More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress

by Mary Balogh

  But it was such a pleasure, she had to admit to herself as she opened the door next to the library and discovered the music room, to be in clean, elegant, spacious, civilized surroundings again.

  There was no sign of a footstool anywhere near the hearth.

  JOCELYN WATCHED HER GO and noticed that she held herself very straight and moved gracefully. He must have been quite befuddled yesterday, he thought, to have assumed that she was a serving girl, even though as it had turned out she really was just a milliner’s assistant. She dressed the part, of course. Her dress was cheap and shoddily made. It was also at least one size too large.

  But she was no serving girl, for all that. Nor brought up to spend her days in a milliner’s workshop, if he was any judge. She spoke with the cultured accents of a lady.

  A lady who had fallen upon hard times?

  She took her time about returning. When she did so, she was carrying the footstool in one hand and a large cushion in the other.

  “Did you have to go to the other side of London for the stool?” he asked sharply. “And then have to wait while it was being made?”

  “No,” she replied quite calmly. “But it was not where you said it would be. Indeed, it was not anywhere in plain sight. I brought a cushion too as the stool looks rather low.”

  She set it down, placed the cushion on top of it, and went down on one knee in order to lift his leg. He dreaded having it touched. But her hands were both gentle and strong. He felt scarcely any additional pain. Perhaps, he thought, he should have her cradle his head in those hands. He pursed his lips to stop himself from chuckling.

  His dressing gown had fallen open to reveal the bandage cutting into the reddened flesh of his calf. He frowned.

  “You see?” Jane Ingleby said. “Your leg has swollen and must be twice as painful as it need be. You really must keep it up as you were told, however fretful and inconvenient it may be to do so. I suppose you consider it unmanly to give in to an indisposition. Men can be so silly that way.”

  “Indeed?” he said frostily, viewing the top of her hideous and very new cap with extreme distaste. Why he had not dismissed her with a figurative boot in the rear end ten minutes ago he did not know. Why he had hired her in the first place he could not fathom since he blamed her entirely for his misfortune. She was a shrew and would worry him to death like a cat with a mouse long before the three weeks were over.

  But the alternative was to have Barnard fussing over him and blanching as pale as any sheet every time he so much as caught sight of his master’s bandage.

  Besides, he was going to need something to stimulate his mind while he was incarcerated inside his town house, Jocelyn decided. He could not expect his friends and family to camp out in his drawing room and give him their constant company.

  “Yes, indeed.” She stood up and looked down at him. Not only were her eyes clear blue, he noticed, but they were rimmed by thick long lashes several shades darker than her almost invisible hair. They were the sort of eyes in which a man might well drown himself if the rest of her person and character were only a match for them. But there was that mouth not far below them, and it was still talking.

  “This bandage needs changing,” she said. “It is the one Dr. Raikes put on yesterday morning. He is not returning until tomorrow, I believe he said. That is too long a time for one bandage even apart from the swelling. I will dress the wound afresh.”

  He did not want anyone within one yard of the bandage or the wound beneath it. But that was a craven attitude, he knew. Besides, the bandage really did feel too tight. And besides again, he had employed her as a nurse. Let her earn her keep, then.

  “What are you waiting for?” he asked irritably. “Permission? Is it possible that you deem it necessary to have my permission to supersede one of London’s most eminent physicians and to maul my person, Miss Ingleby?” It annoyed him that he had not insisted upon calling her Jane. A nice meek name. A total misnomer for the blue-eyed dragon who looked calmly back at him.

  “I do not intend to maul you, your grace,” she said, “but to make you more comfortable. I will not hurt you. I promise.”

  He set his head back against the headrest of his chair and closed his eyes. And opened them hastily again. Headaches, of course—at least the caliber of headache that he had been carrying around with him since he regained consciousness a couple of hours before—were not eased when experienced from behind lowered eyelids.

  She closed the door quietly behind her, he noticed, as she had done when she had gone in search of the footstool. Thank God for small mercies. Now if only she would keep her mouth shut.…

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in a long while Jane felt as if she were in familiar territory. She unwound the bandage with slow care and eased it free of the wound, which had bled a little and caused the bandage to stick. She looked up as she freed it.

  He had not winced even though he must have felt pain. He was reclined in his chair, one elbow resting on the arm, his head propped on his hand while he regarded her with half-closed eyes.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “The blood had dried.”

  He half nodded and she set about the task of cleansing the wound with warm water before applying the balsam powder she had found among the housekeeper’s supplies.

  She had nursed her father through a lingering illness until the moment of his death a year and a half ago. Poor Papa. Never a robust man, he had lost all his will to live after Mama’s passing, as if he had allowed disease to ravage him without a fight. By the end she had been doing everything for him. He had grown so very thin. This man’s leg was strong and well muscled.

  “You are new to London?” he asked suddenly.

  She glanced up. She hoped he was not going to start amusing himself by prying into her past. It was a hope that was immediately dashed.

  “Where did you come from?” he asked.

  What should she say? She hated lying, but the truth was out of the question. “From a long way away.”

  He winced as she applied the powder. But it was necessary to prevent the infection that might yet cost him his leg. The swelling worried her.

  “You are a lady,” he said—a statement, not a question.

  She had tried a cockney accent, with ludicrous results. She had tried something a little vaguer, something that would make her sound like a woman of the lower classes. But though she could hear accents quite clearly, she found it impossible to reproduce them. She had given up trying.

  “Not really,” she said. “Just well brought up.”

  “Where?”

  It was a lie she had already told. She would stick with it since it immediately killed most other questions.

  “In an orphanage,” she said. “A good one. I suppose I must have been fathered by someone who could not acknowledge me but who could afford to have me decently raised.”

  Oh, Papa, she thought. And Mama too. Who had lavished all their love and attention on her, their only child, and given her a wondrously happy family life for sixteen years. Who would have done their utmost to see her settled in a life as happily domesticated as their own if death had not claimed them first.

  “Hmm” was all the Duke of Tresham said.

  She hoped it was all he would ever say on the subject. She wrapped the clean bandage securely but loosely enough to allow for the swelling.

  “This stool is not high enough even with the cushion.” She frowned and looked around, then spied a chaise longue adorning one corner of the library. “I suppose you would rain down fire and brimstone on my head if I were to suggest that you recline on that,” she said, pointing. “You could retain all your masculine pride by remaining in your library, but you could stretch your leg out along it and elevate it on the cushion.”

  “You would banish me to the corner, Miss Ingleby?” he asked. “With my back to the room perhaps?”

  “I suppose,” she said, “the chaise longue is not bolted to the floor. I suppose it could be moved to a place more satisfactory to you.
Close to the fire, perhaps?”

  “The fire be damned,” he said. “Have it moved close to the window. By someone considerably more hefty than you. I will not be responsible for your suffering a dislocated spine even if there would be some poetic justice in it. There is a bell rope beside the mantel. Pull on it.”

  A footman moved the chaise longue into the light of the window. But it was on Jane’s shoulder that the duke leaned as he hopped from his chair to take up his new position. He had flatly refused, of course, to allow himself to be carried.

  “Be damned to you,” he had told her when she had suggested it. “I shall be carried to my grave, Miss Ingleby. Until then, I shall convey myself from place to place even if I must avail myself of some assistance.”

  “Have you always been so stubborn?” Jane asked while the footman gawked at her with dropped jaw as if he expected her to be felled by a thunderbolt in the very next moment.

  “I am a Dudley,” the Duke of Tresham said by way of explanation. “We are a stubborn lot from the moment of conception. Dudley babes are reputed to kick their mothers with unusual ferocity in the womb and to give them considerable grief while proceeding into the world. And that is just the beginning.”

  He was trying to shock her, Jane realized. He was looking at her intently with his black eyes, which she had discovered from close up were really just a very dark brown. Foolish man. She had assisted in the birthing of numerous babies from the time she was fourteen. Her mother had raised her to believe that service was an integral part of a life of privilege.

  He looked more comfortable once he was settled and had his foot resting on the cushion. Jane stood back, expecting to be dismissed or at least to be directed to present herself to the housekeeper for further orders. The footman had already been sent on his way. But the duke looked at her consideringly.

  “Well, Miss Ingleby,” he said, “how are you planning to amuse me for the next three weeks?”

  Jane felt a lurching of alarm. The man was incapacitated, and besides, there had been no suggestive note in his voice. But she had good reason to be distrustful of gentlemen in their boredom.

  She was saved from answering by the opening of the library door. It did not open quietly, as one might have expected, to admit either the butler or Mr. Quincy. Indeed, its opening was not even preceded by a respectful knock. The door was thrown back so that it cracked against the bookcase behind it. A lady strode inside.

  Jane felt considerable alarm. She was a young and remarkably fashionable lady even if she would never earn full marks for good taste in dress. Jane did not recognize her, but even so in that moment she realized clearly the folly of being here. If the visitor had been announced, she herself could have slipped away unseen. As it was, she could only stand where she was or at best take a couple of steps back and sideways and hope to melt into the shadows to the left of the window curtains.

  The young lady swept into the room rather like a tidal wave.

  “I believe my instructions were that I was not to be disturbed this morning,” the duke murmured.

  But his visitor came on, undaunted.

  “Tresham!” she exclaimed. “You are alive. I would not believe it until I had seen it with my own eyes. If you just knew what I have suffered in the past day, you would never have done it. Heyward has gone off to the House this morning, which is bothersome of him when my nerves are shattered. I declare I did not get one wink of sleep last night. It was most unsporting of Lord Oliver actually to shoot at you, I must say. If Lady Oliver was indiscreet enough to let him discover that she is your latest amour, and if he is foolish enough to proclaim his goat’s horns to all the world with such a public challenge—and in Hyde Park of all places—then he is the one who should get shot at. But they say that you shot gallantly into the air, which shows you for the polished gentleman that you are. It would have been no more than he deserved if you had killed him. But of course then they would have hanged you, or would have if you had not been a duke. You would have had to flee to France, and Heyward was provoking enough to tell me that he would not have taken me to Paris to visit you there. Even though all the world knows it is the most fashionable place to be. Sometimes I wonder why I married him.”

  The Duke of Tresham was holding his head with one hand. He held up his free hand while the young lady paused to draw breath.

  “You married him, Angeline,” he said, “because you fancied him and he was an earl and almost as wealthy as I am. Mostly because you fancied him.”

  “Yes.” She smiled and revealed herself to be an extremely pretty young lady despite her resemblance to the duke. “I did, did I not? How are you, Tresham?”

  “Apart from a throbbing leg and a head ten sizes or so too large for my neck,” he said, “remarkably well, I thank you, Angeline. Do have a seat.”

  The last words were spoken with considerable irony. She had already sat down on a chair close to the chaise longue.

  “I will leave instructions on my way out,” she said, “that no one but family is to be allowed in to see you. You certainly do not need any visitor who might be inclined to talk your head off, poor thing.”

  “Hmm,” he said, and Jane watched as he raised his quizzing glass to his eye and looked suddenly even more pained than before. “That is a repulsive bonnet,” he said. “Mustard yellow? With that particular shade of pink? If you were intending to wear it to Lady Lovatt’s Venetian breakfast next week, I am vastly relieved to inform you that I will be unable to escort you.”

  “Heyward said,” the young lady continued, leaning forward and ignoring his opinion of her taste in bonnets, “that Lord Oliver is telling everyone he is not satisfied because you did not try to kill him. Can you imagine anything so idiotic? Lady Oliver’s brothers are not satisfied either, and you know what they are like. They are saying, though not one of them was present, I understand, that you moved like a coward and prevented Lord Oliver from killing you. But if they challenge you, you simply must not accept. Consider my nerves.”

  “At the precise moment, Angeline,” he assured her, “I am preoccupied by my own.”

  “Well, you may have the satisfaction of knowing that you are the talk of the town anyway,” she said. “How splendid of you to ride home, Tresham, when you had been shot through the leg. I wish I had been there to observe it. At least you have diverted talk from that tiresome Hailsham affair and that business in Cornwall. Is it true that a beggar girl screamed and distracted your attention?”

  “Not a beggar exactly,” he said. “She is standing there by the curtain. Meet Miss Jane Ingleby.”

  Lady Heyward swiveled on her chair and looked at Jane in considerable astonishment. It was quite clear that she had not noticed there was anyone else in the room except her and her brother. Not that the curtain offered any great degree of shelter, but Jane was dressed as a servant. It was a somewhat reassuring realization that that fact made her virtually invisible.

  “You, girl?” Lady Heyward said with an hauteur that gave her an even more marked resemblance to the duke. She could be no more than a year or two older than herself, Jane estimated. “Why are you standing there?”

  “She is my nurse,” the duke said. “And she prefers to be called Miss Ingleby rather than girl.” There was a deceptive meekness in his voice.

  “Indeed?” The astonishment in the young lady’s face increased. “How peculiar. But I have to run along. I was to meet Martha Griddles at the library twenty minutes ago. But I had to come here first to offer what comfort I could.”

  “What are sisters for?” his grace murmured.

  “Precisely.” She bent over him and aimed a kiss at the air in the vicinity of his left cheek. “Ferdie will probably be calling on you later. He was incensed by the dishonor Lady Oliver’s brothers were trying to throw upon you yesterday. He was all for calling them out himself—every one of them. But Heyward said he was merely making an ass of himself—his very words, I swear, Tresham. He does not understand about the Dudley temper.” She sighe
d and left the room as abruptly as she had entered it, leaving the door wide open behind her.

  Jane stood where she was. She felt cold and alone and frightened.

  What was the drawing-room gossip to which the Duke of Tresham’s sister had so fleetingly referred? At least you have diverted talk from … that business in Cornwall.

  What business in Cornwall?

  “I believe,” the duke said, “the brandy decanter is called for, Miss Ingleby. And inform me at your peril that imbibing more alcohol will merely intensify my headache. Go and fetch it.”

  “Yes, your grace.” Jane was quite uninclined to argue.

  4

  ORD FERDINAND DUDLEY CAME LESS THAN AN hour after Lady Heyward had left. He crashed the door back against the bookcase just as she had done and strode into the library unannounced.

  Jocelyn winced and wished he had not sent the brandy decanter away as soon as he had set eyes upon it. He had just finished drinking a cup of chocolate, which Jane Ingleby had told him might settle his stomach and soothe his head. It had not achieved either desirable effect yet.

  She melted back against the curtains again, he noticed.

  “Devil take it!” his younger brother said by way of greeting. “Old Gruff-and-Grim tried to stop me from coming in here, Tresham. Can you imagine? Where do servants get such cork-brained notions?”

  “Usually from their employers,” Jocelyn said.

  “Good Lord!” His brother stopped in his tracks. “You really are playing the invalid. Mama used to languish on that chaise longue whenever she had been dancing and gaming for three nights or so in a row and fancied herself at death’s door. There’s no truth to the rumor, is there?”

  “There usually is not,” Jocelyn replied languidly. “To which particular rumor do you refer?”