by Juliana Gray
Olympia and his guest were waiting in the formal drawing room, which had once been the scene of a dramatic capture and beheading of a Royalist younger son during the Civil War (Stefanie had verified this legend herself with a midnight peek under the threadbare rugs, and though the light was dim, she was quite sure she could make out an admirably large stain on the floorboards, not five feet away from the fireplace), but which now contained only the pedestrian English ritual of a duke taking an indulgent late-morning glass of sherry with a knight.
Or so Stefanie had supposed, but when she marched past the footman (a princess always greeted potential adversaries with aplomb, after all) and into the ancient room, she found herself gazing instead at the most beautiful man in the world.
Stefanie staggered to a halt.
He stood with his sherry glass in one hand, and the other perched atop the giant lion-footed armchair that had been specially made a century ago for the sixth duke, who had grown corpulent with age. Without being extraordinarily tall, nor extraordinarily broad framed, the man seemed to dwarf this substantial piece of historic furniture, to cast it in his shadow. His radiant shadow, for he had the face of Gabriel: divinely formed, cheekbones presiding over a neat square jaw, blue eyes crinkled in friendly welcome beneath a high and guiltless forehead. He was wearing a dark suit of some kind, plain and unadorned, and the single narrow shaft of November sunshine from her uncle’s windows had naturally found him, as light clings to day, bathing his bare golden curls like a nimbus.
Stefanie squeaked, “Sir John?”
The room exploded with laughter.
“Ha-ha, my lad. How you joke.” The Duke of Olympia stepped forward from the roaring fire, wiping his eyes. “In fact, your new employer has the good fortune of traveling with company today. Allow me to present to you the real and genuine Sir John Worthington, Q.C., who has so kindly offered to take you into his chambers.”
A white-haired figure emerged dimly from the sofa next to the fire and spoke with the booming authority of a Roman senator. “Not nearly so handsome a figure as my friend, of course, but it saves trouble with the ladies.”
With supreme effort, Stefanie detached her attention from the golden apparition before her and fixed it upon the source of that senatorial voice.
Her heart, which had been soaring dizzily about the thick oaken beams holding up the ducal ceiling, sank slowly back to her chest, fluttered, and expired.
If Stefanie had been a painter of renown, and commissioned to construct an allegorical mural of British law, with a judge occupying the ultimate position in a decorous white wig and black silk robes, bearing the scales of justice in one hand and a carved wooden gavel in the other, she would have chosen exactly this man to model for her and instructed him to wear exactly that expression that greeted her now.
His eyes were small and dark and permanently narrowed, like a pair of suspicious currants. His forehead was broad and steep above a hedgerow brow. His pitted skin spoke of the slings and arrows of a life spent braced between the dregs of humanity and the righteous British public, and his mouth, even when proffering an introductory smile, turned downward at the ends toward some magnetic core of dole within him. Atop his wiry frame was arranged a stiff gray tweed jacket and matching plus fours, with each leg pressed to a crease so acute that Stefanie might have sliced an apple with it.
If Sir John Worthington had ever encountered trouble with the ladies, Stefanie judged, it was not without a significant intake of champagne beforehand. On both his part and hers.
Still, Stefanie was a princess of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, and what was more, she had never yet met a living being she had not been able to charm.
“Good morning, Sir John,” she began cheerfully, and tripped over the edge of the rug.
Time was supposed to slow down during accidents of this sort, or so Stefanie had heard, but all she knew was a flying blur and a full-body jolt and a sense of horrified bemusement at the sensation of threadbare carpet beneath her chin. A feminine gasp reached her ears, and she was nearly certain it wasn’t her own.
A pair of large and unadorned hands appeared before her, suspended between her face and the forest of chair and sofa legs. “I say. Are you quite all right?” asked a sonorous voice, which in its velvet baritone perfection could only belong to the Archangel.
Was it manly to accept his hand in rising? It was a marvelous hand, less refined than she might have expected, square and strong boned, with a row of uniform calluses along the palm. The fingers flexed gently in welcome, an image of controlled power.
Stefanie swallowed heavily.
“Quite all right,” she said, rather more breathily than she had planned. She gathered herself and jumped to her feet, ignoring the Archangel’s splendid hands. “New shoes, you know.”
A little giggle floated from the sofa.
Among the sounds that Stefanie could not abide, the female giggle ranked high: well above the drone of a persistent black fly, for example, and only just beneath the musical efforts of a debutante on a badly tuned piano.
She shot the sofa an accusing glance.
A young lady sat there, utterly dainty, perfectly composed, with a smug little smile turning up one corner of her mouth. She was beautiful in exactly the way that Stefanie was not: delicate features, soft dark eyes, curling black hair, rose-petal skin without the hint of a freckle. Though she reclined with languorous grace upon the sofa, one tiny pink silk slipper peeking from beneath her pink silk dress, she was clearly of petite proportions, designed to make the long-shanked Stefanies of the world appear as racetrack colts.
Except that Stefanie herself was no longer a young lady, was she?
“Charlotte, my dear,” said Sir John, “it is hardly a matter for amusement.”
“Nothing is a matter of amusement for you, Uncle John,” said his dear Charlotte, with a sharp laugh.
Stefanie expected Sir John’s face to empurple at this saucy (if accurate) assessment, but instead he heaved a sigh. “Mr. Thomas, I have the honor to introduce to you my ward, Lady Charlotte Harlowe, who lives with me in Cadogan Square, and who will, I’m sure, have as much advice for you as she does for me.”
Lady Charlotte held out her spotless little hand. “Mr. Thomas. How charming.”
Stefanie strode forward and touched the ceremonial tips of her fingers. “Enchanted, Lady Charlotte.”
“Indeed,” said Sir John. “And I believe you’ve already made acquaintance with the Marquess of Hatherfield.”
“Your friend is a marquess?”
“Yes. Hatherfield practically lives in our drawing room, don’t you, my boy?” Sir John looked grimly over her shoulder.
Stefanie turned. “Lord Hatherfield?”
She spoke with solemn composure, but her head was spinning. The Archangel was a marquis? Good God! What other gifts could possibly have been lavished on his head by an adoring Creator? Did he spin gold from his fingertips?
A marquis. Practically living in his drawing room, the old fellow had said.
God help her.
The Archangel Hatherfield grinned widely and shook her hand. The calluses tickled pleasantly against her palm. “It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Thomas. I admire your pluck enormously, entering into Sir John’s chambers like this. I daresay you charm snakes in your spare time?”
“Oh, I gave that up long ago,” said Stefanie. “I kept tripping over the basket and losing the snake.”
Hatherfield blinked at her once, twice. Then he threw back his head and howled with laughter. “Oh, Thomas,” he said, wiping his eyes, “you’re a dashed good sport. I like you already. You’ve got to take good care of this one, Sir John. Don’t let him near the cyanide tablets like the last poor clerk.”
“Really, Hatherfield,” said Sir John, in a grumbly voice.
“Well, well. This is charming,” said Lady Charlotte, looking anything but charmed. “I look forward to hearing Mr. Thomas’s witticisms all the way back to London. How lucky we are.”
The Duke of Olympia, who had been standing silently at the mantel throughout the exchange, spoke up at last. “Indeed, Lady Charlotte. I do believe that you will profit enormously from Mr. Thomas’s company, both on the journey to London and, indeed”—he examined the remains of his sherry, polished it off, set the empty glass on the mantel, and smiled his beneficent ducal smile—“in your own home.”
Lady Charlotte’s already pale skin lost another layer of transparent rose. “In our home?” she asked, incredulous, turning to Sir John. “Our home?” she repeated, as she might say in my morning bath?
Sir John, impervious Sir John, iron instrument of British justice, passed a nervous hand over the bristling gray thicket of his brow. “Did I not mention it before, my dear?”
“You did not.” She pronounced each word discretely: You. Did. Not.
“Well, well,” said Hatherfield. “Jolly splendid news. I shall look very much forward to seeing you, Mr. Thomas, when Sir John can spare you. You will spare him from time to time, won’t you, Sir John?”
“I will try,” said Sir John, rather more faintly than Stefanie might have expected.
She was not, however, paying all that much attention to Sir John and his ward. Hatherfield had fixed her with his glorious blue-eyed gaze in that last sentence, and she was swimming somewhere in the middle of him, stroking with abandon, sending up a joyful spray of . . .
“Nonsense,” said Lady Charlotte. “Clerks are meant to work, aren’t they, Sir John? It costs a great deal to educate a young man in the practice of the law, and it must be paid somehow.”
“Why, dear Lady Charlotte,” said Hatherfield, without so much as a flicker of a glance in her direction, still gazing smilingly into Stefanie’s transfixed face, “you speak as if you’ve ever done a moment’s useful work in your life.”
A strangled noise came from the throat of the Duke of Olympia. He covered it quickly, with a brusque, “In any case, my friends, I see by the clock that you will miss your train if you delay another moment. I believe young Mr. Thomas’s trunk has already been loaded on the chaise. I suggest we bid one another the customary tearful farewell and part our affectionate ways.”
Hustle and bustle ensued, as it always did when Olympia issued a ducal decree. Stefanie’s hand was shaken, her overcoat found, her steps urged out the front hall and into the chill November noontide, where the Duke of Olympia’s elegant country chaise sat waiting with pawing steeds. To the left, the landscape dropped away into jagged slate cliffs, awash with foam, roaring with the distant crash of the angry sea.
“Cheerful prospect, what?” said Hatherfield.
“Barbaric,” said Lady Charlotte. She reached the open door of the chaise and stood expectantly.
Stefanie, feeling lighthearted and therefore (as her sisters well knew) rather mischievous, grasped Lady Charlotte’s fingers to assist her into the chaise.
A little gasp escaped her ladyship, an entirely different sort of gasp from the one that had greeted Stefanie’s arrival on the threadbare rug of Olympia’s Devon drawing room. She jerked her hand away as if stung.
“Is something the matter, Lady Charlotte?” asked Lord Hatherfield solemnly.
She raised one delicately etched eyebrow in his direction. “Only that I require your assistance into the vehicle, Hatherfield.”
Hatherfield handed her in with a smile, but what Stefanie noticed most was not that golden smile, nor the unexpectedly gut-churning sight of his strong fingers locked with those of Lady Charlotte, but the expression on her ladyship’s face. It had changed instantly at the point of contact, from sharp hauteur into something softer, something dulcet and melting and almost longing, something rather akin to . . .
Adoration.
The Marquess of Hatherfield swung himself into the carriage and tapped the roof with his cane. In deference to both Lady Charlotte and her august guardian, he took the backward-facing seat, next to young Mr. Thomas.
Mr. Thomas. Mr. Stephen Thomas. He glanced down at the plain wool legs next to his. Rather skinny legs, at that; particularly in comparison to his own, which were thick and hard, the quadriceps hewed into massive curves by nearly a decade spent powering racing shells through the rivers and lakes of England in an attempt to outpace the skulking shadows in his memory.
Yes, Mr. Thomas’s legs had a curiously slender cast, beside his.
Which was only to be expected, of course, and not curious at all. For Hatherfield had gathered at a glance what the supposedly keen-eyed Sir John and the reputedly sharp-witted Lady Charlotte had, by all appearances, not begun to suspect.
It was quite obvious, really.
Mr. Thomas’s legs were slender because he was a she.
A brash, clever, amusing, lovely, and elegant she. How she’d sprung right back up to her feet after her humiliating fall, how she’d joked about it afterward. A she for the ages.
The Marquess of Hatherfield straightened his gloves, settled back into his cushioned seat, and smiled out the window.
ONE
Old Bailey
July 1890
The prosecution called Sir John Worthington to the witness box at the end of a brutally hot afternoon, just before adjournment.
Stefanie looked up at the face of her former employer. Though she’d seen him just this morning over breakfast, he seemed to have aged a decade. His skin had grown pallid, and shone with perspiration in the heavy atmosphere of the courtroom. Even his magnificent whiskers drooped in exhaustion. She lifted her pen over the paper before her, as if that little act might somehow have a similar effect on Sir John’s defeated spine.
“Sir John,” said the counsel for the prosecution, brusque and rather offensively energetic in the face of the withering heat, “how would you characterize your relationship to the accused?”
Sir John cleared his throat, and his spine straightened a miraculous inch or two. He said, in a voice accustomed to ringing through courtrooms, “I would characterize him as a friend of the family, a close friend.”
“As a second son, perhaps?”
“I have no first son.”
The prosecutor smiled. “As a kind of protégé, then. A young man who spent a great deal of time in your home.”
“Yes.”
Stefanie’s clenched organs relaxed a fraction. Of course Sir John knew how to answer these questions. Simple, without elaboration. Give the prosecutor nothing to pounce on.
After all, hadn’t she herself learned all this in Sir John’s own chambers?
“Would you say you had a fatherly affection for him, then?”
“Certainly I had an affection for him.”
The prosecutor turned to where the Duke of Southam sat, white-haired and unsmiling, his cane propped beside him, in the second row of benches. He stretched out his arm, palm upward, and stretched his face into an expression of confusion. “But the accused already had a father, did he not?”
“Yes, he did.”
“And yet Lord Hatherfield breakfasted at your house every morning, did he not, instead of that of his father and stepmother.”
“He often breakfasted at my house.”
“So you must have been familiar with the state of Lord Hatherfield’s mind. With the nature of his relationship with his parents.” The prosecutor inserted an emphasis on the word parents.
“We did not discuss Lord Hatherfield’s family.”
“Did you have the impression, then, that relations between Lord Hatherfield and his parents were not warm?”
“I had the impression that Lord Hatherfield was a dutiful son.”
“But not an affectionate one.”
“I can have no opinion on that matter.”
The prosecutor’s eyes narrowed slightly with frustration. He turned around and, in a sweeping gesture, brought his hand to rest on a stack of papers at his table. “But can we not conclude that since Lord Hatherfield lived entirely on his own, took his breakfast each morning in the home of Sir John Worthington, and by all accounts saw
almost nothing of his parents, that relations between them were not only not warm, but in fact quite cold? That Lord Hatherfield was not—as you say—a dutiful son, but rather a hard-hearted and even unfilial son, who paid his parents little attention and rendered them even less service?”
Mr. Fairchurch shot to his feet at Stefanie’s side. “My lord! This is pure speculation on the part of my learned colleague.”
“Proceed with your questioning, Mr. Duckworth,” said the judge, “and stick to the facts, if you please.”
“I beg your pardon.” Mr. Duckworth patted his brow. “As a father myself, I find the subject close to my heart. Sir John, I will rephrase the question, in deference to my learned colleague’s delicate sensibilities. Where would you judge that the Marquess of Hatherfield spent the chiefest part of his time: at your house, or at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Southam, God rest her soul?”
Sir John looked neither at the duke nor at Hatherfield. He fixed his eyes on Mr. Duckworth, and his expression no longer sagged under the oppressive weight of the late July heat, but had hardened into a mask. “At my house.”
Stefanie’s fingers grew damp around her pen. She glanced at Hatherfield in his box. He stood with his usual expression of mild interest, hands resting lightly on the rail, a small smile curling the corner of his beautiful mouth. As if they were not discussing his father and stepmother at all, but rather two strangers whose names escaped him at the moment.
Mr. Duckworth smiled and turned to the jury. “Thank you, Sir John. I believe that settles the question of Lord Hatherfield’s filial affection to the court’s confident satisfaction.”
TWO
Cadogan Square, London
November 1889
Among the many virtues owned by Her Royal Highness Stefanie, youngest Princess of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, the earliness of her hours was not conspicuous.
“One final admonition,” Miss Dingleby had said, sharp of eye and sharp of voice, that last morning in Devon. “You are now a member of the professional classes. Early to bed, early to rise.”