The Last Hellion

by Loretta Chase

  Only once, at the very end, had she made anything like a plea for mercy. Even then, it wasn’t on her behalf. Those last, barely legible lines, written days before her death, stood stark and blazing in his brain as though burned there with an iron: Dear Father in Heaven, look after my girls.

  He’d tried to blot out her story, as he’d banished so much else from his mind, but it stuck and rooted there, like the stubborn gorse that grew on the inhospitable moors her Ballister ancestors had made their home.

  The words of a woman eighteen years dead had dug into him as few others’ words could do, and made him feel like a cur and a coward. She’d borne her lot with courage and humor…while he couldn’t face what had happened on his wedding night.

  He’d leapt at the chance to quarrel with Dain, eagerly used anger to blot out the other thing.

  As though what he had to bear, one disagreeable realization, were the most excruciating thing in the world.

  It wasn’t. The joke was on him, that was all.

  He’d wanted Grenville, hadn’t he, as he’d never wanted any other woman. Why then should he be so amazed that when he’d finally bedded her, it wouldn’t be like bedding any other woman?

  With the others, he’d merely coupled.

  With his wife, he’d made love.

  She was a writer. In his place, she’d have found streams of metaphors to describe the experience, what it was like, how it was different.

  He hadn’t metaphors. But he was a libertine, with more experience than any man ought to have. Experience enough to discern the difference. And wit enough to understand his heart was engaged, and to know the word for that.

  Are you in love with me? he’d asked, smiling, as though the possibility amused him. And he’d had to go on smiling and teasing, all the while aware what the thing was that stabbed his heart, and why it hurt, as no physical injury had ever hurt him, when she didn’t give the answer he wanted.

  Hurt, that was all. In love, that was all.

  What was that to what Anne Grenville had endured? To what her daughter had endured?

  Not to mention, he knew only a fraction of the tale. The slim volume scarcely covered the palm of his hand. Its few pages held so little—most of it appalling—with great gaps in time between entries. He was sure it told only the smallest part of the story.

  He didn’t want to know more, didn’t want to feel smaller than he did already. Small and petty and selfish and blind.

  But if Grenville could live it, whatever that life had been, he could certainly bear learning about it.

  Not from her. She hadn’t wanted the past raked up, she’d said, and he wasn’t going to make her relive it.

  Dain would know more of the tale, and he’d tell, like it or not. He had a lot to answer for. The least he could do was answer a few questions, Lord All-Wise and All-Knowing.

  He would seek Dain out first thing, Vere resolved, and pound the facts out of him if necessary.

  With that agreeable prospect in mind, the Duke of Ainswood finally drifted into sleep.

  As it happened, Vere didn’t have to seek Dain out. Midafternoon, upon learning from Jaynes that the master and mistress were up and about, Dain arrived to bear Vere off to the private dining parlor, while the ladies enjoyed a late breakfast in Dain’s chambers.

  “Jessica is nigh exploding,” Dain said as they descended the stairs. “She must have a private tête-à-tête with my cousin, in order to share her experience in the art of torturing husbands. Trent’s taken Miss Price to Portsmouth to shop for some fripperies my lady insists your lady can’t do without, so he shan’t pester us with his blithering while we eat. Jess and I will take the pair of them with us to Athcourt. You will need to reorganize your household to accommodate a wife, and you won’t want Trent about. Not that I want him, either, but he shouldn’t be too much underfoot—at least not under my feet. He will trot after Miss Price, and show a degree of intelligence for once in his life, in falling head over ears in love with the only female in all the known universe who has any idea what to make of him.”

  Vere paused on the stairs. “In love?” he said. “Are you sure?”

  “Certainly not. How should I know? To me, he sounds and looks as imbecilic as usual. But Jessica assures me he has fixed his minuscule brain upon Miss Price.”

  They continued on, Dain calculating aloud the amount he’d settle upon Miss Price if she would take pity on Trent and marry him, while Vere heard “in love” echo in his mind and wondered whether Lady Dain had noticed symptoms of the same ailment elsewhere.

  “You are abnormally quiet,” Dain said as they settled into their chairs. “We’ve passed a full five minutes together, with nary one belligerent remark passing your lips.”

  A servant entered then, and they ordered. When the man had left, Vere said, “I want you to tell me everything you know about Grenville.”

  “As it happens, that was what I intended to do, whether you wanted to hear or not,” said Dain. “I had prepared myself to beat you senseless, revive you, and drop your broken body into the chair. In that agreeably spongelike state you would absorb the tale, and perhaps even the occasional tidbit of advice.”

  “Interesting. I had something like that in mind for you, in case you chose to be your usual aggravating self.”

  “I’m in charity with you this once,” said Dain. “You’ve made my cousin a duchess, restoring her to her proper place in the world. Furthermore, you wed her with, if not noble motives, at least not entirely ignoble ones. I was touched, Ainswood, I truly was, by your serene unconcern for her origins.” The mocking half-smile played about his lips. “Perhaps ‘serene’ is not precisely the word I want. Still, I was affected—not to mention deeply astonished—by your evidencing taste, for once in your misbegotten life. She is a wonderfully handsome girl, is she not? They are appallingly handsome, most of the Ballisters. She gets her looks from her maternal grandfather, you know. Frederick Ballister and my father were much alike in their youth. But Frederick contracted smallpox in his late teens, and the disease disfigured him. That must be why Anne compared her daughter to my father, instead of her own. She mustn’t have been aware that Frederick had been one of the beautiful Ballisters. We haven’t yet discovered a portrait of Anne. However, if one exists, you may be sure Jessica will find it. She has an alarming genius for finding things.”

  Vere was aware that one of the “things” Lady Dain had found—and made Dain keep—was his bastard son, Dominick. The thought stirred a chill wave in the dark area of Vere’s mind, the distant shores where orphaned and outcast thoughts huddled.

  He labeled the feeling “hunger” and looked impatiently toward the door.

  “Where’s the servant got to?” he said. “How long does it take to draw a tankard of ale?”

  “They’ve all been run off their feet, attending to the wedding guests this morning,” Dain said. “Or collecting the corpses is more like it. When I first came down at midday, the public dining room was strewn with bodies. It brought back fond memories of our Oxford days.”

  The servant appeared then, and another behind him. Both staggered under the weight of the trays, though the meal was for only two men. Still, they were two very large men, with commensurate appetites.

  It was a while, therefore, after the servants had gone, before Dain launched into the story. Still, he didn’t linger over the telling by adding literary embellishments or, worse yet, sentimental ones. He told it as Vere wanted it told, as a man would tell it, keeping to the plain facts and putting them in order, without wandering into whys and wherefores and that most profitless of all digressions, if onlys.

  Still, it was as unpleasant a tale as Vere had expected, and he lost his appetite before he’d emptied his plate of the first helping, because by then he’d heard about the Marshalsea.

  He pushed his plate away. “She told me her sister had died, that was all. She said nothing of how it happened. She said nothing of debtors’ prison.”

  “The Ballister nature i
s not confiding,” said Dain. “Lydia is obviously like the rest of us. ‘Didn’t want the past raked up’ was all her explanation for telling nobody anything about her origins. Did you know she was at my wedding—on the very church steps—and never made herself known? What the devil was she thinking? That I gave a damn what her mother did?” He scowled at his mug. “My own mother ran off with a sea merchant. The brat I got with the prime whore of Dartmoor lives in my house. Did the girl think I fancied she wasn’t good enough for us?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Vere. “I haven’t the least idea what goes on in her head.”

  The scowl shifted to Vere. “I am well aware your interest lies elsewhere. You did not marry her for her mind. It is inconceivable to you that she—any woman—has one. Well, let me tell you something, Ainswood. They do. They are always thinking, women are, and if you don’t wish to be outmaneuvered at every turn, I recommend you exercise your very thick and sluggish brain in comprehending your wife’s. I know this is hard for you. Thinking upsets the delicate balance of your constitution. I am trying to make it easier, by telling you what I know. We men must stick together.”

  “Then get back to telling, why don’t you?” said Vere. “You’ve scarcely buried her sister.”

  Dain took up the tale where he’d left off, but hadn’t much to say about Grenville’s life from the time after her father had gone to America, when she went to live with her great-uncle and -aunt. The father had died in ’16, of injuries sustained in a beating. He’d tried to run off with a rich American girl. This time, though, they were pursued, and the girl’s brothers rescued her and meted out their own justice to John Grenville.

  “It appears that my cousin traveled abroad with Stephen and Euphemia Grenville,” Dain said. “They died last autumn. I had learned the name of one of their servants, who lives in Marazion, Cornwall. We were planning to go down to talk to him when we received your wedding invitation.” Dain took up his tankard and emptied it.

  When he set the mug down, his dark gaze shifted to Vere’s plate. “I shall send Mr. Herriard to meet with your solicitor in London. You will not deny me a small act of belated revenge upon my sire, I hope. To spite the dear departed, I should like to dower Lydia, and Herriard can be counted upon to entangle you in settlements sufficiently exorbitant and complicated to stifle any shrieks of your manly pride. Lydia, of course, is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, as she’s proven. Yet I’m certain she would not object to having her offspring’s future secured.”

  “If she does, I’ll tell her to quarrel with you about it,” said Vere. There would be offspring, of course, he told himself, and Dain asked nothing more than what was customary. Dowry and settlements tied up certain issues neatly and legally, and provided a degree of material security for the future. If other aspects of the future troubled Vere, and if he was having rather more difficulty than usual in obliterating fresh anxieties, only his gut—currently in an annoying state of mal de mer—offered a hint, and that was on the inside, where Dain couldn’t see.

  “You won’t leave me to it without ammunition,” Dain said. “I’ve told you what you didn’t know. It’s your turn to satisfy my curiosity. I’ve had Sellowby’s version of recent events, but even he, it seems, does not know all. I’m on tenterhooks to hear about this business of climbing to the first floor of Helena Martin’s house. He was there at the time?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Vere.

  “I’ll order more ale,” said Dain.

  The waiter was summoned, the tankards replenished, and Vere took his own turn, telling his tale from the start, in Vinegar Yard. He did not tell everything, naturally, and he made a joke of what he did tell—which it was, and what did it matter that the joke was on him?

  He wasn’t the first man who’d run blindly into matrimony without realizing where he was headed. It was rather, as Dain so succinctly put it, like walking into a door in the dark. Dain certainly should know. He, too, had walked into the door.

  And because he had, Dain had no qualms about laughing at his friend’s errors, discomfitures, and defeats, or about calling him a “precious cretin” and other like endearments. Dain was merciless, but then, they had always been merciless to each other. They had always traded insults and blows. That was how they communicated. That was how they expressed affection and understanding.

  And because this was the way it had always been between them, Vere soon relaxed. If the uneasiness did not altogether vanish, he forgot it for the time he remained in the dining parlor, talking with his friend.

  It was all so much like old times that Vere could be excused for failing to understand that times had changed. He didn’t know that in six months of marriage, Dain had come to know himself better, and had no trouble applying this sharpened awareness elsewhere.

  Consequently, Lord Beelzebub was strongly tempted to take his bosom bow by the neckcloth and bang his head against the wall. He resisted the temptation, though, as he later told his wife. “He has Lydia,” Dain said. “Let her do it.”

  “Oh, Lizzy, I’m so sorry,” Emily moaned.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Elizabeth said briskly, as she wiped her sister’s forehead with a cool cloth. “If it had been something worse than dyspepsia, then you must be sorry, because it would frighten me out of my wits. But I’m not afraid of mere puking, however prodigious.”

  “I ate too much.”

  “You’d gone too long between meals, and the food was ill prepared. I was queasy myself, but then my stomach’s tougher than yours.”

  “We’ve missed it,” Emily said. “We’ve missed the wedding.”

  That was true. It was Thursday evening. They occupied a chamber of an inn near Aylesbury, many miles from their destination. They might have reached Liphook in time for the wedding, if Emily had not become violently ill half an hour after a hurried midday meal on Wednesday. At the next stage, they had to disembark. Emily had been so sick and weak that an inn servant had to carry her up to the chamber.

  They were traveling as governess and charge. Elizabeth had donned one of her old mourning dresses, because black made her look older. She’d also “borrowed” a pair of reading spectacles from the Blakesleigh library. She had to look over them, since she couldn’t see through them, but that, Emily assured her, made her appear all the more stern.

  “You must stop fretting about the wedding,” Elizabeth said. “You didn’t get sick on purpose.”

  “You should have gone on without me.”

  “You must be delirious to say such a thing. We’re in this together, Lady Em. Mallorys stick together.” Elizabeth plumped the pillows behind her sister. “They’ll be sending the broth up soon, and tea. You have to concentrate on getting strong again. Because as soon as you are, we’ll set out.”

  “Not for Blakesleigh,” Emily said, shaking her head. “Not until we’ve made our position clear. He has to know. That we tried.”

  “We can write a letter.”

  “He never reads them.”

  The Longlands servants communicated regularly with those at Ainswood House, and Longlands’ housekeeper wrote every quarter to the Ladies Elizabeth and Emily. Consequently, the girls were aware the present Duke had not opened his personal correspondence in a year and a half. At Longlands, the house steward dealt with His Grace’s business correspondence. At Ainswood House in London, the butler Houle performed the same service.

  “We could write to her,” said Elizabeth. “And she could tell him.”

  “Are you sure they’re married? News travels fast, but it isn’t always accurate. Maybe she won the race and he’ll have to try something else.”

  “It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper,” Elizabeth said. “Then we’ll decide what to do.”

  “I’m not going back to Blakesleigh,” Emily said. “I shall never forgive them. Never.”

  There was a tap at the door. “There’s your dinner,” Elizabeth said as she rose from the chair. “And in the nick of time, too. Perhaps your temp
er will improve when you’ve something in your belly.”

  Though Lydia and Ainswood arrived at Ainswood House very late on Thursday, all the household awaited them.

  By the time the housekeeper had relieved Lydia of her outer garments, the rest of the staff had filed in to the ground-floor hall and stood at attention—or their version of it.

  Lydia understood what Wellington had felt before Waterloo when he surveyed his “infamous army”—the ramshackle lot with which he must overcome Napoleon.

  She noted wrinkled aprons and tarnished livery, wigs and caps askew, haphazardly shaven chins, and most of the range of human expression from terror to insolence, embarrassment to despair.

  She withheld comment, however, and concentrated on memorizing names and positions. Unlike Wellington, she had a lifetime to make a satisfactory domestic fighting unit of this demoralized mob.

  As to the state of the house itself: Even without seeing much of it, she perceived that it was in even sorrier condition than its staff.

  She was not surprised. Ainswood rarely spent much time in residence and, like so many of his sex, lacked the faculty for perceiving dust, dirt, or disorder.

  Only the master bedchamber turned out to be in neat order. This, doubtless, was due to Jaynes. She had discovered earlier in the day that, contrary to appearances—which was to say Ainswood’s appearance—Jaynes was a prodigious fussbudget. He simply had the misfortune to be working with an uncooperative subject.

  Since Ainswood had dismissed the others with an impatient wave as soon as the butler and housekeeper, Mr. Houle and Mrs. Clay, had introduced everyone, it was Jaynes who showed Lydia her apartments. They adjoined Ainswood’s. No one, evidently, had entered them in years.

  Ainswood certainly didn’t want to enter them. As Jaynes opened the door to Her Grace’s quarters, the duke went in the opposite direction, into his dressing room.