“Pray for the devil to claim his spawn,” Sir Malcolm muttered as he sent the doctor on his way.
Sir Malcolm never did ride toward the inn. When the captain’s note was delivered, he sent his wife to search the girl’s room. She’d packed a valise; no one came and forced her to run off with a blackguard extortionist. He tore up the note. When the messenger came from the magistrate, babbling about how Captain Anders was dead, his daughter Lucinda responsible, Sir Malcolm replied, “I have no daughter.” And when they brought her battered, frozen body home, he almost had them deliver her to the poorhouse or the church or the livery stable, he cared not which. Only his wife’s whispered, “What will the neighbors think?” kept him from slamming the door on the poor fool of a magistrate who’d spent hours searching the countryside for the jade.
Lady Edwina looked at her husband across her daughter’s still form in the big bed. “No one will have her now, not even Halbersham.”
“No matter, you heard the doctor. If she hasn’t woken by now, she likely won’t. If the fever does not carry her off, she’ll waste away unless someone spoons sustenance into her. Likely a futile effort anyway,” he said. Sir Malcolm glared over at Lucinda’s old nanny. “So we need not try too hard. Is that clear?”
Lady Edwina wrung her thin hands. “Oh, the shame of it all. There’s no dressing this up in clean linen, not with half the county hearing about it already. What will I tell our friends?”
“Nothing. We simply won’t receive anyone for the week or two this should take. Then we can go away.”
They left the darkened room, discussing the merits of Jamaica versus Greece. Only Lucinda’s old nanny stayed behind, weeping.
Chapter Two
Kieren Somerfield, sixth and possibly last earl of Stanford, was a tidy person. He conscientiously wiped his Hessians on a faded Turkey runner in the marbled hall of Stanford House, Grosvenor Square, and carefully draped his caped greatcoat over the back of a Queen Anne chair that was missing an arm. Sweeping the lamp left burning there for him in an arc, he made sure everything in the grand entry was in order: no valuable pictures on the wall, no ornate candle sconces, no Chinese urns filled with hothouse flowers. Kerry shrugged his broad shoulders. Poverty as usual. He made his way to the study at the rear of the house, one of the few rooms in the mansion currently in use.
’Twas easier to keep clean this way, more considerate of Demby, his man-of-all-jobs, few-of-them-by-choice. The earl owed his only servant so many months’ back wages, Demby must be staying on for room and board. That and the scarcity of positions for a groom whose hands shook so badly he took half a day to tack up a horse, or a valet so palsied ’twould be a death sentence to ask him to shave you. The neckcloths Demby tied more likely ended under the earl’s ear, and his cooking more often landed on the kitchen floor than on the table. The man had sworn off drink, though, and did manage to get Stanford’s clothes pressed, his mail delivered, his bed made up, the stable mucked out, and his watch redeemed from the jeweler when the dibs were in tune.
The earl hadn’t known the hour for some weeks now. It was obviously time to get his life in order.
In his study Kerry rekindled the fire, then gathered scraps of paper from his desk, his drawers, his pockets. Fastidious as ever, he made neat stacks of the letters and notes.
The first pile was for tradesmen’s bills, complete with dunning notices for payments in arrears: the grocer, the vintner, his clubs, a coal dealer. A great percentage of these bills were from the finest tailors, bootmakers, and hatters in London. The earl was very particular in his dress, particularly for a man with pockets to let.
The next bundle was for debts of honor. He smoothed out the crumpled notes from his pocket and penciled in some figures on others. These were gaming debts, vowels, chits—fortunes owed to other members of the sporting class. Since inheriting his father’s honors, along with the fifth earl’s debts and mortgages, Kerry had made his living by his wits. They’d gone begging, too. His horses were like to trip at the gate, aces seemed to have a magnetic attraction to his opponents, and the dice could be round, for all the mains he hit. Hell, these days if he wagered the sun would rise on the morrow, likely the world would end today. But somebody would be around to collect, he was sure.
He got up to pour himself a brandy from the decanter left on the mantel. When he got back, the stack of vouchers on his desk looked even taller. Taller than his own six feet, taller than a mountain. Kerry swallowed down his glass and tried, unsuccessfully, to recall if there was any gudgeon on earth who owed him money.
The next batch of papers were all official-looking documents. The earl did not need to read the letters from his bank enumerating his mortgages or the interest payments due. The bank wrote to him often enough that he had the figures memorized. As for his account balance, well, the bank did not waste postage when there was nothing to report. Downy birds, those banking fellows, his lordship thought, pouring another glassful. They watched every last groat.
The final pile consisted of letters, which took another brandy to open and read. His steward at his seat in Wiltshire reported two more of the few remaining tenants—and their rents—moved off to better-yielding lands, half the fall harvest lost to flooding, and the roof of Stanford Abbey itself about to collapse.
The dowager Lady Stanford, Kerry’s loving mother, wrote a brief, affectionate letter in which she fondly recalled that Kerry’s properties were in disrepair, the earldom was in danger of extinction, and his way of life was not conducive to a doting mama’s mental well-being, but she was, as always, contributing what assistance she could. Of course, those were not the exact words she used. Hers were more like gudgeon, popinjay, and wastrel, with demands he marry an heiress posthaste, before she was forced to pawn her last piece of jewelry just to keep a roof over her aching head. And, by the way, she’d concluded, all of the housemaids had left because Aunt Clara was talking to Uncle Nigel again.
Uncle Nigel, his father’s younger brother, had gone overboard on a fishing expedition when Kerry was barely seven, some twenty years ago, Aunt Clara was positive Nigel’s spirit haunted Stanford Abbey, waiting for her to join him in the Great Beyond. As expected, Aunt Clara’s letter was full of Uncle Nigel’s advice and pronouncements: Nigel thinks the roof tiles can be repaired, Nigel thinks the south quarter fields can be drained into a ditch across the home woods. If Uncle Nigel knew so much, Kerry wondered, how come he never learned to swim? And why the deuce did he have to leave his widow without a feather to fly with? In Kerry’s poor, dilapidated nest, no less.
Aunt Clara’s final remark, that his mother was keeping company with a smuggler, he ignored. The Countess of Stanford and a personage called Goldy Flint? Even Kerry’s befuddled mind rebelled at that notion. The woman was as queer as Dick’s hatband, that was all. The two widows cordially loathed each other, giving Kerry another excuse to avoid visits to the ancestral pile, if overwhelming debts and impossible demands were not enough.
The papers were all neatly arranged, corner to corner across the desk. On the top of the piles of bills and notices the earl placed his assets: the last bottle of brandy, a handful of coins from his pocket, and some lint. He opened the bottom drawer of the desk. He had no way of repaying his debts, no stake to make another wager, nothing to send to keep the abbey from crumbling into dust. No heir, no hope. He did have his father’s prized dueling pistols. Kerry tenderly placed one of the silver-sided Mantons in the exact center of the desk.
* * *
“Drat. He said this task was hard, not impossible.”
“Demby? Is that you, man?” The Earl of Stanford squinted into the shadows at the other end of the room.
“And I should have known better than to believe that devil. There isn’t a male anywhere a girl can trust, living or dead.”
“Demby, if you’ve brought one of your dollymops into my study, I’ll—” Kerry’s words were cut off by a cough as his nose and throat were assailed by an awful stench. “Gads, something mu
st have died in the chimney. I wonder if the sweeps will come on credit,” he muttered as he went to open a window. The smell of rotten eggs and boiling tar abated somewhat, mingling with London’s usual rank odors. He took a deep breath of the cold night air to clear his eyes and his lungs—and his head.
“That’s right, enjoy the cold now; it’s the last you’ll know for a long, long while if I can’t do my job.”
Kerry spun around. There was a woman in the room, and what a woman. This wasn’t one of Demby’s barmaids either, not if he was any judge of the demimondaine. This luscious creature had to be one of the highest-flying birds of paradise on three continents. She was small, but shaped like a goddess, with flame-colored hair trailing down her back. The shimmering red-gold gown she wore was so sheer, he could see the nipples painted to match her lips and her nails and her toes. Gads, the brazen baggage was barefoot. Kerry licked his suddenly dry lips. “I am sorry, chérie—you’ll never know how sorry—but I just cannot afford your services tonight. I do admire your, ah, initiative, though…”
“Afford my…?” She gasped, which served to lower the neckline of her gown into near nonexistence. “You think I’m a…Oh, my, I’ll never succeed.”
“Au contraire, my dear, I think you’ll be a bigger success than Little Harry. You could have every buck in London at your feet in a sennight, if that’s your goal.”
“Well, it isn’t. My assignment is to lead you to the path of righteousness!”
Kerry laughed till tears came to his eyes. “Congratulations, my dear. That’s the cleverest remark I’ve ever heard come out of a whore’s mouth.”
“I am not a…what you said, and this is not a laughing matter, my lord. Your whole life, for all eternity, could be decided tonight, and mine along with it. I just have to get you to renounce your life of sin.”
“You? Ma’am, I beg to tell you, you make a very unlikely evangelical. Why, you could lead the Archbishop of Canterbury straight to hell with one blink of those incredible green eyes.”
“Me? Drab little Lucinda Faire?”
“Fishing for compliments, are you? Drab? Have you looked at yourself recently?”
“Well, no. You see, I have this problem with mirrors. I can tell, however, that this dress is like nothing I’ve ever owned.” She ran her hands along the silky material over her thighs. His lordship didn’t breathe again until she murmured, “It feels rather nice.”
Rather nice? Kerry swallowed, hard.
Lucinda was twirling one of those fiery curls in her hand. “And I am sure my hair was never so red, just a streaky kind of blond. And it never took a curl like this. It must be the heat.”
His lordship was fairly overheated himself, watching her. Before he grew too uncomfortable, he tried to get her to leave again. “This has been pleasant, miss, a truly novel approach, but I really have other business tonight, as I am sure you must also. If you would just come this way.”
Instead of following him toward the door, the female seemed to drift toward his desk. Her hand reached out for his pistol. “I killed a man, you know.”
By Zeus, she was a Bedlamite! What a shame, for such a beauty. She must be someone’s mad relative escaped from confinement. Zounds, he didn’t want to send her into hysterics by shouting for Demby. He didn’t want to end up shot either. “Miss, please, come away from there. That’s a very delicate mechanism.”
“Will you listen?”
“Yes, yes, anything.”
Lucinda stepped away from the desk, but floated gracefully out of his reach. “I did kill a man, truly,” she began, and started to tell Lord Stanford about how her parents were very strict, and how they had arranged her marriage to a crotchety old man.
“I’m sure they meant well,” he said, trying to hurry the tale along and not believing a word of it, or this whole bizarre occurrence. “The road to hell, you know. Paved with good intentions.”
“No, it’s not. It’s paved with rakes and libertines, reaching and grabbing and slobbering over you.” Then she told him about Captain Anders and the elopement with a sadness in her voice he couldn’t help wishing gone. When she got to the part of how Anders confessed it was all a pack of lies to get her father’s money, and how he wanted to ruin her to complete the plot, Kerry found himself wishing the bounder were still alive, so he could shoot him.
An actress, that’s what she was, he decided, gathering his thoughts again, an incredible actress who almost had him believing that farrago of nonsense. She’d gone from seductress to lunatic to innocent child in a matter of moments. One of his friends must have hired her for his entertainment. Kerry smiled at the thought of what kind of entertainment was in store, if she was as talented in bed as she was in the drawing room. Then her words drew him back.
“So I hit my head. Now, for all intents and purposes, my father’s especially, I am dead.”
“Dead? You mean you’re a ghost?” Actress, he’d believe, prostitute definitely, but this was too much. She was back to being dicked in the nob.
“No, not exactly a ghost, since I’m not precisely dead yet. You see, things have been fairly slow at the Gates these days, what with the peace talks and the new smallpox inoculation, so they decided to hear my case before the fact, as it were.”
“They?” Kerry had heard one should always humor a madman. “What happened to St. Peter?”
“Oh, he took the pleasant job of welcoming new arrivals. He leaves the messy details of deciding who goes where for the women to handle. Typical male, don’t you know.”
Kerry’s mouth was hanging open by now. He could only repeat: “The women?”
“Oh, yes, they run everything. Anyway, St. Joan was there, and St. Ermintrude, and that Queen Medea for the opposition. But they couldn’t decide. I did disobey my parents, and I did cause Captain Anders’s death, directly or not.” She paused and looked down at the hands clasped in her lap. In a near whisper she confessed, “And I did know lust. I wanted him to kiss me, at first.”
“A kiss? You call that lust? Why, every red-blooded female—”
“So I was destined for hell,” Lucinda interrupted. “But I had led an exemplary life before then, and I was truly sorry Captain Anders was dead. I could not regret pushing him, of course, only the result of it. So the angels struck a bargain with the demonesses.” She looked up and smiled, showing perfect dimples. “I can go to heaven if I save you from hell.”
Chapter Three
“Hell and damnation!”
“Exactly, my lord.” She was smiling now, pleased with his understanding.
“You mean you expect me to believe that a parcel of females, all martyrs and murderesses, got together and decided my fate?”
“And mine, my lord.”
He ignored that. “You’re saying that females run the show there? What about God? What’s He doing while all this is going on?”
“He? I’m afraid you’re not ready for all of this yet, my lord.”
“But I am more than ready to be shut of this fustian nonsense. I really must ask you to leave, miss. I don’t know how you got in—it’s not like Demby to be so careless—and if someone paid you, tell him it was an excellent joke while it lasted. But let me give you some advice, ma’am, if you wish to continue your career, whichever career you choose. Do drop the missionary gobbledygook. You’re liable to be labeled a reformer, and no one is comfortable around a moralizing zealot, especially any gentleman you’d like to encourage. No one takes that religion stuff seriously these days.”
“Sad, isn’t it?” Her tone was wistful, but she did move toward the door in a graceful, gliding sort of motion.
Relieved the female was finally taking his hint, which was more an outright request, the earl vowed he’d have Demby’s head in the morning if he found the man had let her in.
Lucinda paused at the sofa where she’d been sitting. She bent over to pick up her slippers, then kept bending until her softly rounded derriere was in the air, wiggling as she searched for something else undernea
th the furniture. Kerry loosened his cravat before he strangled. Damn, she was good. Too bad she was queer in the attic, and too bad he was punting on the River Tick. If the chimney sweeps didn’t take credit, bits of muslin never did!
“Oh, my,” Lucinda exclaimed, blowing a dustball back under the couch. “Haven’t you ever heard that cleanliness is next to godliness?” Still bending, she wiped her hand along the length of one shapely hip.
Kerry clenched his teeth, murmuring something about the devil preaching gospel, and almost reached out to thrust her forcibly from the room before he was tempted past endurance. Then he caught the gleam of something under the sofa. Along with another fluff of dust was a shiny yellow-boy, two crumpled pound notes, and the diamond stickpin he had thought lost in some boudoir or other ages ago.
“By George, that’s marvelous!” he exclaimed, retrieving the bounty as she stood. He rose and held out one of the pound notes. “Here, you keep this, for bringing such luck.”
She shook her head. “Luck had nothing to do with it, my lord. I told you, I’m here to—”
Kieren, Lord Stanford, that nonpareil among the Corinthian set and paragon of fashion, was already back on all fours, searching beneath the rest of the furniture. “Blast, only a silver button.”
The woman was gone when he straightened up. Kerry shrugged. She had been a diverting interlude, no denying, but now he had business to attend to. Two pounds, a golden guinea, and a stickpin weren’t much of a fortune, but they more than tripled his current holdings. He couldn’t begin to pay off even the smallest of his obligations, but now he had a stake. Not much of one, for certain, but enough, with Lady Luck on his side. Or whoever that peculiar ladybird was.
His lordship went to bed for a short sleep, blessing Demby’s careless housekeeping. His dreams may have been filled with scarlet women, but he still woke refreshed and eager. A bath, a change of clothes, some of Demby’s wretched coffee with the grounds still floating in it, and he was ready. He left the two pound notes with his servant for safekeeping. “And do see about the chimneys, Demby, that odor was appalling.”
An Angel for the Earl Page 2