Unraveling the Earl

by Lynne Barron

  “What nonsense,” Georgie replied. “Although, I must admit that if your foolproof system begins with a dip into the honeypot it is no wonder you have the ladies lined up to have a go at you.”

  “I never should have told you about my system,” he grumbled, dropping his head over his plate, but not before she saw the flush that slashed across his cheeks.

  “Too true.” Taking the second chair, she pushed aside the platter of beef and set the bundle in its place. “I am unlikely to cease teasing you anytime soon. It is simply not in my nature to let go of such a tasty morsel.”

  “It doesn’t,” he mumbled.

  “What doesn’t, my lord Henry?”

  “My system doesn’t begin with pleasuring a woman with my mouth,” he answered.

  “No? Well, it ought to.”

  “Liked my mouth on you, did you?”

  “What woman wouldn’t?” Just speaking of the pleasure he’d wrung from her had Georgie anticipating the next time, and the next time, and all the next times she might enjoy as his mistress.

  “I’ll keep that in mind for future reference.”

  “Surely you are not saying…are you telling me you have never…no, I don’t believe it.” It was too ludicrous a thought.

  “Believe what you will,” Henry replied, finally lifting his head to flash her a grin.

  “Gracious me,” she breathed in wonder. “I was your first. Imagine that.”

  “I don’t need to imagine it. I was there and it was better than all of my fantasies rolled into one.”

  “But if you’d fantasized about such delights, why did not act on those fantasies with one or more of your twenty-six other lovers?” Georgie asked, awed by his confession, by the knowledge that he’d waited, for whatever reason, for her to live out his secret desire.

  Henry only shrugged in answer, a wry smile pulling at his lips, before pointing to the small parcel that sat in the center of the table. “What’s in the packet? A gift for me?”

  “I don’t know that it is a gift, so much as a beginning, my beginning as it were. You did suggest I begin at the beginning.” Fully aware that she was rambling but quite unable to stop, Georgie drew in a shaky breath. “I had the perfect little speech arranged in my head but then you asked me to be your mistress and I thought I might beg a favor of you instead.”

  “In lieu of financial support, you mean?” he asked, clearly surprised by the idea. “You have only to ask. I will help you in any way I can. You needn’t trade your favors for…well, a favor.”

  “I think I would rather barter favors than coin,” she replied. “It seems a more honest and honorable trade.”

  “I see.”

  And Georgie thought that perhaps he truly did see. As his steady blue gaze drifted over her face, she imagined he saw past her rambling and fidgeting, saw past the woman she had schemed and seduced and cajoled to become. If he looked hard enough, delved deep enough, might he see the terrible yearning that drove her, that had taken hold of her when Lady Joy had died, abandoning a frightened and lonely girl to a world of strangers who hadn’t the faintest inkling what to do with her.

  Unsettled by the idea, Georgie blurted out her next thought.

  “Please, will you help me to find my mother?”

  Henry blinked in surprise. “You’ve lost your mother? But where was she when last you saw her?”

  Bubbling laughter, born of equal parts dark humor and astonishment, spilled from her lips before she slapped a hand across her mouth, muffling the inappropriate and entirely too childish sound.

  “I apologize,” she gasped. “But you…you are so sweet, my lord.”

  “I’m sweet?”

  “Do you always see the world around you awash in sunshine and rainbows? How splendid it must be like to live as you do, forever seeing the good in people.”

  “Are you calling me naïve?” he asked, obviously amused by the possibility.

  “Perhaps a tad,” she replied. “But in the best possible way.”

  Henry waved away her words. “If you haven’t lost your mother, how is it you need my assistance in locating her?”

  “Oh, I never thought,” Georgie whispered, appalled as a new idea took shape. “Did the countess go wandering there toward the end when she’d well and truly lost her marbles? Is that why you thought I might have lost my own mother? Why, old Tibby McCray used to wander outside in her unmentionables.”

  “Mother never went wandering, in her unmentionables or otherwise.” Henry replied, his lips twitching. “And please don’t take off down one of your twisted paths.”

  “I do go off down twisted paths, I know,” she agreed with a laugh. “But it’s only when I’m nervous or distraught or happy or excited. Oh, and if I allow my temper to run rampant. My mind just gets too crowded, you understand.”

  “As scary as I find the admission, I do believe I am coming to understand,” Henry replied. “Please, love, just stay on the straight and narrow and tell me how I can help you to find your mother.”

  “Well, it all began with this blanket, leastwise it was the first clue.” Georgie made every attempt to curb her tendency to babble as she unwound the red ribbon holding the worn and faded velvet folded around the items that made up the story of her life. “You see, when I was given into your mother’s hands, I was wrapped in this blanket.”

  “Pardon me? My mother?” Henry looked at her from wide eyes, his mouth open as if he might say more.

  When it became apparent he either could not or would not continue, Georgie forged ahead. “They were friends, your mother and mine. Particular friends. And when my father, a libertine by the name of George Buchanan, left my mother in a delicate condition, Lady Hastings swept her away to the country, there to bear her babe in secrecy.”

  Henry made no reply to her revelation, only continued to stare at her across the table.

  Pushing aside the tattered edges of fabric to reveal a wrinkled white shirt, Georgie smiled. “I’ve returned your shirt, just as I promised I would.”

  Henry looked down, one hand reaching as if he might touch the garment before he snatched it back and his gaze came back to her.

  Georgie lifted his shirt and set it aside.

  “Lady Hastings placed me with a family by the name of Graham at River’s End, a rather rickety estate somewhere nearby. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Grahams or River’s End?” She knew it was a futile hope, but she could no more cease hoping than she could cease breathing.

  “No, of course not,” she whispered when he made no reply. “I knew I did not belong to the Grahams. I knew it long before I was told.”

  Unnerved by his continued silence, by the weight of his eyes on her, Georgie dropped her gaze and fiddled with the frayed edge of the letter that had been stashed beneath his shirt.

  “When I was sixteen, Lady Joy came for me.” Shaking her head at the memory, she laughed. “She found me flat on my bum in the pigsty. Mum, that is, Millie Graham, had written a letter to my father asking him to come for me.”

  She glanced up to find Henry regarding her with the oddest expression on his face. One she could not decipher, shock or perhaps horror.

  “This is the letter.” She lifted it in offering, dropped it to the table when he made no move to take it. “It’s only the one line. You must come for George as we can no longer care for the child. My father had taken ill so Lady Joy came in his stead. He died before we’d crossed the border into Scotland.”

  In the silence that followed, Georgie heard the first drop of rain land on the window beside her and turned to watch it slide down the glass. As if the sky had been split wide open, the rain began to fall in earnest, beating against the panes. Lightning lit up the sky a mere moment before a tremendous boom shook the house.

  “Goodness, that was close,” she breathed in awe.

  When she turned back Henry had the small miniature in his hands but his wary gaze was on her.

  “If you flip it over you will find her name scrawled across the back
along with a date. I was born almost exactly nine months later. Do you remember I told you I have a confession to make?”

  He nodded once, the motion stiff, before setting aside the small portrait of a lady with golden curls framing her pale face and bright blue eyes.

  “Yes, well, here is my confession.” With hands that shook, Georgie lifted the small leather-bound book and held it out to the man who’d said not a single word as she’d opened her heart, offering him the oldest pieces, those that were battered and bruised and likely beyond repair. “I borrowed your mother’s journal.”

  Henry took the book, his eyes never leaving Georgie’s face and in that moment she realized he knew. He’d likely guessed as soon as she’d mentioned the Countess of Hastings’ involvement.

  “I don’t suppose there is any need for me to confess, is there?” she asked, gearing up to deliver the speech she’d rehearsed, wanting only to get it behind her so that they could move on to more important matters.

  “You didn’t follow me from Town.” Henry pushed back his chair, the legs scraping against the floor, a jagged screech mingling with the pelting rain and thunder to create a discordant wave of sound, as if a group of novices had plucked up the forgotten instruments of a small orchestra and set about torturing an unsuspecting audience.

  “I haven’t much experience with apologies.” Georgie leapt to her feet, the beginning bars of her prepared speech falling from her lips before she fully comprehended his words. “Is that what you thought? That I’d followed you from London?”

  “Holy shit. I am an idiot.”

  “Now Henry, you are no such thing,” she argued.

  “Naïve, just as you said.”

  “Only a tad.”

  “I thought you were following me around Town in hopes of sampling my wares,” he said with a raspy laugh. “But all along it was my mother who’d taken your interest.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she exclaimed. “I was never interested in your mother. Well, of course she interested me in so far as she knew my mother. But Lady Hastings refused to tell me anything that might assist me, so yes I followed her around, then I followed her family and friends.”

  “That is why you crash weddings.” Henry shook his head as if the motion might jog something loose and Georgie suspected he had too many thoughts crowding around, all of them fighting for freedom.

  “In the beginning I went to St. George’s in hopes… It’s foolish I know, but I thought I might see her, that I would somehow know the woman who had given me life,” she explained, her words tumbling over one another. “I was recognized right off, on account of my hair and eyes, you understand. I heard the ladies, and a surprising number of the gentlemen, whispering among themselves throughout every ceremony, no matter how solemn. And while they traded tales of my father, they never mentioned the scandal of my birth. But I enjoyed the weddings and christenings, and even the funerals, so I kept going, knowing the scandal was long buried, if in fact it had ever lived.”

  “And the theater, when I saw you with your opera glasses raised and pointed at my box?”

  “You saw me?” she asked, surprised he’d paid her the slightest notice with all the women perpetually crowed into his box.

  “Loitering outside my club, sitting in the park in front of Hastings House, flying past me in your curricle,” he muttered and Georgie knew he was speaking more to himself than to her, counting off the ways in which she’d tricked him, however unwittingly.

  Even so, she chose to answer him. “Lord Piedmont is a member of White’s and I wanted to make his acquaintance as he is something of a chronicler of the times. Your mother was residing in your home with you so I would imagine my presence in the park speaks for itself. As for my curricle, in all probability I was following one or another of your mother’s friends or family members. I would likely still be pointlessly hacking along after every single person she’d ever known if you hadn’t approached me after her funeral.”

  “You knew I’d misunderstood,” he accused, advancing on her with an unholy gleam in his eyes.

  “I knew no such thing,” she countered, rounding the table to meet him toe to toe. “I thought you were bored and randy. An arrogant libertine who’d spotted me at his mother’s funeral and decided I might entertain him, seeing as how there weren’t many ladies of quality loitering about the village.”

  “Ladies of quality do not seduce a gentleman solely to gain entrance to his mother’s private apartments,” he replied, his words lashing her with deadly accuracy.

  “I never claimed to be a lady of quality,” she drawled, pulling forth her weightiest, frostiest glare, one she’d learned from her grandmother. “And what sort of gentleman follows a woman from a funeral in hopes of taking a tumble? A cad led by his cock, that’s who.”

  “My God, you are the devil.”

  “Oh, first you name me Janet,” she replied, rifling her fingers through her hair, leaving it standing up every which way, knowing full well the orange coils were as tangled as any witch’s matted tresses.

  Henry took two stumbling steps back, his eyes fixed on her flyaway hair.

  “Now I’m Lucifer himself,” she continued, sticking two fingers through her curls and pointing them at him like horns. “My, my, I am moving up the ladder of true evil lickety split.”

  “Damn it, Georgie,” he spluttered. “You sucked my cock and taunted me and teased me and fucked me into oblivion so that you could ransack my mother’s apartments!”

  “Mayhap I did,” she acknowledged, dropping her hands to her hips.

  “There is no mayhap about it. You used me and tossed me aside when you’d gotten what you wanted.”

  “Do you hear yourself?” Georgie asked, fighting to hold back a grin, or heaven forbid the laughter that was building in her belly and tickling her throat. Then she opened up her mouth and an unmistakable peep escaped, followed by a snort. “You sound like a woman who has awoken to find the bloody stump of an arm on the pillow beside her.”

  “A bloody stump?” he growled, twin spots of color appearing on his chiseled cheeks.

  “You used me and tossed me aside,” she mimicked, giving up the battle and laughing outright. “If I am not much mistaken, you’ve used twenty-six women only to toss them aside.”

  “Make that twenty-seven.”

  He spoke the words so quietly, Georgie barely heard them over the drumming of the rain and the echo of her laughter.

  “Don’t be silly,” she cried in surprise. “We are only talking, having a little spat. Then we’ll kiss and make up and laugh about it.”

  “Oh, no, Miss Buchanan, you have laughed at me for the last time. Consider yourself tossed by the wayside,” he said with a harsh laugh.

  Before Georgie could form an argument, the Earl of Hastings, the kindest, sweetest man she had ever met, hurled his mother’s journal across the room to bounce against the chest of drawers and slide over the smooth surface, toppling a small porcelain statue and sending it careening toward the edge.

  The door slammed behind the angry lord with enough force to shake the rafters and the windows. Following which, two things happened simultaneously, two things that knocked the air from Georgie’s lungs and some sense into her head.

  Sprinting toward the door, intent upon calling Henry back to finish what they’d started, she tripped over her hem and fell to her knees, taking most of her weight on her bad leg. She let loose a howl of pain as she twisted onto her backside and pulled the injured limb to her chest.

  Just as the delicate statuette of the boy and his lamb fell from the chest of drawers, the lamb breaking away to slide across the floor while the boy’s head snapped off and rolled under the dresser.

  It struck her as odd, the Earl of Hastings having such a dainty piece in his sparsely furnished, masculine chamber. Odder still that he’d decapitated the boy when he’d dismissed her from his life with no more consideration than he’d shown when he’d tossed his mother’s words, her hopes and wishes, across the r
oom. And oddest of all, that it was a boy and a lamb. It might have been a boy and a dog, or a girl and a cat, or even a girl and a lamb.

  It was absurd, and more than a bit morbid, she knew it and still she laughed. “A boy and a lamb,” she spluttered. “The arrogant lord…separated them…lopped off…that…that boy’s head …and doesn’t even know it.”

  She laughed until tears streamed down her face, until her belly ached and each breath she drew was a battle. Then she rose and limped to his lordship’s dresser, the guillotine by which he’d severed boy from lamb, head from shoulders. She searched through his drawers until she found a pair of faded work pants, a belt with which to hold them above her bony hips, a pair of woolen socks, and a knotty knit guernsey in a wonderfully garish shade of green that would clash terribly with her hair.

  While Lord Hastings was somewhere in the house stewing over his injured pride, Georgie Buchanan crept down the stairs, carefully avoiding the seventh step that creaked, and snuck out the front door, quietly closing it behind her. In her left trouser pocket was a headless boy, in her right a lamb watched over his head.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Henry came awake with a jolt, bolting upright in the worn leather chair behind the immense desk that had once belonged to his father. With his elbow, he knocked a nearly empty decanter to the floor, crystal shattering and flying off in every direction.

  “Georgie!” he bellowed as he came to his feet, his eyes scanning the study where his sister Beatrice had learned her sums and later Greek and Latin. The curtains were open, weak gray light barely penetrating the glass and rain battering the windows.

  “Shit, no. No, no, no.” Even as he crossed the room, avoiding shards of crystal and spilled brandy, a sense of déjà vu swamping him, he knew she was gone.

  He almost expected to find Critchley standing in the hall with her dress in his arms, Davenport waiting behind him with a steaming cup of coffee in hand. But the hall was empty and dark, the house silent beyond the relentless rain hammering away above him and all around him as he ran for the stairs.