Best stock up on pins.
***
What was that damnable scratching in the wainscoting?
Carver Danforthe paused, halfway down the stairs to the servants’ hall, listening intently for those tiny sounds he could have sworn followed him all over his house. No. Quiet again now.
He stumbled down the remaining steps and looked about for signs of other life. Surely someone should be up, although he actually had no earthly idea what time it was. Usually whenever he came home very late—or very early, depending upon your point of view—he found at least one soul down here, pottering about in the scullery or the kitchen.
But as he stood at the foot of the stairs, looking around, he finally remembered that she was gone. Robbins, his sister’s lady’s maid, who was often the person he encountered down here so late—or early—had left his household to get married. Of all the bloody ridiculous things for her to do.
He stared at the empty chair by the long table, where he was accustomed to seeing her bent over a patch of mending or fighting with a stubborn stain on one of his sister’s gowns. She would look up, put her work aside, and fetch him whatever he wanted. He wouldn’t even have to tell her. There was no exchange of words. She just knew what he needed.
Funny, plain little girl. Or woman, as he supposed she was now. It was hard to recall how long she’d been a part of his household. Not exchanging words with him.
Suddenly a door opened, and the well-padded cook waddled in from the larder with a large ham on a tray. When she saw him, there she almost dropped her burden.
“My lord. I did not know you were—you should have rung the bell, sir, and someone would tend to you.”
“Ah…yes.” Should have rung the bell, numbskull. Larkin, his valet, or Richards, the butler, would have come in answer to it. “What time is it, Mrs. Jakes?”
“Why, ’tis just eleven, my lord.” She gestured with a nod at the clock on the wall.
“In the morning?” He thought he’d better check. One could never be entirely sure, and he was still dressed in evening clothes.
The stout cook set her tray on the table and smiled indulgently. “Indeed it is, my lord.”
Robbins wouldn’t have smiled like that, he thought, staring again at her empty chair. She would have given him one of her looks that made him feel thirteen again, instead of three and thirty. Impertinent young woman, really. Jolly good thing she was gone. Her preposterous piety, communicated almost entirely with glances, chafed something chronic. No one other than his father had ever made him feel quite so inadequate. When Robbins made one of her disapproving faces, it read as if she, like his father, hoped to see someone else standing before her and, upon finding him there instead, could only give herself up to resigned disappointment.
“Did you require anything, my lord?” the cook asked.
Yes. But he could no longer remember what it was. Robbins probably would have known, he thought.
How dare she up and leave his household? He was accustomed to her being there. She might be a dreadful prig, but she was steady and dependable.
Odd how that happened—that she became a part of his life when she clearly did not want to be and he didn’t want her there either.
The cook, he realized, was still waiting to know what he wanted. Hastily searching for an excuse to be below stairs, he finally muttered, “Have you seen any mice about, Mrs. Jakes?”
“Mice?” She paled, her round knuckles hastily gathering bundles of skirt, swiping it aside to check around her feet.
“I thought I heard…no matter. Carry on as you were. Excellent work, Mrs. Jakes.” He turned and made his unsteady way back up to the main floor of the house.
Why had he gone down there? Well, if he should remember, he’d ring the bell. As Mrs. Jakes said, someone would tend to him. Didn’t matter who it was. Even though one woman was gone, he still had a house full of good servants. He was—whether his father had thought he was the best man for the post or not—the Earl of Everscham. As such, he had everything he could ever want at his disposal. What did the absence of one woman matter?
Cherishing this thought the way a little boy clutches at marbles won against a bitter enemy, Carver Danforthe went to his chamber, dropped to his bed, and jerked the counterpane over his head. Shutting out the sunny April day, he dismissed likewise a fear of sly, swift, brown-eyed creatures hiding in his walls, disapproving of him with a twitch of their tiny pink noses.
Two
Three days later
The trouble with wearing one’s best drawers was that nobody else ever got to admire them. As a young woman of frugal sensibilities, that unfortunate fact always grated on Molly’s nerves, but there were certain days that required the wearing of elegant underpinnings, even when she was the only soul who knew she wore them—and even though some would consider her “fast” just to be wearing drawers at all.
This was one such day. For Miss Molly Robbins was about to begin a new chapter and hopefully become that rarest of all things: a woman of independent means. Not to put too fine a point upon it, she was about to seize her world by the unmentionables.
Unfortunately, she must first find the courage to walk up a set of grand steps to the pilasters of Danforthe House and pull on that bell cord. Her fancy drawers weren’t about to do it for her.
Paused in the street, one hand resting on wrought iron railings, she looked up again, squinting against the rain. Here before her was the elegant Portland stone facade of the house in which she’d lived and worked for just over a dozen years. Within those walls she’d transformed from girl to young woman, emerging like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Perhaps not a butterfly, she reconsidered, more like a dull brown moth. Which was perfectly adequate for her purposes. Not everyone was meant to be a great beauty, and God had given her other talents, which, as her mother had said, would last longer than a pretty face.
Danforthe House looked different today, more forbidding, with dingy, tattered clouds snagged around the chimneys. No sun shone on the windows this morning, and they stared down at her—dark, hollow eyes in a ghostly white face. The master of that house was probably still fast asleep, his cheek stuck to a fat pillow, his mind wallowing in those empty dreams of the rich and idle. But he was in for a surprise. Molly had often thought a few sound shocks might do her former employer some benefit, and she was in a position now to be the purveyor of one such rousing poke in the breeches—another pinprick in his toe. The jaded rake might not be her ideal source of coin, but he was the only one she had. At least, he was the only one from whom she could accept a loan with no danger of him meddling in her spending of it.
Just a week ago he had made his offer, throwing a handful of spice into the bland pudding mixture she stirred with her good intentions.
“Well, Mouse,” he’d slurred to her, grabbing a newel post to maintain a semiperpendicular stance as he leaned over her, “ponder my offer and remember—it’s your last chance. I’ll never make another, and once you’re married to that farmer, I shan’t be able to help you.” He hiccupped, swaying dangerously before her in his fine evening clothes, a lick of dark curl falling over his brow. “The Earl of Everscham never makes propositions to lady’s maids, especially those with”—he waved one pointed finger at her nose—“damnably grim faces.” Then he turned to the side, tried to take a step up, and missed. They were at the foot of the kitchen stairs, and it was very late. He had come home from an evening at his club and stumbled down to the servants’ hall, looking for a glass of cordial water.
How lonely the earl had seemed to her. A lost boy. If she was not there to put her hands on his arm, he would have fallen chin first to the wooden stairs. As she steadied his leaning form, he’d put his gloved hand on her waist—contact that should never have been, after a conversation that should never have taken place. Between master and servant there should always be distance, but in that moment the space was breached, and neither corrected the error.
He had lowered his lips toward her.
It was not accidental; she was almost certain.
“Mouse,” he’d whispered, staring down at her mouth the way a beggar might stare at a pie shop window. “Do you never smile?”
“Not if it can be helped,” she’d replied.
His smoky eyes darkened, and the rugged lines of his face seemed accentuated, sharpened. “Smile at me now, Mouse. I insist. I command.”
“I cannot smile at you, my lord.”
“Why not?”
“I see nothing amusing to smile at in a grown man who doesn’t know his own limits.” Since she was leaving his house the next day to be married, Molly had seen no detriment to expressing her opinion. There might even be some worth in it, if he actually paid heed to her words, she thought.
A quizzical line had formed across his brow. He bent over her, one hand still claiming her waist with surprising steadiness for one in his cups.
“Mouse,” he said again.
“Yes, my lord?” She’d thought, for one awful moment, that he would ask for something else she could not give. Preparing herself to let him down—possibly the first and only woman ever to do so—she was saved the trouble when he said simply, “Do tell Larkin to make sure he tends my new boots with linseed oil.” Hiccup. “They squeak dreadfully.”
The spell was broken. Apparently looking at her had reminded the man of his boots.
She could still feel the fine cloth of the earl’s sleeve sliding beneath her palm as she’d let her hand linger on his arm. Could still remember the warmth of his flexing muscle.
Squeaking boots indeed!
He was a rake and a cad, tempting her with an offer she should have declined at once. Instead, here she was, having raced back to the wretched man.
Mouse, indeed! She’d teach him a thing or two about mice.
Unfortunately, there were very few things in life that Danforthe took seriously, and he may already have forgotten the promise he made in one of his capricious moods, when he was most certainly in liquor.
But Molly Robbins, sober and strong willed, had not forgotten.
That determined spirit growing inside would not allow her to ignore this chance. Although it should have been housed inside a man, seven foot tall with the shoulders of a prize seed ox, a most obstinate force lived in her lean frame and had suddenly decided to cause a vast deal of havoc, pushing her to be bold. There was nothing she could do about it now; the damage was done. One man was jilted at the altar, an entire village left to gossip about her, and her best friend, Lady Mercy Danforthe, thought she’d discarded her wits as well as her groom. If this plan fell through, she may as well throw herself off Tower Bridge and just hope she didn’t float like a cork, which is what happened to witches, according to her brothers, who insisted she was one just because she always knew what they were thinking. As if that should be hard to discern. Men’s minds were sheer gauze and just as impractical to make anything out of.
Well, this was it. Once again she’d come too far to go back now. Best get it over with.
About to take her first step up, she stopped again. No good. She simply couldn’t bring herself to use the entrance of the house, where the family and other important folk came and went. Instead, she spun around, ran back along the pavement, and dashed down the other, more familiar set of steps used by delivery men and milkmaids.
***
Slowly and with ominous smugness, like water dripping through a crack in the ceiling, unavoidable morning made itself felt and heard. The valet’s voice—which had probably been talking for some time before Carver became conscious of it—informed him of three things. It was ten o’clock, it was raining, and a young woman waited below for an appointment she seemed to think she had with the Earl of Everscham.
Carver cracked open one eye. “Young woman?”
He tried to think if he’d made any rash promises last night. It wouldn’t be the first time he woke to the discovery of a stray female in his proximity—one whose name, had he ever known it, escaped him, and whose face was only distantly familiar.
“It is, I believe, my lord, Miss Robbins.”
“Who?” He raised his head from the drool-dampened pillow.
“The Lady Mercy’s former maid.”
Blinking slowly, he tried to clear the haze that currently blurred his sight. Hadn’t his sister’s maid just left to be married?
Scraping fingertips leisurely over his rough cheek, he waited for the room to cease spinning, his thoughts to steady likewise. A heavy ache in his skull and the fact that he was still partially dressed in last night’s clothes would usually be reason enough to lower his head back to the pillow for a few more hours. Ten o’clock was an unearthly hour to be woken. But as his face prepared to meet the comfort of goose down again, his head suddenly jerked back. “Robbins? Are you quite sure?”
“Yes, my lord. She still goes by the name, so I would assume the marriage did not take place. Miss Robbins arrived here alone, in the carriage that previously took Lady Mercy into the country, but she was observed hovering outside the house for some time before she came to the door.”
His mind began to slot the pieces together, working sluggishly.
So the little Mouse was back. Aha! He knew that wedding would never go off. He’d warned his sister before she left for the country four days ago.
“I wouldn’t be at all shocked if Robbins called off this wedding at the last minute. If she has any wits about her, she would.”
But Carver’s smug pleasure at being proven right in this instance was short-lived, crowded out as the last pieces came together in his head and presented the full picture.
“Bloody hell,” he exhaled lavishly.
If the Mouse was downstairs waiting to see him, it could mean only that spur-of-the-moment suggestion he’d teasingly tossed her way was actually accepted as a solid offer. But surely she knew he wasn’t the sort to be taken with any degree of sincerity. She’d worked there long enough to know his personality by now, and there wasn’t much more he could do to discourage any good opinion of him. He still vividly recalled the incident when she had walked up to him in the hall and silently handed over two ladies’ slippers she’d recovered from a privet bush in the walled garden behind the house. She hadn’t said a word, just held them out for him, as if she knew it must be his fault and no one else’s.
Rain threw itself at his window now, like diamonds pelted by an angry, abandoned mistress. Carver felt the intense urge to curl up in bed again, shutting out the day and with it any unpleasantness he might otherwise be obliged to face. Alas, the moment he laid his head down again and shut his eyes, he’d see her small, frowning face with pinched lips, mutely confronting him. A quiet creature with a gloomy disposition, Robbins need apply only one very subtle tightening of the mouth to convey an entire barrage of sheer disgust at his behavior without a single word exhaled. As a boy, he’d endured nannies with less stern power in their stout bodies than whip-slender young Robbins had in the tiniest change of expression.
There was nothing else for it. The day and the Mouse must be faced. And his own stupidity explained away on drink, mischief, and…well, he was Carver Danforthe. Surely that was reason enough. It usually was for most people.
***
Having cast an unhappy gaze up and down her bedraggled length, the butler intoned somberly, “The earl is indisposed today, Robbins. You should have sent a note first and waited for a summons. Especially in this weather. What could you be thinking to traipse about in it?”
“I could not delay my visit another day, Mr. Richards. Life goes on whether it rains or not. You must excuse me, but I will wait here until his lordship’s lazy posterior is up and out of bed.”
The butler’s nostrils widened, and that haughty nose tipped so far back that she feared being sucked up by his horrified inhale. “I did not say he was still abed, Robbins.”
“I know what you said, Mr. Richards. I have two good ears and very shrewd powers of deduction.”
The earl must be suffering the ef
fects of a long night of carousing. Even on the best of days, he was seldom out of bed before noon, but she couldn’t risk the fellow leaving his house again before she caught him, so she was early. Better that than too late. Carver Danforthe could be a slippery creature when he wished to avoid a person, but he certainly wouldn’t slip by her today.
She dropped her backside—secretly clad in those emboldening fancy drawers—to the old bench by the fire and warmed her boots in the heat. “Unless you feel inclined to lift me up bodily and throw me out into the pouring rain, you’ll have to tell his lordship I’m here, won’t you, Mr. Richards?” She took a kerchief from her reticule and blew her nose soundly. “I daresay Lady Mercy won’t be too cross to hear how you forced me back out into this foul weather.”
Eventually one of the kitchen maids, risking the butler’s displeasure but on the cook’s urging, brought her a cup of tea. After a wait of forty-five minutes and two more cups of tea, she was taken upstairs, marched across the hall, and shown into the earl’s library.
“Mind your manners,” the butler muttered before closing the door behind her. It was as if he had to say something to put Molly in her place, but he wasn’t really certain what her place must be anymore. She barely knew herself.
Mind her manners? She was not the one who kept a person waiting this long. At least she was dry now—almost—and those cups of tea would keep her stomach from grumbling in the presence of the almighty Lord Sloth, Earl of Lazybones.
She looked across the room. A fire in the grate provided a wavering, bronze glow to one area of the library, but had evidently not been ignited long enough to completely chase away the damp chill. The curtains were only half-open, allowing a thin, lackluster shaft of foggy light to trickle across the blotter on his desk. But the man himself sat back, hiding his face in a shroud of darkness. A cup of tea waited before him, untouched, and she could just make out his hands spread upon the blotter, the ring on his little finger winking at her in the flickering shadows.
Miss Molly Robbins Designs a Seduction Page 2