Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

by Cooper, Karina

  The earl offered a gloved hand, his eyes unreadable behind the lenses of his clipped protectives, but his gaze fell on Mr. Brisco beside me. “My thanks, Constable.”

  “Of course, m-my lord,” stuttered the man, who was clearly unused to dealing with lords and their sons. He bowed, an awkward thing, and took his leave of what I was sure was his private version of hell.

  A wayward Society miss caught in a murder mystery, while the Earl Compton flies down like a guardian angel to pluck his only witness from the constable’s grasp.

  I almost smiled, but the hard line I saw between Compton’s eyebrows stilled the urge. I took his hand, wincing when I remembered that mine was still bare. “I suppose my chaperone requested your aid?” I asked, sounding every inch a sulking girl.

  The earl helped me aloft, waited until I found my seat before stepping up behind me. The set of his mouth was firm. “You gave Mrs. Fortescue a fright,” he returned, as much a reprimand as an explanation.

  My shoulders rounded. As the earl settled to the padded seat across from me, the driver flicked a whip, clicked once and the horse whickered softly and plodded into motion. I was keenly aware of the silence between us, and the eyes staring blatantly at the earl’s open carriage.

  Unconsciously, I lifted a hand to my cheek.

  Compton caught it, pressed a clean, monogrammed handkerchief into my palm. His fingers were strong, firm enough to brook no argument of verbal or physical design, but it wasn’t that what caught me.

  It was, instead, the way his mouth set in an uneven slant. Angry, of course I could see that, but concerned. Relieved, even, as his gloved fingers pressed fervently into my palm. My hand closed over the offering, even as I shivered.

  “I apologize for the open carriage,” he said stiffly. “You understand the necessity.”

  Of course. Propriety demanded open carriages when the sexes mingled, especially with lack of a chaperone. Yet that very lack might be enough to doom this to the scandal rags, regardless. I could not summon the will to care.

  Truthfully, the air was rather cold on my cheeks and nose, but I would rather suffer than complain.

  I did not have to do either. The earl lifted a large fur from the floor, and as the carriage plodded along the streets lined with flickering lamps, he pulled it over my shoulders. Unlike me, he’d come dressed for the weather, with his greatcoat pulled up over his ears.

  I’d graduated, then, from forgetting small details to even how to take care of myself. Shame bit deeply; my cheeks flushed as his fingers pulled the fur tightly around my throat.

  I did not know what to say. Here was an earl, come to rescue me. I sighed, my breath fogging somewhat against the chill damp. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  Compton’s hands dropped. The carriage was not so large that we had room to sprawl, and I was aware of the driver’s back behind him, but his gaze remained steady on me through his glass lenses.

  “Why,” he finally said, drawing the word out in stiff demand, “were you at the scene of a ghastly crime, Miss St. Croix?”

  So the constables had passed details. Of course. I looked away, at my hands, clenched around his handkerchief, and remembered I’d meant to clean my face. I did so now. “I wanted books,” I said. Not quite a lie. Not wholly the truth, either.

  “That is all?”

  Not in the slightest. I lied with ease. “I truly just wanted books. Mr. Pettigrew has . . .” I paused. “Had a fascinating collection.”

  He blew out a breath, and I realized how tightly he’d held himself. All that lordly reserve had hidden more than I suspected. His jaw set, and he reached up with two fingers to remove the fog protectives from his nose.

  Without the glass in the way, I was suddenly viscerally aware of how sharp his eyes were; how clear and acute.

  What did he see?

  My throat dried, already near to parched from the fog and my tears and the ailment festering deep in a secret part of me.

  “When we are wed,” he said, leaning forward so that I would not mistake his words, “you will have staff.” I blinked. “Anything your heart desires, Miss St. Croix. You will never have to do anything so foolish as this again.”

  I would have anything? My smile, I fear, was sad. I couldn’t be sure, but I know that he saw it. “I desire freedom, my lord.”

  But whatever he read in my features, it did not dissuade him. As the carriage bumped gently over the cobbled street, he clasped his hands between his knees and said most reasonably, “What greater freedom than a countess?”

  I opened my mouth, but no word came.

  He was serious.

  I licked my lower lip; warmed as his gaze fell to the motion. Followed it with cool appraisal. Yet when those pale eyes met mine again, I realized I was wrong.

  He was not so cool that he could hide the flicker of warmth within.

  He had kissed me once. I remembered it vividly; it had been my first real kiss. Yet it would take more than a simple meeting of the lips to change my mind. “You presume acceptance when I’ve offered none,” I told him, drawing pride around me like a shroud—what little I could claim, at the moment.

  “Is it your inheritance?” he asked, more shrewd than I’d given him credit. “You will lose nothing. It shall be entrusted and invested securely, and over time, it shall double. Perhaps even more.”

  “Why?”

  “I am a very wealthy man in my own right, and will be the more so upon my own inheritance. I’ve no need of your fortunes, Miss St. Croix. Even without the investments, you will have access to a generous allowance. Spend it on a mountain of books, for all I care.”

  “No.” I clutched the fur around me tightly, grateful now as warmth began to trickle back into my flesh. “Surely there are a dozen females far more suited. Perhaps less interesting, as you maintain,” I admitted, referring his previous answer on the subject, “but far less trouble.” Or scandal.

  “You are only as much trouble as you take upon yourself,” he told me, as if he had it all figured out. Perhaps he did; he wasn’t wrong. “As my wife, you will have no need for such adventures as you’ve taken here. Anything you require will be provided, and you will be more than busy seeing to your new life.” A pointed pause. “Which will not be even a little boring, I assure you.”

  “So all I must do is change?” I asked, my eyes narrowing.

  And then I saw it. A tilt at the corners of his mouth, that damned smile that didn’t quite shape his soft lips, but I read it clear as day in his eyes. “We are suited,” he said simply. “All you require is polish.” And, as a faint blush stained his cheeks, he added, “I am fond of you, Miss St. Croix, and I believe that you could grow fond of me.”

  Certainly marriages had been built on worse. Yet I could say nothing, staring at his handsome face, chapped by the cold and no less appealing for it. Women across all of London would give their eyeteeth to sit where I now sat.

  Offered the world by an earl, soon to be a marquess.

  The horse whickered uncertainly. “Whoa,” soothed the driver, and I looked beyond the earl to see the horse’s ears turning this way and that.

  What did I want, then? Freedom? From what? As a countess, one day a marchioness, I could be as eccentric as I wanted. Who would say?

  Entertain the world by day, and I would be free to pursue whatever intelligent interests I wanted with his support.

  All I needed was to fill the role of hostess. Of wife.

  Fanny would have a constant home, care for the rest of her life. Booth could remain in the Chelsea home, live out his years with Mrs. Booth at hand. And Zylphia . . .

  Zylphia had spent so long beneath men who lived the life I wanted to give her. She would live as my maid in surroundings she had only ever seen from the outside.

  This was the logical thing to do. The choice that would make my family, the people who loved me, happiest.

  But what about me? What would I give up?

  My freedom, for one. Actual freedom, free of the marriag
e laws, the demands, and the thumb of a husband who would only see me change to suit him to be happy.

  My fingers tightened on the fur. “Lord Compton, I must— Oh!” The horse shied suddenly, clipping a few paces to the side and jerking the carriage.

  In a sudden flash, I acted. I could not even say now what caused me to do so, but blindly obeying my instinct had saved me many times; my fog-sense was keen enough by practice. I sensed trouble. I threw off the fur, seized the earl’s collar in both hands and wrenched hard as I possibly could, just as the horse reared, twisting with a loud, screaming whinny of warning.

  The carriage tilted.

  Surprise filled the earl’s face, promptly followed by as determined a scowl as I’d ever seen. In one smooth motion, his arms banded around me. He twisted. All oxygen fled my lungs as we collided with the street below—his back to the unyielding street, my body to his.

  The horse shimmied and danced in unruly anxiety; the driver wrestled with the reins, calling sharply for the pedestrians about us to move out of the way. The carriage wobbled wildly.

  The earl had shifted us so that he took the brunt of the fall. I was not so delicate as to shatter on cobblestones, but it would have hurt tremendously nevertheless, and he . . .

  What common man did that?

  Gasping for air, I pushed up to see his face. “Cornelius!”

  Pain etched a line beside his mouth, between his eyebrows, but his chest expanded beneath my hands as he took a deep breath.

  There in the muck of the street, the gas lamps guttering all around us and the horse shying nervously as its ears flicked this way and that, one of Compton’s gloved hands slid into my hair. Cupped the back of my head and held me when I would have wriggled away.

  Someone, something, had spooked that horse. Deliberately, no less, for I saw no sign of accident. There’d been nothing. Only the horse’s own senses.

  And mine.

  Yet I could say nothing of this; how would I explain the instincts finely honed after years in this very fog? The surprisingly hard shape of the man sprawled beneath me caught me unawares, one of my legs tangled between his and his palm warm at the back of my skull.

  The driver exclaimed urgently to see if we were well, but the earl ignored him. “You called me by name,” he said, soft, but no less resolute for the gentleness.

  “You have an exceptionally stubborn dedication, my lord,” I assured him, attempting for chastisement but falling instead to uncertainty and concern. “Are you hurt?”

  “I will be the more so if you deny me.” The grip at the back of my head tightened. “Say you’ll have me, Miss St. Croix.”

  A crowd was gathering. Demanding answers, yelling. In my peripheral, a large longshoreman grabbed the horse’s reins, but the beast was placid now.

  I stared into fog-green eyes framed by heavy-lidded sandy lashes, felt his heart pounding solid and warm beneath my hand.

  His mouth was only a breath away; it would be so simple to lean down and press mine to it.

  Was that an answer? Could it ever be?

  Marriages have been made on less.

  Mine would not be one made. “My lord—”

  “Think on it,” he said over me. Under me, for that matter. “I shall ask again.”

  A firm hand wrapped around my upper arm, the polished shoes of the carriage driver at the edge of my vision. I frowned down at Compton’s determined stare. “My answer will not change.”

  “I will not hear it,” he told me, nodding with a glance to his footman, “until it does.”

  Stubborn. Inexcusably so!

  “My lady,” the driver said by way of warning, and I found myself partially lifted by the one, partially supported by the other man whose body had protected my own.

  Stubborn, indeed, but kind. Demanding. Wealthy, of course, titled. He claimed to be fond of me.

  I shook out my skirts, studying the throng around us as several of the stronger dockworkers righted the carriage with much shouting.

  Was the danger I’d sensed among them? The person who somehow spooked the horse must be close. He’d want to see the damage, wouldn’t he?

  The fur once more settled around my shoulders. “These roads are terrible,” he commented.

  Of course. The roads. As if that were all. He watched the men work, and I inspected his profile and barely kept from sighing.

  Just my luck that I would be saddled with the one man in all of England who would not be put off by a lady’s refusal of his hand.

  A put-off proposal would not do it, but I’d wager all of my inheritance that if he knew that I chased a murderer in the fog, his indignation would be fierce, indeed.

  One gloved hand settled over his own shoulder. I detected a subtle wince.

  “My lord, you’re hurt.”

  “Nonsense,” he countered, with a tone that declared that was the end of it. Whether he was or was not, I would not get an honest answer. I suspected more than his service in Her Majesty’s Navy kept his upper lip stiff. Pride came part and parcel with the Northampton legacy. “Let us get you home, Miss St. Croix. Mrs. Fortescue will not thank me for tarrying too long in your company without a chaperone.”

  Oh, yes, she would. I bit my tongue and allowed the earl to help me alight.

  From my higher vantage point, I scoured the chattering folk now turning away; curious event witnessed, now all must return to their daily routines, their goals. None stared too long. None lingered, save for the few beggars and Abram men hoping for a scrap or two.

  Who, or what, had spooked the horse so badly?

  Chapter Seventeen

  As if some secret announcement had been made, as if the gossips had learned that I was once more solidly in Earl Compton’s favor, social invites began arriving by the following day. I greeted this new development with a facial tic I acquired on the spot.

  Fanny all but waltzed through the house, humming in a rusty but perfectly acceptable key. More often than not, I caught her humming Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. I gritted my teeth and said nothing.

  I would not keep shouting my denial to deaf ears.

  To make matters worse, Mrs. Booth became her conspirator and enabler. I had never seen either so cheerful. Often, I came upon them in the kitchens—where Fanny rarely ventured—or in the parlor, head to head studying this fashion periodical or that catalogue of silk ribbon and gilded fluff.

  I drifted out of view before either could see me, silent as a ghost, contemplative as a nun.

  Hungry for something beyond food or drink.

  I passed Booth as he walked from the door to the parlor, a small stack of carefully organized cards in his gloved hands. His smile was indulgent, his gray eyes snapping with good health and nature.

  He said nothing to me; I did nothing to engage him. Booth was too proper a butler to invoke casual conversation with the lady of the house.

  And I had nothing to say.

  I rested one hand atop a lion’s head for balance, circled the silent, watchful beast with an affectionate, distracted pat and took the stairs quietly. My plaid skirt rustled; the only noise to combat the girlish laughter and delight drifting from the parlor.

  Zylphia was just coming from Fanny’s room, her arms loaded with pale linen bedsheets. The look she gave me over her burden wasn’t cheerful or excited. It was probing.

  And all too knowing. “You look peaked,” she said flatly. She dropped the bedsheets into a basket, pushed them down with a strong hand. “Are you taking any of that laudanum at night?”

  I looked away. “There is none left.”

  “Are you sleeping?” Because Zylphia was not the type to fritter away an afternoon gazing at fashion plates, I followed her downstairs.

  “Not entirely.” An honest answer, for all it revealed nothing. “There is much going on, Zylla, it’s difficult to ascertain my sleeping habits.”

  “Hm.” A noncommittal sound as she balanced the basket upon her pinafore-tied hip. “Have you considered a bit of Ashmore’s brandy
—”

  “Good heavens, no,” I denied hastily. “I’d never developed the taste for it, and I’ve been assured Mr. Ashmore’s private stock is beyond my reach.” But I lowered my voice, because we neared the parlor, and Fanny would not approve. “May I help?”

  Zylphia snorted outright. “You, doing housework? That one would have my head,” she replied, nodding to the parlor. Whether she meant my chaperone or my housekeeper, it didn’t matter.

  She was right.

  I needed something to do. I was tired of idly sitting, listening to the cheerful harmony of my door chimes as caller after caller depressed the mechanism just to leave a calling card.

  Propriety stated that I would have to go through them, decide who I would call upon in turn and who I would simply send ’round a note.

  I couldn’t give a fig for any of it.

  I felt trapped in my own house.

  And I was, to a certain degree. Fanny would not allow me to go below; not while so many eyes were suddenly trained on me.

  I kicked at my skirt hem in silent, childish protest. “What are they so gleeful about, anyhow?”

  Zylphia’s sky eyes, filled with sympathy, flicked at me. “I’m not to say, but . . .”

  I frowned at her when she trailed off. “Zylphia.” A warning.

  “Shh.” She glanced at the parlor entry, then whispered, “Your earl sent a letter of intent.”

  “The devil he did,” I gasped.

  She nodded, blue eyes steady. “Mrs. Booth was talking it about it to Mr. Booth this morning. Have you considered, cherie?”

  “Considered what?” I considered many things. Escape by my bedroom window, fleeing to the eastern desert savages where I understood women of pale skin and vivid coloring like myself were prized harem jewels, even so far as briefly considering asking the Menagerie for sanctuary. Of course, the fact that the Menagerie seemed a far more bitter pill to swallow than a harem’s life amused me, but I still considered it.

  I discarded all of them. Fanny would only be upset, I’d likely balk under any man determined to keep me a possession—as gossip rumored all such desert princes demanded of their kept harem women—and I would rather die than give Micajah Hawke the satisfaction.