SLIGHTLY WICKED

by Mary Balogh

  “I’ll do it for you, Grandmama,” Judith offered.

  But when she saw the inside of the large, ornate wooden box in which all her grandmother’s considerable collection of jewelry was piled, she could see that something drastic needed to be done about it.

  “Would you like me to sort it all out?” she offered. “You see, Grandmama, the box is divided into compartments. If you used one for your rings, another for your earrings, and others for your brooches, necklaces, and bracelets, then everything would be much easier to find.”

  Her grandmother sighed. “Your grandfather was forever buying me jewels,” she said, “because he knew that I liked them so much. I do keep the most precious pieces separate, as you can see.” She pointed at a wine-colored velvet drawstring bag that was almost submerged under the clutter of everything else. “Will you sort everything out for me? How very good of you, Judith, my love. I have never been good at keeping things tidy.”

  “I’ll take the box to my room,” Judith suggested, “so that I will not disturb you as you rest.”

  “I do need to rest,” her grandmother admitted. “I believe I must have taken a chill to the stomach while sitting outside with Sarah yesterday. I thought that perhaps my tea would settle it, but it did not. Tillie will give me a dose of something, I daresay.”

  Judith took the heavy box with her to her room and tipped everything out onto her bed. Grandpapa must indeed have been besotted with Grandmama, she thought, smiling, to have given her so many and such ostentatious jewels, many of the glittering pieces almost indistinguishable from one another.

  She was sorting through the necklaces, the last pile to be dealt with, when there was a hasty tap on her door and Branwell opened it and came hurrying inside even as she was calling for whoever it was to come. He was looking as pale as a ghost.

  “Jude,” he said. “I need your help.”

  “What is wrong?” She suddenly remembered the persistent visitor. It must be he who had upset her brother. “What did that man want?”

  “Oh.” He tried to smile. “He was just a messenger. Damned impudence really. A fellow owes his tailor and his bootmaker and has to be pursued halfway across the country, as if his gentleman’s word to pay up eventually is not sufficient.”

  “He was a tailor come to demand payment?” she asked him, a heavy sapphire necklace suspended from one hand.

  “Not the tailor himself,” he said. “They have fellows hired for just this sort of thing, Jude. I have two weeks to pay up, he told me.”

  “How much money?” she asked, her lips feeling suddenly stiff.

  “Five hundred guineas,” he said, his smile ghastly. “There are fellows who owe ten times more than that, but no one is pursuing them.”

  “Five hundred—” For a moment Judith thought she was going to faint. The necklace landed with a thud in her lap.

  “The thing is,” Branwell said, pacing to the window, “that Papa is going to have to cough up more of the blunt. I know this is a lot, and I know I cannot do it again. I must mend my ways and all that. But it is done this time, you see, and so Papa is going to have to get me out of it. But he will explode if I go and ask him in person or even if I write to him. You write to him for me, will you, Jude? Explain to him. Tell him—”

  “Bran,” she said, her voice seeming to come from a long way off, “I am not sure Papa has that much money to give you. And even if he does, he does not have anything more. He will be beggared. So will Mama and Cass and Pamela and Hilary.”

  He turned paler if that were possible. Even his lips were white.

  “Is it that bad?” he asked. “Is it, Jude?”

  “Why,” she asked softly, “do you think I am here, Bran? Because coming to live with Aunt Effingham is my life’s dream?”

  “Oh, I say.” He looked at her with frowning sympathy. “I am dreadfully sorry, Jude. I did not want to believe it. Is it really so, then? I have done this to you? Well, no longer. I’ll come about, you’ll see. I’ll pay off my debts and restore the family fortune. I’ll see to it that you are fetched home and that there are portions to attract husbands for all of you. I’ll—”

  “How, Bran?” Far from feeling touched by his outpouring of remorse, she was angry. “By playing for higher stakes at the races and the gentlemen’s clubs? We would all be far happier if you settled to some respectable career and made a decent living for yourself.”

  “I’ll think of something,” he said. “I will, Jude. I’ll think of something. I’ll come about and without applying to Papa either. Good Lord.” His eyes had been absently focused on the jewelry box. “Whose glitters are all those? Grandmama’s?”

  “They were all jumbled together,” she explained, “except for her most precious pieces in the bag here. I offered to sort them for her.”

  “There must be a fortune there,” he said.

  “Oh, no, you don’t, Bran,” she said grimly. “You will not apply to Grandmama to pay your debts. These are her jewels, her mementos of her life with our grandfather. Maybe they are worth a fortune, but they are hers, not mine and not yours. We have never even paid her much attention in our lives, have we, because Papa has always given the impression that she is not quite respectable, though I cannot imagine why. She can be tiresome in some ways, always forgetting things in another room, always complaining about her health, though she has done less of that recently. But I have grown remarkably fond of her. She is fun and loves to laugh. And I do not believe she has a mean bone in her body—which is more than I can say of her daughter or ... or her son.” She flushed at having said something so very disloyal about her father.

  Branwell sighed. “No, of course I’ll not ask the old girl for help,” he said. “It would be humiliating to have to admit to her that I am in difficulties, for one thing. Good Lord, though, she would not even miss one or two or ten of those pieces, would she?”

  She fixed him with a severe eye.

  “I was joking, Jude,” he said. “Do you not know me better than to believe I might consider robbing my own grandmother? I was joking.”

  “I know you were, Bran.” She got to her feet and gave him an impulsive hug. “You are going to have to find your own way out of this difficulty. Perhaps if you call on the tradesmen involved, you can come to some agreement with them to pay them so much a month or—”

  He laughed, a mirthless sound.

  “I ought not to have bothered you with my troubles,” he said. “Forget about them, Jude. They are not your troubles, after all. I’ll come about. And as for you, I don’t see why you should not attract a decent husband even though you are living here without any fortune. But you will not do it looking like that. I never understood why Papa always insisted that Mama keep you in caps when the other girls don’t wear them half the time. I have never seen what is so dreadful about your hair. I have always thought red hair on women rather attractive.”

  “Thank you, Bran.” She smiled. “I must finish off here and get this box back to Grandmama’s room. I confess it makes me somewhat nervous to have all this wealth in my own keeping. I wish I could help you, but I cannot.”

  He grinned at her and looked more himself. “Never fear,” he said. “Fellows go through this all the time. But they always come about. I will too.”

  It had become something of a catch phrase with him, Judith realized. He would come about. But she did not see how.

  Papa would be dragged into it eventually, she thought, and Mama and the girls too. And she would be stranded forever and ever at Aunt Effingham’s. She had not realized until this moment how a part of her had still held out hope of one day going back home, of everything being restored to normal again.

  Chapter XII

  The weather cooperated in grand style for the garden party at Grandmaison. Despite a cloudy morning that looked for a while as if it might have been the prelude to rain, the afternoon was clear and sunny, with just enough heat not to oppress the senses. The sitting room was in use for anyone who felt more inclined to sit
indoors than out, but the French windows were opened back and most of the guests remained outdoors, walking the paths of the formal gardens, sitting in the rose arbor, or strolling over the lawns or down along the stream path. On the terrace, long tables covered with crisp white cloths were laden with appetizing foods of all descriptions as well as tea urns and large jugs of lemonade and punch.

  Judith was determined to enjoy herself. She was wearing what she had always considered her prettiest dress, the pale green muslin, though like most of her dresses it had not escaped alteration. And she was wearing one of her own caps beneath the bonnet Aunt Louisa had given her. She did not feel pretty, but then she had never been under any illusions about her looks. However, this afternoon she did not feel so very different from a number of the other guests who had been invited from the neighborhood. Most of them did not look nearly as elegant or fashionable as the Harewood set. And Judith had the advantage of having made the acquaintance of some of them the day before when she had delivered invitations to the ball.

  She spent the first half hour with the vicar’s wife and daughter and believed that she might in time develop a friendship with them. They in turn introduced her to a few other people who spoke politely to her and did not look at her with disdain or—worse—turn immediately away as if she simply were not there. After an hour or so she went to join her grandmother in the sitting room and brought her a plate of food from the terrace. They sat there, comfortable together until Lady Beamish found them and bore them off to the rose arbor after persuading Grandmama that the air was warm and the breeze really close to being nonexistent.

  She was enjoying the party, Judith told herself after leaving the two old friends together to chat with each other. All around her she could hear the sounds of laughter and merriment. It seemed as if the young people were all moving about in groups, sometimes in couples, looking youthful and exuberant, enjoying one another’s company. Even all the older guests seemed to have someone with whom they belonged or felt thoroughly comfortable—as did she, of course. She had her grandmother.

  Julianne was surrounded by the closest of her female friends and a few of the gentlemen from the house party. Lord Rannulf was at her side, as he had been almost all afternoon, and she was sparkling up at him though she must have said something to make the whole group laugh.

  He really was going to marry Julianne.

  Judith longed suddenly for solitude, having discovered— as she had never done at home—that it was possible to feel at one’s loneliest in the midst of a crowd. No one was taking any notice of her at the moment. It was almost a certainty that the back of any grand home would be quiet. She took a path around the side of the house and found the expected kitchen gardens at the back. Fortunately they were deserted and immediately she breathed more easily.

  She was going to have to get over this, she told herself sternly—this feeling of displacement, this loss of all confidence in herself, this self-pity.

  The stables were at the far side of the house with a paddock behind them. She walked past the fenced-off area, looking at the horses grazing there, relieved that there were no grooms outside to see her and wonder what she was doing so far from the party.

  Beyond the stables the ground fell away down a steepish grassy slope into a wooded area. Judith half ran down it and found herself among rhododendron bushes, surrounded suddenly by their heavy fragrance. And ahead of her, now that she was down, she could see a pretty little summerhouse and beyond it a lily pond.

  The summerhouse was hexagonal and completely closed in beneath its pointed shingled roof though there were windows on all sides. She tried the door and it opened inward on well-oiled hinges to reveal a tiled floor and a leather-covered bench all around the wall. That it was sometimes used was obvious. It was clean. There were a few books strewn along one side of the bench. But surely it was not someone’s completely private retreat. It was not locked.

  She went inside, leaving the door open so that she could breathe the rhododendron-fragrant air and listen to the birds singing, and so that she could get an unobstructed view of the pretty, well-kept lily pond, its water dark green beneath the roof of tree branches, the lilies a startling white in contrast.

  It was a little heaven on earth, she decided, sinking onto one of the benches, folding her hands in her lap, and allowing herself to relax for the first time all afternoon. She pushed aside homesickness, loneliness, and heartache. It was not in her nature to harbor negative feelings for long and these ones had oppressed her for altogether too many days. Here were peace and beauty to nurture her spirit, and she would accept the gift by opening herself to what was offered and giving it a chance to seep into her soul.

  She inhaled deeply and then relaxed further. Her eyes closed after a couple of minutes, though she was not sleeping. She felt both happy and aware of being blessed. She lost track of time.

  “A pretty picture indeed,” a voice said softly from the doorway and she was jolted back to unpleasant reality just as if she really had been sleeping.

  Horace was standing there, one shoulder propped against the door frame, one booted leg crossed over the other.

  “Oh,” she said, “you alarmed me. I came for a walk, found the summerhouse, and sat down to rest for a few moments. I must be getting back.” She stood up and realized that the summerhouse was really not very large at all.

  “Why?” he asked her without moving. “Because Step-mama may have some errands for you to run? Because your grandmama may need someone to fetch her more cakes? The garden party will continue for some time yet, and we Harewood guests will be staying even after everyone else leaves, you know. We are invited for dinner. Relax. You will not be missed for some time yet.”

  That was precisely what she was afraid of.

  “It is all very picturesque, is it not?” she said brightly. And very remote and secluded.

  “Very,” he agreed without removing his eyes from her. “And would be even more so without its bonnet and cap.”

  She smiled. “Is that a compliment, Mr. Effingham?” she asked. “I thank you. Will you stay here a while? Or will you walk back to the house with me?”

  “Judith.” He smiled at her, revealing almost all his perfect white teeth. “There is no need to be skittish—or to call me Mr. Effingham. I saw you leave the party because you were feeling alone and neglected. You go unappreciated here, do you not? It is because Stepmama treats you like a poor relation and encourages the impression most of the guests have that you are your grandmama’s companion. And because you have been forced to wear this heavy disguise. I am the only man here, apart from your brother, who has been privileged to catch a glimpse beyond it.”

  She silently reprimanded herself for dressing the way she had on that day he had arrived with Bran. He would have shown no interest in her if he had seen her only as she looked now. She could think of no sensible answer to his words.

  “You are not quite unappreciated, though,” he told her.

  “Well.” She laughed. “Thank you. But I really must go now.” She took one step forward. Another would bring her into collision with him. But, as he had done on the wilderness walk, he stood his ground and did not move aside for her to pass. “Excuse me, please, Mr. Effingham.”

  “I daresay,” he said, “you had a very strict and narrow upbringing at the rectory, did you, Judith? A little dalliance can be very entertaining, you know, especially when the party is so dull.”

  “I am not interested in dalliance,” she told him firmly.

  “That is because you have never experienced it,” he said. “We will correct that gap in your education, Judith. And could we ask for more ... picturesque surroundings for the first lesson?”

  “Enough of this,” she said curtly. She was truly alarmed now, since he seemed to be a man who would not take no for an answer even when it was firmly given. “I am leaving. And I would advise you not to try stopping me. Uncle George and Aunt Louisa would not be pleased with you if you did.”

  H
e chuckled and sounded genuinely amused.

  “Little innocent,” he said. “Do you really believe they would put any blame on me? And do you really believe you would tell?” He took one step forward and she took a half step back.

  “I do not want this, Mr. Effingham,” she said. “It would be ungentlemanly of you to come one inch closer to me or to speak any further on a matter that is thoroughly distasteful to me. Let me go now.”

  Instead of letting her go, he lifted one hand, pulled open the ribbons of her bonnet, and tossed both it and her cap onto the bench behind her before reaching for her. Half of her hair fell down over one shoulder, and she heard the sharp intake of his breath.

  It was the last thing she consciously heard or saw for what seemed forever and was perhaps a minute, maybe two. She struck out at him blindly, flailing both fists, stamping with both feet, sinking her teeth into whatever came close to her mouth—but not screaming, she realized afterward. She had never been a screamer. Yet it was strange how, mindless as she seemed to be, a part of her took a step back and watched almost dispassionately as she struggled in a panic for her freedom and as Horace overpowered her quite effortlessly, laughing softly most of the time, cursing once or twice when she struck him.

  And then her body was pressed to his, her dress half ridden up her legs, one of his wedged between them, her hands imprisoned against his chest, his horrid wet, open mouth seeking hers. It was the moment when her conscious mind returned. He fully intended to ravish her, and she was essentially powerless to stop him. But she would not go down meekly. She struggled on, panic returning as she became aware that her twistings and turnings were doing nothing to free her, but were only further amusing and inflaming him.

  And then suddenly, without any warning, she was free, gazing in terrified incomprehension at the great monster who had just lifted Horace bodily away from her and was still growling menacingly as it turned and flung him outside. The monster resolved itself into Lord Rannulf Bedwyn as he went outside after Horace, lifted him from the ground with one hand, and slammed his back against a tree.