by JayneFresina
The editor of a popular ladies' magazine wanted to publish a story about the Miss Pipers, highlighting their youthful delight in the fashions of London, their eagerness to enjoy the Season and, in fact, revealing how they were not so very different to other young ladies of the age."I don't understand the sudden interest," their aunt exclaimed, "but we mustn't look this gift horse in the mouth. However it came about, we'll seize our opportunities!"
The weather improved. At the house, velvet winter drapes were taken down and replaced with summer linen, and paper fans filled the cold fireplaces with color. Rugs were taken out for a beating and moved around when they were put back, so that sunlight would fade the pattern evenly over time. A symphony of birdsong greeted the opening of windows every morning and the clouds no longer seemed so oppressive, even on days when the sun still struggled to shine through.
Pip was glad to get out more often for walks in the fresh air, although the unpredictability of a sudden British "drizzle" still caught her out frequently.
In general, life was less grim. She might even have begun to like her temporary home a little.
* * * *
He saw Miss Piper across the street one day as he was on his way into the offices of Stempenham and Pitt. She was with her aunt and sisters, who all carried hat boxes. Nonesuch trailed behind the others, empty handed until she stopped to purchase a newspaper from a boy by the park railings. Her aunt looked over one shoulder and shouted at her not to dally, but she still paused to share a word with the boy, before she tucked the newspaper under one arm and walked on. Apparently she liked to keep abreast of current affairs and didn't care about print getting on her clothes.
Whether she saw Damon or not, he couldn't tell.
Every day, after that, he saw her stop and get the newspaper from that same boy across the street from his office. Most of the time she was alone, which, in itself was unusual for a young, unmarried woman, and caused several disapproving glances from folk she passed on the pavement. But she didn't seem to care. Of course, she could defend herself if need be with that efficient right hook, he thought with a wry smirk.
Damon made certain to be early at his desk each morning so he wouldn't miss this sighting of Nonesuch. It became a new part of his routine, along with freshly baked muffins provided by Lady Roper, who had taken to sending him a basket for his breakfast, apparently intent on feeding him up as if for a harvest sacrifice. What was it about him, he wondered vaguely, that made women want to give him food— particularly cake? Did they think he needed sweetening up? Whatever the lady's reason, and he had no doubt there was some ulterior motive, Damon enjoyed the muffins as he drank his morning coffee and watched the street come to life outside his window.
He could not be fully content, however, until he'd seen Miss Piper appear around the corner to fetch her newspaper. Then he knew all was well with the world and everything in its place.
It was a puzzle as to why she walked so far from Belgravia to get the newspaper every morning, when there were surely many other boys on her route from whom she might have made her purchase. She must like the boy by the park. Or perhaps she enjoyed the exercise and the fresh air.
And why the devil was he trying to make sense of anything she did? As long as she had no violent encounters in the street and didn't try to pick anybody's pocket, it was none of his concern.
One morning, as she strode around the corner in a jaunty yellow ensemble, the previously innocent looking clouds overhead suddenly cracked apart to douse the street in a hearty spring rain shower.
Nonesuch was unprepared and, within seconds, soaked to her skin.
Damon knew he could have sat there and pretended not to see, but watching her try to find shelter under a wet, crumpled newspaper was too much. He could do nothing else, but put down his pen, run outside and bring her into the building.
The clerk looked over his spectacles as Damon led her through the front door.
"Rainin' out, I see," the fellow remarked drily.
Once inside his own office, Damon shut the door and set his desk chair— the only seat in the room— by the fire for her.
"Miss Piper, don't you possess an umbrella?" He looked, in some distress, at the rainwater pooling around her feet and onto his well-swept, wooden floor boards.
"I do, but when I set out this morning the sun was shining."
He shook his head. "One must always be prepared for the weather here."
"Thank you for that. It is something that would not have occurred to me, as I stood in the street steadily being drowned." But she looked around his office with eager eyes and, having removed her wet bonnet, seemed to forget the rain and her dampness immediately. Rather than sit, she took a quick tour of the room. "This is a very small office."
"I prefer to call it," he looked her up and down, "bijou."
"I thought you were more important than this."
"No. I am quite unimportant. As you see." Truth was he didn't want a bigger office. He liked this one, tucked out of the way, contained and tidy. It always took people by surprise, and he liked to do that, catch them when they were startled. Because it was such a small space, clients often marched in with a long stride, expecting this to be merely an antechamber and looking for a door into a larger room beyond. When the one and only door was soundly shut behind them and they found themselves sequestered in that small, tight square— a space in which there was no hiding— they immediately forgot all the lies they had composed to tell him. But to her, all he said was, "They mostly keep me busy here with the cases nobody else cares to handle."
"Like keeping me out of trouble?"
"Precisely."
Her gaze had drifted over the basket of muffins from Lady Roper. "I suppose... you are young still," she said, "and everybody must start somewhere, even with the most unpleasant of tasks."
"Indeed."
"But take heart, one day you might have an office with more than one sorry candle and a desk in it. You might even have carpet and a stuffed animal head of some description on the wall."
"A man must have something at which to aspire."
Once again she looked at the muffins and then away to survey the view through his window. "I thought I saw you coming in here last week, but I didn't know for sure if it was you. Of course, from across a street all men look the same and there is nothing particularly special about you."
"Miss Piper, you really shouldn't be walking about in London unescorted. But I'm certain you know that. You're simply remarkably obstinate and resistant to rule."
"I prefer to call it," she spun around to give him a brisk up and down assessment of her own, "self-sufficient."
He sighed and gestured to the chair. "You may as well sit. The rain could last a while." He didn't like her wandering about, moving things, dripping all over the place.
"Am I not in your way?"
Yes. Exceedingly. "I invited you in, didn't I?"
"I suppose you wanted to amuse yourself by making sport of me again."
"Miss Piper," he assured her somberly, "this is a place of business, not sport. Please do sit." The room was too small for two people to walk around comfortably, while avoiding contact with each other and the chair. And neither of them seemed very good at standing still.
But she ignored his request. Instead, sweeping restlessly around the room again, she said suddenly, "Why did you pretend that shawl was from Lord Boxall?"
"How else might I have got it into your hands? I sincerely doubt your aunt would approve a gift from me."
"How do you know that?" Her eyes narrowed.
"I'm a Deverell. I know of few guardians who would welcome such a suitor for their maiden charge."
"But you're not a suitor."
"A gift would make me one in the eyes of this society. A proper young lady should never accept a gift from a man unless he is an acknowledged, approved suitor." He paused. "And I know that Prospero Piper wants titles and land for his daughters."
"You're very well informed."
He gave a little smile. "I have to be."
She walked by the window, her fingertips trailing along the ledge. "What else do you know about us then?"
Rather than answer that, he picked up Lady Roper's basket and held it out to her. "Would you care for a muffin, Miss Piper?"
"Well, I—" She clasped her hands together. "I shouldn't really."
"They're very good. Freshly baked. Still warm."
Naturally, she could not resist. He had barely got the word "warm" out and she was advancing with an eager gleam in her eyes. Finally she sat, but he was still not safe from her inquisitive nature. Spying the one and only ornament in the room, she pointed to it with her muffin. "Who's that? Your sweetheart?"
He looked over at the little oval silhouette above the mantle. "That's my mother... Emma Gibson."
"It's a very pretty profile." She eyed him thoughtfully. "She must be very proud of you."
His reply was a curt, "She's dead."
She licked her lips. "Oh...I'm sorry."
"I was two and have no memory of her. Just the silhouette." He'd often thought that must be why he took such effort now to remember everything and file it away in his mind. Every detail. He didn't want to lose anything like that again.
After a short pause she said, "My mother died also, just a year after Merrythought was born. I was four. Serenity likes to say it's a good thing our mother passed away when she did, so she didn't have to see how badly I turned out."
She had said nothing about his mother not having the last name of Deverell. It was breezed over with the same apparent ease with which she shrugged off her sister's callous remark. Now she ate her muffin and continued to admire the little silhouette until the unpredictable rain halted. Then she retied her bonnet ribbons, thanked him for the shelter, and was on her way again.
Standing in the door of his office, basket in one hand, Damon watched her leave and felt again that deflated sensation. As if he was a toy she'd picked up to play with briefly, before dropping him again.
"Who's that then?" the clerk wanted to know.
"A very difficult client."
"Oh, aye? What's she done then?"
"I'm not entirely sure," he muttered.
"Guilty or innocent?"
"Unabashedly guilty I would say."
"But you don't know her crime?"
Damon thought about it for a moment. "I have a feeling it's a crime as yet unknown to me. I... have no name for it." When he glanced over at the clerk, he caught the other man quickly looking down at his desk, his shoulders trembling slightly. "Something amuses you, Tom?"
"Naught amuses me," the clerk exclaimed, as if the very notion of it were scandalous.
"Good," he snapped, straightening his neck cloth with a sharp jerk of the hand. "See to it that nothing does. This is an office of work, not frivolity."
* * * *
The next morning he paid the newsboy to slip a note inside the paper for her. It took him almost a full hour to decide what it should say. Another unusual occurrence and an utter waste of his time, probably.
I have a surfeit of muffins again, should you care to partake.
There could be no harm in asking, he reasoned. Muffins were hardly the first step to a passionate affair. But he waited on tenterhooks that morning until he saw her, cheerfully marching along the street to get her paper.
She stopped, as usual, to chat with the boy by the railings. Early sunlight kissed her bonnet tenderly as she bent her head and opened her reticule.
Damon quickly looked down and rearranged his pens.
Muffins. What a stupid, blithering idea that was! He felt his face grow warm. Damn it! He'd dropped a pen to the floor.
By the time he was upright again, rubbing a banged head and opening his eyes, she was crossing the street and on her way toward him, whistling a blithely merry tune, much to the evident outrage of anybody she passed.
A quick check of his office assured him of everything being tidy and in its place. But he leapt up to give his mother's silhouette a hasty polish on his shirt sleeve before slipping it back on its nail above the mantle.
* * * *
"I hear you have muffins."
What else was there to say? It seemed foolish to waste time on chit chat and niceties. He wasn't the sort with whom one shared thoughts on the weather.
He was rubbing the back of his head. Showing off that lovely head of hair again, she thought. "Yes. I am in possession of muffins again," he muttered hoarsely. "Do come in."
Nobody else had yet entered the offices of Stempenham and Pitt. Not even the clerk was at his little crooked desk yet in the front room. The shelves and desks, overflowing with scrolls of paper and thick, dusty books, sat poised in wait for their day to begin, while soft sunlight reached tentatively, shyly through the windows.
Deverell led her into his office again, grabbed a grey cutaway from the back of his chair and hastily shrugged those broad shoulders into it.
"Forgive the mess," he said.
His was the tidiest office she'd ever seen. Inside her father's one could hardly put one foot before the other without tripping over a pile of paper. But she replied, "I shall try."
Today, he had a pot of coffee on an iron trivet, warming by the fire. From this he poured them both a cup and she was somewhat amused, having never been served coffee by anybody but a footman before.
"Do you bake your own muffins?" she asked mischievously.
"No. A lady friend provides them."
"Oh." That took some of the pleasure out of it.
Until he added, "An old lady friend. Not intimate."
"Well, I'm sure there's no need to explain to me."
He gave her a dark look. "Isn't there?"
Pip shrugged. "You can have all the lady friends you like. I'm only here for the muffins."
"Are you?"
"Your note said you had a surfeit, and I wouldn't want you to have to eat them all. It's the least I could do to relieve you of a few. Besides, I know how you've been helping us, so I ought to be cordial and polite." She paused, eyed him dubiously, and then added, "This is nothing romantic. It's only cake."
He pushed the basket of muffins into her hands in such a surly fashion that she thought she'd said something to offend him. "Why don't you sit down?" he grumbled.
"There's only one chair," she pointed out.
"How many do you need?"
So, despite the ungraciousness of the offer, she perched on the hard chair behind his desk, while he paced before the little window, periodically glancing out of it in a furtive manner.
"I suppose," she ventured, "if people see us alone together like this they might talk."
He stopped pacing and put both hands behind his back. "Your father is a client. You've a right to be here. Nothing odd about it. Not that anybody would dare push their nose into my business. Eat, Miss Piper."
After a while, she said, "Is this where you question witnesses? Would you badger and bully me into a state of confusion and wild contradiction, until I confessed to all my evil deeds?"
He stared hard at her.
"My aunt says Deverells are extremely wicked and that, being a lawyer, you would only do nice things for people if they paid you."
"I cannot argue with that assessment."
"You don't defend yourself?"
"Why would I? I am the very worst of men. Your aunt is right."
She watched him for a moment, while he resumed his back and forth patrol at the window. "Grinding one's teeth is a terrible habit," she warned. "I knew a man once who—"
"Eat your muffin, Miss Piper."
"Shouldn't we have some conversation to pass the time?" she asked politely.
He shot her a scowl. "What about?"
"Well, let me see...books?"
"I read for work, not for pleasure."
"Theatre?"
"I don't have the time to waste."
"Music?"
"Lot of racket mostly."
Pip laugh
ed. Enjoying her muffin, she studied the dark walls of his office again, as she did the day before. She found it fascinating. All those neat stacks of paper, locked boxes guarding dark secrets, and the scratches and marks on the old paneling. No decoration except for the small silhouette of his mother. Nothing else to soften the fact that this is where truth was weighed and fates held in the balance before they went before the magistrate. "It's not a very cheerful room," she concluded out loud.
"It's not meant to be."
How many clients had entered that room in the past, she wondered. Hopeful men, distressed men, angry men. And women too, of course, some coming to plead for his help, clutching their hands in prayer and holding them to heaving bosoms. She'd read enough stories to know that women always had bosoms that heaved when they had to beseech a man for his mercy. Pip's bosom didn't heave anywhere for anybody. Serenity had said it was because she didn't lace her corset tight enough.
"What are you thinking about now?" he demanded, staring out of the window, his back to her.
She chuckled dourly. "I very much doubt you would want to know. You might blush."
"I don't blush."
Hastily she sought another subject. "You're very young to be a lawyer, are you not? Does it not take years of study?"
"For me it didn't."
"You must be very clever and studious."
"If a man wants something he should work hard for it. And not be distracted."
She nodded. Yes, he plainly was not a man who stood for much nonsense. Which made their first encounter and the way he'd teased her, quite inexplicable. "So what does the Dangerous Mr. Damon Deverell do in his time away from work, if he does not read or attend the theatre? I suppose you like cricket. All Englishmen love their cricket. We could talk about that."
He turned to look at her, arms folded across his chest. "What do you know about cricket?"
"You'd be surprised. I was recently treated to a lecture by a gentleman who extolled its virtues for a full three hours over tea and crumpets. I know all about bouncers, gogglies and silly-midwickets."
