Deportation in chains would be a cheery outcome, considering the alternatives.
Which, of course, Madeline could not allow. Pahdi didn’t deserve the suspicion and insult that came his way, any more than Aunt Theo deserved a miserable death for want of a hundredweight of coal.
“Even if you find the bag,” Madeline said, “Higgans won’t look in on Theo the next time she’s ill. He won’t bother treating a consumptive child, unless the child’s parents can pay the fee. The yeomen at the Weasel won’t learn generosity. Mortimer Cotton will never stop complaining that Aunt Hattie stole a ram who weighs nearly as much as she does.”
Madeline realized this now, now that she’d all but stuck her neck in a noose.
“You are tired,” Jack said. “Today has been trying, and I understand our elders are hatching plots likely born of too much elderberry cordial, and not enough concern for you. I’ll find that damned bag, and this will all blow over.”
Somebody should find the damned bag soon, if Madeline’s scheme went as planned, but that somebody would not be Jack.
“I am tired,” Madeline said, stopping outside her bedroom. “I am exhausted, in fact.” Tired of hoping, tired of serving, tired of wishing, tired of coping. A crime spree had created more problems than it had solved, and soon, Madeline would have to deal with those problems too.
“I missed you today,” Jack said. “You have a knack for seeing what needs to be done, for honest appraisal of difficult situations. I don’t suppose you’d like a go at the magistrate’s position?”
His jest was a sad commentary on the limitations Madeline was sick of dealing with. She was poor, a woman, attractive, and intelligent—all of which were burdens rather than blessings.
“I do not want a go at the magistrate’s position,” she said, kissing Jack on the mouth. “I want a go at the magistrate. Another go, in a damned bed, uninterrupted by footsteps in the corridor, or a well-meaning butler. I want pillows, lavender-scented sheets, and privacy.”
She wanted so much more than that, but Jack would be furious with her when she told him the truth. There was a limit to the memories Madeline would steal for herself.
Jack kissed her back, a sweet, lingering, answering sigh of a kiss. “You need your rest.”
“I need you.”
Madeline needed one night with him, for herself. He’d already been intimate with her, another encounter wouldn’t make that much difference when the truth came out. But the bleak prospects awaiting her in the morning wanted some ballast, some joy to make the suffering endurable.
“I need you too,” Jack said, taking her by the hand. “I do not need for your reputation to be compromised, and my quarters have greater privacy.”
“I’ll just get my nightgown and robe,” Madeline said, hand on the door latch.
“Madeline, you won’t need either of those for what I have in mind.”
She would miss him terribly—starting tomorrow. “Take me to bed, and we’ll just see about what I need.”
* * *
Jack ought not to be having intimate relations with a decent woman to whom he was not engaged, but then, Madeline ought not to have refused his addresses.
He’d spent the afternoon interviewing various members of the lending library subscription list, all of whom confirmed Pahdi’s presence in the village the night of the darts tournament—which added nothing to Jack’s store of facts. Nobody had walked with Pahdi to the edge of town. Nobody had anything more to add to Jack’s potential defense of his butler.
He’d also stopped by Hattie Hennessey’s cottage, endured a single cup of weak tea, and heard many effusions regarding Theodosia’s impending remove to London, and the possibility that Hattie would take over as housekeeper at Candlewick.
Hattie had spent the evening of the darts tournament weaving at home, just as she’d spent the majority of her winter evenings—or so she’d claimed.
“My day was mostly wasted,” Jack said, as he ushered Madeline into his bedroom. “I gather you were a paragon of productivity?”
As much as he wanted her naked in his bed, he wanted even more to smooth the rough edges from his day with the sort of talk known only to couples. He wanted to learn what Madeline had done with her time, and what had put the sadness in her eyes.
“I was… I was useless,” Madeline said, closing the door. “Theodosia and your mother have concocted a mad scheme to hare off to London, and Aunt Hattie has apparently decided she must become Candlewick’s housekeeper, provided I’ll put in a word for her. She has no idea what the job entails, and hasn’t managed a household for years, but she’s… she’s desperate.”
Jack took Madeline in his arms, famished for the feel of her. “And because you can’t tell your elders what to do, you exhausted yourself counting pillowcases.” Jack didn’t mention that Candlewick would do far better with Madeline as its chatelaine.
Perish the notion of her returning to Belmont’s household on any terms.
“I was not invited to the whist party,” Madeline said. “Not the one after lunch, or the one after dinner, but that’s just as well. Most of the afternoon was taken up deciding how to arrange the linens when the chambermaids cannot agree—”
She sighed and cuddled closer. “I worry about you, Sir Jack, charging around on bad roads, out until all hours in an attempt to solve petty crimes.”
Madeline bore the fragrance of lavender, on her clothes, in her hair, on her skin.
“I can’t help but feel that regarding our latest rash of mischief, I’m missing something obvious, a pattern that goes beyond the annoying nature of the offenses. The king’s man ought not to be foiled by pranksters and miscreants.”
Madeline drew away and took a seat at Jack’s vanity. “If Pahdi is charged with stealing Higgans’s bag, that’s quite serious.”
She pulled pins loose, stacking them in a neat pile on her right. A long coppery braid came free, the tip reaching below her waist. The sight was so… domestic, so free of seduction and artifice, that Jack was temporarily at a loss for words.
He shrugged out of his coat, hung it in the wardrobe, and unfastened his cufflinks.
“The law does not convict a man based on half-inebriated accusations,” Jack said, sitting on the bed to pull off his boots. “Or it shouldn’t. That’s all Higgans has to offer—accusations.”
Madeline unraveled her braid until her hair was a loose riot of curls down her back. “You know better. Pahdi can be charged on the strength of anybody’s accusations, and if you’re not willing to do that, Higgans will create a fuss, and demand you recuse yourself from the matter. Mr. Belmont would step in, however reluctantly. Once charges are laid, anything can happen, including a conviction and sentencing.”
“Your father was taken up for debt. Your view of the king’s justice is understandably grim.”
“Realistic,” Madeline said, examining Jack’s hairbrush, which was backed with gold and nacre. “My aunt’s plan to elope to London is not realistic.”
Jack’s plan to marry Madeline Hennessey was very—well, he didn’t care if it was realistic. For the rest of his life, he wanted to end his days like this, talking with Madeline, watching Madeline prepare for bed, and sharing that bed with her.
And he’d damned well take her aunts in hand too. Madeline could devise a way for him to do that, and to keep Weekes from being so faint of heart when it came to inspiring the flock to charity.
“Mama has a kind heart,” Jack said, “despite appearances to the contrary. Theodosia would fare well under Mama’s roof.”
Madeline set the brush down and turned on the stool to face Jack. “Fine for Theodosia, but what about her property? She’s not selling it, because she’s determined that I should inherit from her. I can live there, though I’ve no notion how to make a smallholding profitable, and neither she nor Hattie have discussed how I’m to look after two properties when I haven’t the coin or ability to manage even one.”
Despite Madeline’s quiet tone, her wo
rds were filled with both ire and incredulity.
“I’ve never wanted to be a smallholder,” she went on, “and they assume—without so much as asking me—that I’m thrilled to take on work that stout young men find exhausting—work I have no idea how to do, work my aunts honestly haven’t been able to do. I might as well be fifteen again, learning to set a table or beat a rug.”
The part of Jack that liked puzzles started manufacturing solutions: sell one property, live on the other, using the proceeds of the first to make needed improvements. Rent both and use a steward to manage the tenants. Rent one, live at the other.
The set of Madeline’s shoulders warned him against that version of helpfulness. None of those schemes would work for long if the property owner was a single, young female. Her aunts were tolerated based on their widowed status, and given some financial aid from the church and neighborly assistance. Madeline would have a harder time than even her aunts had endured.
Then too, the problem wasn’t the properties, but rather, the people merrily thrusting them onto Madeline’s shoulders.
“You’d never set a table as a girl?”
“For the tea parties I held in the nursery.” Madeline picked up Jack’s boots and put them outside the door. “I never realized that every time I sat down to breakfast, everything on the table had been precisely positioned, item by item. It’s silly—the food tastes the same, provided the plate and silverware are clean—but it wasn’t silly when I was new to service.”
Jack undid his pocket watch and hung his waistcoat over the chair at the escritoire. “Are you angry, Madeline?”
He was angry, at Higgans, who might well have hidden his own medical bag to justify making accusations against an innocent man.
“Yes.” She fastened the door lock with a decisive snick. “Yes, I am angry, now that you ask. I hadn’t put that label on my sentiments, but I’m furious, and hurt, and—how can my aunts assume I’ll gladly step aside from everything I know, and the people I know, and take up feeding chickens? I’ve given them my every spare groat, keeping only a little for my own old age at their insistence. I’ve given up my free time, gone without… I never foresaw that they’d cast me aside.”
“But you daren’t tell them that, because their happiness matters to you very much.”
Just as Mama had not stopped Jack from shipping out for India, though she’d probably felt awfully betrayed by his actions.
And afraid, afraid for her firstborn son. Doubtless Jeremy’s decision to enter the clergy had also been a result of Jack’s determination to see India firsthand.
“Can you talk to your aunts?” Could Jack talk to them? He could buy both properties, find Madeline tenants for them, and set his steward to managing them, but he could not force assistance on Madeline that she wasn’t prepared to accept.
“I can’t deny Theo a chance to live far more comfortably, I know that. I’m just—hold me.”
That, Jack could do, happily, forever. He pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it toward the wardrobe, then wrapped his arms around his tired, bewildered, annoyed lady.
“Would you ask me for help if you needed it, Madeline?”
She yawned against his shoulder. “Do you ask anybody for help?”
“I asked you for help, and you did not fail me. My house is a happier place, my mother has seen the wisdom of having good companionship, and the year will proceed more smoothly henceforth because you have put a guiding hand on the—”
Madeline slid a guiding hand around to his backside. “You’re paying me well for my time here.”
Money had no place in the point Jack was making. “You could have refused me. Your position at Candlewick was comfortable, and you owe me nothing.”
She had no glib retort, and she was wearing far too many clothes.
“Are you falling asleep, Madeline? My masculine pride will never recover if you prefer a nap to sampling my charms.”
She turned, swept her hair up, and presented him with a row of hooks. “So be my lady’s maid. A maid can get in and out of her uniform unassisted, but not so, a companion.”
Her posture was trusting and alluring both. Jack made himself useful unhooking her dress and loosening her stays rather than dwell on how many ways he’d like to kiss her nape.
“You’re welcome to borrow my toothpowder,” Jack said, “and there’s water warming by the hearth.”
Madeline walked straight to the privacy screen, her undone dress and unbound hair provoking a riot behind Jack’s falls.
He’d never felt this way about a woman, not even about Saras. She’d been exotic, passionate, loyal, intelligent, and beautiful, but Jack had been too young to grasp that she could also have been his friend.
And he hers. “Shall I bring you the warm water?”
“Please.”
Why hadn’t he lit more candles when he’d had the chance? Behind the privacy screen, Madeline stood in her shift and stockings—thin shift, much-darned stockings—twisting her hair back into a braid. Jack fetched her the tattered hair ribbon from his vanity.
“You are not shy. I like that.” He hated that she hadn’t even a decent pair of stockings.
“I am not sixteen, and you will soon see every treasure I possess. You might want to get out of your breeches first.”
He wanted desperately to get out of his breeches, but the moment to display his wares hadn’t arrived.
“I’ll warm the sheets.”
The bed had been turned down when Pahdi had last tended to the hearth and brought the wash water. Jack filled the warmer with coals and did a thorough job, even warming the pillows, then pulled the covers back up.
Madeline emerged from the privacy screen in Jack’s dressing gown, a luxurious brown velvet article lined with blue silk. She’d probably never worn so rich a garment—and all Jack wanted was to get her out of it.
“I hope you don’t mind that I’ve borrowed this,” she said. “I like that it bears your scent.”
“It will also keep you warm in a winter wind. Into bed with you. I’ll be only a moment.”
Jack remained before the hearth, rather than give her a moment of privacy. In this at least, he’d insist on her trust.
Madeline unbelted the robe, let it slip from her shoulders, and passed it to him.
He let the robe fall to the floor. Madeline Hennessey was… Aphrodite come to life. Her figure testified to both rigorous activity and good nutrition, and her feminine endowments made Jack ache everywhere from his hands to his breeding organs, while her trust warmed his heart.
“I’m not a girl,” Madeline said, chin tipping down. “You know that.”
What Jack knew, was that Madeline wasn’t entirely his. Not yet. He stalked over to her, and wrapped her in his arms. The sensation of her against him, both of them naked from the waist up, was like holding the fire of life, both shocking and dangerously delightful.
“My back is scarred,” Jack said. “I’m proud of those scars, because they remind me that I can fight when I have to, fight until other men with more sense would give up. You are beautiful, you don’t need me to tell you that, but it’s not your exquisite form that captures my regard.”
He paused to kiss her, truly, properly, indecently kiss her.
“You like my form,” Madeline said. “When you look at me like that and kiss me like that, I like my form too.”
About damned time. “I will do far more than like your form just as soon as I join you in that bed. Don’t let the sheets get cold.” He managed to extricate himself from Madeline’s embrace and walk to the privacy screen without stumbling, though it was a near thing.
For her, he’d get his unruly passion under control, and pleasure the lady witless as long as she allowed him to—and pleasure himself witless a time or two as well. That part, he was confident he could manage.
Jack did not know how he’d convey to Madeline that he suspected her Aunt Hattie had taken to a life of petty larceny and that his own mother agreed that such a
hypothesis explained all the facts.
And Jack was in a complete quandary over what to do about it.
* * *
Of all the thefts Madeline had committed, stealing this night with Jack was the one she would not regret. Something troubled him—the missing medical bag perhaps—and yet, for her, he would put off the magistrate’s role and be her lover.
As she would be his.
He emerged naked from the privacy screen, a long, lean warrior of a man, honed by life, and to Madeline’s profound gratification, well past his foolish, strutting youth. When he turned to bank the fire, Madeline got her second good view of the scars on his back.
Old scars, and he was right to be proud of them. He’d not given up, against terrible odds, nor had he taken to stealing and offering silent, symbolic sermons to his betters.
But then, soldiers were permitted to fight. Their lot wasn’t to black andirons, dust sideboards, and polish wainscoting until their knees screamed and their elders died of poverty and exhaustion.
Jack set the poker on its stand and replaced the fire screen. “That is a pensive expression, Miss Hennessey.”
“Do you have regrets, Jack?”
“Yes,” he said, climbing into the bed. “I regret that you won’t marry me—yet—despite the fact that your common sense and pragmatism would greatly improve my ability to be useful to my neighbors, both as their magistrate and otherwise. Prepare yourself for a display of my legendary tenacity.”
Madeline forced a smile. “That approaches a boast. Fortunately, we have all night for you to demonstrate this tenacity.”
“We will talk,” Jack said. “At length, and about whatever uncomfortable reasons you have for refusing the addresses of a man who esteems you beyond telling. If you fear I will dodge off to India, you’re wrong. If you fear I’ll grow bored and indifferent, you’re in error there as well. If you fear my vows will be taken lightly, then let me put your fears—”
Madeline touched two fingers to his mouth.
She feared he’d uphold the law. A man who’d considered it his duty to stop wars wouldn’t flinch at arresting his lover when she handed him a sincere confession.
Jack (The Jaded Gentlemen Book 4) Page 24
