She wished that none of those details about her mattered and that she could once again look in Marcus’s eyes and see that he thought she was special. But wishing was for people who were not in the kind of desperate straits she was in.
Marcus was offering her what would likely be a better wage than she was making as a seamstress, and for much easier work. Though she knew it was foolish to consider accepting his offer, not just because of the potential harm of her aunt’s accusations, but because she couldn’t bear for Marcus to find out that his mystery lady from the ball was really a poor, shabby seamstress, her future looked bleak, and his offer was tempting. The seamstress work paid barely enough to keep herself, and she had no hope of securing anything better. Was there really any choice?
“My name is Rosamund, my lord.” Socrates started to shift in her arms, and she held him out to Marcus, who accepted him.
“Well, Rosamund, what do you think? Will you agree to be Socrates’s companion, at least for the next month, or until he grows in wisdom and acquires civilized behavior, which might be rather further in the future? I would, of course, make it worth your while to set aside your current employment, and I would provide you with a character reference, should your work prove satisfactory.”
He then named a wage that would solve a great deal of her troubles, the kind of money that might allow her to leave London and establish herself somewhere else, perhaps as a dressmaker. Such a vision of the future was so vastly better than what she was now facing that she could hardly believe it possible.
“Your offer is unexpected,” she said, stalling for time as she considered whether it was the height of idiocy to be a companion to Marcus’s dog and thus inevitably put herself in Marcus’s charming company when he could never be for her. Now that he was not wearing a mask obscuring half his face, she could appreciate fully how handsome he was. His eyes were a gorgeous shade of dark blue, and he was just as tall and broad-shouldered as she remembered. Simply standing there talking to him was making her heart beat faster. “I would imagine there are not many dog companions employed these days.”
He gave her an amused look. “I would imagine so as well. Just think, it might be the start of a new sort of occupation, and you can be proud to say that you were the very first.”
She couldn’t resist smiling back—really, the man was too charming for his own good, never mind everyone else’s—and gave an inward sigh. Charming people, and likely charming women, probably came as easily to him as breathing. She would doubtless regret this, but she had little choice.
“Very well, I accept,” she said, hiding a smile as Socrates attempted to lick his master’s ear. “When should I start?”
“Well…” He grinned sheepishly, deftly evading Socrates’s little pink tongue. “Now, actually. I really was just about to depart on my journey.”
“Now? As in, this very moment?”
“Well, as soon as possible. I did want to get an early start so as to make the trip in one day.”
“But I would need to give notice and let my landlady know I won’t need a room now and pack my things.” Only a very few, since she didn’t have much.
He waved a hand, dismissing her concerns. “A footman can be dispatched to your employer to give notice for you and sort things out with your landlady, and someone at Boxhaven House can pack a valise for you. I’m certain there are any number of my sisters’ castoff clothes lying about.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose that would all be agreeable.” Since he was neatly doing away with all these details for her, agreeable was an understatement, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Excellent. You can have a cup of tea and a sandwich, if that would suit, while the valise is packed.”
“That would be welcome,” she said, trying not to sound absurdly eager about his offer of food. Since her dwindling store of coins had necessitated measures such as simply telling herself she wasn’t hungry when she was, the possibility of eating an entire sandwich in one sitting sounded like heaven.
“If you will come this way, Rosamund, I will take you to Boxhaven House, where I can finally put down this squirming bundle of fur-coated insanity.”
Chapter Seven
* * *
Rosamund had not quite believed that tea could be served and a bag packed for her with such speed that in little more than half an hour, she and Marcus would be ready to leave, but that was what happened. The benefits of being a marquess were clearly many.
She took a seat in the coach opposite Marcus, a servant handed Socrates to her, and they were off.
“I appreciate your willingness to travel on the spur of the moment,” Marcus said. Considering that he was a marquess and she was a lowly dog companion/former seamstress, he was being remarkably gracious toward her, but what else would she have expected? He was the same considerate man she’d met at the ball.
“There really isn’t any comparison between the work I was doing and what you were offering,” she said. He nodded in acknowledgment, his gaze lingering on her for a moment, and her heart thumped in anticipation of she didn’t even know what, but all that happened was that his brow wrinkled a little.
While she was in his house, she had begun to worry that, in the close confines of the carriage, he might remember her, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Good, she told herself unconvincingly. All for the best.
Socrates, meanwhile, grew unsettled as the carriage rolled through the streets of London and into the countryside, alternately standing up and sitting down in Rosamund’s lap and on the seat next to her. After yet another trip across Rosamund’s lap, he whimpered and looked at Marcus.
“Here, hand him over,” Marcus said. “I suppose he’s not used to coach travel.”
With an apologetic look, Rosamund passed the little dog to Marcus, and there was quiet in the coach for about three minutes, at which point Socrates began pacing back and forth across Marcus’s lap.
“Must you?” Marcus asked his dog.
“Perhaps he would like to be on the floor,” Rosamund said. So Socrates was gently deposited on the floor, where he curled into a ball for some time before standing up again and looking imploringly at Rosamund. She leaned down and scooped him up.
“At this rate, you will be ready to give notice by the time we arrive at my grandmother’s house,” Marcus observed.
“Nonsense, he is the dearest thing,” she said, petting the dog’s soft head. This seemed to calm Socrates a bit.
“You have not yet heard him howling. Have you always had a particular way with dogs?”
“I’ve always loved dogs. We had one when I was little, though it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a household with a dog.” Rosamund couldn’t imagine Melinda even petting a dog, let alone welcoming one into her household. Though it was just as well for the world of dogs that none of them had to be part of Melinda’s household, however much Rosamund would have loved a dog like Socrates to curl up with her in her cold little room.
He nodded, a man with impeccable manners marooned in a coach with a woman so far down the social scale from him—or at least, to his knowledge—that normally he would not be expected even to acknowledge her existence.
“I have a number of dogs at my country estates, but they are bigger, naturally, and housed in kennels. Socrates was a gift from my mother, and thus of special concern to me.” He chuckled. “It was the oddest thing. He took to me from the first moment. I can’t say the sentiment was shared initially, but he has grown on me. Slightly.”
She’d seen Marcus at the ball with his mother, seen the easy affection between them, and she nearly chuckled at the idea of his mother presenting him with a lapdog. Her father had given her a puppy for her third birthday, and Tatter had been her constant companion.
She smiled at Marcus, and he smiled back, though with a wrinkled brow again. His smile gave her a little spark of happiness before she reminded herself that she was the only one in the carriage dreaming dreams. She simply needed to not care, for t
he next few weeks, that he didn’t know who she was, and then she would be free to begin a new life.
* * *
Rosamund was quite pretty. When he’d first encountered her on the street, Marcus had merely noticed this fact in the reflexive way that a man notices an attractive woman.
That he was noticing her prettiness now, again, as they sat across from each other in his coach was because of that same reflex, and not because he was on the alert for pretty women. Far from it, since there was only one pretty woman he wished to know better: Poppy. She was the reason for this journey to the country, where his grandmother had repaired, because he hoped she might be able to shed some light on the initials on the necklace clasp and thus Poppy’s identity. Still, he was a man, and he’d long ago learned that some things about being a man were fixed, and noticing pretty women, whether he wished to or not, was one of them.
When he’d proposed the plan to visit Lady Tremont, his mother had pointed out that he could easily send her a letter. It wasn’t as if seeing the pearls themselves would help his grandmother solve the mystery of Poppy, since pearls were pearls. But it had been almost three months since the ball, and despite the fruitlessness of Marcus’s efforts to find out who his mystery lady was among their acquaintances, he couldn’t forget Poppy, and he needed to do something.
Besides, his grandmother had also seen the mystery lady at that ball, if briefly, and maybe in talking about her, one of them would remember something more, some detail that might help identify Poppy.
My Poppy, as he had taken to thinking of her. Ever since the ball, he’d actually had trouble focusing on much besides her and the hope that he would either discover her identity, or she would somehow contact him. He hadn’t forgotten for a moment how it had felt to be with her, and he’d spun more than a few fantasies about what it might be like if she were part of his future.
Still, anyone, male or female, would have said that Rosamund was pretty, and he would have to be made of stone not to be a little charmed by the way her eyes danced when she was talking to his dog.
“I really think you might prefer choosing one place and staying there for a bit,” she counseled Socrates, who had adopted a vexing pattern of pacing in circles on the floor, followed by looking imploringly at his two companions in turn, apparently seeking to be picked up again since he was too small to jump onto the seats.
Socrates whimpered.
“You were just in my lap a moment ago,” she pointed out to him patiently.
“I suspect Socrates’s concept of time is not the same as ours. But then, his command of the English language is perhaps not very deep either.”
“I’m sure you’re right. I was mostly thinking of trying to distract him, because he doesn’t seem quite content.”
“Mostly?” He chuckled. Really, there was something so refreshingly amusing about Rosamund. Refreshing... That was a funny way to describe a person, but fresh actually seemed to work because she was different. She had an open quality, as though ready to be delighted by life, which was surprising in a woman who’d surely been spending most of her waking hours in drudgery, sewing for little pay.
Or maybe it was the way she made him feel—wait, no. He frowned. She didn’t make him feel any way. She was only a nice young woman who was good with dogs and happened to be pretty and have a sense of humor.
“Does that mean that in some respects you think he understands you when you address him comments about his behavior?” he couldn’t resist asking.
“I suppose it does,” she said. “Something about his eyes—don’t you find that when you look into his eyes, you sense understanding?”
He snorted and found himself thinking that his sister Kate, who had a sense of humor that was attuned to life’s absurdities, would like Rosamund. Not because Rosamund was absurd, but because—blast, there he went again. He tamped his wandering mind down firmly.
“His eyes? I don’t think I’ve spent even a second gazing into Socrates’s eyes.”
“That’s a shame,” she said with a perfectly straight expression, though mirth tweaked the corners of her mouth. “You can tell a lot about someone by looking into their eyes.”
He believed this, though he’d never thought of extending the idea to include dogs. But he could remember how it had felt to look into Poppy’s eyes, how from the first moments, he’d felt that something special was meant to be between them.
He was vexed that he couldn’t entirely recall the color of her eyes, but it had been night, and most of the time they’d spent together had been on the terrace, which had been fairly shadowy. He remembered only that her eyes were brown. At least, he was nearly certain they were brown.
Rosamund had brown eyes with gold flecks. They were lovely eyes, and though he’d put aside that sense of familiarity he’d experienced when he first encountered her, he did wonder about her and how it seemed likely that she had been gently bred. Was it possible she was from some family perhaps distantly known to his family? The idea was not comfortable.
“I was thinking again about that sense that I’ve met you before,” he said. “Even your voice, now that I think of it, seems familiar. Do I look at all familiar to you?”
She coughed. “You? Familiar?”
“Yes. This feeling that I know you—it’s like a puzzle I can’t solve.”
“You must have me confused with someone else.”
“I agree that’s likely, but still, there’s this sense of familiarity.” He cocked his head. “Do you ever go to Gunter’s?”
“I have never been there.”
He nodded. Gunter’s was probably too costly for a seamstress. And yet... “But you haven’t always been a seamstress, have you? I mean, you have clearly been educated.”
“I was fortunate as a girl. Our vicar allowed me to sit in on lessons with his daughter.”
He nodded. “And your father?”
“He was a working man,” she said.
“And your last name? You didn’t give it earlier.”
At that moment, she leaned down and plucked Socrates from the floor and simply handed him to Marcus. “I’m certain you did not know my family, my lord, unless you’ve spent a great deal of time in Liverpool.”
“No, I can’t say that I have,” he said, distracted by the way Socrates was fidgeting in his lap.
“There, you see?” she said. “Nothing to puzzle about.”
Why was he pressing her anyway? Did he think she had met him before and was hiding that information for some mysterious reason? But he couldn’t seem to let this go.
He gave up on trying to get Socrates to sit still and put him back on the floor. “Why did you come to London to work?”
“Because there is work in London.”
“But might you not have done something else with your education, been a governess perhaps?”
“So many questions, my lord. But I’m afraid my history is quite dull and that all I have to say for myself is that I’ve done a great deal of sewing.”
He had the sense that Rosamund’s history was far from dull. A person so engaging as she was bound at least to have an amusing perspective on her experiences. But it would be ridiculous to press her further.
“Oh dear,” she said to Socrates, who had begun pacing in a slightly panicked way. “I do wonder if you’re feeling quite well. Perhaps we’d better—”
But Marcus had also noticed Socrates’s increased agitation, and he was already getting the driver’s attention. They just managed to stop and get the dog outside the coach in time for him to cast up his accounts in the grass.
“Carriage travel doesn’t seem to agree with him,” Rosamund observed as Socrates retched again.
“Indeed.”
Marcus could not have imagined watching a small dog be sick in the grass with any other woman of his acquaintance, but standing there with Rosamund was oddly companionable, as though they were parents patiently attending a sick child.
Socrates, apparently instantly recovered, moved
several paces from the scene of his handiwork and began nibbling grass. Rosamund crouched down next to the dog. “Are you feeling better now?” she inquired of him.
The spectacle of Rosamund addressing his dog made Marcus want to laugh, but then Socrates began to wander away, and she dropped onto all fours and crawled after him, and the laughter died in his throat as he watched her from behind.
He wanted her. He liked her and he wanted her.
He tore his gaze away. What the devil was wrong with him? He was besotted with Poppy! He was! He was not making this trip to seek his grandmother’s help on a whim, but because he’d truly felt something important, perhaps even eternal, when he’d been with Poppy. She was very possibly the woman for whom he’d been waiting his entire life, and he wanted more than anything to see her again, to talk to her, to know her.
So why was he noticing and thinking about and wanting Rosamund?
He’d never been so disgusted with himself, and he clenched his teeth and vowed he would master this. Clearly, he needed to stop being so friendly to his dog’s companion, and he needed to remember that that was all Rosamund was. And that he had urgent business to attend to.
“If you and Socrates are quite finished, Rosamund,” he said abruptly, “we will get back on the road.”
“I think perhaps another minute or two, my lord,” she called over her shoulder, still crawling after his dog, her rump swaying erotically, though he was certain she was oblivious to the effect she was creating.
“You don’t need to crawl around after him,” he said sharply. “Just pick him up and let’s go.”
She sat back on her heels and looked up at him, and he saw that she had perceived that his manner had changed. “Of course, my lord.”
Marquesses at the Masquerade Page 6