How could she run off like that, after everything that had passed between them? What could possibly have been so pressing that she’d had to leave so suddenly? And who the devil was she?
He began trying to find out who she was as soon as possible on the day following the ball. He had one additional clue beyond the name Poppy, the few details she’d revealed, and the unremarkable gloves she’d left behind: the pearl necklace that had come loose as he’d tried to catch her. It wasn’t much to go on. Pearls being fairly indistinguishable, all the necklace had to offer was the clasp, which was engraved with SDW to HPW. He brought the necklace to his mother, who knew the most of any of the family about the members of the ton.
“SDW to HPW,” she mused. “I’m flattered that you think me so knowledgeable, but this is really very little to go on. And you say she gave her name as Poppy?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, thinking. “Very likely a nickname.”
“Right.” He’d already thought of that, and it wasn’t a comforting thought.
“And a last name that might begin with W, and we don’t know if the initials refer to the present generation, or an earlier one, though it’s probably safe to assume the pearls were a gift from either a husband to a wife, or a parent to a daughter. Ward, Wilcox, Warner, Wallingford,” she listed, squinting. “Wilson. I can think of dozens of people, and that’s not including Williams. So many people named Williams.” She paused. “And then there’s the fact that these initials could refer to people from a hundred years ago. A strand of pearls is the kind of thing that gets handed down in families for generations.”
“I get your point, Mother,” Marcus said tightly.
“I’m sorry, dearest.” She touched his cheek. “I’d love more than anything to help you. Your Poppy seemed like a very nice young lady.”
“She is.”
His mother tapped her chin. “I suppose the best thing would be to create a chart for different generations and match up names. We ought to be able to narrow the possibilities down that way.”
Having no other sensible course of action, Marcus sat with his mother, and together, they filled several pieces of paper with names. In the end, all they determined was that HPW must be the initials of a woman, since a man would not receive a gift of pearls, though Marcus had assumed that to begin with. Beyond that, he now had a lengthy list of people with initials that matched at least one set of the initials on the clasp, and a much smaller group of those who could be reliably matched in the sort of relationship that would occasion the gift of a costly necklace.
“And this is all supposing the two people were not unrelated people with last names that started with the same initial,” his mother pointed out. “Or someone whose family is not well known to us.”
“I know,” Marcus said, trying to keep his frustration in check.
But he did at least now have a place to start, so he compared their list with the ball’s guest list and arrived at eight families with possible family members that might have, or might at one time have had, at least one of the sets of initials.
Marcus made eight calls, one to each family, and drank many more than eight cups of tea while he tried obliquely to tease out whether any of the families might have a young lady previously unknown to him who’d attended the ball and lost a necklace. This was a tricky undertaking—he didn’t want to give too much away, because the consequences of the Marquess of Boxhaven going house to house looking for a woman whose last name started with W, but about whom he knew little else, did not bear thinking about. If nothing else, he would be besieged by everyone within a fifty-mile radius who had a marriageable daughter, cousin, or friend who had a last name starting with W.
None of the calls yielded anything helpful.
Meanwhile, every night, he dreamed of her.
In his dreams, they danced and laughed and kissed, and then she told him her full name. But in that maddening way of dreams, he could never quite hear it.
By the end of the week, his frustration was mounting. Surely it couldn’t be that he’d found the woman for whom he’d been waiting all his life, only to never see her again. Surely fate wouldn’t be that cruel.
But as the days continued to pass with no sign of her, he began to think that fate might be exactly that cruel.
* * *
The axe fell six days after the ball, when Melinda was picking through her jewelry box to make a selection for a dinner party that evening. Her scream of outrage could be heard all the way in the Outer Reaches, and Rosamund, putting the finishing touches on the new gown Vanessa was to wear that night, immediately knew that the jig was up.
Bronwen had been instructed that if Melinda discovered the pearls were missing, she must tell Melinda that Rosamund might know where they were. Rosamund was thus summoned immediately, and a livid Melinda demanded an explanation.
As there was nothing for it, Rosamund simply said, “They were mine and I took them.”
“Shocking creature!” Melinda cried. “Where are they? Bring them to me at once!”
“They’re gone.”
Melinda’s features hardened. “You sold them, didn’t you? You little thief! But what should I have expected, inviting someone like you into our home? I have been a fool, a fool who was far too generous for her own good.”
Melinda then demanded the money from the supposed sale, which Rosamund of course didn’t have. Amid Melinda’s resultant pronouncements that Rosamund was a thief and no longer welcome in her house and shouts for a Bow Street runner to be called, Rosamund threw her few belongings in a bag and said a hasty goodbye to Uncle Piggott.
“She’s the thief!” Uncle Piggott nearly spat. “The necklace was yours.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
His fury melted away as his dear old features sagged with concern. “But where will you go, Rosamund?”
“I have some money saved.” Only a very little bit, but Uncle Piggott, who had so little himself, didn’t need to know that. “And I’m sure I’ll find work somewhere.”
“This is an outrage! She has treated you abominably.”
“Shh,” Rosamund said gently. Uncle Piggott would never be thrown out on the street, but he needed to preserve the goodwill of Melinda lest he find himself neglected and mistreated. “It will be all right.”
She hugged him, blinking back tears, and asked him to relay her goodbyes to Mrs. Barton and the servants. And then, in case a Bow Street runner might really be coming for her, she left in haste.
Rosamund found a cheap room in a boarding house and began visiting employment agencies and shops, seeking work anywhere that looked likely. But work was not easy to find for a woman with no references, and as the days wore on and her meager funds dwindled, she had to ration what she spent on food. When she was finally offered work as a seamstress, at wages that would barely allow her to feed herself, she ignored the irony and accepted the position with alacrity.
As the weeks ground on, hunger settled in as a permanent guest and her own clothes grew threadbare while she sewed new gowns for fashionable ladies. She’d been right about one thing, though: the memories of Marcus and her night at the ball became the one bright spot in her days, bittersweet though the memories were because of the knowledge that she would never see him again.
Chapter Six
* * *
Marcus, who about to set out on a journey north to visit his grandmother, had just stepped into his coach and was closing the door when Socrates unaccountably jumped out of the coach. Before Marcus had even dismounted, his dog, who had previously never run anywhere if it was not toward Marcus, had raced a good way down the street.
Marcus took off after him, calling fruitlessly, trailed by a footman doing likewise. He was still some distance from the dog when a carriage turned the corner ahead at a smart clip. Socrates was but a few feet from its wheels, and Marcus barely had time to conceive of imminent and appalling disaster, when a woman stepped into the road and snatched his dog out of harm’s w
ay with moments to spare.
The coach rolled on obliviously as Marcus reached the woman, who was still holding his wayward dog. She was young, though he couldn’t see her face because she was wearing a bonnet and her gaze was directed at Socrates. Her worn and faded frock and the dated look of her bonnet suggested slender means, and he took her for a servant of some kind.
“Excuse me, miss,” he said, approaching. “That’s my dog you just rescued from certain disaster. I can’t thank you enough.”
She looked up, and as his eyes met hers, he was struck by the entirely unexpected, and strangely intense, sensation that he’d met her before. And was that an answering light of recognition in her own eyes?
He hardly had time to formulate these thoughts, though, because she immediately directed her eyes woodenly to his chest. As this was a not uncommon reaction among the servant classes when encountering someone like Marcus, he took little note.
He tried for a moment to place her. Had he perhaps passed her on the street before, or glimpsed her working in the home of an acquaintance? He must have encountered hundreds of servants over the years. Or perhaps she simply looked like someone he knew.
However, he really had no time for such inconsequential considerations. He was about to leave for a journey to the home of his grandmother, who’d retired to her country home as the Season was coming to an end. It had been almost three months since the masquerade ball, and despite his continuing lack of success in discovering anything about Poppy, he couldn’t forget her. She popped into his head at all sorts of odd times—when he was eating breakfast, while riding in Hyde Park, at dinner with friends. Never mind how often she appeared in his dreams. He was hoping that his grandmother would be able to provide some thoughts as to the possible identity of the owner of the pearl necklace, and thus of his mystery lady from the ball.
“He was almost hit by that carriage,” the young woman scolded him. Marcus couldn’t remember the last time he’d been scolded by anyone, being that he was thirty years of age and a marquess. Her bonnet must have come loose while she was running after Socrates, because it now began slipping toward the back of her head. As she pushed it impatiently off, he saw her face better.
She was pretty, a slim slip of a thing with thick dark brown hair escaping here and there from a careworn knot and those eyes that interested him more than they should. They were brown with flecks of gold.
She rubbed her cheek consolingly across the top of his dog’s head, though Socrates seemed unbothered by the notion that he’d just escaped death. That his dog was not merely tolerating the attentions of a stranger but making no attempt to reattach himself to Marcus was astonishing, because the only other person Socrates had shown any real interest in since Marcus had acquired him had been Poppy of the Ball.
It seemed his dog had a fondness for females or, apparently, certain females, since Socrates had not taken a particular liking to Marcus’s housekeeper, nor any of the maids, his mother, or even, inconveniently, his sister Alice, who’d volunteered to take care of him while Marcus was away. Much as he would have liked to accept her offer, he could not in good conscience have done so, since experience had taught him that as soon as Socrates perceived that his master had left the house, he began howling and didn’t stop until Marcus returned.
So far, all of Marcus’s efforts to train Socrates into better behavior had been completely ineffective. But apparently, and inexplicably, Socrates liked this young woman. Perhaps this was because she’d rescued him, but Marcus had no time to puzzle over the issue, because he needed to be on his way. He had, though, just had an idea.
“I am keenly aware that he was in great peril and that you saved his life,” he said. “For which I am extremely grateful. He’s a good-hearted fellow”—considering what he was about to propose, Marcus thought it best not to mention the diabolical howling yet—“but, I’m afraid, young and untrained. He was in my carriage, and I was closing the door when he bolted out. I can’t think why.”
“Dogs will do things like that,” she said reasonably. “Perhaps he saw a cat, or smelled something appealing to him, like a cheesemonger’s cart.”
Her speech was educated, her manner pleasant. He suspected she might be one of the numbers of women of good families who had fallen on hard times. And then her eyes met his again, and he was struck anew with the thought that he knew her.
“I say, is it possible that we’ve met before?”
“How—” the word came out as a croak, and she cleared her throat. “That seems highly unlikely.”
He grinned. “It does, doesn’t it? But I have the strangest sense that I’ve seen you before.”
“Oh, well, I’ve walked through Mayfair many times. Perhaps we’ve passed each other on the street.”
He nodded slowly, though he felt that this wasn’t quite right, that it was too thin an explanation for the jolt of connection he felt when looking in her eyes. But what difference did it make if he had once passed her on the street? He didn’t know her.
“Shall I relieve you of my dog?” Socrates had laid his head shamelessly on her shoulder and appeared supremely content.
“Could I hold him for a moment longer? He’s so dear.”
“Certainly.” Marcus would have gleefully agreed that she might hold Socrates for the rest of the day, since such an occurrence would allow him to do any number of things he had put off while he’d been busy keeping Socrates out of trouble. As Marcus watched, his dog licked the area of his rescuer’s neck right below her ear.
“Socrates,” he said sternly, “behave yourself.”
She laughed. “I don’t mind. He’s just a puppy.”
Something about her laughter made him want to laugh as well, even though there wasn’t anything especially amusing about their conversation. Or maybe it wasn’t only the sound of her laughter, but the way her eyes twinkled that made him feel as though they were sharing something fun.
“Well, I can’t thank you enough for saving him. It was fortunate that you were here.”
This was the moment when she might say why she had happened to be on the street, whether she perhaps worked in one of the neighborhood households.
“Yes, it was,” she agreed, not offering so much as a hint as to why she was there.
“Are you perhaps employed in the neighborhood?” he prompted.
“I am a seamstress.”
This made sense. Not a few seamstresses were gentlewomen fallen on hard times, and the more he talked with her, the more certain he was that she had had a good upbringing.
“Ah. Well, I hope that I might perhaps tempt you to make a change in position. I have a proposition of employment for you: I would like to retain you as a minder for my dog. As evidenced by recent events, Socrates is in need of someone to keep him out of trouble.”
“I’m sorry, did you say you wish to retain a companion for your dog?” she said, clearly puzzled.
He couldn’t blame her, as he would never have expected to find himself attempting to hire a woman he’d just met to be a companion for a dog, but he knew that he would not be able to bear the disappointment in his mother’s eyes if something happened to Socrates. Not that he wanted anything to happen to Socrates either, at least, not most of the time. Also, this woman presented the possibility that Marcus might have time unencumbered by his dog, which, after months of nearly constant canine companionship, sounded incredibly appealing.
“Yes. Suffice it to say that he was a gift and that, excepting yourself, it seems, he will not tolerate the company of anyone but myself. As you might imagine, this can create problems. Namely, if I can’t be with him, he howls constantly.”
“Ah,” she said.
“I’m journeying north today, as soon as possible, in fact, and I should be obliged if you would consent to accompany me—or, more specifically, my dog—on the journey.”
Not surprisingly, she looked taken aback by this abrupt proposal.
He smiled encouragingly. “I would pay you handsomely, of
course.”
His words did not appear to put her at ease, and he thought she hugged his dog a little more tightly to her chest, as if Socrates might protect her from him. He was slightly offended, until he remembered that he hadn’t introduced himself and that a pretty young woman had good reason to be nervous about the idea of a strange man offering employment suddenly, particularly employment that would require a journey alone in his company.
“Please excuse me,” he inclined his head politely. “I have not introduced myself. I am the Marquess of Boxhaven.”
* * *
He didn’t recognize her.
She’d known it was him the minute their eyes met and she heard his voice, even as the carriage behind him with its gilded crest silently mocked her. But he didn’t know who she was.
True, he’d clearly felt some recognition—she’d seen it in his eyes and the wrinkling of his brow. The jolt when their eyes first met had been a shared jolt. But that had meant nothing. He didn’t know she was Poppy, and he apparently wasn’t under any kind of lingering enchantment from the ball that might have swept across the chasm between them and made everything into a happily ever after.
Rosamund knew she should be glad. None of the circumstances that had allowed them to meet at the ball was in force anymore, and she now was of an even lower status than when they’d first met.
Still, it stung that he didn’t know her, after they’d shared what had felt like the most special hours of her life. Over the past months, just thinking of him, of the fact that he was somewhere in London while she was there as well, had filled her with secret joy. Forbidden joy, but joy nonetheless. Now she was being shown how meaningless all that had been.
She briefly considered simply telling him they’d met before. Oh, this is funny, she might say, we met at your ball. But then she would eventually have to tell him her real name, and he would know her as the daughter of a man who was, however undeservedly, a national disgrace. And if Melinda then also discovered her whereabouts and made an issue of the “stolen” necklace, Rosamund might be in a great deal of trouble. Considering her father’s sad infamy, she could not, as his daughter, expect leniency.
Marquesses at the Masquerade Page 5