Lord Perfect

by Loretta Chase

  Peregrine should have realized that anything to do with Olivia Wingate spelled disaster. He should have let her go with Nat Diggerby.

  But then Peregrine would have missed the adventure.

  And the truth was, he was not in any hurry to go to Edinburgh and be bored and aggravated at yet another school, out of which he would soon be chucked.

  What troubled him was annoying Lord Rathbourne, who might decide Peregrine was more trouble than he was worth, and upsetting Mama and Papa because they might become hysterical enough to forbid any more visits with his lordship. Otherwise Peregrine wouldn’t have minded continuing with Olivia on her mad Quest. For a young man who planned to travel the Nile, traveling the road to Bristol would be a useful experience.

  But there was Lord Rathbourne to consider, and since he hadn’t caught them yet, Peregrine decided he must stop and wait to be caught.

  Meanwhile he wanted food. And a bed.

  Maidenhead, a good-sized market town, boasted a number of inns. He returned to the Bear, the largest and busiest. As he neared the entrance, he saw Olivia there, waiting, her arms folded. “You are supposed to be my squire,” she said. “Squires are steadfast and true. They don’t abandon their knights.”

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “I want to sleep.”

  “You can’t do it here,” she said. “This is the biggest inn in Maidenhead. It will cost the earth, and I know they’ll never let us have one of their grand rooms out of charity.” She glanced appraisingly about her at her surroundings. “You can’t expect me to earn any money at this time of night.”

  “Earn?” he said. “You mean bamboozle.”

  She shrugged. “Your father gives you money. I have to work for mine.”

  Peregrine was not sure that sharp practices and outright deceit ought to be called work, but he was too tired to debate semantics. “As a matter of fact, my father does give me money,” he said. “And I do have a bit with me.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “In the first place, it isn’t very much,” he said. “In the second, it’s no use looking at me that way because I never lied to you about it.”

  “You never said you had money,” she said.

  “You never asked,” he said. “Have you asked once for my advice or help or opinion?” Without waiting for an answer he went on, “I’ll buy you supper and maybe a bed if we’re lucky, if you promise not to tell anybody else about our dying mother—or any other people who don’t exist.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “It isn’t sporting.”

  “It isn’t what?”

  “Sporting,” he said.

  “You mean it isn’t proper,” she said mockingly.

  Peregrine wrenched the door open. “I mean,” he said, “it’s like a great, big fellow picking on a little fellow. That’s what I mean.” He waved her inside.

  “Oh,” she said, and went.

  She became quiet after that, which suited Peregrine. He wanted to eat and he wanted to sleep. After he’d had some rest he’d be ready to talk, perhaps.

  He did rest, very comfortably, though the inn was indeed expensive and they ended up in a cupboard-sized room on hard cots meant for servants.

  Though it was more Spartan than anything he’d ever experienced before, even at school, Lord Lisle was sound asleep when Lord Rathbourne drove through Maidenhead at half past three o’clock in the morning.

  BENEDICT HARDLY NOTICED Maidenhead. He devoted the first tautly silent moments of travel to trying to revive his famous self-control, gather the remaining shreds of his moral fiber, and evict the alien spirit that had taken possession of him.

  Then Mrs. Wingate spoke, and everything went to pieces.

  “I think it would be best if we separated in Twyford,” she said. “I shall take Olivia to Bristol and attempt to settle the treasure nonsense once and for all.”

  “To Bristol?” he echoed incredulously. “Did you hit your head in Colnbrook as well as your hand?”

  “You and I cannot return to London together,” she said, “and you know you must hurry back if you wish to avoid causing a stir. You were to set out for Scotland today, were you not?”

  “That is not the point,” he said. “The point is, you cannot travel to Bristol alone.”

  “I shall have Olivia with me,” she said.

  “You haven’t any money,” he said.

  “I have a little,” she said.

  “It must be a very little,” he said. “When I came to your lodgings, you were preparing to visit the pawnbroker with a sack of your belongings.”

  “Olivia and I have always traveled with very little money,” she said. “It is not as though I plan to hire a post chaise. We can walk.”

  “To Bristol? Are you mad? That is nearly a hundred miles.” He recalled the men’s reaction to her provocatively swaying hips at the Kensington tollgate.

  She was proposing to swing those hips over a hundred miles of road along which mainly men would be traveling.

  “It is out of the question,” he said. “I will not permit it.”

  She turned in the seat to look at him. Her knee bumped his thigh. He set his jaw.

  “Where on earth did you obtain the mad idea that you had any say over my doings?” she said. “Oh, never mind. I had forgotten. With you, it is force of habit, ordering everyone about. Very well, my lord. Go ahead and tell me everything I may and may not do. I had rather spend the next few miles laughing than fretting about my exasperating daughter.”

  “You say she is exasperating, yet you mean to indulge her,” Benedict said. “What have you in mind, exactly? A visit to your relatives’ mausoleum in the dead of night? I have an interesting picture in my mind of the pair of you in hooded cloaks, Olivia carrying a dark lantern and you with a spade on your shoulder.”

  “Like many great estates, Throgmorton is open to visitors on certain days,” she said. “I shall take her to the mausoleum and let her see how scrupulously the grounds are tended. She will see for herself that, had any treasure been buried there, the gardeners or men making repairs would have found it ages ago. After that, perhaps we shall amuse ourselves looking for smugglers’ caves.”

  “In other words, you do not mean to return to London for some time.” He ought to be glad. He would not be tempted to hunt for her when he returned from Scotland. In time, this damnable infatuation would pass.

  “Certainly not,” she said. “You will be in Edinburgh with your nephew. What is there for me—for anyone—in London when Lord Rathbourne is not there?”

  He glanced at her. She turned away again, her countenance sober, but not before he saw the glint of mirth in her eyes.

  “You are laughing at me,” he said.

  “On the contrary, my lord,” she said, “I am trying desperately to contain my grief at your impending departure. I am smiling bravely, not laughing. Well, I am not laughing very much.”

  Troubled as he was, he couldn’t help smiling, too. But then, he was bewitched.

  She looked away, to the road ahead, and her expression sobered. “It will not be a laughing matter if we do not take care,” she said. “You know we must separate as soon as we recover the children, and you must take Peregrine to Scotland without delay. If you are only a day or two late, his parents will not make a fuss.”

  “They always make a fuss,” he said. “His parents are the least of the difficulty. By now my household will be aware that something is amiss. Someone will talk and some sort of rumor will begin making the rounds. I shall need a good lie.”

  “I shall need one as well, for Mrs. Briggs,” she said, “to explain my extended absence.”

  “Write her a note when we get to Twyford,” Benedict said. “You are needed to nurse your sick relative. I shall see that the note arrives quickly. As to my story: Perhaps I shall say that Peregrine took it into his head to join a traveling acting troupe or a band of gypsies. Or perhaps he became enslaved by the charms of a peddler’s daughter and followed her. That is the sort of rom
antic idiocy his parents would accept implicitly.”

  “They do not know Lord Lisle very well, do they?” she said. “Even I, knowing him for only a few weeks, would never believe it for a moment.”

  “What I cannot believe is that his parents had anything to do with producing him,” Benedict said. “All the Dalmays are emotionally extravagant, and they tend to choose spouses of the same temperament.”

  “He is an aberration,” she said. “It happens all the time. I only wish it had happened in Olivia’s case.”

  “Then Peregrine would have missed an adventure,” Benedict said. And so would I, he thought.

  The end of it was approaching all too quickly.

  “If only it were no more than that,” she said. “But it is not, and I don’t mean to let her off easily.” After a pause, she added, “Rathbourne, what shall we do if it is found out that we traveled together?”

  He had no trouble imagining that possibility. He knew that the darkness was not a completely reliable shield. He realized that someone might have recognized him at some point along the last twenty-odd miles.

  He was well aware of how swiftly gossip could travel.

  He remembered the men talking about Jack Wingate at the club. He could still hear the mingled contempt and pity in their voices. He could hear the disgust in his father’s voice, when he spoke of the Dreadful DeLuceys.

  Benedict had seen countless times what happened when some unhappy soul became the subject of scandal: the titters and whispers behind fans, the smirks, the not-so-subtle innuendoes, the not-at-all subtle caricatures hanging in shop windows or pinned inside umbrellas for all the world to see.

  The prospect of becoming such an object was not pleasant to contemplate. The prospect of her being tittered and whispered about and caricatured was intolerable.

  “Denial is the only sensible response,” he said.

  “Do you truly believe it could be so simple?” she said. “All we need do is say, ‘It isn’t true’?”

  “No,” he said. “We pretend a faux pas has been committed. We elevate an eyebrow. We allow ourselves a faint, pitying smile. If people persist in being tiresome, we adopt the expression and tones of one who is bored witless and endeavoring to be polite, and say, ‘Indeed’ or ‘How very interesting.’ ” He demonstrated as he spoke.

  “That is very good,” she said. “But are you sure it will be sufficient?”

  “It had better be,” he said.

  In the distance he made out a faint twinkle near the side of the road. “That looks to be Twyford,” he said. “We had better decide how to proceed once we locate the children.”

  They devoted those last minutes to working out the logistics of going their separate ways.

  It was a more melancholy experience than he was prepared for.

  He had not long to be melancholy, however, because at Twyford, they learned that no one—man, woman, or child—had disembarked there from the Courser.

  They drove on, to Reading.

  Chapter 11

  THE SKY WAS LIGHTENING BY THE TIME Benedict and Mrs. Wingate had made the rounds of the likeliest inns in Reading. By this point, she was on the point of collapse, though she refused to admit it.

  They stood near the ticket office of the Crown Inn, she watching every vehicle that came and went while quarreling with him about their next step.

  “This grows ridiculous,” he told her. “We have wasted valuable time taking the word of innkeepers and servants who are half asleep. It makes as much sense to wait in Reading for the Courser to make its return trip, and speak directly to the coachman.”

  “That will be hours,” she said. “The children might be halfway to Bristol by then.”

  “If you would only apply a little logic, you would see how very unlikely that is,” Benedict said as patiently as he could. “They are two children with next to no money. They must rely on their wits and the kindness or gullibility of strangers. Even your daughter, spawn of Satan that you believe her to be, cannot travel at any great rate unless she hires a post chaise. To afford it, she must take to highway robbery. She would then need to find, in a short space of time on a small piece of road, a victim willing to hand over an unusually heavy purse.”

  Mrs. Wingate regarded him through slitted blue eyes. “Have you any idea, Rathbourne, how utterly detestable you become when you adopt that tone of patient superiority?”

  “The trouble is, you are tired, hungry, anxious, and afflicted with an aching hand,” he said. “The trouble is, you had confidently expected a happy outcome only to have your hopes dashed. Consequently, you are too low-spirited at present to appreciate that I am perfect and therefore cannot be detestable.”

  She gazed at him for a moment, up and down, then up again. Then, “Did your wife ever throw things at you?” she said.

  “No,” he said, blinking, not merely because the question surprised him but because he was trying to picture Ada doing it and couldn’t.

  “Was she an aberration then, like Lord Lisle?” she said. “You did say all the Dalmays were emotionally extravagant. Yet she never threw anything at you.”

  “She never did,” Benedict said. “We never quarreled. We were strangers, as I told you before.”

  “She could not have been as emotional as you claim,” she said. “Perhaps she merely seemed so, compared to you. A mild show of feeling or a lack of perfect logic must seem extreme to a man who is so determinedly in control of everything.”

  “Once upon a time, I imagined I was in reasonable control of my life,” he said. “Now I have a missing nephew, a stupendous scandal looming like a great storm cloud on the horizon, and you.”

  And the dreadful truth was, he was enjoying himself.

  The dreadful truth was, he was relieved they hadn’t found the children yet.

  It was madness to feel this way. Everything Benedict cared most about was at risk. He knew this; he never forgot that storm cloud on the horizon.

  But it had been a very long time since he’d courted trouble. He’d forgotten how stimulating it could be.

  “Lady Rathbourne must have been a stoic,” Mrs. Wingate said. “That is the only way she could have borne six years of marriage to you without throwing something at you.”

  “A Dalmay is as likely to be stoical as I am to sprout fins,” he said. “But if you wish to quarrel with me about my late wife or my in-laws or anything else, may we not do it over breakfast?”

  “I am not hungry,” she said. She dragged her hand through her tangled hair. “I am too frustrated to be hungry.”

  “If we do not stop to eat and rest, Thomas cannot stop to eat and rest,” Benedict said.

  Her gaze went to the footman, who was talking to one of the grooms. Her brow knit.

  “He has been awake for more than four and twenty hours,” Benedict said, ruthlessly flaying her conscience. “He has had little to eat since we left London, some twelve hours ago. He has ridden in the least comfortable part of the vehicle. He has fought off drunken ruffians. He—”

  “Yes, yes, you have made your point,” she said. “One hour, then.”

  “Two,” he said.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Perhaps three hours would be better,” he said. “Do you feel faint?”

  “I do not feel faint,” she said. She opened her eyes. “I was counting to twenty.”

  BATHSHEBA DID NOT quarrel with him about his late wife or anything else at breakfast. She had all she could do not to fall asleep on top of the eggs, bacon, potatoes, bread, and butter he’d ordered heaped upon her plate.

  He had an even taller heap, which he swiftly demolished.

  After breakfast, she staggered up to the room he’d hired for her and went straight for the bed, the upper mattress of which was level with her shoulders. She somehow clambered up the set of steps. She sank onto a mattress of cloudlike softness.

  The next she knew, a chambermaid was talking to her and the sun was streaming in the window. The angle of light told her
it was midmorning.

  “You ordered a bath, ma’am,” the chambermaid said. “Shall we bring it up now?”

  Bathsheba sat up and looked about her. She’d stayed at countless inns, but never in a room as luxurious as this. A washstand, a dresser, and a set of shelves lined the walls. A mirror stood on the deep windowsill, and a tall horse dressing glass nearby. At the opposite end from the bed, more chairs surrounded a small table. Pristine white curtains draped the window and the bed. The bed linens were clean and dry. A fire burned in the grate, eradicating all traces of the previous night’s and early morning’s chill and dampness.

  Now she was to have a bath. With hot water and good soap. In a tub in a great, sunny, warm room. Unheard-of luxury.

  But not for Rathbourne.

  “How I long for a bath,” she had said—or mumbled, rather—at some point during breakfast.

  And he had told Thomas and Thomas had told somebody and no one had seemed the least put out.

  Now she watched a pair of servants carry in a tub. Behind them came a short parade of more servants carrying pitchers and buckets.

  As soon as they had all gone out again, she latched the door and tore off her clothes.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, BENEDICT and Thomas retired to the narrow servant’s room adjoining the guest chamber Benedict had hired for “Mr. and Mrs. Bennett.” Leaving Mrs. Wingate to sleep in solitary splendor atop three mattresses, Benedict took a nap on the narrow cot, Thomas on the floor beside him.

  Sometime later, feeling sufficiently refreshed, Benedict rose and bathed, using the large basin Thomas had borrowed from next door.

  At present, having done his best with his master’s clothes, the footman was seeing about the carriage. Since that would take time, and the bill must be settled and the servants given their gratuities, Benedict decided Mrs. Wingate need not be wakened for another quarter hour or so.

  He was about to sit down to pull on his boots when he heard loud whispering in the corridor outside.

  “It can’t be Lord Rathbourne,” said one voice.

  “Mistress says it were,” said the other. “She seen him at the ticket office.”