SLIGHTLY WICKED

by Mary Balogh

  Judith reached out blindly for the nearest windowsill and clung to it.

  “Perhaps it escaped your notice,” Lord Rannulf was saying—still in a harsh growl, “that the lady was unwilling.”

  “This is rather extreme, is it not, Bedwyn?” Horace said, trying unsuccessfully to brush off the hand that held him by both coat lapels. “She was being coy rather than unwilling. We both know that. .. Oofff!”

  Lord Rannulf had drawn back his free hand and driven his fist into Horace’s stomach.

  “What we both know,” he said in a voice that suggested his teeth were half clenched, “is that to call you a worm, Effingham, would be to dishonor the insect kingdom.”

  “If you fancy her yourself... Oofff!” Horace sagged forward as another blow landed to his stomach, but Lord Rannulf’s left hand held him firmly in place.

  “You can be thankful,” he said, “that we are on my grandmother’s land with a garden party in progress. It would otherwise give me the greatest pleasure to send Miss Law away and give you the thrashing you deserve. I guarantee that you would end up unconscious and bloody on the ground here, your features permanently rearranged on your face.”

  He dropped his hand and Horace, looking visibly shaken, stood away from the tree and started to restore his coat and shirt to rights.

  “You think so, Bedwyn?” he said with studied nonchalance. “Dear, dear, and all over a wench who is simply panting for the attentions of anything in breeches.”

  Lord Rannulf clearly kept in mind that the scandal of a fight must not ruin Lady Beamish’s garden party. Not one of his blows was aimed at Horace’s face. All were directed at his body above the waist. Judith clung more tightly to the windowsill and watched, only half noticing that Horace, though he waved his fists ineffectually a few times, did not land even one blow. It was not a fight, though Horace was free to make it into one if he so chose. It was punishment. It ended only when Horace was on his hands and knees on the ground, retching horribly into the grass between his hands.

  “You may wish,” Lord Rannulf said, his voice only slightly breathless, “to excuse yourself from staying for dinner, Effingham. It would make me sick to see you at my grandmother’s table. You will stay away from Miss Law in the future, do you hear me? Even when I am not in the vicinity to observe you pursuing her. I will find out, and next time I will thrash you to within an inch of your life . .. z/you are fortunate. Get out of my sight now.”

  Horace stumbled to his feet, clutching his stomach with one hand. He was pale to the point of greenness. But he looked at Lord Rannulf before turning and stumbling away.

  “I’ll get even with you for this,” he said. He switched his gaze to Judith. “I’ll get you for this.” His eyes blazed with hatred.

  And then, finally, he was gone, and Judith realized that her knuckles were white from the death grip she had on the windowsill and that her stomach was fluttering and her knees shaking. Lord Rannulf was straightening his clothes and then turning to her. It was only at that moment that she realized she should have been using the time to put herself to rights, but she still could not release her hold on the sill.

  “I am sorry you were a witness to that violence,” he said. “I should have sent you back to the house first, but you would not wish to be seen like this and have everyone knowing or guessing what had happened.”

  He came inside the summerhouse when she did not reply.

  “You were putting up a fierce fight,” he said. “You have spirit.”

  He took her hand from the sill then, prising her fingers gently away from it, took it on one of his, and chafed it with the other. His knuckles were reddened, she could see.

  “It will not happen again,” he said. “I know men like Effingham. They are bullies with women who will not worship and adore them and cowards with men who call them to account. I do assure you he fears me and will heed my warning.”

  “I did not invite any of that,” she said, her voice shaking quite beyond her control. “I did not come here with him.”

  “I know,” he said. “I watched you go around the side of the house, and then I saw him go after you. It took me a few minutes to extricate myself from the company I was in and to disappear without notice. I beg your pardon that I came so late.”

  She could see her hair—on both sides of her face. Her dress, she saw when she looked downward, had been pulled forward in the struggle so that its modest neckline now revealed the tops of her breasts. She lifted her free hand to pull it up and discovered that her hand was shaking so badly that she could not even grasp the fabric with it.

  “Come.” He took that hand in his too and lowered her to sit on the bench. He sat beside her, still holding one of her hands, his arm pressing reassuringly against her shoulder. “Never mind your appearance for a few minutes. No one else will come here. Rest your head on my shoulder if you wish. Breathe in the peace of the surroundings.”

  She did as he suggested, and they sat like that for five, perhaps even ten minutes, not speaking, not moving. How could two apparently similar men be so different? she wondered. Lord Rannulf had issued an invitation to her after the stagecoach accident, a most improper one, and had proceeded to act upon it. What made him different from Horace, then? But she had answered the question already. And she still believed her own answer, perhaps now more than ever. He would have ridden on alone that day if she had said no. He would have left her at the posting inn if she had said no to the move to the one by the market green. He would have allowed her to sleep on the settle in the private dining room there if she had said no. No, actually he would have given her the bed and slept on the settle himself. She knew he would have. Lord Rannulf Bedwyn was quite prepared to flirt with and even sleep with a willing woman, but he would never ever force himself upon an unwilling one.

  And yet he would dishonor marriage vows by taking mistresses? It did not fit what her instinct told her of him. But she was—oh, of course she was—in love with him, and so it was natural that she would idealize him. She must not begin to believe that he was perfect.

  She lifted her head and drew her hand from his and leaned away from the support of his shoulder. He did not turn his head, she noticed gratefully, while she adjusted the bodice of her dress and, in the absence of a brush, smoothed her hair back as best as she could, secured it to the back of her head with as many hairpins as she could find, and shoved the whole mess beneath her cap and then her bonnet.

  “I am ready to go back now,” she said, getting to her feet. “Thank you, Lord Rannulf. I do not know how I am ever going to repay you. I seem always to be in your debt.” She held out her right hand to him. It was quite steady, she was proud to see.

  He took it in both his own again as he stood. “If you wish,” he said, “you may excuse yourself from dinner and the entertainment afterward by saying you are indisposed. I will see to it that you are sent home in my grandmother’s carriage and will even send a servant to stay with you if you fear you will be molested there. Just say the word.”

  Ah, it was tempting. She did not know how she would be able to sit down to dinner and retain her composure and converse with whoever was seated to either side of her. She did not know how she would be able to bear seeing Lord Rannulf seated beside Julianne, as he surely would be, talking and laughing with her. But she was a lady, she reminded herself. And though she was only a lowly member of Uncle George’s family, she was a member nonetheless.

  “Thank you,” she said, “but I will stay.”

  He grinned suddenly. “I like that way you have of lifting your chin as if inviting the world to bring on its worst,” he said. “It is at such moments that the real Judith Law steps onto the stage, I believe.”

  He lifted her hand to his lips, and for a moment she could have wept over the brief loveliness of the intimacy. Instead she smiled.

  “I suppose,” she said, “there is a little of Claire Campbell in Judith Law.”

  She would not take his arm, though he offered it. The occasion
had drawn them close, but there was no more to their amity than that. He had saved her and comforted her because he was a gentleman. She must not refine on his behavior more than that. She must not cling to him. She clasped the sides of her skirt and plodded up the slope toward the stables.

  “I will go back the way I came,” she said when they reached the top. “You must go a different way, Lord Rannulf.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. And he strode off toward the front of the stables, leaving her feeling unreasonably bereft. Had she expected him to argue?

  She hastened past the paddock and the kitchen gardens, shuddering at the realization that she could be returning under vastly different circumstances if he had not noticed Horace following her. It did not bear thinking of.

  But why had he noticed? She had been convinced that she had slipped away without anyone’s seeing her. Yet Horace had seen and Lord Rannulf had seen. Perhaps after all she was not quite as invisible as she had begun to believe.

  Chapter XIII

  Rannulf was seated between Lady Effingham and Mrs. Hardinge at dinner, his grandmother having been more discreet in her table arrangements than Lady Effingham was at Harewood. It was a relief to him, even though the one lady talked about nothing but the travails of having six daughters to bring out when one would like nothing better than to remain on one’s own country estate all year long, and the other tittered and commiserated with him over the fact that he had to keep two matrons company when he would doubtless far prefer to be seated by someone younger and prettier.

  “Might I even say,” she suggested, arching him a sidelong glance, “a particular someone?”

  Miss Effingham, farther down the table, on the same side as Rannulf, talked animatedly with Roy-Hill and Law, her table companions. A few times Lady Effingham leaned forward and wanted to know the cause of a particular burst of laughter.

  “Lord Rannulf and I and everyone else feel very isolated from the merriment, dearest,” she said on one of those occasions.

  Judith Law sat on the other side of the table and conversed quietly with her uncle on one side and Richard Warren on the other. Looking at her now, one would never guess that she had endured such a terrifying experience just a few hours ago. She was far more the lady than her aunt, despite the latter’s elegance and surface sophistication. Like the other ladies from Harewood, she had changed in a room allotted to her upstairs. She was wearing the same cream and gold silk dress she had worn at the Rum and Puncheon on the second evening. He remembered it for its simple elegance, which at the time he had thought deliberately understated, like the rest of her garments. It now had panels of a well-coordinated darker cream fabric set into the sides, a band of the same material lining the neckline so that far less of her bosom was visible, and an almost nonexistent waistline. She wore a fine, lace-trimmed cap, which, quite predictably, covered her hair.

  How many of those seated about the table, he wondered, though they had been acquainted with her for a week, realized that she was below thirty years of age? Or knew the color of her hair—or of her eyes for that matter?

  One thing had become distressingly clear to him in the course of the day. He could not—he really could not—marry the Effingham chit. He would be insane within a week of their marriage. It was not just that she was silly and empty-headed. It was more that she was vain and totally self-absorbed. And her only reason for trying to attach his interest was that he was the son of a duke and a wealthy man. She had made no attempt whatsoever to get to know him as a person. She probably never would. He might spend fifty years married to a woman who would never know—or care—that he had spent the last ten years denying the guilt he felt over not doing his duty and entering upon a career in the church as his father had planned for him and instead had lived a life of aimlessness and occasional dissipation. Or that very recently he had decided to give his life direction and meaning by becoming a knowledgeable, involved, responsible, perhaps even progressive and compassionate landlord.

  The dinner table conversation did not demand much of his brain. He was able to do a great deal of thinking at the same time.

  He could not marry Miss Effingham.

  Neither could he disappoint his grandmother. Was he the only one who could see the rigidity of her bearing and the deep lines on either side of her mouth, both indications of suppressed pain? Or the brightness of her eyes that masked bone-weariness? And yet this garden party extending into a dinner and entertainment for the Harewood guests had been her idea. Rannulf glanced several times at her with fond exasperation.

  And there was Judith Law. He wondered if she realized that two men had panted equally for her this afternoon. To his infinite shame he had wanted her quite as desperately as Effingham had. Pale and disheveled and bareheaded, she had looked achingly appealing, and her trembling bewilderment had invited him to comfort her in other ways than the one he had chosen.

  He had sat beside her in the summerhouse, imposing rigid control on his own urges, concentrating every effort of his will on giving her the quiet, passive comfort he had sensed she needed and castigating himself at every moment with the knowledge that he was not far different from Effingham.

  He had always seen women as creatures designed for his personal pleasure and satisfaction, to be taken and used and paid and forgotten. Except for his sisters, of course, and other ladies, and all women of virtue, and even those few of questionable virtue who had said no to him.

  The trouble for women as voluptuously gorgeous as Judith Law must be that men would almost always look on them with lust and perhaps never see the person behind the goddess.

  His grandmother interrupted his rambling thoughts by rising from her place and inviting the other ladies to join her in the drawing room. It was tempting after they left to settle in to the port and congenial male conversation for an indefinite length of time, especially since he suspected that Sir George Effingham and a number of the other gentlemen would be quite happy to spend the rest of the evening at the table. However, duty called and he had promised himself that he would play host and lift some of the social burden from his grandmother’s shoulders. He stood up after a mere twenty minutes, and the gentlemen followed him to the drawing room.

  He had no intention of having the same few young ladies as usual entertain the gathering with their pianoforte playing, Miss Effingham inevitably keeping the instrument all to herself once she had occupied the bench, with him as her page-turner.

  “We will take tea,” he announced, “after which we will all entertain one another. AM of us who are—let me see—all of us who are below the age of thirty.”

  There was a chorus of protests, most of them male, but Rannulf held up one hand and laughed.

  “Why should the ladies be the ones expected to display all the talents and accomplishments?” he asked. “We all, surely, can do something that will entertain a gathering of this nature.”

  “Oh, I say,” Lord Braithwaite cried, “no one would wish to hear me sing, Bedwyn. When I joined the choir at school, the singing master told me that the kindest comparison he could think of for my voice was a cracked foghorn. And there was an end to my singing days.”

  There was general laughter.

  “There will be no exceptions,” Rannulf said. “There are more ways to entertain than by singing.”

  “What are you going to do, Bedwyn?” Peter Webster asked. “Or are you going to exempt yourself on the grounds that you are the master of ceremonies?”

  “You may wait and see,” Rannulf told him. “Shall we say ten minutes for tea before we have the tray removed?”

  He went first. It seemed only fair. He had learned a few conjuring tricks over the years and had been fond of entertaining Morgan and her governess with them. He performed several of them now, foolish tricks like making a coin disappear from his hand and then reappear out of Miss Cooke’s right ear or Branwell Law’s waistcoat pocket, and making a handkerchief suddenly transform itself into a pocket watch or a lady’s fan. He had, of course, the a
dvantage of being able to plan well ahead of time. His audience exclaimed in wonder and delight and applauded with enthusiasm, just as if he were a master of the art.

  A few of the guests had to be coaxed and one of them— Sir Dudley Roy-Hill—refused categorically to make an idiot of himself, as he phrased it, but it was amazing over the next hour to discover what varied and sometimes impressive talents had lain hidden through the first half of the house party. Predictably, the ladies entertained with music, most either vocal or on the pianoforte, one—Miss Hannah Warren—on the drawing room harp that Rannulf could never remember hearing played before. Law sang a woeful ballad in a pleasant tenor voice, and Warren sang a Baroque duet with one of his sisters. Tanguay recited Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with such passionate sensibility that the ladies burst into appreciative applause almost before the last word was out of his mouth. Webster did a creditable imitation of a cossack dance he had once seen on his travels, bending his knees and crossing his arms and kicking his feet and leaping and singing his own accompaniment and succeeding in convulsing both himself and his audience in helpless laughter before collapsing in an inelegant heap on the carpet. Braithwaite, perhaps encouraged by the reception of his choirboy story, told three more tall tales about his school days, all at his own expense, embroidering the details with humorous exaggeration until the ladies and even a few gentlemen were mopping at their eyes while still laughing.

  “Ah,” Lady Effingham said with a sigh when Braithwaite sat down, “that is everyone. I could continue watching and listening for another hour. But what a splendid idea, Lord Rannulf. We have all been royally entertained. Indeed I—”

  But Rannulf held up a staying hand.

  “Not so, ma’am,” he said. “Not everyone. There is still Miss Law.”

  “Oh, I really do not believe Judith will wish to make a spectacle of herself,” her fond aunt said hastily.