“Jonah. Please. If you like.”
“Can the dog—may the dog come too?” asked Laurie.
The long-legged animal was everywhere at once in the dim foyer, shaking her matted fur and thumping her long tail into walls and people.
Jonah eyed the dog. “Sit.” When she behaved at once, looking up at him with eager eyes, he patted the narrow head. “You’ve got a deerhound here. They’re wonderful creatures, kind as can be. Someone will have to give her a name.” He looked from Laurie to Irene to their mother.
“I’ll let Harris know we’re leaving,” said Mrs. Baird.
Harris thumped up from the basement just then, hands full of radishes. “This is all I found in the kitchen.” He eyed Jonah aslant. “If you take them, the cook will have to change her plan for the next meal. I’ll have to have a shilling for them.”
Jonah almost laughed. “For a few radishes?”
“A dozen.”
Jonah rolled his eyes, but didn’t protest. Making the exchange, he said to Laurie, “Take these radishes to my horse, and his heart will be yours. He’s the gray gelding. Call him Jake—he knows his name.”
The radishes poured into Laurie’s grasp, a cupped double handful.
“Do you know how to safely feed a horse something small?” Jonah asked.
“Palm out flat.” The boy suited his action to his words, sending a few radishes over the floor in a scatter. Then he was off like he’d heard a starting shot.
The dog clambered to her feet, dropped Jonah’s abused glove, and gobbled the fallen radishes. Then she trotted after Laurie out the door.
Susanna Baird nodded her satisfaction, then turned away. “I’m going to get those letters.”
“No!” Harris creaked to the foot of the stairs. “You may not go back up. Everything’s going out the window.”
“These are important!” protested Susanna.
“You think every scrap is important,” murmured Irene, low enough that Jonah was the only one who heard.
Jonah picked up his discarded glove. “Maybe some of them are.”
This particular scrap wasn’t, though. The dog’s teeth had punctured it all over. He stuffed it into the pocket of his coat, then removed his second glove and did the same. The ritual gave him a moment to think as the older adults argued their way up the stairs and Irene looked after them with unease on every feature.
“Let them work it out,” Jonah said quietly. “Your mother is the tenant here and he the landlord. It’s their battle.”
Irene slipped something into Jonah’s hand. “It’s ours too.”
When he opened his hand, a shilling winked at him. “Did you just pick Harris’s pocket?”
“Easy enough, in this small space.” Irene shrugged. “He charged you too much.”
“Sometimes the cost doesn’t matter. Only the result.”
Her brows knit. Brown eyes, beautiful eyes, looked into his. “You’re not only talking about the radishes, are you?”
“No.”
She accepted this. “Why are you in London before I expected you?”
“I needed a respite from the stud farm. I…” He swallowed, but his voice was still thick. “I lost a mare in foal. For the first time. She was one of the Arabians my father bought last year. He all but pinned the family fortunes on them.”
With the mare’s death, the stud farm had ceased to be a safe and dependable place. Always before, Jonah had succeeded at whatever task he was set. Carefully and deliberately, sometimes grimly.
But he never failed. He couldn’t allow it.
A gentle hand touched his arm. “I’m sorry. What was her name?”
Irene always knew what to say. What to ask. “Coneflower. She was a golden bay with four black stockings. Her foal died as well.” A fine colt, he’d been starved of air. Life and death were separated by a few moments, a few missed breaths.
Jonah shook this off, adding roughly, “I’ve a task for my father as well. Someone to find for him in London.”
He’d find the girl, and then he’d take Irene back to Newmarket with him. And the world would tip back into order.
Because they’d been apart long enough. Just as Irene had warned him before they wed, they’d had four years of a marriage that was split in twain. Their occasional reunions had been planned in advance, hidden from all others. One hurried meeting at a time. One letter at a time from Irene to the Chandler stud farm. One place and date they could be together with no one suspecting. All of it wrapped around the missions that shaped her life. He accepted it because he’d rather see his wife occasionally than never.
That was, he had accepted it. In the past two years, all three of his siblings had wed—his widowed twin sister for the second time. And though Jonah’s father now used a wheelchair, the baronet had again begun attending race meets and participating in Jockey Club events.
Their lives went on, and Jonah’s didn’t.
They were happy, and Jonah wasn’t.
It was time to change all of that.
“You’ve come to London because of a lost horse and a person to find. Am I somewhere in your plans?” Irene’s slim fingers were tense on his sleeve.
“Top three.” Top one.
Irene brightened. “I’ll help you. As much as I can before the end of term, and then…” She trailed off. The and then of their marriage had always been nebulous like that.
Jonah’s jaw set. “And then we settle matters. Before I return to Newmarket, I want you to live with me as your husband, or I want our marriage annulled on grounds of fraud.”
Irene’s fingers clenched, then slipped from his forearm. She stepped back as if slapped. “Annulled? But we don’t meet the legal requirements. We’re of sound mind, and we weren’t underage when we wed.”
Now she looked stricken. And damn, ah, damn, his heart cried for her. It always did. And that was why he couldn’t bear this half a marriage anymore.
“Fraud is cause for annulment too,” he said in a clipped tone. “It’s been four years, Irene. Your brother is thirteen, and his Harton admission is out of your hands. Your reasons for continuing your work and living apart from me…they’re gone.”
She stared at him, wounded. With each passing second, the room became smaller around them.
“You have a few weeks to decide what you’d like to do,” said Jonah. “By the end of the month, maybe. Until I’m done with my errands here. Then you can return to Newmarket with me, or we can be done with each other as if we never began. My family solicitor will prepare the legal arguments for having our marriage nullified.”
She fumbled for words. “But I teach. And my brother…he might be starting school, and my mother needs…and my father might… Jonah, I can’t just leave.”
“You left me,” he reminded her quietly. “You left me, just like that. And over the last four years, you’ve left me again and again. I want a family, Irene. With you. But I can’t live like this anymore. Are we really husband and wife? And if not now, when will we be?”
Chapter Three
It happened more quickly than Irene could have credited. After Jonah’s timely appearance, a messenger was dispatched to retrieve a wagon and a Chandler servant. Under Susanna’s supervision, the rescued items in the street were transferred to the wagon bed.
“They’ll manage this. Let’s make things ready for them at the house,” Jonah told Irene. “Bring your dog.”
She thought about protesting: It’s not my dog, and I’m not staying at your house. But this was her dog now, at least until the animal chose to pad away. And since Irene had failed to keep her mother and brother in their current home, she could at least help them feel welcome in their new one.
“All right,” she agreed. “But two people and a deerhound can’t ride one gelding, full of radishes though he might be.”
Thus Jake the horse stayed with the wagon and servant, and husband and wife and deerhound hailed a hackney for the journey to Queen Anne Street.
As the carriage r
olled westward, away from the fringes of Whitechapel, streets widened and buildings straightened their shoulders. Spreading trees sliced through the summer heat and spattered it with shade. The dog pressed her nose to a window in the hired carriage, panting with curiosity, but Irene hardly noticed the passing sights.
Because this wasn’t a mere journey of a few miles. It was a step into a new life.
Annulment, Jonah had said. Or return to Newmarket with me. She couldn’t bear the thought of either—giving up the life she’d painstakingly built or denying the husband who provided its foundation.
She had taken his steadiness for granted. But even stone crumbled, even boulders rolled. After four years of marriage on Irene’s terms, change was coming.
At last the hackney deposited the trio before a solemn structure of red brick and owlish white-framed bay windows. Jonah dangled a battered glove before the dog, then knocked at the door. Bemused, Irene watched as the dog settled calmly onto her haunches and gnawed at the leather. Would that humans could be so easily set at ease.
The servant who answered the door was young, perhaps close to Jonah’s own age of thirty-one, and as freckled as he was ginger-haired. His neat black-and-white attire proclaimed him the butler even before he ushered them inside, welcoming Mr. Chandler in an East London accent as bouncing as rubber.
As the men exchanged greetings and the dog’s tail thumped the bounds of the entrance hall, Irene looked about. Though small, the space was airy, perhaps because there was no furniture. The floor was tiled in smooth marble, with no carpet underfoot. No console table, no place to lay a calling card or a set of gloves.
Before she could ponder this odd arrangement, Jonah drew her notice to the servant. “Mrs. Chandler, this is Bright.”
The young butler beamed. “What an honor to meet Mr. Jonah’s wife at last!”
His easy good humor was a balm after Harris’s grim disapproval. “Bright, I’m pleased to meet you. My mother and brother will be here shortly and will require rooms.”
“Very good, ma’am.” Bright’s gaze darted toward the deerhound. “Will the dog require a room, or is the animal merely visiting?”
“We’ll bathe her and see what happens,” suggested Jonah. “If she stays, she’ll have to be clean.”
“Very good, sir. I shall have a footman see to the dog’s bath directly.”
The dog dropped the glove. Jonah stuck a booted toe under it, flipped it neatly up, and caught it. “No need. I’ll wash her myself. Have a basin and some soap brought to the rear yard.”
Bright blinked. “Very good, sir,” he said again, this time clearly meaning the opposite. “Mrs. Chandler, would you care for tea while your husband washes the animal?”
As if she were a guest. Was she a guest? She hesitated. “No, thank you. I’ll wait here for my mother and brother.”
Jonah handed Bright the slobbery leather glove. The butler held it gingerly at arm’s length, dangling it before the deerhound. “Miss Dog. If you will?”
The dog perked up, following her toy, and the butler and hound left Jonah and Irene behind.
Miss Dog. It was rather adorable.
“You’ve an unusual butler,” she commented.
“Because he’s young, you mean?” Jonah took the remaining glove from his coat pocket and slapped it against his palm. “He’s worked his way up from errand boy over the past quarter century. My father made him butler here last year. I believe not even my late mother was as devoted to my father as Bright is.”
“His accent’s unusual for a butler too.”
“He’d like to smooth it out, but the family doesn’t mind a Cockney butler. Or—do you?”
“Not at all. I like it.” Irene ventured a smile. “This is a different world to the lodging my mother and brother are leaving. It will help, I think, that your butler is kind and not stuffy.”
“I wouldn’t like a stuffy butler. Chandlers need someone who can manage our quirks, not our social calendar.”
Irene arched a brow. “What quirks? Should I develop some?”
“If you’re inclined.” Jonah flapped the glove at their surroundings. “The house is one. We can’t have carpets in the public areas. No statues or other things on the floors. It’s all got to be kept clear, you see, in case my father turns up unexpectedly.”
Irene had never met the baronet, but she knew he had used a wheelchair for some years. “So he can navigate the house?”
“Exactly. He had a lift installed for getting upstairs, and that helps. But he can’t wheel his chair well over rugs and around clutter.”
Irene groaned. “And you think my mother will keep the place tidy? You saw what she hoarded in a small set of rooms. Now she’s going to bring it over here, as much as she can dig out of the mud of the street.”
“We’ll see what happens,” Jonah said for the second time. “No sense in worrying before there’s a problem.”
“Before there’s a problem? As if we haven’t had problems enough today?”
He reached a fingertip out, as if to touch the tip of her nose, then drew back and let his hand fall. “Help me wash the dog. Would you?”
Irene bit her lip.
“She is your dog,” Jonah added.
Irene looked up into merry hazel eyes. Her husband didn’t smile or laugh much, but his eyes showed his every feeling. They grew stony as jasper when he was angry. Just now, they were crinkled at the corners and as warm as the summer sun.
Washing a dog sounded so pleasantly normal that Irene agreed, and she followed Jonah through the house.
In the walled rear yard, a tiny garden rioted with flowers, guarding a gate that opened onto mews. Behind the kitchen, a stone-paved area included an ash heap, an enormous copper tub for laundry, and a water butt from which someone had filled a washtub. Beside it sat a cake of lye soap, a few old bath sheets, and a dirty deerhound with a battered leather glove in her jaws.
“Wrap this about you to protect your dress.” Jonah offered Irene a towel, then tucked another like an apron into his breeches. Just in time too, as the dog plunged into the tub, splashing them both.
Irene sputtered, blinking water from her eyes. “Seems she’s ready for a bath.”
“Seems so.” Jonah handed Irene a small knife. “Shave some soap into the water, if you would.”
She sliced waxy bits from the cake of soap as Jonah stirred them into the water with a cupped hand. Miss Dog adored Jonah’s gentle attention, brushy tail beating the water’s surface.
“We’ve got to name her,” Irene said. “We can’t go on calling her Miss Dog, can we?”
With his fingertips, Jonah scrubbed the deerhound’s head. The animal’s eyes closed in bliss. “She’s your dog. You’re the one to decide on a name.”
The matted fur began to yield its dirt, revealing shades of cream and light gray. It reminded Irene of the summer she and Jonah had met, when she’d curried muddy, sweaty racehorses. Anything to remain at the side of the man she’d fallen for so swiftly. “We met at Newmarket. Why not call her by an equine name?”
“Racehorse names are completely lacking in dignity,” Jonah said solemnly. “My father is this season racing a filly named Long Meg and a colt named Eggs-and-Butter. There must be a reason, but I don’t know it.”
“We could call her Jockey,” Irene suggested.
The dog barked.
Jonah lifted each ear gently to work soap into the coarse fur. “Don’t like that? Bold girl, aren’t you?”
“She’s no mouse.” Irene rubbed a shaving of soap directly onto the animal’s back. “Today she stole herself a meat pie and a glove, and she won herself a new home.”
“Not a mouse at all,” Jonah agreed. “That might be a funny name for such a big dog. What do you think, girl? Shall we call you Mouse?”
“Mouse,” tried Irene. “Hullo, Mouse.”
The dog’s tongue lolled, the picture of animal contentment.
“That’s it, then,” Irene decided. “We have a dog called Mouse.
”
It was pleasant to say we, to share something with Jonah—even something so brief as a dog’s bath. Not since the summer they’d met had they simply been. Soaking in the warm sun, letting a faint breeze ruffle their hair and a playful dog spatter them with cold water.
It was simple. It was lovely. And since she’d met Jonah, such peace had never been anything but fleeting.
In the summer of 1815, she’d been in Newmarket for one of the missions she completed for Mrs. Brodie outside her regular academy teaching. In this instance, she was to collect information on a baronet named Sir William Chandler—a difficult task, as the invalid baronet rarely left the grounds of his estate. His daughter served as his secretary, a son traveled the country for family business, and the eldest ran the family stud farm. A racing family, a self-sufficient family.
Irene had hoped to learn more under the cover of a race meet. All of England rubbed shoulders at the track: every shade of skin was here, every level of wealth or poverty. Irene would blend into the raucous, diverse crowd.
Or she would have, if not for her father. Where shoulders rubbed, pockets were easy to pick, and he had traveled with Irene from London to make his fortune—always the dream, and this time in stolen purses. Picking pockets as he walked, he strolled through the race-day crowd.
What could Irene do? If he were caught, Susanna would undoubtedly lose her job by association. And her father might draw attention to Irene that would endanger her mission.
So Irene had followed him, picking his pockets in turn and slipping purses back where they belonged.
Then someone had bumped her, a bump she hadn’t expected, and she was caught with the purse halfway back in a man’s pocket.
He’d protested, of course, and loudly. He’d thought she was stealing from him and was about to call for a constable. With an iron grip on her wrist, he’d snarled, “People like you can’t be trusted.”
“The lady”—the firm voice had sliced through the man’s clamor—“was merely returning your purse, sir, as it had fallen to the ground. You owe her your thanks.”
His Wayward Bride (Romance of the Turf Book 3) Page 3
