by Eloisa James
“And you see how healthy she is,” Mrs. Minchem said defiantly.
“She always said—” Melinda piped up, then faltered to a stop after a glare from Mrs. Minchem.
“Yes, Melinda?” Villiers asked, peering down at the little girl attached to his leg.
“She said as how the hogs would eat us if we fell asleep,” Melinda said, and pressed herself even harder against Villiers’s thigh. “And she left Lucinda and Phyllinda in there all night long.” She gulped. “Maybe they’ve been et up.”
Villiers looked at Mrs. Minchem and she actually recoiled. “You might want to spend the next few minutes praying that your hogs haven’t acquired a taste for little girls,” he suggested.
He waited until he was out of earshot before assuring Melinda that pigs were vegetarians. But when he and Eleanor, trailed by various orphans, undid the huge rusty clasp shackling the door to the sty, and stuck their heads into the dark, odiferous place, he felt serious misgivings.
There was no one in the sty but three extraordinarily large pigs and a litter of piglets. The sow lumbered to her feet with a murderous look in her small eyes.
In the middle of the soiled straw was one small shoe.
“That’s Jane-Lucinda’s!” the eldest Jane said, bursting into noisy tears.
Chapter Fifteen
“They must have escaped,” Eleanor said, giving the girl a hug. “They are, after all, your children, Villiers. That is surely what happened.”
He had picked his way through the filthy straw and was examining the window, set up high and caked with indescribable dirt. “They didn’t go out this way.” Of course the pigs couldn’t have eaten two children. One of the animals was so fat that he couldn’t imagine it on its feet. Though one had to suppose that there was room in that vast stomach for a small child—
No. Of course not. One could not imagine that.
“Someone let them out,” Eleanor said. “Someone in this house had the Christian decency to look out for two small girls locked in this nauseating place overnight.”
His blood was beating in his ears and he heard only part of what she said. Suddenly she was next to him, hand on his arm. “A servant rescued them,” she repeated.
A servant…a servant. Of course a servant rescued them. The red haze in his head miraculously cleared. He didn’t even thank her, just pushed his sword back into its scabbard; he must have withdrawn it without realizing. “Whoever saved my children will be handsomely rewarded.”
But after Mrs. Minchem had been led away by Villiers’s grooms, cursing and protesting, and all the servants gathered around, it became clear that not one of them had dared to gainsay their mistress’s commands.
“You frequently left children overnight,” Villiers stated, looking from face to face.
“She weren’t an easy woman,” a servant said.
He was a craven fool who turned his face to the side rather than meet Villiers’s eyes. “You’re all dismissed,” he said. “Lady Lisette will make certain that you are not hired within the county.” He turned to Eleanor. “Where is Lisette?”
“She felt dizzy at the idea of the sty,” Eleanor said. “I sent her home. She’ll send the carriage back for us. Your twins are on the grounds somewhere. We must find them.”
But two hours later the children had still not been found. Every room had been searched; the barns had been rifled; the sty was turned inside out.
There was no sign of two small girls.
“They must have run away,” Villiers said. “That’s what I would have done.”
“There’s nothing more we can do at the moment,” Eleanor said. “We must go home. It’s long past time for luncheon. You’ll send your footmen out to search the surrounding countryside and they’ll find the children in no time. They can’t have gone far.”
That was true. He could feel the logic of it like a balm to his soul. “You called me Leopold in the orphanage,” he pointed out.
“A moment of weakness,” she said, accepting a footman’s hand to climb into the carriage.
Once in the carriage, he put his head back so he didn’t have to meet her eyes and said, “You must think it’s very odd that I…” He tried to figure out how to phrase exactly what happened to him.
“You were terrified,” Eleanor said, pulling a little mirror from her net bag and rubbing a smudge on her cheek. “That sty! That grotesque woman! I was just as frightened, and the children aren’t even mine.”
“I can hardly claim them as my children, in that sense of the word. I didn’t even know where they were living until a few days ago. I never gave them a second’s thought until this year. They could have been spending every night in a sty, for all I knew.”
“Nonsense. You paid for them to be well-housed, warm, fed, and educated. That’s more than many fathers in the same situation do.” She peered at herself in the small glass and then dropped it back into her bag. “Lord knows, you’re rich enough to give them all settlements, and that will buy them a future.”
“No man is rich enough to buy back his past,” Villiers said.
She met his eyes and the regret in hers made him feel better. “True. But there’s no point in wailing over it. I hope to goodness that Willa remembered to walk Oyster. If not, my chamber is going to be as malodorous as the sty itself.” She started searching about in her bag again.
She is a good person, Villiers thought, watching her under half-closed eyes so that she didn’t realize. He’d never noticed what a firm chin she had until she faced off with Mrs. Minchem.
There was something about Eleanor that made him want to bite her. He’d like to bite that firm little chin. And then do the same to her neck. Her neck was as strong as she was: a beautiful, fierce column.
Without thinking too much about it he rose and sat down beside her, crushing her skirts. She squeaked some sort of reproach, but he kissed her silent. She tasted like one of the first raspberries in spring, so sweet and tart that it bit the tongue. And she tasted angry somehow, which made him wonder about why he could taste what she was feeling.
But then she stopped being angry and her arms wound around his neck and she said “Leopold” into his mouth. He stopped thinking altogether and just focused on kissing her. After a while it dawned on him that there was something different about the way she was kissing him. Something he didn’t recognize.
She was kissing him back. Really kissing him back.
She had one hand woven so hard into his hair that it almost hurt. And her tongue was playing with his, swooping and hiding and generally driving him mad with desire.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been kissed before. But when he let his mouth trail away over her cheek, thinking to bite her ear, she bade him return in a husky little command. And when he didn’t, she grabbed his head and pulled him back.
That was new. No woman had ever…
He lost the train of thought again because she said his name, his given name, in sort of a purr, and every inch of his body blazed.
She was flushed and pink and utterly desirable. She looked at him that way she had, as if she were smoldering, as if she wanted only one thing in the world…
“You’re no virgin,” he said, surprising himself. Gentlemen didn’t say that sort of thing to ladies, let alone the gently-bred daughters of dukes.
She let a finger run over his eyebrows, down his nose. He almost shuddered at her touch. Not even the highest paid courtesan in the world could manage the sultry look that Eleanor seemed to wield at a moment’s notice. There was something about that…he needed to think it out, but he didn’t have time.
“Tell me you’re not a virgin,” he said after a moment, assuring himself that he wasn’t begging.
“I don’t see how that is relevant to our particular activity.”
She wasn’t a virgin. He knew it. It would be extremely ungentlemanly to make her confirm it. The promise of illicit pleasure sang in his blood, so he had to kiss her again.
They stepped out of the car
riage only to be greeted by frenzied barking. Oyster launched himself from the front steps, so ecstatic at the sight of his mistress that his squat little body actually twisted in the air. He literally catapulted into her arms. “Sweetheart,” Eleanor said as he licked her face. “Were you afraid I’d gone away and left you forever?”
Villiers could help thinking that he had reached a new low in his life. Jealous of a dog. Wonderful.
“Now I’m going to put you down, Oyster,” Eleanor said. “You must not start barking again, because Lisette is afraid of you.”
Oyster gave her a last lick; she put him on the ground; he started barking again.
Villiers stepped forward. “Oyster.”
Oyster sat back on his haunches and looked him over. Villiers had no pretensions about dogs. They were smart; they were self-centered; they were single-minded. Oyster opened his mouth.
“Oyster,” Villiers said, dropping his voice an octave or so.
Oyster shut his mouth, showing that he was as smart as the other dogs Villiers had encountered in life.
“What a good dog he is,” Eleanor said, sounding utterly delighted with the plump little mongrel she had just been kissing all over his absurd-looking head.
“There’s no such thing as a good dog,” Villiers said, “any more than there are bad men.”
“There certainly are bad men! And bad women too. Witness Mrs. Minchem.”
“There are men who lose fear. Mrs. Minchem had no fear, and therefore she acted with impunity. She wanted to put a troublesome child in the pigs’ dormitory, so she did. That’s not necessarily bad—just opportunistic.”
“I think it’s bad. And Oyster is a good dog, because he obeys. Stay, Oyster. And don’t bark. There, you see—”
Oyster suddenly leapt into the air with his strange twisting jump and began barking like a maddened rabbit with a voice box.
“Oyster!” Eleanor cried—but Oyster had leapt past both of them and through the open door of the carriage.
“No untrained animals in my carriage!” Villiers snapped.
He and Eleanor reached the door at the same moment.
Oyster was barking with the singular fixation that a beggar might give a steaming pudding.
One of the seat cushions was thrown to the side, the wooden lid was up, and two extraordinarily dirty and rather sleepy faces were staring back at Oyster. The faces were identical.
“Jane-Lucinda,” Villiers said. One of the girls nodded.
“And Jane-Phyllinda,” Eleanor breathed.
Having made his point, Oyster stopped barking.
“How do you know our names?” Lucinda demanded, putting her arm protectively around her sister.
“We’ve been looking for you,” Eleanor said after a second’s silence during which Villiers tried to figure out how to say Because I’m your father.
“Looking for us? Why?” The girl’s chin jutted out. “You can tell Mrs. Minchem that we hope she falls over and the pigs eat her ankles, because we aren’t going back.”
“I agree,” Villiers said.
“Ever.”
“Would you like to get out of the blanket box now?” Eleanor inquired. “I can assure you that Oyster won’t hurt you.”
The bolder girl climbed from the box. She was wearing hardly any clothing, just a rough gown with no stockings and one shoe. Oyster started forward and began smelling her legs with an air of deep interest.
She certainly had an interesting odor; Villiers identified it immediately as Scent of Sty. In fact, now that he thought of it, all four of them were likely pungent.
“Oyster won’t hurt you,” Eleanor said encouragingly. “He’s just a puppy.”
Lucinda gave Oyster a pat. He had finished sniffing her legs, so he sat back down, looked up at her face and gave a brisk command.
“What does he want?” Lucinda asked.
“He wants you to give him a proper pat,” Eleanor said. “And scratch his ears. He likes that. Would you care to come out of the box?” she asked Phyllinda.
Phyllinda shook her head.
Lucinda sat down on the floor of the carriage while Oyster jumped into her lap. She started giggling helplessly as the dog licked her face. Villiers watched with some interest as the shape of her face emerged from all the dirt.
But he didn’t see what she really looked like until he pulled Oyster outside, bringing Lucinda with him. And then he almost dropped to his knees in surprise.
Her eyes were a gorgeous dark lilac, the color of larkspur in late summer.
“My grandmother’s eyes—” he started to say to Eleanor, then realized that she was still inside the carriage. He poked a head in to find that she had coaxed Phyllinda out of the box.
“He’s not a bad dog,” Eleanor was saying. “If you just peek out the door, you’ll see your sister playing with him. Oyster is just a puppy.”
But Villiers took one look at Phyllinda’s terrified, obstinate face and knew that it was all too much for her. She was five years old, and she’d spent the night in a pigsty, presumably terrified of being eaten; she’d escaped the sty only to find her way—God knows how—into their carriage; and now she was risking being chewed by a wild dog. Her instincts for self-preservation had clearly been honed inside the orphanage.
“Here,” he said, plucking her off the seat.
Her body went rigid, but he scooped her against his shoulder and backed out of the carriage.
It was only when he turned around that he realized what an audience they had drawn. By now, most of the Duke of Gilner’s household had emerged from the house and were watching transfixed.
Eleanor bent over Lucinda, now sitting on the ground with Oyster in her lap. “If you stand up and come with us, Oyster will come as well,” he heard her say.
The coachman was staring straight ahead, as was proper, but Villiers could see his ears practically wiggle as he listened.
“This is Lucinda, and this is Phyllinda,” he said. “Lucinda, stand up.” She scrambled to her feet. There was a little rustle among the servants, as if wind blew through a pile of straw.
“Does anyone know where my son is?” Villiers inquired.
They all looked around, as if someone else was sure to know. “He left for the orphanage this morning,” Villiers continued. “Did anyone see him go or return?”
No one said a word.
“Is he in the nursery?”
Popper gestured and a footman dashed up the stairs.
“What would Tobias be doing at the orphanage?” Eleanor asked, knitting her brow. “He—”
“He said he was going home,” Lucinda put in, looking up from the dog.
This was unexpected. All eyes turned to the little girl.
“You know Tobias?” Eleanor asked.
Lucinda grinned, and Villiers looked past the streaked dirt and dog spit and who knows what to discover that his daughter was an extraordinarily beautiful girl. “He got us outta the sty this morning,” she said. “We heard a banging.”
“We thought it was Mrs. Minchem coming again,” Phyllinda said, her voice high and thready.
He tightened his hold on her. “Mrs. Minchem is incarcerated.”
“Where’s that?” Lucinda asked.
“The Clink,” Eleanor explained. “And she’s not coming out either.”
“Tobias unlocked the sty and took you out,” Villiers said, rather stunned. “And then he stowed you in the blanket box.”
“He put the blanket down and said as we should just go to sleep and he’d walk home and then sneak us out of the box later.”
“So you’ve been asleep?” Villiers asked, suddenly remembering talk of virginity in the carriage.
“We couldn’t sleep last night because of that old sow,” Lucinda said. “But I would have just kicked her good if she tried to bite us!”
“I was too scared,” Phyllinda whimpered.
“We stayed awake all night instead,” Lucinda said. “An’ then we slept in that box until we heard this doggi
e barking.”
“Don’t let Oyster lick your mouth,” Eleanor told Lucinda. “Your cheek is all right, but your mouth, no.”
“Send someone out on horseback to look for Tobias,” Villiers said to Popper. “It’s quite a few miles, and he has to have stowed the girls after Lisette sent the carriage back.”
“Why didn’t he just climb in the carriage and wait for us?” Eleanor said. “He could have told any of the groomsmen and they would have fetched us.”
“It’s a surprise,” Phyllinda whispered against Villiers’s cheek. “We weren’t supposed to move even after the carriage stopped.”
“Why not?”
“We was going to have a bath first,” Lucinda said. “We still needs to have that bath. He said our pa won’t like us if we aren’t clean.” She gave Oyster a final pat. “If you don’t mind, mister, we’d better have that bath because our pa might be along at any moment.”
The entire household went utterly quiet, every eye fixed on Villiers.
He looked down at Lucinda. She stood almost as high as his waist. She had one hand on her hip, and she looked five going on forty. Phyllinda was staring at him expectantly.
“What on earth is going on out here?” Lisette cried, bouncing down the front steps and waving at her maid. “Beatrice, I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Please fetch my painting materials; I had a fancy to paint a portrait of young children.” She smiled at Eleanor. “How could one not want to paint youth, after seeing those beaming faces this morning?”
“Yes, well,” Eleanor said, “they did beam after we dispatched with Mrs. Minchem, of course.”
“Their joy was wonderful,” Lisette said, sighing.
Eleanor turned away and Villiers noticed that she had a remarkably jaundiced look on her face, which wasn’t quite fair. Lisette had no way of knowing the particular conversation she was interrupting.
He pulled himself together. “I am your father,” he stated, looking first at Lucinda and then at Phyllinda.
Lucinda’s eyes narrowed, and Phyllinda’s eyes grew round, and Villiers thought he learned quite a lot about each of his daughters in that moment.
He learned even more just seconds later when Tobias appeared around the edge of the carriage, limping slightly. Lucinda dashed over and threw her arms around him, and Phyllinda began struggling and gave Villiers a solid kick before he realized that she wanted to get down.