Sniddon took the money and Lem and departed. The butler exited with a flea in his ear about getting machinery in to clean the chimneys next time, or dangling the multitudinous footmen by their heels with rags on ropes. “Anything but another infernal scene like this one,” the earl insisted. Then he demanded a maid or someone to come take charge of the brat. It seemed there was no such creature at Stanford Abbey.
There was Mrs. Cobb, the housekeeper, but she was as starchy as his nibs in the wig, according to the footmen. She didn’t consider filthy urchins to be in her province. Lady Stanford’s abigail rode an even higher horse. Cook was in the middle of supper preparations, and whatever maids hadn’t left on account of the ghosts had left on the earl’s arrival.
“Your lordship’s reputation, beggin’ your pardon, my lord.”
Kerry ran a hand through his hair and looked beseechingly in Sidwell’s direction. “Sorry, my lord, I know only numbers. I’ll, ah, list the guinea under housekeeping expenses, shall I? Or under charity?” And the secretary fled before he could be dragooned into nursemaiding a weeping tot.
Just when Kerry feared he’d have to bathe the child himself—drowning seemed the only way of dislodging the barnacle—his prayers were answered. A female voice filled the air with motherly warmth: “What’s the meaning of this outrage, you sap-skulled booby? I have company coming for dinner tonight, so why is the chimney sweep leaving before all the rooms are done? And why are you covered in soot? You’ll have to hurry to fix yourself up. You still look like death in a dressing gown.”
“Thank you for your concern, Mother, but you’ll have to excuse me. I don’t think any amount of effort will make me presentable to company this evening.”
“That’s neither here nor there. The Westcotts are coming and bringing Felicia, apurpose to meet you, so you’d better be there. It would be the height of rudeness to disappoint them. And don’t look daggers at me. Since you canceled the ball, someone has to look after your interests and make sure you meet the proper young females.”
“And someone has to make sure there is no intimate family dinner where we might discuss the Stanford rubies.”
“Fustian. There is nothing to discuss. But what, pray tell, is that piece of offal clinging to your leg? Get rid of it at once.”
Kerry ruffled the boy’s hair—his hand was already smudged—and asked, “Do you like dogs, Dickie?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Dickie answered, wiping his nose on his filthy shirttails, to the dowager’s further disgust, and staring up at the earl with worship in his eyes.
“Then this, Mother, is Master Diccon, my new kenneler. Of course he commands only one dog at the moment, but we are starting small.”
“And that way you won’t miss me so much when my mama comes for me.”
Finding Dickie’s mama might be harder than finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, Kerry feared. The needle might want to be found; Dickie’s mama might not if she had, indeed, traded the boy for Blue Ruin. Lord Stanford just smiled and said, “I’ll share my mama with you until then,” which effectively curtailed the dowager’s incipient lecture on duty, dignity, and dressing for dinner.
So Lord Stanford took another bath, after scrubbing Diccon through three changes of hot water. The child had started bawling again when Kerry tried to hand him over to a footman, so it was easier to do the job himself. He was already besmirched, and something about the boy’s tears caught at emotions he never knew he possessed. Washed, the boy’s hair was blond and curly, reminding Kerry of the cherub in the oil painting he had held back from sale. For his sons. Yes, an heir mightn’t be a terrible idea after all, especially if he was a trusting, adoring tad who thought you could shake hands with the man in the moon. Of course Kerry might prefer his son to have his own brown hair instead of this pale yellow. Then again, gold-glinting red was nice.
The infant cleaned up better than Kerry did. Soap and kitchen salve might work wonders on the boy’s bruises; nothing was going to mend a bulbous scarlet snout in time for public viewing.
Aunt Clara came to the rescue then, having rummaged in the attics for long-outgrown nankeen shorts and jackets while Kerry introduced Dickie to his old tin soldiers and some picture books from the nursery.
Even bubble-headed Aunt Clara noticed what a fine, well-mannered boy he was, no street beggar or city foundling at all. After more questioning they discovered that his name was not Dickie either, it was Richard, Richard Browne. But Diccon was what his father called him, so that was all right. Mr. Browne’s name was, of course, Papa. And Diccon knew precisely where he lived: in London, near the park. There were only a few thousand Browne families in London, all near some park or other, but one bit of information seemed hopeful: Diccon’s father sometimes took him to work, at a furniture warehouse.
Sidwell was put on the case at once, to contact Stenross in London and Bow Street if necessary. Someone had to be looking for the boy. Diccon was convinced to go along with a footman to view Lucky in the stables. His new charge might be permitted to sleep in the nursery that night, if he promised to be good and release his death grip on the earl’s leg.
Aunt Clara started weeping as she watched the boy solemnly take a footman’s hand. “Nigel and I wanted a big family, not like your mother, who was relieved to have the heir first thing. We weren’t married long enough. Oh, how I wish I could have had a son of his to remind me, even after he was gone.” She was sobbing into the handkerchief Kerry hastily handed over.
“Uh, Aunt Clara, they never did find Uncle Nigel’s body, did they?”
“No,” she sniffled. “I had them bury his fishing gear instead. I insisted on a headstone, you see.”
Kerry didn’t see at all, but knew he had to wait for Lucy to find out any more. He hurried back to his room to finish his own toilette. She was there waiting, and glowing.
Her gown seemed more rose-colored than red, and her hair, which looked more gold than titian tonight, was held back with a silk rose. Mostly she was smiling a smile that warmed the whole room, just for him.
“What you did was magnificent, and without any prompting.”
“Oh, it wasn’t so much,” he preened. “I couldn’t have the nipper blubbering all over the place, could I?”
“You could have handed him back to the sweep. Or had him carted off to the workhouse.”
“He’s just a baby!”
“Oh, Kerry, you do have a conscience after all!” The kiss she placed on his cheek almost felt like a summer breeze. And it almost made his nose feel better.
“Don’t worry about that, it will heal only a little crooked.”
“Crooked? My nose is going to be crooked?”
“Well, I think it will make you better looking, not so intimidatingly perfect. And you know what they say about vanity.”
“No, and I don’t want to. I do want to know about Uncle Nigel. What do you mean, he’s not dead?”
“I checked. He’s very much alive and living in France.”
“In France? For all these years? Without telling anyone?”
“There was a war on, you know.”
“I suppose he could have been captured and been a prisoner of war,” the earl said doubtfully. “But why hasn’t he come home now that the war is over?”
“Well, he wasn’t exactly a prisoner of war. He was more a spy.”
“Then the government should have made a special effort to get one of their own people out earlier than this!”
“That’s just it,” she said as the dinner gong rang. “He wasn’t a spy for England.”
Chapter Fifteen
Dinner was not the complete disaster Kerry expected. His attire this evening was not up to Weston’s standards in fit or style, but it was acceptable for a country gathering. The deficiencies went unnoticed in light of his battered face, which the Westcotts were too well bred to comment upon. Only John Norris grinned, until Kerry invited him to trade his cob for the black. Then Lord Westcott had to be shown the fearsome beast, so dinn
er was delayed for a trip to the stable, where Diccon was still playing with Lucky. The marquis was inclined to be suspicious of the boy’s presence in a known libertine’s household, but he was impressed with the horse despite himself.
“I wouldn’t have gotten on his back for anything, not even in my salad days. Tossed salad, I’d be. I daresay a broken nose is a small price to pay for such a noble animal.”
And Lord Westcott was off in a rambling, onesided discourse of all the mean, unbroken horses he’d ever encountered. His monologue lasted through the soup course, the fish, meat, poultry, and sweets, with removes, and was directed to the entire table, not just his partner, the dowager. Lady Stanford kept a smile fixed on her face and pointedly fingered her paste diamonds whenever Kerry looked down the table in her direction. As if he needed a reminder that Westcott was as rich as Golden Ball, and had just the one chick.
Miss Felicia Westcott was a pretty girl, fair-haired, soft-spoken, elegantly dressed in a demure white gown with pearls at her neck and laced through her hair. Kerry thought he might have danced with her at some ball or other but he couldn’t be sure; all debutantes tended to look alike. She blushingly denied it when he asked if they’d been introduced, so he gathered she’d been warned off rakes like him. But her duke hadn’t come up to scratch, so the Earl of Stanford did not seem quite so reprehensible.
Well, marrying an heiress didn’t seem quite so outrageous now either. Kerry vowed to keep an open mind.
Still, he was in no hurry to join the ladies after dinner, even though Lord Westcott’s cigar made his hands shake with wanting a cigarillo. He sipped his port instead, and asked Johnny about his day appraising the lands for hog farming.
At the mention of hogs, Lord Westcott set off on a whole new saga of unruly beasts, culminating in the boar that had just trampled poor Tige Welford, one of his tenants. The widow was wanting to up and leave as soon as she could find someone to buy out her herd of pigs. Except for the boar. She’d shot the bastard and was even now making sausages. Westcott thought Kerry could get a deuced good bargain if he hurried. On the pigs, not the sausages.
Johnny was thrilled, even Kerry was excited. Sidwell was more cautious when consulted, citing the other costs involved. They carried the conversation and their glasses into the drawing room, where Miss Westcott was posed gracefully at the pianoforte. The marquis took a seat in the corner and placed a handkerchief over his face for a nap. Aunt Clara was sewing by the fire, and the two other ladies were enjoying shredding reputations on the sofa. Kerry directed John to turn Felicia’s pages, so he could continue the discussion with Sidwell of how much of the horse sale money they could afford to pay out, after the secretary’s study of the estate’s income and expenses. Kerry did notice that Miss Westcott played adequately, more or less in keeping with Herr Beethoven’s intentions, and softly enough not to impede conversation around her.
All in all, he congratulated himself after, it was a satisfactory evening. Of course he’d had to accept Lord Westcott’s invitation to a hunt two days hence; that was the least he could do in recompense for the tip about Widow Welford’s pigs. Lord Westcott declared he wanted to see the black in action. Kerry didn’t need Johnny’s wink and his mother’s satisfied smirk to know the marquis actually wanted to see his prospective son-in-law in action.
* * *
“Tell me again about Uncle Nigel, Lucy. I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time accepting it. After all, if I can think nothing of having a comfortable coze with a soul in transit, I should not cavil at Uncle Nigel’s being a spy.”
Kerry was sitting in front of the fireplace in his own room, sipping a cognac. Lucy was sitting across from him with her embroidery, but the mirror over the mantel showed a solitary gentleman in his robe and slippers, talking to an empty chair.
Lucy set aside the altar cloth and smiled. “He never wanted to be, you know.”
“I didn’t suppose anyone ever wanted to be a spy. I mean, it’s not as if some boys are mad to enlist in the army, others hear a calling to join the clergy, and Uncle Nigel grew up itching to be a traitor to his country. All Nigel wanted to do, as far as I ever heard, was go fishing.”
“And so he did that day, but his boat capsized. While he was hanging on, waiting for rescue, a fishing ketch came along. Only it wasn’t really a fishing boat, and the sailors were not English. They gave him the choice: stay there or come with them back to France. They would not return him to the English shore for fear of the patrols. He might have been rescued, but his arms were getting tired, and the water was getting cold. So he accepted their offer.”
“Understandable. He was just saving his own skin.”
“Yes, but then the smugglers felt he owed them something for their trouble, so he helped them unload their cargo.”
“Which was?”
“Guns.”
“Which was treason.”
“Exactly. And they said they’d kill him if he didn’t tell them everything he knew.”
“About what, for pity’s sake? Uncle Nigel wasn’t with the government or anything. He was just a gentleman of modest means who liked to fish.”
“And who knew every current and tide and shoal on the coast of England and half of Scotland.”
“Fiend seize it, so he did. And he told them?”
She shrugged. “He did not want to die. After he told them what they wanted, the French let him go to find his own way home. Ashamed of what he’d done, he thought he’d skulk around and discover their plans, to report back to the British.”
“To prove his loyalty.”
“Precisely. Instead, he got shot.”
“But not killed?”
“No, he was taken in and nursed by a family of peasants who made a living fishing. As soon as he was recovered, he intended to pretend to be one of them, to earn passage home on another smuggling boat. Except…”
“Except?” Kerry was grinning now. Uncle Nigel’s saga was starting to sound like a Minerva Press novel.
“Except that while he was unconscious, the patriarch of the family had him wed to one of the granddaughters. Nicolette was increasing, with decreasing chance of her chère ami coming forward.”
“The marriage wasn’t legal. He was already married, for one, unwilling for another.”
“And not Catholic for a third. The family did not care. And Nicolette begged him to stay until the baby was born. What could he do? He had no money, these people had saved his life, and he had no state secrets to bring back to British intelligence anyway. The English would hang him, the French would shoot him. And Nicolette’s father would skin him alive if he tried to escape.”
“So he stayed all these years?” Kerry finished off his drink and sat up. “What about Aunt Clara?”
“He thought she could never forgive him, so he might as well stay away and let her get on with her life, remarry, have the family they wanted.”
“Poor Aunt Clara.”
“And poor Uncle Nigel. He wants so badly to come home to her—Nicolette has been dead for years—now that the war is over, but cannot afford to.”
“Dash it, I can scrape passage money together. I can pawn my watch again, or Mother’s paste diamonds.”
“For two thousand pounds?”
Kerry sank back. “What, is he planning on buying a yacht to bring him across the Channel? Won’t the packet boat do?”
“He cannot come home without a pardon. Living in France all those years, aiding the enemy…”
“With a few tide tables?”
“He also did some interpreting of smuggled papers, to earn extra money for the children.”
“The children? No, don’t tell me. This pardon thing, one doesn’t just petition for it? We can get character witnesses, explain away the whole bumblebroth.”
“In a perfect world, yes,” she said with a frown. “In this one it requires bribes. Support for the Crown, I believe they call it.” She took up her needlework again, angrily stabbing the needle through the fabric.
“Two thousand pounds.” Kerry dropped his head back against the cushions. “Where the bloody hell am I going to get two thousand pounds? I already told Johnny we could use most of the horse sale money to buy the hogs, so there’ll be an income down the road. And Sidwell thinks that if we chop down the home woods timber, we can earn enough to make the improvements necessary to get the tenants back, hence the rents. But that’s years away. I even informed the countess that I couldn’t pay a farthing toward her gaming debts. She fainted again, incidentally, when I told her that Flint can wear her diamonds on his next smuggling raid for all I care, but if he tries to sell the Stanford rubies, I’ll have the both of them arrested. If I cannot afford to retrieve the engagement ring, I cannot afford to retrieve Uncle Nigel.”
“So you liked Miss Westcott?” Lucy asked with feigned indifference.
“She’s a pleasant enough chit. But that wasn’t what I meant.”
“She liked you.” Lucinda sucked on the finger she pricked.
“She liked Johnny and Sidwell, too. Did you see the priceless look on Mother’s face when I announced I’d invited my secretary and my steward to dinner? That alone was worth all the insipid chit chat. Evened the numbers at table, at any rate, and gave Miss Westcott her choice of gentlemen to flirt with. Of course Johnny stared at her like a mooncalf all night, and Sidwell stammered, but Felicia was happy.”
“You didn’t stare or stutter, yet she appeared pleased with your company.” And why not? Lucinda asked, but kept the thought to herself. “So she might welcome your addresses. Then a match there mightn’t be a simple financial arrangement, her money for your title.”
“Now you’re sounding like Aunt Clara, who looks for April and May everywhere. Everywhere but France, of course. No, I was not struck all aheap by Miss Westcott, and I doubt she is ready to throw her bonnet over the windmill for an earl residing in Queer Street.”
“But if you could find pleasure in her company, and she in yours, then love could follow duty.” Lucy ripped out the line of stitches she’d just sewn and bundled the cloth away.
An Angel for the Earl Page 12