by Laura London
“Do you feel well enough to talk, Katie?” asked Linden, his gaze intent on her face. She nodded, looking a little scared by his cool tone.
He studied her and then said, “I’ve been to see your grandfather’s lawyers. He had a law firm in London, very respectable. It seems that everything Guy said was true—you stand to inherit some twenty thousand pounds from your grandfather. Unfortunately, sweetheart, that’s not the good news that it sounds to be.” He saw her clench one small hand into a fist and bent forward to straighten her curling fingers and stroke the back of her hand. “Your grandfather, it appears, was something of a misogynist; he left you the money in your father’s name and the way the will stands, if your father is your legal guardian, then the money can go to meet his debts.”
“But you said if my father is my legal guardian!” said Katie, her hand tensing again under Linden’s. “He is. Of course, he is.”
Linden tucked her hand against the warmth of her hip. “I’m sorry, Katie, but that’s not so. Ivo Guy’s gotten legal custody of you by claiming you’ve been deserted by your father. He’s got a weasel of a solicitor starting a suit against me to demand you be returned to him. Where Guy himself is, nobody’s been able to discover.”
Katie twisted the back of her hands to her cheeks in agitation. “I shall have to go back to him,” she said, her voice weak with horror. “No one will believe that he threatened me. They’ll think I’m lying. Lord Linden! Lord Linden!”
Linden moved swiftly to the bed and caught her trembling wrists with one hand. His other hand flew to her chin and held it, forcing her to look up into his cold eyes.
“Enough!” he said sharply. “You’ll work yourself into a fever. Do you think that I’d go to all this trouble to save your pretty body and then turn you over to tease Guy’s manhood? I won’t let Guy take you. I’m fully aware of what that would mean to you. Damn you, Katie, breathe deeply or you’ll grow faint again! Easy, child… Better. Listen to me. If I have to, I’ll kill him. But I doubt it’ll come to that. We’re going to court to get a temporary order placing you in my grandmother’s custody. In the meantime, though, we look for your father… and watch out for Ivo Guy.”
Chapter Fifteen
The May rain clattered in cold pellets against the pavement outside, but Fawnmore had caused a fire to be lit in Lady Brixton’s green drawing room so no unpleasant consequences of the elements need disturb its noble occupants. Lord Linden had just, under Andrew’s encouraging gaze, finished telling his grandmother the same story that he-had told Katie earlier this evening, only this time he spared nothing of its grimmer details.
Lady Brixton had listened without comment, her face serious. Finally she said, “You think the girl’s in danger then.”
Linden crossed his legs at the ankles, his teak eyes remote. “Guy’s only choice now is to kill her before we can win custody in your name,” said Linden, his voice without emotion. “Or before we find her father and his credit-sharks can claim the money.”
“He’s a madman!” declared Lady Brixton. She cast an impatient glance at Linden. “Why can you not find him first? Lord knows, boy, you’ve enough connections with low life men from your work spying for the War Department, of which I will never approve, not if I live to be a hundred. Ahem. Point is, why can’t you hire one of those wretched fellows to locate Guy?”
“I have,” said Linden calmly. “But, Grandmère, do you have any idea how many places there are to hide in a city the size of London? Of course, we’ll find him eventually, but… damn, I wish I knew where her father was!”
“Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to contact Katie’s pal, Zack, again?” ventured Drew, who was sitting on a wool carpet in front of the fire, his arms resting on knees that he had drawn up to his chest. “Katie went there once to see if Zack’d heard from her father. Might be worth one more try.”
Linden nodded. “All right, Drew. But that boy’s tough as timber. I have a feeling that he wouldn’t tell me anything for money, love, or fear. But if I brought him here to see Katie… I will.”
Lady Brixton’s gaze riveted indignantly on Linden. “Oh, you will, will you! You’re taking a lot on yourself, aren’t you, boy? First I’m to adopt the Bad Baron’s daughter and then you expect me to entertain some rascally scum of a pandering gin-shop owner at tea! You brided your jezebel Laurel with jewels; what blandishments do you offer me?”
Lord Linden offered her his most Elysian smile. “You’ve got more jewels than a sultan’s harem. Would you do it for my eternal gratitude?”
“Conceited calf! Bamboozler!” said Her Grace. “I’m not doing it for you, anyway, I’m doing it for Katie. Nice little gal, sort of chit I like. Got a way about her… and she’s not stuffed full of fuss and affectation like most modern misses. And I’ll say this for your little Kendricks, she could have made life easier for herself by serving gentlemen’s conveniences. She didn’t choose to, which says a good thing for her morals, if not for her brains.” The duchess regarded the shaded brown eyes of her grandson. “As you say, she’s an innocent.”
Linden set down the wine glass that he had recently emptied, leaned back into his chair, and spoke coldly. “Comment cela, Grandmère? What convinced you? Beside, of course, my word.”
The duchess chuckled. “Well, I didn’t harass the chit with an interrogation so you needn’t glare at me as if I were poisoned porridge. It’s obvious the chit has her virtue—when she told me about Laurel’s bedroom—oh, aye, frown your head off, boy, I don’t care! If you don’t like it, you oughtn’t to have taken her there! Anyway, Katie didn’t know why Laurel had a mirror hanging over her bed. That’s innocence.”
“Didn’t know?” asked Linden. “Past tense?”
“Past tense,” agreed the duchess, mischievously. “She knows now. I told her.”
The duchess had taken a strong liking to Katie but if this was any comfort to Linden, it didn’t show. Her Grace had invited him to take a late dinner with his family but she soon saw she had made a mistake. Before the meal was over Linden had drunk enough to have laid any other man under the table several times over. Something, it appeared, was worrying his lordship. He had gone from wine to cognac to a tankard of dark ale. Every so often Lady Suzanne, who was quite unused to heavy drinking, would pause in her discourse on the day’s activities (just now she was confiding to a politely glazed-over Andrew the finer points of pruning the garden rosebushes) to glance uneasily in Linden’s direction. When she had directed her fourth nervous peek at her inebriated cousin, Linden slammed his tankard onto the dinner table’s mahogany surface in a blow that was to forever mar its satiny finish.
“Hell and damnation, Suzanne!” lashed Linden. “Must you cutty-eye me as if I were a vampire from hell? God knows, I’m only swilling at the trough… in the great family tradition of Grandpère’s prize sow. No, boar. Damn. Do you know what you can do with your rosebushes? I can see by your face that you do. Good.” Linden lurched to his feet, sending his chair flying into the wall behind him and oversetting a silver fruit dish. He swore, snatched a bottle of port from the sideboard and grabbed the hapless Suzanne, twisting his hands into her hair and kissing her full on the mouth. Then, not opposed to adding insult to injury, he released the bewildered girl roughly and remarked, most unfairly, that if that was all the better she could kiss, it was no wonder her late husband had seen fit to break his neck.
“Lesley,” observed the duchess, “is not behaving well.”
She found her elder grandson in the library some ten minutes later. Linden had pulled off his jacket and flung himself into an oversized armchair. One long booted leg was cast carelessly over the chair’s molded arm and he swung it idly to and fro while perusing a short sheet of gilt-edged note paper. Lady Brixton came into the room, closing the door quietly behind her. Linden looked up.
“There are times,” said the duchess tranquilly, “that you are inconsiderate and thoughtless, Lesley, but I have never known you to be a bully.”
“You’re righ
t. I drink too much,” he answered her, his voice without expression.
Lady Brixton sat on the edge of his chair and tenderly brushed the dark curls back from his forehead. “That’s all right, then. You can drink too much as long as you know you’re drinking too much.”
“Christ,” he said irascibly, “living with Suzanne has turned you into a damned petty philosophizer.”
Her Grace received this criticism with equanimity. “I thought so. Suzanne’s done something to anger you, hasn’t she? Interfered with your business? How you hate anyone to do that! The chit’s a bom meddler. What’s she done? Aside, I presume, from the lamentable lapse in manners that led her to discuss her rosebushes at the dinner table?”
“She’s taken to sending me instructive dispatches. I found this note pinned to a pillow cover in the bedroom.” Linden handed the note to his grandmother between two fingers. “Remark, if you will, that it bears the heading ‘Axioms for Lord Linden.’”
“It’s Suzanne’s hand, all right,” said Lady Brixton, scanning the small sheet. “Dear me. It says, ‘Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing. Proverbs 18:22.” Her Grace laughed softly. “Oh, Suzanne, you brat.”
Linden waved one hand and raised the wine bottle to his lips with the other. “Continue, Grandmère. You will see, we progress through history.”
“ ‘Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife. Euripedes. 5th C. B.C.,’” read Lady Brixton, “and it continues, ‘There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage. Martin Luther. 1569.’ Poor Lesley, how galling to have your deepest concerns guessed and reduced to a series of obscure platitudes.”
“Voilà,” snarled Linden, “she’s as subtle as a cocked musket, your Suzanne. And too damned well-read.” He closed his eyes for a long time and sat without moving. The duchess was quiet beside him, looking away from him so as not to disturb his thoughts by the intensity of her gaze. At length, he opened his eyes and said, “Katie has enough problems without trying to flow in my harness. I’ve done her too much harm already.”
Lady Brixton regarded her attractive grandson curiously. “And you think it would harm her more if you married her?”
“Without a doubt. I’d make a devil of a husband.”
Lady Brixton dropped a loving hand on Linden’s shoulder. “Lesley. You’re too hard on yourself. You always are, you know. But, of course, we both know that this is nothing I can help you with. What I can do is to cease my petty philosophizing and go beat Suzanne for you. Good night.”
Much later that evening, when Lady Suzanne came into her dressing room to prepare for bed, she found a scrap of note paper addressed to her standing in a folded pyramid on her dressing table. She opened it and recognized Lord Linden’s impatient scrawl. At the head of the note was one word, ‘Sorry.’ And below it read ‘A saying for Suzanne—More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed. Thomas Fuller. 1732.’
The rain stopped an hour before sunrise and the passive night breezes brought London a comfortable daybreak. It was the last comfort the city was to feel that day. As quickly as the new, angled sunlight hit the still damp pavement, thin, wet noodles of steam rose upward in sun worship. This was to be the day of the sun, the most unseasonably hot, humid day that London had suffered in twenty-five years. It was hot as blazes, hot as hell. The heat rebaked the bricks of the National Trust, broiled the broken eggs of pigeons nesting on St. Paul’s dome and roasted fishermen casting their nets on the Thames. Ladies sacked their wardrobes for their lightest garments, gentlemen discarded jackets and cravats and Lady Brixton ordered the housemaids to forbear their dusting and the chef to prepare no meals that didn’t come out of the cool cellar and needed no heating.
At nine o’clock, Katie took her promised walk in the Brixton gardens, sharing a parasol with Lady Suzanne. By nine-thirty, both ladies were forced to admit it would be madness to go on. Though Katie felt the strongest she had since her injury, in fact, almost well, a faint pink heat flush had crept under her skin and the humidity had attacked Lady Suzanne’s curling-ironed coiffure and what had been ringlets an hour ago had become straight mousy-brown hanks. The ladies repaired to the Lady Suzanne’s boudoir where they shed as much clothing as modesty would permit, fanned themselves vigorously with large palm-leaf fans and drank unladylike quantities of lemonade. Conversation, when it existed at all, was desultory and concerned mostly with the cruel and unpredictable nature of the elements.
Sometime during the afternoon, Lady Suzanne stretched out on her daybed and fell asleep, her arms outflung, her petticoats riding up to her knees. Katie was tired, too, but also a little restless, so she sponged herself with cool rose-scented water from Suzanne’s porcelain ewer and struggled into an eau-de-Nil green gown of silk gauze. The sleeves were small and puffed, the waist cut high under her breasts, and there were twelve tiny buttons inconveniently set down the back seam that caused Katie a fair amount of grief to fasten. It took five minutes of painful effort and much backwards consultation with a full-length mirror before each button was in place.
“Thank God,” she said and started from the room, only to be stopped by the sight of the hairbrush staring reproachfully at her from the sycamore-stained vanity. Katie returned guiltily to run it through her hair and thread a dark green ribbon through the peaking curls in the way that Antoinette had taught her, except that it didn’t look quite the same as when Antoinette had done it herself.
Katie wandered fascinated through the long, carpeted halls and Italianate marble anterooms of the great house, a diffident, respectful tourist among the refined opulence. At length she came to the billiard room where she found Drew, who had most improperly engaged a young underfootman in a game. They stopped when Katie came in and at length Drew bore her off to the orangery, which, he claimed, was the only room in the house with a temperature below roasting.
The orangery proved to be a large, delightfully exotic room closed in by shaded glass, and thick with a velvet jungle of bushes, vines, ferns, and timidly blooming bulbs. Drew led Katie to the center of the room where a hissing fountain sent out a perpetual spray of crystal vapor. She sat on the cool granite floor beneath a spreading umbrella plant and began to question Drew about the plants. What were their names? Did they come from Brazil? Were they poisonous? Did Lady Brixton have a bush with fruit that could make you drunk? Drew had been about to indignantly refute any suggestion that he knew anything about a bunch of damned plants but Katie’s last question and the credulous expression on her pretty features spurred his sense of the ridiculous. Grinning, he began to weave Katie several long and totally imaginary tales about the monstrous botanical rarities of Brazil. He achieved a considerable success with a plant that drugged its human victims with an irresistibly intoxicating fragrance, then drew them inside their leaves and digested them while the unfortunate victims had visions of Utopia. Katie began to look nervously at a lazily curling frond which was nodding seductively over her shoulder.
Lord Linden had been to visit The Merry Maidenhead that afternoon and had just returned to Brixton House accompanied by Zack. The two men entered the orangery in time to hear Drew’s last mare’s nest. Linden came to the fountain, brushing aside a few boldly straying branches and tousled his younger brother’s hair.
“I ought to throw you in that fountain,” Linden said pleasantly. “The poor child probably believes every word of your Irish bull.” He bent to touch Katie’s cheek and ran a quick searching gaze over her face.
“If I’m ever to be thrown into the fountain, I’d as lief it be today as any. Sounds devilish refreshing.” Drew studied the thinnish youth with shoulder-length straggling hair and tight breeches who had followed Linden into the room, and nodded, keeping his hands at his sides. “You must be Zack. I know you from Katie’s description.”
“If it was from Katie’s description, then you must be expecting the Demon King,” said Zack matter of factly. He dropped to sit on his heels in front of Katie. “How are you, Kati
e, pet? Christ, you’re pale. Linden’s been telling me about your escapades! Seems like I no sooner let you out of my sight but you embroil yourself in a set of madhat shenanigans.”
“Of all the unkind, unfair…” said Katie, setting her hand on the fountain’s edge to pull herself upright. She was still angry about his attempt to force her into elegant prostitution. “It was a shame that you didn’t know about Ivo Guy before you sold me to Lord Linden. My cousin might have paid you more than fifty pounds for me.”
Katie turned her back and would have marched from the room, but Zack stood and caught her around the waist, pulling her back against his body.
“Whist, Mousemeat. Will you listen a minute? There’s nothing that could ever make me sell you to anyone who’d hurt you. I think you know that.” He ran a tender hand through her curls. “Dammit, are you going to hate me forever? As it turns out, if this Ivo Guy was going to come after you, then you were a hell of a lot better off under Linden’s protection than mine.”
“I’d have been better off under the protection of a cannibal tribe than yours!” said Katie wrathfully, but weakening. “Why did you come? To see if anyone’s bought me a Viennese villa? Well, they haven’t. Good-bye.”
Zack laughed, planted a friendly kiss on her cheek and released her. “Saucy chit,” he said indulgently, “I came to see you in your hour of illness, of course. Lord Linden came to the Maidenhead and told me you’d been shot. Behold me here, to see for myself that you were all right. Even though it wasn’t any picnic going through the streets in this heat. I worry about you, y’know.”
“Do you really, Zack?” asked Katie, half skeptical, half sincere. She sighed and sank down on the fountain’s variegated Carrara marble edge. “I’m glad that you do because Papa certainly seems to have forgotten about me.”
It would have been nice to be able to comfort her, but her words so nearly echoed the sentiments of the three gentlemen present that none of them felt able to do so. Drew sat down beside Katie and looked at Zack.