by Mary Balogh
“No indeed, your grace.” The doctor, who had finished rebandaging the duke’s leg, looked considerably flustered.
It was all her fault, of course, Jane thought. It came of having grown up in an enlightened home, in which servants had invariably been treated as if they were people and in which courtesy to others had been an ingrained virtue. She really must learn to curb her tongue if she was to have this chance of earning three weeks’ salary to take with her into the unknown beyond it.
The Duke of Tresham submitted to being carried downstairs, though not before he had dismissed Jane and instructed her to stay out of his sight until he summoned her. The summons came half an hour later. He was in the drawing room on the first floor today, reclining on a sofa.
“My head appears to have returned to its normal size this morning,” he told her. “You will be pleased to learn that you will not be much called upon to use any of your considerable resources in entertaining me. I have given Hawkins leave to admit any visitors who may call, within reason, of course. He has express instructions to exclude any milliners’ assistants and their ilk who rap on the door.”
Jane’s stomach lurched at the very thought of visitors.
“I will excuse myself, your grace,” she said, “whenever someone calls.”
“Will you indeed?” His eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“I assume,” she said, “it will be mostly gentlemen who will call. My presence can only inhibit the conversation.”
He startled her by grinning at her suddenly, completely transforming himself into a gentleman who looked both mischievous and far younger than usual. And almost handsome.
“Miss Ingleby,” he said, “I do believe you are a prude.”
“Yes, your grace,” she admitted. “I am.”
“Go and fetch that cushion from the library,” he instructed her. “And set it under my leg.”
“You might say please once in a while, you know,” she told him as she turned toward the door.
“I might,” he retorted. “But then again, I might not. I am in the position to give the commands. Why should I pretend that they are merely requests?”
“Perhaps for the sake of your self-respect,” she said, looking back at him. “Perhaps out of deference to the feelings of others. Most people respond more readily to a request than to a command.”
“And yet,” he said softly, “it appears that you are in the process of obeying my command, Miss Ingleby.”
“But with a mutinous heart,” she said, leaving the room before he could have the last word.
She returned with the cushion a couple of minutes later, crossed the room without a word, and, without looking at him, positioned it carefully beneath his leg. She had noticed in his bedchamber earlier that yesterday’s swelling had gone down. But she had noticed too his habit of rubbing his thigh and baring his teeth occasionally, sure signs that he was in considerable pain. Being a proud man, of course, he could not be expected to admit to feeling any at all.
“Apart from the thin line of your lips,” the duke said, “I would not know you were severely out of charity with me, Miss Ingleby. I expected at the very least that you would jerk up my leg and slam it down onto the cushion. I was all ready to deal with such a show of temper. Now you have deprived me of the opportunity to deliver my carefully rehearsed setdown.”
“You are employing me as a nurse, your grace,” she reminded him. “I am to comfort you, not harm you for my own amusement. Besides, if I feel indignation on any subject, I have the vocabulary with which to express it. I do not need to resort to violence.”
Which was as massive a lie as any she had ever told, she thought even as the words were issuing from her lips. For a moment she felt cold and nauseated, her stomach muscles clenching in the now-familiar feeling of panic.
“Miss Ingleby,” the Duke of Tresham said meekly, “thank you for fetching the cushion.”
Well. That silenced her.
“I do believe,” he said, “that almost elicited a smile from you. Do you ever smile?”
“When I am amused or happy, your grace,” she told him.
“And you have been neither yet in my company,” he said. “I must be losing my touch. I am reputed to be rather superior, you know, in my ability to amuse and delight women.”
Her awareness of his masculinity had been a largely academic thing until he spoke those words and looked at her with the characteristic narrowing of his dark eyes. But suddenly it was no longer academic. She felt a totally unfamiliar rush of pure physical desire that did alarming things to her breasts and her lower abdomen and inner thighs.
“I do not doubt it,” she said tartly. “But I daresay you have already used up this month’s supply of seductive arts on Lady Oliver.”
“Jane, Jane,” he said gently. “That sounded remarkably like spite. Go and find Quincy and fetch the morning’s post. Please,” he added as she moved toward the door.
She turned her head to smile at him.
“Ah,” he said.
5
NGELINE CAME AGAIN IN THE LATE MORNING, escorted this time by Heyward, who had accompanied her in order to inquire civilly after his brother-in-law’s health. Ferdinand came before they left, but more with the purpose of talking about himself than out of any great concern for his brother’s recovery. He had become embroiled in a challenge to race his curricle to Brighton against Lord Berriwether, whose skill with the ribbons was rivaled by no one except Jocelyn himself.
“You will lose, Ferdinand,” Heyward said bluntly.
“You will break your neck, Ferdie,” Angeline said, “and my nerves will never recover so soon after this business with Tresham. But how dashing you will look tearing along the road as fast as the wind. Are you going to order a new coat for the occasion?”
“The secret is to give your horses their heads whenever you have a straight stretch of road,” Jocelyn said, “but not to get too excited in a pinch and not to take unnecessary risks on sharp bends as if you were some circus performer. For both of which vices you are famous, Ferdinand. You had better win, though, now you are committed. Never make a boast or a challenge you are incapable of backing up with action. Not especially if you are a Dudley. I daresay you were boasting.”
“I thought perhaps I might borrow your new curricle, Tresham,” his brother said carelessly.
“No,” Jocelyn said. “Absolutely not. I am surprised you would waste breath even asking unless you think a hole in my leg has made me soft in the brain.”
“You are my brother,” Ferdinand pointed out.
“A brother with a working brain and a fair share of common sense,” Jocelyn told him. “The wheels on your own curricle were round enough when last I saw them. It is the driver rather than the vehicle that wins or loses a race, Ferdinand. When is it to be?”
“Two weeks,” his brother said.
Damn! He would not be able to watch any part of it, then, Jocelyn thought. Not if he was obedient to the commands of that damned quack, Raikes, anyway. But in two weeks’ time, if he was still confined to a sofa, his sanity might well be at stake.
Jane Ingleby, standing quietly some distance away, had read his mind, Jocelyn would swear. A single glance at her showed her with her lips compressed in a thin line. What did she plan to do? Tie him down until every last day of the three weeks had passed?
He had refused her request to be excused when his family members arrived. He refused it again later when more visitors were announced while she was taking his letters one at a time from his hand as he perused them and dividing them into three piles according to his instructions—invitations to be refused, invitations to be accepted, and letters whose replies would necessitate some dictation to his secretary. Most of the invitations, except for those to events some time in the future, of course, had to be refused.
“I will leave you, your grace,” she said, getting to her feet after Hawkins, who seemed far more in control of his own domain in the front hall today, had come to announce the arriva
l of several of his friends.
“You will not,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “You will remain here.”
“Please, your grace,” she said. “I can serve no function here while you have company.”
She looked, he thought, almost frightened. Did she expect that he and his friends were going to indulge in a collective orgy with her? He would probably have dismissed her himself, he supposed, if she had not announced that she would leave. Now, out of sheer stubbornness, he could not let her go.
“Perhaps,” he said, “all the excitement will bring on a fit of the vapors and I will need the ministrations of my nurse, Miss Ingleby.”
She would doubtless have argued further if the door had not opened to admit his visitors. As it was, she scurried for the farthest corner of the room, where she was still standing when it occurred to him to look a few minutes later. She was doing an admirable job of blending into the furniture. Her cap was adorning her head again and covering every last strand of her hair.
They had come in a collective body, all his closest friends—Conan Brougham, Pottier, Kimble, Thomas Garrick, Boris Tuttleford—bringing hearty good cheer with them. There was a great deal of noise as they greeted him, asked rhetorically after his health, jeered over his dressing gown and slippers, admired his bandage, and found themselves seats.
“Where is your claret, Tresham?” Garrick asked, looking about him.
“Miss Ingleby will fetch it,” Jocelyn said. That was when he looked and noticed her in the far corner. “My nurse, gentlemen, who runs and fetches for me since I am unable to reach the bell rope from where I recline. And who scolds and worries me into and out of the dismals. Miss Ingleby, ask Hawkins for the claret and the brandy, and have a footman bring a tray of glasses. Please.”
“Please, Tresh?” Kimble chuckled. “A new word in your vocabulary?”
“She makes me say it,” Jocelyn said meekly, watching Jane walk out of the room, her face averted. “She scolds me when I forget.”
There was a raucous guffaw from his gathered friends.
“Oh, I say,” Tuttleford said when his mirth had subsided a little, “isn’t she the one who squawked out, Tresham, just when you were unnerving Oliver with your pistol trained at the bridge of his nose?”
“He has employed her as his nurse,” Conan replied, grinning. “And has threatened to make her sorry she was born or something like that. Is she sorry, Tresham? Or are you?”
Jocelyn played with the handle of his quizzing glass and pursed his lips. “You see,” he said, “she has a damnably annoying habit of answering back, and I have a damnable need for mental stimulation, penned and cribbed and incarcerated as I am and as I am likely to be for a couple of weeks or so longer.”
“Mental stimulation, ho!” Pottier slapped his thigh and roared with merriment, and everyone else followed his example. “Since when have you needed a female for mental stimulation, Tresham?”
“By Jove!” Kimble swung his quizzing glass on its ribbon. “One cannot quite picture it, can one? How else does she stimulate you, Tresh? That is the question. Come, come, it is confession time.”
“He has one immobilized leg.” Tuttleford laughed again. “But I’ll wager that does not slow you down one whit, does it, Tresham? Not in the stimulation business. Does she come astride? And do all the bucking so that you can lie still?”
The laughter this time was decidedly bawdy. They were all in fine fettle—and getting finer by the minute. Jocelyn raised his quizzing glass all the way to his eye.
“One might casually mention,” he said quietly, “that the female in question is in my employ and beneath my own roof, Tuttleford. Even I have some standards.”
“My guess is, fellows,” Conan Brougham said, more perceptive than the others, “that the notorious duke is not amused.”
Which was a mistake on his part, Jocelyn thought a moment later as the door opened and Jane came back into the room, carrying two decanters on a tray. A footman came behind her with the glasses. She was, of course, the instant focus of everyone’s curious attention, a fact that should have amused him as it would surely disconcert her. But he felt only annoyance that any of his friends would for one moment think him capable of the execrable taste of dallying with his own servant.
She might have tried to escape with the footman, but she did not do so. She retired to her corner with lowered eyes. Her cap was pulled lower than ever over her brow.
Viscount Kimble whistled softly. “A beauty in hiding, Tresh?” he murmured, too low for her to overhear.
Trust Kimble’s eyes to penetrate her disguise. Kimble, with his blond god’s good looks, was very much a ladies’ man, of course. A connoisseur to equal Jocelyn himself.
“But a servant,” Jocelyn replied, “under the protection of my own roof, Kimble.”
His friend understood him. He grinned and winked. But he would not make any improper advances to Jane Ingleby. Jocelyn did wonder fleetingly why he cared.
The conversation quickly moved off into other topics since they could hardly discuss Jane in her presence. But no one seemed to consider it improper to discuss in her hearing Lady Oliver’s apparent enjoyment of her notoriety as she had played court to a host of admirers at the theater last evening; the presence of three of her brothers with her and Oliver in their box; the avowed determination of the brothers to call the Duke of Tresham to account for debauching their sister as soon as he was on his feet again; the ridiculous lengths to which Hailsham was going to prove that his eldest son, now nine years old and reputed to be mentally deficient, was a bastard so that he could promote the claims of his second and favorite son; the latest sensational details of the Cornish scandal.
“It is being said now that Jardine is dead,” Brougham said on that last topic. “That he never did recover consciousness after the attack.”
“It must have been one devil of a bash on the head,” Kimble added. “The more sensational accounts insist that his brains were fully visible through hair and blood. London drawing rooms are filled with swooning females these days. Which makes life interesting for those of us who can be close enough to some of them when it happens. Too bad you are incapacitated, Tresh.” He chuckled.
“As I remember it,” Pottier said, “Jardine did not have a great deal of hair. Not too many brains either.”
“He never regained consciousness.” Jocelyn, attempting to shift his position to rid himself of a few cramps, inadvertently knocked the cushion to the floor. “Come and replace this, Miss Ingleby, will you? He never regained consciousness and yet—according to some accounts—he was able to give a perfectly lucid account of the attack and his own spirited and heroic defense. He was able to identify his attacker and explain her motive for breaking his skull. A strange sort of unconsciousness.”
Jane bent over him and placed the cushion in just the right spot, lifted his leg onto it as gently as she always did, and adjusted the top of the bandage, which had curled under. But she was, he noticed when he glanced at her, white to the very lips.
He was almost sorry then that he had insisted upon her remaining in the room. Clearly she was uncomfortable in the company of all men. And no doubt with their talk. As stoic as she had been over his injury, perhaps the talk of hair and blood and brains had been too much for her.
“News of his death may be just as exaggerated,” Garrick said cynically, getting to his feet and helping himself to another drink. “It could well be that he is simply ashamed to show his face after admitting to having been overpowered by a mere slip of a girl engaged in a robbery.”
“Was she not clutching a pistol in both hands?” Jocelyn asked. “According, that is, to the man who never regained consciousness from the time she struck him with one of them until the moment of his demise? But enough of that nonsense. What sort of a cork-brained scheme is this that Ferdinand has got himself into? A curricle race against Berriwether of all people! Who made the challenge?”
“Your brother,” Conan said, “when Berriwether w
as boasting that you will be eating humble pie at all your old sports now that you will have one lame leg to drag about. He was claiming that the Dudley name would never again be one to be uttered with awe and admiration.”
“In Ferdinand’s hearing?” Jocelyn shook his head. “Definitely not wise.”
“No, not exactly in his hearing,” his friend explained. “But Ferdinand got wind of it, of course, and came striding into White’s with flames roaring from his nostrils. I thought for one moment he was going to slap a glove in Berriwether’s face, but all he did was ask as polite as you please what Berriwether thought your finest accomplishment was apart from your skill with weapons. It was your skill with the ribbons, of course. Then came the challenge.”
“And how much has Ferdinand wagered on the outcome?” Jocelyn asked.
Garrick provided the answer. “One thousand guineas,” he said.
“Hmm.” Jocelyn nodded slowly. “The family honor worth one thousand guineas. Well, well.”
Jane Ingleby was no longer standing in her corner, he saw idly. She was sitting there very straight-backed on a low stool, her back to the room.
She did not move until his friends took their leave more than an hour later.
* * *
“GIVE ME THE DAMNED thing!” The Duke of Tresham was holding out one imperious hand.
Jane, standing beside the sofa, where he had summoned her the moment after the drawing room door had closed behind his visitors, unfastened the ribbons beneath her chin and removed the offending cap. But she held it in her own hands.
“What are you intending to do with it?” she asked.
“What I am intending to do,” he said irritably, “is send you to fetch the sharpest pair of scissors my housekeeper can provide you with. And then I am going to have you watch while I cut that atrocity into shreds. No, correct that. I am going to have you cut it into shreds.”
“It is mine,” she told him. “I paid for it. You have no right whatsoever to destroy my property.”
“Poppycock!” he retorted.
And then to her horror Jane knew why he had suddenly blurred before her eyes. An inelegant sob escaped her at the same moment as she realized that her eyes had filled with tears.