The Misfit Marquess

by Teresa DesJardien

  She had read quite a few of them, Gideon noted—or so she said. She was either a bit of a bluestocking or else she was simply making wild claims.

  He suspected the latter.

  Curious, that. There were not many females of his acquaintances who not only liked to read, but who would readily admit to that scholarly pursuit. Granted, his shelves did not offer much in the way of Greek or Latin tomes. Most of Gideon's inherited library consisted of dreadfully dry religious tracts, tales of travel almost as dusty, and a daunting profusion of Minerva Press novels. Mama had cared for the latter in her younger days, and Papa had cared for books only as decoration of his library. Still, there was the occasional volume of poems, treatises on farming practices, and recent popular reading that Gideon had added to the collection, and most of those presented to Elizabeth she claimed to have already read.

  "Collection of the Essential Works of John Gay" She read another title aloud, and Gideon noted she placed it in her "no" pile.

  "Am I to take it you have read John Gay?" Gideon scoffed.

  "I have." She gave him a curious look, one that suggested she bordered on being insulted.

  "Quote me something by him then. Anything at all that you recall," Gideon said, not bothering to hide his skepticism.

  She gave him an arch look. "If the heart of a man is deprest with cares," she recited with the slow dawning of a superior little smile in her eyes, "The mist is dispell'd when a woman appears.' That is from The Beggar's Opera."

  "So it is," Gideon agreed, blinking away his surprise. "Thank you," he murmured, and ungraciously turned his attention back to his account books.

  "Now here is something I have not seen before," she said, and Gideon had to credit her for not sounding smug. He glanced up from his work once more, despite an interior command not to keep allowing her activities to distract him, and saw she had a Minerva Press volume in her hands.

  "The Serpent's Tooth." Elizabeth read the title aloud. "It is surely about ungrateful children, do you not think?" she asked the room in general.

  Gideon frowned at the pages before him, realizing he had yet again lost his place. He would have to start the sums all over again.

  He took a deep breath, and let it out in an audible sigh as he wondered for the hundredth time why he did not simply hire a secretary to do this tedious estate work for him. Other men left estate affairs to their men of business—but other men ended in bankruptcy or debtor's prison. Not Gideon. Not with a houseful of dependents relying on him and his ability to remain solvent. That was why he watched over his own books.

  If only some of those dependents were not immediately in this room and disturbing his thinking, Gideon thought sourly.

  He was almost relieved when his butler, Frick, stepped in at that moment, interrupting the resumption of his calculations. "The post, my lord," Frick informed him, bringing the same into the room on a silver salver.

  Gideon removed the single missive, and Frick bowed himself out, but not before inquiring if Miss Elizabeth required anything for her comfort and nodding to a request for tea. Gideon looked up at that, disgruntled by the obvious indication that she meant to linger here a while longer. Maybe he should leave, for he certainly was not getting much accomplished with Elizabeth in the room. She was a dratted distraction.

  "Is your letter from someone you care to hear from?" The distraction spoke yet again.

  Gideon glanced at the handwriting in which his name had been penned on the outside of the folded missive. "Benjamin," he answered curtly.

  "Benjamin?" Elizabeth echoed, quite evidently content to make idle conversation.

  Gideon sighed, but in all fairness he could hardly blame her; time could be a heavy weight on the shoulders of an invalid. In some minds time was a flexible thing, not a straight line ruthlessly ticked away second by second. In some minds, one day could go on and on, revisited, relived for years, or never ending. Mama, in her later days, had returned in her mind to her youth, so far lost to reality that she could not even think how to don the clothes in her wardrobe, for they no longer had the shape or purpose of the clothing she had worn as a girl forty years earlier.

  Elizabeth continued to look at Gideon with a question in her gaze.

  "Benjamin is my brother," he explained. "I have two. Benjamin is younger by two years, and Sebastian by five."

  "You have no sisters?"

  "None. And you?" He gave her a level gaze, and hoped he had not allowed his interest to visibly sharpen.

  She parted her lips, then closed them deliberately. He would swear she was perfectly aware he had meant to trap her into a confession of her past. She might be of the nervous sort, but she was not stupid.

  "I cannot say," was her reply.

  "You do not know?" he queried sharply, now not bothering to hide his keen interest. "Or you will not say?"

  "I cannot say," she reported. She turned her gaze down to the book she cracked open in her lap, her mouth set in a firm line.

  "Could you say, if I promised to do nothing to find your family?"

  She glanced up sharply. "Do you promise that?"

  It would be easy to lie, but some sense of honor or correctness held his tongue. "Of course not. Your family has a right to know where you are—"

  Putting the book under her arm, Elizabeth turned her attention to the nearest footman. "I would like to be returned to my room, please. At once."

  "You are running away," Gideon said with surprise, and wondered if he meant from their conversation or from her past.

  "No," Elizabeth said, nodding as Simons brought the usual chair for her to transfer into. "I am running toward something, Lord Greyleigh." She hesitated, then looked back at him. She squared her shoulders. "I do wish you would not ask me questions. If you will insist on doing so, I will have to leave this house at once, no matter what the doctor cautions."

  He stared at her, not so much angered as shocked. It wasn't her apparent lucidity that shocked him, nor her demands to remain unquestioned, but the stark anguish sitting in the back of her eyes. She tried to hide it, tried to stare him down haughtily, but Gideon had looked too many times into despondent eyes not to recognize the agony he saw now.

  The footmen glanced between the lady and their master, clearly at a loss as to whether or not they should proceed. Elizabeth did not signal them, her attention wholly fixed on Gideon.

  She had been through some terrible ordeal—he could see that as clearly as he could see by the rapid rise and fall of her bosom that her breath had quickened in agitation. Or perhaps the ordeal was something that lived in her brain, torturing her, making her unable to cope with the world around her.

  It did not really matter which. Sane or mad, she was a soul in pain—lost, wandering, afraid.

  She surely feared that her refusals to speak would cause him to cast her out, before her enfeebled body was able to withstand the risk. She feared her future swung on this moment, and she waited with bated breath to learn her fate. He knew it as clearly as if she had spoken. He had looked into fear-filled eyes a hundred, a thousand times, and despite his strictest intentions to safeguard his own soul, found himself succumbing to the plea he sensed now from her.

  "Come back in a few minutes," Gideon said in a rough voice to the footmen, who withdrew at once. When they had gone, Gideon turned back to Elizabeth.

  "My dear lady, if it distresses you so, I promise I will not ask you any more questions," he found himself saying, wanting to do what he had always done, wanting to make that despondency recede from her eyes.

  "Thank you," she said on a breathy sigh, manifestly relieved. "Perhaps, one day. . . . My lord, I would like to repay your kindnesses in some way—one day, if it is in my power to do so."

  "To tell me the truth?"

  "To explain everything. Yes."

  "You could write to me," he said, indicating his brother's letter with a forced half smile, an attempt to lighten the moment, to make her relief complete.

  She responded with a half smil
e of her own, and he experienced a physical thrill when he saw that the fear had retreated from her gaze. "Yes," she went on. "I would like to tell you all. When I can."

  "When you can," he repeated, and the words made some manner of pact between them, as firmly as if they had shaken hands over a bargain. How had this happened? How had they come to a moment where words were not necessary, but the force of her will, her intent gaze, the anxiety there, had been enough to communicate silently with him?

  She smiled again, a tremulous twist of the lips.

  "Do you still wish to return to your room?" Gideon asked for something to say while he frantically tried to sort through their

  conversation, tried to see how it was that he had been made to shape this odd agreement with her.

  She smiled again, this time a yes to his question, and he stood to summon the footmen once more into the room.

  He remained standing until she was clear of the room, and then he slowly regained his seat. He put one hand to his forehead and planted his elbow atop his desk. His other hand slowly rose to join the first, and he cradled his head in growing exasperation, wondering what manner of fool promises not to ask questions of an addled stranger who has invaded his home.

  "A gullible fool," he responded to his own question.

  Mama had sometimes manipulated him this way ... and despite having dealt with her moods and fits for years on end, he had still been easily gulled. He had not only let this Elizabeth with-no-surname lead him by the nose, but it seemed to him he had done so willingly.

  The absurd part of his eager capitulation to her demand was that he'd had every intention of asking her why she had recognized his description of the dandy, the one who had been trying to remove her ring in that ditch. But now he could not.

  "Deftly done," he murmured aloud, and wondered if Elizabeth's face, could he but see it at this moment, would be wreathed in a smug smile. Oh no, she was not stupid, not this stranger who refused to tolerate any more of his questions.

  Elizabeth made an awkward transfer from the chair to her bed, dismissed the footmen, and for once felt she deserved the stinging pain in her heel.

  It was not that she felt bad for Simons, even though he had explained to her how he had come to lose his fingers, and even though she knew his injury had much longer lasting repercussions than her own.

  It was not the promise she'd extracted from Lord Greyleigh that made her feel deserving of discomfort, even though she suspected he had never wanted to promise any such thing.

  No, it was the way she had reacted to his presence, to his steady regard when he had fixed his attention on her, that made her now concentrate on her heel's pain, as if to do penance.

  His steady regard. She had been keenly aware of his presence in the library, even though he sat across the room from her, even though he spent most of the time with his head down, hard at work. When she had first glimpsed him there, she had begun to order the footmen to carry her elsewhere, but Lord Greyleigh had looked up and seen her, and waved her in. It had seemed churlish to decline once she had already disturbed his peace, and she had wanted a book to read, after all.

  It was his appearance, of course, that made him difficult to ignore. His hair had become lightly kissed by gold in the slanting afternoon sunlight, reminding Elizabeth of the luminous painted halos in religious art. And when he glanced up at her, she was shocked as ever by his pale blue eyes, eyes to rival any painted saint's—and a few devil's eyes she'd seen painted as well.

  As she moved her leg onto a pillow, hoisting her injured heel, she considered that one thing about the afternoon had been gratifying: Lord Greyleigh had promised not to question her further. It would be good to be done with that particular tension between them. Now she could just be a guest, lingering awhile, until she was gone—no complications, no ties, no worrying constantly about what clue to her past he might wring from her.

  He could be lying about questioning her no more, of course, or ranting despite sounding rational. Yet, without evidence to the contrary, Elizabeth did not think so. Whatever else he was, Lord Greyleigh was not a man who spoke for the sake of hearing his own words; what he said, he meant. His thinking might be muddled—how else had he gained the singular reputation he bore?—but he was consistent within his own thinking at least.

  No, it was not his word she doubted, but her own nature.

  Damn Radford Barnes to Hades, Elizabeth thought, shocking herself with the blasphemy, but even more with the knowledge that she really would condemn Radford to the flames if she could. She detested him for all he had done to her, but what she hated him for the most, what shamed her to the core, was that the man had awakened in her a carnal longing.

  All the passages in the Bible, the ones she used to think she understood, but had not really, now made humiliating sense to Elizabeth. Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul. . . . Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be bunted? Can one go on hot coals, and his feet not be burned? She could have written one herself: Can a woman know physical love and not be changed?

  When she had believed herself married to Radford, she had tried to love him. tried to be all that a wife is to her husband. She'd had no thought that the special license he'd presented was worthless, a forgery, that the man who had "married" them was but a hired accomplice, no more real than the marriage bond she'd thought she'd entered.

  She had learned from Radford the pleasure of physical love. God help her. she had enjoyed the intimacy. Up until the night he had revealed his perfidy, she had been content enough in her decision to wed the man, and to take this stranger nightly into her bed. No, not just content, she had been eager.

  God had been merciful in one regard at least: she was not breeding. It was in fact her womanly cycle that had finally brought out the dark side in Radford, had finally set him to telling her the truth. Denied her bed four days running, he had resorted to the bottle for entertainment instead. The drink had loosened his tongue and had brought out his true nature. Eyes that had gazed upon Elizabeth with loverlike zeal had then turned dark with a malicious kind of glee. He had shown her the special license and revealed its worthlessness.

  "No, 'scuse me, that's not quite true, it's not worthless," he had slurred. "It has quite a bit o' worth. Your papa will pay dearly to have me hand it, and you, back to him."

  "Radford?" Elizabeth remembered asking with a quivering voice, but even then, even at that first moment of revelation she had believed him. Even in their brief time together, there had been something missing between them, something that even the pleasure of the marriage bed could not cloak. They were on their bridal journey, granted, but all mention of returning home had been deftly turned aside by him . . . but it was more than just his vagueness about their future together. It had been the occasional look she'd surprised in his eyes, or the way he had phrased a comment, a small hurtful way of saying something to her. She had already begun to wonder if her husband always spoke the truth . . . and, most important, if he spoke it when he said he loved her.

  "Now don't you worry, m'dear," he had gone on in a growing sneer. "I'll reward your papa for payin' me for your return by keeping m'mouth shut." He had put a finger to his lips in a shushing motion. "Shhh! No one tells nothin', once m'pockets are full. Everythin' goes back to normal, and everyone is happy. You'll see."

  "I shall take you to court," she had declared, wishing she sounded fierce, but even to her own ears she had only sounded devastated.

  "No, you will not. Courts bring scandal. Trust me, m'dove, no one's ever taken me to court. It's all 'pay up and hush up,' and your Papa will want it just the same. How else will he ever pawn you off on some unsuspecting half-wit if it gets about you've been diddled with? Just be glad I'll take the money and leave it at that."

  Tears had slid down her cheeks, as much from comprehension of her changed circumstances as from the pain he dealt her. She had eloped with him in order to increase Lorraine's chance of wedding her beloved Broderick—and now
Elizabeth would have to return home, ruined, bringing scandal to the family name. It was the very kind of scandal that would put paid to Lorraine's acceptance by Broderick Mainworthy's family. Elizabeth did not want to weep in front of this monster who had pretended to marry her, but the thought of the pain that lay ahead for her entire family was too overwhelming.

  "Oh, stop that blubberin', you silly cow. Did you think I actually loved you?" he had slurred with a drunken laugh.

  She had stifled her tears until he had fallen asleep, intoxicated and snoring on the inn's bed, and then she had gathered her jewelry, stolen one of his carriage horses, and ridden out of his life.

  But some things could not be ridden away from—and one of them was her schooling in the ways of the flesh. Once that gate had been opened, there was no shutting it again.

  When she looked at Lord Greyleigh, admittedly a strange man of peculiar look and even more peculiar ways, still she saw the man beneath the trappings. She knew what existed under a man's waistcoat, under his unmentionables, and, Heaven help her, men were no longer the sexless creatures they had been to her once innocent eyes.

  She saw now wide shoulders where a woman's were more narrow, and narrow hips where a woman's were wide. She saw tone of muscle under a well-cut coat; she saw the way an Adam's apple pushed at a man's cravat; she saw a difference in the way a man balanced on his feet. Where men had once been "un-women" to her sinless mind, now she saw them as "males," and Radford had been of a male beauty such as to make her lips part and her breath catch.

  Lord Greyleigh was such a male, although Elizabeth would have been hard-pressed to explain why. He was handsome in his own extraordinary way, but it was more than that. There was some quality to his voice, as well, the deep timbre of it, yes, but also what he said. She supposed it was that she could not always guess what he might say, and not knowing was interesting, even stimulating.

  It did not matter, of course, and her awareness of him as a male was wholly inappropriate.