by Connie Lane
“And you will be what, then? My secretary?”
“Secretary. Steward. I care not what you call me.”
“And when the silver disappears?”
“I swear it won’t. I’ll count it myself each night before I go to bed.”
“And that little urchin at the front door?”
“Jem is Clover’s son and worked at Madame’s before today. He may have looked familiar to you because of it.” She did not pause to allow him time to confirm or deny the fact. “We didn’t have time to clean him up completely but once he’s had a bath—”
“Once he’s had a bath and all the dirt is washed away, there won’t be much left of him but bones and a runny nose.”
“He is a rather scrawny thing, I’ll give you that much. But he’s bright. And eager to please. He would make a serviceable footboy once he’s cleaned up, or a crack tiger.”
“And the doxies?”
“Chambermaids. And why not? They have proved that they are used to hard work, there’s no doubt of that.”
“You are surely mad, Miss Culpepper!” Somerton had had enough. He turned and stalked across the library and when he got to the door, he threw it open and marched into the passageway without another look at Willie or another word.
Watching him go, Willie’s shoulders sagged and her spirits plummeted. She had promised Madame and the rest of them that she had the situation well in hand, and that when things looked their bleakest, the Viscount Somerton would surely not let them down.
And now he was on his way belowstairs to prove her wrong.
The very thought gave Willie impetus to hurry after him.
She raced from the room but by the time she got to the bottom of the stairway, Somerton was already there. Madame was chatting amiably enough with the woman who was to work in the scullery. Rooster O’Reilly, Mr. Finch and Simon Marquand were standing in a knot with the other men Willie had engaged as staff, glancing somewhat enviously at the door to the morning room. It was open when Willie accompanied Somerton upstairs, It was now firmly closed.
Flossie, Bess, Marie, and Clover were nowhere to be seen.
Neither were Hexam, Latimer, or Palliston.
Fortunately for Willie, Somerton paused to look over the scene, too, and when he did, she had time enough to scramble to catch him up. She was right behind him when, eyes flashing blue fire, he stalked to the morning room and threw open the door.
Over his shoulder, Willie saw Latimer and Bess standing near the window, his head on her bosom. Palliston and Flossie were locked in an embrace over near the mantelpiece. Hexam had both Clover and Marie with him on the sofa, the result of which looked to be a tangle of legs and arms and an Arthur Hexam who was smiling broadly in anticipation of what might come next.
“What the devil!” Somerton’s voice boomed through the room. Hexam rolled off the sofa and ended up on the seat of his pants on the floor. Latimer stood at attention. Palliston laughed and looped an arm around Flossie’s shoulders.
“Hexam! Latimer! Palliston!” Somerton bellowed.
“Get the hell away from my chambermaids!”
“Dun territory?” Somerton’s voice cracked over the words. “What do you mean, dun territory?”
Willie closed the ledger book that sat on the desk in front of her and linking her fingers, rested her hands atop it and looked across the desk at the viscount.
She would have been a fool to think she would get little or no reaction to her announcement. After all, it wasn’t every day a man learned he had somehow managed to live well beyond his considerable means. She had expected anger, or even disbelief, and to counter his response, she had carefully laid out her case in neat rows of neat numbers written on the stack of papers piled neatly at her left elbow. She was more than prepared to defend each and every one of the sums it had taken her the better part of a week to compile, especially the ones that added up (or more precisely, subtracted down) to negatives.
She had not thought that instead of fury or skepticism, Somerton might meet her statement with absolute astonishment.
As if he hadn’t quite heard her correctly, he cocked his head to one side and stared at her in silence. It was early in the day and his blue eyes were still slightly blurry from a night at the gaming hells, the clubs and the schools of Venus, the same gaming hells, clubs and schools of Venus where he had no doubt spent the better part of his adult life squandering his family fortune, reducing his personal wealth and amassing so great a debt, that even Willie—always a wizard with numbers and logical enough to understand what they meant—could hardly believe the sums herself.
His hands against the desktop, Somerton leaned forward.
“Dun territory,” she repeated, trying to break through Somerton’s astonishment with reasoning and careful explanation. “I don’t know a better way to explain, m’lord, than to put it in plain words. I’ve gone over the figures again and again and there’s no mistaking any of them. You’ve hit the low water mark, I’m afraid.” Still, she had no reaction from him and she decided to be more direct.
“You are out at the heel,” she told him, carefully pronouncing each word. “In the suds. Cleaned up.”
“The hell you say.”
It was a good thing that Bess had moved a chair directly in front of the desk the last time she cleaned the library. Unseeing, Somerton dropped into it. “You can’t be serious, Willie. There must be—”
“Some mistake? No.” Willie shook her head. “I’m sorry to say there is not. Between the tradesmen’s dunning notices…” She lifted a hefty stack of papers, “and the debts you have voweled…” She held up a sheet he should have recognized, one on which he kept a running—and she suspected, incomplete—tally of the IOUs he’d signed to various creditors. “You lose a great deal gambling,” she said, a fact that should have been no surprise to him.
“Of course I lose a great deal gambling.” His voice teetered on the edge of awareness that was sure to bring a rush of anger along with it. “That’s what gentlemen do. We spend money. On gambling. And clothes. On drinking. And—”
No doubt, he was going to say bits of muslin but instead of pointing it out, Somerton swallowed his words and Willie was just as glad. As difficult as it was to inform her employer that he was under the hatches, it would have been even more difficult to sit across from him and hear him admit what she already knew, that a good deal of his fortune had been spent on women like Bess and Flossie, Marie and Clover.
As good-hearted as they were and as good-natured as they had been about taking on responsibilities they had never thought to assume, Willie couldn’t help but feel a stab of emotion every time she thought about the girls. It had taken her a long time and a great deal of soul searching to discover—and then to admit—what that emotion was.
When she thought about Somerton with the likes of Bess and Flossie, Marie and Clover, she knew envy.
The very idea caused a spark to sizzle its way through her and startled both by it and by her reaction to it, Willie sat up straight and tall. She refused to meet Somerton’s eyes, afraid that if she did, he might see some evidence of the completely inappropriate thoughts that rattled through her brain.
Apparently, he mistook her reluctance to look at him as a sign that she was backing down from her assertion about his finances.
“I always lose a great deal,” Somerton said, trying for the jolly, devil-take-it attitude she had heard ring through his voice when he was in the company of the Dashers. “I can lose a great deal because I have a great deal to lose.”
“Had a great deal to lose.” Willie stood. The rest of what she had to say was better delivered on foot. “Unless you have some kindly relative who would be willing to—”
“Afraid they’ve always depended on me for that sort of thing.”
“Or some equally unfortunate gentleman who might owe you—”
“There have been a few such debts.” Somerton shrugged. “I’ve forgiven them.”
“Then you are—”<
br />
“Not plump?” He caught Willie’s gaze.
“Thin.” As tempted as she was to turn away, she forced herself to meet his eyes. “Very thin, indeed. I do not think we can keep the household running past—”
“That bad?” Somerton got up and spun around, pacing to the far side of the room and back again, his hands clutched behind his back.
“There is a solution to the problem.”
Willie’s statement stopped him in his tracks. His back was to her and he turned. “You’re not proposing we send Mr. Finch in to pinch someone’s jewels, are you?”
Willie wished she were.
At the same time she wondered why the thing she was about to suggest was more troubling, even, than a little larceny.
“Actually…” Stalling for time while she searched for the best way to offer the suggestion, she rounded the desk and went to stand nearer to him. “You do have something quite valuable,” she said, and because the subject was much too serious to allow him to make light of it, she continued before he could venture a guess as to what that something might be.
“Your title,” Willie reminded him. “You are the Viscount Somerton, after all, and I do believe your family has deep roots and a fine lineage.”
“Are you saying—”
“I am saying that there is one and only one thing that can redeem your present financial state of affairs, m’lord. A rich wife. It is time for you to marry.”
8
“You are not listening to me.”
“You’re wrong.” Nick glanced over his shoulder to where Willie was trailing behind him like a gray cloud threatening a summer picnic. He crossed the entryway, looking around one last time to make sure that everything was as shipshape as it was likely to get considering the current state of his household staff. Satisfied that the brass was polished (except for Jem’s sticky finger marks), the paintings were free of cobwebs (except for the ones that couldn’t be reached) and the furniture was dusted (except for a spot on the table near the morning room doorway that he wiped away with his shirt cuff), he paced to the far end of the entryway, then turned to head back the other way. When he did, he nearly slammed right into Willie.
He stopped just short of doing either of them any damage and realized it was lucky that he did; it was clear she was not about to give an inch. “I am listening,” he told her on the end of an exasperated sigh. “I cannot fail to listen. You won’t let me.”
“Then why won’t you stop just for a moment and simply look?” She fluttered a paper on which he could see a long list written in her neat hand. “If you are indeed listening, m’lord—”
“Listening and planning to act on what I’m hearing are two different things,” he reminded her. “If that is a list of women who you think might be possible marriage candidates—”
“It is.”
“Then I am simply not interested.”
She glowered at him, her ginger-colored brows low over eyes that were as steely as any he had ever seen. He refused to give her the satisfaction of rising to the bait. “Willie, I told you…” A carriage pulled to a stop outside the front door and Nick glanced at the window. His guest had arrived. “You’ll see,” he said, stepping aside so that Mr. Finch could be ready to answer the door at the first knock. “You may think you have the solution to my problem—”
“I certainly do not have the solution. But one of these ladies…” She read the name at the top of her list. “Devonna Markham, perhaps. She has at least six hundred pounds a year from her grandfather and another eight or nine hundred—depending on who is telling the story—from an elderly aunt, another Miss Markham, who named our Miss Markham the only heir to her estate. Then there is Emma Greenlaw.” She glanced at the second name on the paper, then up at Nick, as dispassionate as if they were discussing consolidated annuities rather than flesh and blood women—and the flesh and blood man who, if he was not careful, would find himself strapped to one of them.
“Miss Greenlaw’s father is in trade,” Willie explained, “and to some, that might make her less than satisfactory, but by all accounts, the Greenlaws are respectable and as plumb in the pockets as any. Then there is Lady Catherine Sutcliffe who is a widow, and of course, Sylvia Moore-Paget and—”
“Charming. All of them.”
And just hearing their names read like the roll of the Doomsday chronicle struck terror in Nick’s heart.
He cast aside the thought and consoled himself with the sure knowledge that there was light, yet, at the end of the tunnel and hope, still, that he would not be backed into a corner with pen in hand, ready to sign a prenuptial settlement.
“I have no doubt that they are splendid girls with splendid families and splendid family fortunes. But don’t you see—” There was a knock on the door and Nick’s face lit with a smile at the same time his spirits lifted far higher than they had been since the day a week earlier when Willie had so clearly spelled out the sorry state of his finances.
Rather than be seen waiting at the door and look far too eager, he ducked into the morning room and Willie followed.
Nick peered around the half-closed door and watched as Mr. Finch ushered his visitor into the entryway. “You’ll see, Willie.” He backed away from the door so that Mr. Finch might announce his visitor and when he thought a sufficient amount of time had passed to send the clear message that he was not overanxious, overly concerned or overwrought at the news of his financial ruin which, no doubt, had already gone through town like wildfire, he told Mr. Finch to show the man in.
Waiting, Nick gave Willie a smile that told her he was supremely confident and so sure of his plan, she need think about hers no longer. He was not about to be ensnared by some modest miss with a smile on her pretty face and naught in her heart but the desire to shackle a husband to herself and control his fortune, his thoughts, and his very life.
“Yours may be one solution to my problem but it is not a satisfactory one,” he told Willie in a whisper. “And it is not the only one. Wait here. You’ll see.”
Willie did not have to wait long. A second later, Rawdon Farleigh stepped into the room.
A lifetime of dealing with his betters in a capacity that, by nature, needed to leave room for both discretion and a little healthy competition had made Mr. Farleigh into exactly the kind of man Nick expected. Just as those of Nick’s acquaintance who had dealt with the man (ever so secretly, of course) had described, Farleigh was small and slight, with a pointed chin and eyes that were yellow, like a rat’s. He was well dressed—even if he was a bit dandified, well mannered—even if he was a bit unctuous, and cognizant enough of the ways of society—and his place on the fringes of it—that he knew exactly what to say, how to say it and when to keep his mouth shut.
When he was introduced to Willie, he kept his mouth shut. After all, it was not often that a viscount introduced a young lady in his household as his secretary and steward, and if Farleigh thought better of the designation and that, perhaps, it was a grand and glorious title for a different sort of profession altogether, he was too mindful of what might be at risk to give an opinion.
Which was a very good thing, Nick decided. He would have hated to throw Farleigh out before they ever had a chance to get down to business.
Farleigh wasted no time. Chafing his hands together as if against a chill, he scanned the paintings that hung around the room.
“Excellent.” Farleigh headed straight for a portrait of Nick’s great-aunt Hermione and Nick’s mood brightened even more. He had never liked Great-Aunt Hermione and he liked her portrait even less. She was a gray-faced, hatchet-jawed, rock-ribbed old lady and it would do his frame of mind—not to mention his purse—a world of good to be rid of her.
“Wonderful, isn’t she?” Nick could hardly believe the words that poured out of his mouth. Great-Aunt Hermione, wonderful? He controlled the shiver that spilled down his back and got on with it. Better to lie to Farleigh than to spend the rest of his days with Great-Aunt Hermione staring over his sh
oulder.
“It is a Gainsborough,” Nick said. He directed the comment at Farleigh at the same time he glanced Willie’s way as if to underscore what he had told her earlier. There was more than one way to save a family’s fortunes. Even if it meant selling off the long-dead ancestors, one by bloody one. “Been in the family for years.”
“I have no doubt of that.” Farleigh brushed a finger against the frame and came away covered with dust. His top lip curled and without ceremony, he pulled out a silk handkerchief and cleaned his hands. When he was done, he retrieved his quizzing glass, held it up to his eye and took a good, long look at Great-Aunt Hermione.
He nodded and mumbled to himself. He clicked his tongue. He stepped back and looked at the painting from the right, then from the left. He stepped back even farther and squinted at Hermione. Step by careful step, he got closer to her—closer, Nick suspected, than any man had ever gotten in life. He ran a finger along Great-Aunt Hermione’s massive bosom.
Another thing Nick suspected had never happened to the old lady in her lifetime.
While Farleigh was still staring deep into Hermione’s eyes, Nick decided it was time to start the negotiations. He made sure to look at Willie as he did, so she could see that, in spite of her dire warnings, he had his financial situation well in hand. And he didn’t have to chain himself to an iron-ball of a wife to do it.
“I’ve been told at least two hundred pounds.” It wasn’t what he’d been told at all but Nick thought it would be bad form to let Farleigh think there was a bargain to be had.