earl of Greyley.” He flicked a stare over her face. “You’ve no relation to him. He is His Lordship to you.” Stalking over to the front of the room, he pulled the door open. “Now that you’ve seen him”—he peeled his lip in a mocking sneer—“safely delivered to his rightful home, you are dismissed. You may leave now.”
Gertrude Killoran drew in a breath. “I am afraid I cannot do that.”
He narrowed his eyes. “And whyever not?”
“I’m not leaving.”
“I beg your pardon?” What more could she possibly want or expect of him?
The young woman clasped her palms before her, like a nun at the abbey. “I’m staying.”
Confusion rooted around his mind. “Staying?” he repeated. “Staying where?”
“Here.” She settled her features into a serene expression he’d have believed impossible for a Diggory. “Indefinitely,” she clarified.
Edwin rocked back on his heels.
My God, I’ve finally found someone madder than myself.
Chapter 6
Silence met Gertrude’s pronouncement.
Given the vitriol in the Marquess of Maddock’s gaze since the moment he’d caught sight of her, one might believe the gentleman was taking her announcement a good deal more calmly than one might expect.
And yet . . .
A memory trickled in, tugging at the corner of her remaining vision, tunneling her sight.
I lost the purse.
She squeezed her eyes shut and reflexively hunched her shoulders against that vicious strike, willing the remembrance gone. Willing Diggory back into the bowels of hell where he belonged. And yet, being here before the marquess and answering for crimes carried out by her father, Gertrude could not simply thrust aside thoughts of the man who’d sired her. Instead, she was forced to think of him . . . and the wrath he’d unleashed on her . . .
Moisture beaded on her brow. It slicked her palms.
Get out . . . leave me . . . leave me . . .
A faint whistle pealed around her ears, not an unfamiliar call in the streets of East London. This whistle, however, wasn’t the practiced warning amongst a den of thieves or the alarm raised when a constable was close. “You’re mad.”
That awed invective brought her gaze open and reality rushing back in the form of the marquess.
The Marquess of Maddock.
Not Diggory.
“I’m not mad,” she croaked, cursing her weakness once more. Cleo would neither croak, choke, tremble, nor sweat in the face of a threat. She’d take it on and own it. That reminder of her youngest sister sent strength back into her spine. “I am the woman who came to view your son as my brother over the years, and as such, I cannot simply sever my affections because of . . . what happened.”
Lord Maddock flicked a speck of imagined lint from his immaculate sapphire-colored sleeve. “Whatever affections or feelings you have or don’t have for my son matter not at all.”
“Not to you,” she conceded. She’d never make him see her as anything other than the enemy. But this, his deserved resentment for her and her family, wasn’t about Gertrude or her siblings or the marquess himself. “They matter to Stephen.”
She may as well have run him through with her dagger.
The marquess jerked.
But said nothing. Those men and women she’d known and witnessed in East London who’d been afflicted by madness had been incoherent; their gazes had darted around, and their words had often been rendered nonsensical gibberish. Lord Maddock was measured with his speech. Encouraged by that and his silence, Gertrude found her strength and trudged on with her plans.
“Banishing me and my family from Stephen’s life does not make his life as it has been these past years without you just go away.” Gertrude moved deeper into his office and set up a position in the middle of the carpet. “It does not diminish the feelings he has for us or take away the fear he knows being here.”
A muscle at the powerful, square set of his jaw jumped.
He was a proud man. He wore it in his granite, chiseled, slightly-too-broad-to-ever-be-considered-handsome features.
“What are your intentions? Have you found a governess for him?” she pressed. “Tutors?”
“I don’t answer to you,” he said brusquely.
“No, you do not,” she agreed. “But I’m not asking you to answer to me for your decisions or actions; rather, I’m raising questions as to how your plans might affect”—my brother—“Stephen.” A terrifying idea settled around her brain. “Or do you intend to send him away to Eton?” It was the common way for the nobility, and yet Stephen, being scuttled off and thrust amidst a sea of proper, gently bred boys? Gertrude shivered as dread snaked down her spine for the peril that would come to Stephen and any noble boys he’d be forced to live and attend school with.
Crimson splotches of color suffused Lord Maddock’s cheeks.
Gertrude opened and closed her mouth. “You haven’t yet decided what to do.”
His go-to-hell silence spoke volumes. Her eyes widened. “You’ve hired no one.” Oh, dear, this was even more dire than she’d considered.
The marquess ground his teeth so loudly he was going to give himself a devilish headache. “Nor do I need advice from you in how to care for my son.”
“I wouldn’t presume to,” she lied.
Within her pocket Sethos chirped and squirmed abou
t as if calling her out for the liar she was.
The marquess sharpened his gaze on Gertrude. “What was that?” he barked.
She slipped her hands into her pocket and pressed her palms gently to the tiny creature darting back and forth in panic, seeking escape. I well know the feeling. Gertrude kept her features smooth. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about,” she lied with an ease that had saved her skin countless times from a Diggory beating. Gertrude made a show of glancing about the room.
With a growl, the marquess slashed a hand in her direction, and Gertrude flinched. He wouldn’t put his hands upon her. Her earlier confidence in this man called mad, feared by so many, evaporated. And why wouldn’t he? Why, when his hatred was even stronger than the antipathy her father had carried for her?
“Get on with whatever it is you’d say,” he gritted out.
The perils of her leaving now, with Stephen’s fate even more uncertain than it had been at her arrival, set off a new wave of determination that outweighed any fears over what he might do to her. “Steph—His Lordship . . .” Her heart twisted at that correct form of address for the boy who had been and always would be her brother. “He cannot be unattended.” Gertrude removed her hands from her pocket and turned the palms up, needing him to see. Willing him to understand. “His Lordship’s life has been such that he requires structure and . . . surveillance.”
“He’ll have it.”
“Does he have a tutor or governess in place?” she rebutted. At the marquess’s silence, she pounced. “Because if he does not, then you . . .” She shook her head. “You do not know the failure you’ll set him up for.”
The air hissed between Lord Maddock’s teeth. “You would presume to call me out as one setting him up for failure.” His voice dripped with a mocking derision. And then he tossed back that golden lion’s mane and shouted his empty amusement to the rafters. Gertrude huddled deep within her cloak, borrowing the little comfort she could from Sethos. For in this instance, she was proven so very wrong: from the marquess’s glittering eyes down to those unruly, overly long strands, he bore the look of a man who’d gone mad . . . and embraced it.
“You, of all people? Your family taught him to thieve and set fires and shoot guns and . . .” As he spoke, he slashed a large hand angrily through the air, and she carefully followed each wave of his erratic palm. The marquess’s stinging diatribe drifted in and out of focus. A humming rang in her ears as those oldest, darkest of memories fought their way back to the surface. I’ll show you wot ’appens, ya stupid chit . . . “Keeping company with the vilest thugs.” The marquess’s voice came roaring back, even with his rage, safer than the demons that threatened still. “Whatever other crimes you’ve forced him to commit.”
Those accurately leveled charges landed a decisive mark at the corner of her chest where her heart beat. He was right. Gertrude had lived a life steeped in logic, and she was not so proud that she could not see the veracity of the marquess’s heated accusations.
Even correct as he was, she still had to make him see reason. For Stephen. “His Lordship’s lessons cannot be delivered the way a governess or tutor would for a typical charge.”
Lord Maddock flattened his lips into an unyielding line.
At his silence, Gertrude continued. “He’s resisted his studies, and therefore, instruction has to be carefully tailored to meet his interests.” As it should for any child.
The marquess eyed her for a long while before moving to his desk and taking up a seat in an Empire-style, gilded chair, a king in charge of this kingdom. She braced for him to order her gone once more. This time, he simply sat back in his seat. “You have experience with how a child should be instructed.”
Unable to make sense out of the meaning to his deadened tones, Gertrude ventured forward. And without waiting or asking permission, she claimed the seat opposite him, perching herself on the edge. “I have experience working with him.”
“You?”
She frowned at the heavy skepticism there. Her pride smarted, and yet her own feelings were irrelevant, too. “I have,” she repeated. Gertrude placed her palm on the edge of his immaculate desk. “It is why I know the manner of instructor and education he needs.”
“He requires an education for a marquisate.”
“Yes, that much is true.” She paused. “But you cannot simply shift him away from everything he’s known and over to the life that awaits him now.”
Any other man, regardless of station, would take umbrage to being challenged and refuse to concede the point. It was therefore a mark in Lord Maddock’s favor when he steepled his fingers, resting them under his chin, and contemplated her—the enemy’s—advice.
That gaze, all frosted ice, was emptier and hollower than those of the most street-hardened criminals in St. Giles. He drummed his fingertips together in a slow one-two-three-four pattern. “What are you proposing then? To stay here as his”—the marquess curled his lips up in an equally cold, small grin—“governess?”
As Stephen’s sister. That was what she’d been. It was a role she could not and would not divorce herself from simply because they’d all been deceived in the cruelest way possible. Their bond was too strong and was one that would only further stir the embers of this man’s resentment. “Yes,” she settled for in quiet tones. “That is precisely what I’m proposing.”
The marquess abruptly ceased that tapping. “No.”
Her heart sank. “No,” she echoed dumbly, falling back in her chair at the abrupt rejection. You fool. Did you truly believe he was actually considering what you’d put to him?
Lord Maddock dropped his elbows onto his desk and leaned forward. “One of the last times I had someone linked to your family in my household, it was left in a pile of ash.” A spasm of pain twisted his features, and her heart wrenched anew for altogether different reasons. Ones that had to do with his tangible suffering. The marquess narrowed his gaze on hers, and as soon as that brief expression of grief had come, it was gone, replaced by hardened, hate-filled emotions. He seethed. “I’d sooner trust my soul to Satan than allow you to reside here.” With that, he shoved back his chair; the legs of that thronelike seat scraped along the hardwood floor, certain to leave marks upon the surface.
Panic setting in, Gertrude jumped up, her muslin skirts swishing noisily. “But—”
“You have my answer. The answer, regardless of your pleading, pathetic attempt at reasoning or begging—”
“I do not beg.”
“Miss Diggory.”
She gritted her teeth, and she dropped her palms onto his desktop. “My name is Miss Killoran.” And I will beg . . . for Stephen. For any member of my family.
He matched her pose. “My answer remains, and will remain, no. Now we are officially done here.”
The door exploded open with such force, it slammed back against the plaster wall and bounced forward, nearly hitting the face of the angry observer on the other side. August.
“You send her away, you might as well send me, too,” the young boy hurled. “Because I’ll be damned if I stay here without Gertrude.”
Goddamn Gertrude Diggory.
With her presence and terms, she’d pit Edwin and his son into a battle that Edwin would always come out on the losing side of.
“Is there something wrong with your hearing?” August shouted, waving a tiny fist as he stalked over. “And your mind?”
Edwin jerked.
“Stephen, that is enough,” Miss Diggory said sharply. Sliding herself in front of the boy hurtling himself across the office, she gripped him by the right arm. “Do not speak so.”
“But he is mad.”
While August proceeded to quarrel with the young woman who called herself August’s sister, Edwin stared on dumbly.
His son was correct. Edwin was insane. He hadn’t always been. His madness, however, hadn’t been a disease passed on through rotten blood; rather, his mind had been poisoned by the memories of all he had lost.
&
nbsp; The boy wrestled against her hold. “Let me go!”
Edwin snapped back to the moment. He schooled his features into the mask he’d worn so long for protection. “It appears you’ve overestimated your abilities, madam,” he taunted.
That managed to quiet the feral boy’s frenetic movements.
Color rushed to the stubborn chit’s cheeks.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” August glanced back and forth between Edwin and Miss Killoran.
It meant no one, not even this woman who’d stormed Edwin’s household, could tame the child that had been returned to him. That realization hit Edwin square in the chest.
He was saved from answering by the harried footsteps pounding outside his office. Hopping out from behind Miss Diggory, August yanked a jewel-studded dagger from his boot and had it pointed at the door just as Marlow stumbled inside. “I cannot find . . . ,” he rasped, and then his gaze found the boy he’d been tasked with watching and the vicious tip of the dagger pointed at him. Marlow’s eyes bulged, and he took a hasty step back. “Oh.” Breathless and his face flushed red from his exertions, the servant stared past the boy to Edwin, his features a blend of fear, horror, and remorse.
“It is fine.” Edwin waved off that silent apology, damning this day. Damning his life. Damning the chit with steely determination for being proven correct in this instance. August didn’t require just anyone watching over him. He required someone capable and prepared for a charge who could sneak off and—Edwin’s gut clenched—brandish weapons like a seasoned military man. “Shut the door behind you.”
With a jerky nod, Marlow backed out of the room and closed the panel with a faint click, leaving Edwin alone with two strangers. Just one of whom shared his blood.
Desperate to regain some foothold, Edwin gestured for the ragtag pair to sit. “If you would?” he urged, calling forth every lesson ingrained in him long ago about politeness and self-control. They were sentiments he’d had no use for after his wife’s death. It hadn’t mattered what the world thought or didn’t think of him. He had become the monster everyone took him to be: a madman tortured by the memories of a fire that had stolen everything from him. But now . . . it did matter. Not for anyone other than the eleven-year-old boy with hatred brimming in his eyes.
The Bluestocking Page 7