Perhaps the fever was returning after all.
“Miss Jones did give us the mittens,” Bea allowed, jerking him back to the present. Oh yes, the mittens. “It was the only redeeming part of the holiday. And they are hideous.”
“It’s the gesture that matters, Bea,” he reminded her, as a good father was supposed to do—or so he’d been told. Many times. By Elaine, who God knew had enough children of her own to know what she was talking about.
Bea rolled her eyes as if that were obvious. “Well, Fräulein Schmidt made us listen to sermons all Christmas day. In German.”
The pieces suddenly slotted into place in his fevered head. The German woman. Sermons. His daughters. That bald, bald head.
Oh, dear Lord.
“Is that why you shaved that poor woman’s head?” he asked.
Bea exchanged a wary glance with her sister, no doubt telepathically attempting to get their stories straight. He used to do that with Evander all the time when they were young enough to still like each other, so he was on to their scheme.
“She made us eat soap whenever we cursed,” Bea said.
So, quite a lot of soap, then.
“She rapped our knuckles with a cane whenever we were naughty,” she continued.
Not acceptable. The soap was one thing—laying hands upon his children was quite another. Their knuckles had to be black and blue underneath those terrible mittens, since the twins were perpetually doing something wrong.
He hoped he never ran across the bald woman again, for he was afraid he might have to return the favor. With his fists. Not that he was a proponent of hitting women or anything so incredibly callow. But he was still not quite sure that creature was a woman.
He braced himself for their next complaint, dreading tales of further corporal punishment. He still had nightmares of the lashes and beatings he’d received in his childhood at the hands of both his father and those bumbrushers at Harrow. They’d nearly succeeded in breaking his spirit, and if he’d damned his girls to a similar fate while he was too sick to keep them safe, he’d never forgive himself.
“And she was blackmailing Miss Jones,” Bea finished.
Marlowe’s eyes, clenched shut in preparation for the next blow, shot open in surprise. This was an unexpected and rather fascinating development. Who knew West Barming School for Recalcitrant Young Ladies was such a hornet’s nest of intrigue? “Blackmail?”
“We like Miss Jones,” Bea said. “She’s not very good at knitting, but she’s nice to us. Unless we’ve done something naughty. Then she gets a bit piqued. But not in a mean way. She never rapped our knuckles.”
Marlowe rather liked the sound of this Miss Jones, despite the mittens.
“Why was the fräulein blackmailing her?”
Bea shrugged. “Miss Jones likes naughty poems. She has a secret stash of Christopher Essex books under her mattress, and the fräulein found it and threatened to tell the headmistress about it.”
He thought it best not to inquire exactly how the twins knew about this stash. But . . . “You know who Christopher Essex is?”
Both twins rolled their eyes in tandem, as if Marlowe were as thick as treacle.
“Of course, Papa. Who doesn’t?” Bea said in exasperation.
He wanted to know just when the devil his nine-year-old twins had metamorphosed into cheeky thirteen-year-old girls. Surely he’d not been on his deathbed for that long. He could only pray they hadn’t gotten their paws on The Hedonist. And—if they had—that they didn’t understand any of the double entendres in it.
“Not that we’ve read any. Poetry is hideously boring,” Bea continued.
Marlowe didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. He’d settle for relieved. He didn’t fancy having to explain (i.e. lie convincingly about) what a dew-kissed woman’s secret bower symbolized. It was just too early in the day.
“So you shaved the fräulein’s head because she was blackmailing this Miss Jones for reading poetry?” he prompted, endeavoring to stay on a safe-ish subject.
“Yes?” Bea said a bit uncertainly.
Well, never let it be said his twins were not humanitarians. But he did not praise them for their actions. Even he knew this would be a terrible idea. Though he wanted to. Very much. He settled on a noncommittal grunt.
“Well, all of that bother is over now,” he said. “No more blackmailing Huns or knuckle rapping.” Just as long as the twins didn’t set fire to Parliament next. He wouldn’t exactly be shocked by that development, but he was fairly certain that even he would not be able to rescue them from the wrath of the British government.
Bea seemed about to give up their ridiculous verbal wrangling and give him the hug he’d been waiting for all morning, but Laura nudged her sister in the shins—well, kicked, to be more precise—and sent her a weighted glare.
Bea’s scowl quickly resettled upon her brow, and her arms crossed again. “We’re not forgiving you so easily, Papa,” she said scoldingly.
When the devil had they turned the tables on him so completely? Why was he being chastised like a child when they were the ones who had committed arson?
“Oh, and what else have I done to incur your wrath, brat?” he demanded.
“You got poor Miss Jones sacked,” Bea said, as if this, like every other thing they’d spoken about, should have been perfectly obvious to him.
“What are you on about?”
“Miss Jones, Papa,” Bea replied exasperatedly. “We heard the headmistress yelling at her . . . when we were absolutely not listening at the door to her office . . .and we heard all about what you did to her.”
He was totally at sea on this one, and it must have shown, because Laura just rolled her eyes at him again and huffed.
“Papa! You were found in fragrant delicious with her!” Bea cried, outraged he didn’t understand what she was trying to say.
He still didn’t.
Until he suddenly did. Oh. Oh, so the little hellcat from last night was the infamous Miss Jones of the chartreuse mittens. “Ah. In flagrante delicto,” he said. God, he hoped that they didn’t understand what that one truly meant.
“That’s what I said,” Bea muttered back. “They found you on top of her, Papa.”
“I was trying to sneak in and find you lot. I . . . er, fell on her by accident?” He cringed. Just hearing himself say that out loud sounded absurd. Of course the headmistress—and half the school, who’d gathered outside Miss Jones’s bedroom—would have believed the worst.
“Well, the headmistress thought Miss Jones was your fancy woman.”
He could feel his cheeks grow warm with a blush, his skin crawling with the wrongness of this conversation. Bea was nine. Nine! She was not supposed to know about fancy women, not until she was at least a hundred years old. None of Elaine’s nauseatingly perfect children did. How had he gone so wrong with the twins?
“And then Fräulein Schmidt told the headmistress about the books, hateful old bat,” Bea continued. “So the headmistress sacked Miss Jones. And it’s all your fault.”
Marlowe huffed and crossed his arms defensively. “Probably the best thing to ever happen to her,” he muttered. He’d not wish employment at West Barming on his worst enemy.
“But, Papa, Miss Jones is an orphan, and now thanks to you, she is a lewd woman without references. What is to become of her now?”
So they’d paid more attention to the German woman’s sermons than they’d let on, apparently. “Why do you know anything at all about lewd women without references?” he demanded.
Another tandem eyeroll. “Papa, we’ve just spent three months in a school for recalcitrant girls. All we learned was what happens to lewd women. Now Miss Jones is going to burn in hellfire, no thanks to you, Papa.”
Oh, yes, he was definitely going to murder his father.
After he had Montford and his ducal influence raze the School for Recalcitrant Young Ladies to the ground.
“No one’s going to burn in hellfire, brat,”
he growled. “Especially your Miss Jones, who is, by the way, not a lewd woman.”
Definitely not. He rubbed at his bruised hips and banged-up hands and thought about those outraged gray eyes, that long, prim braid of sable hair, those pursed lips and sneering button nose, and that flat, unspectacular chest beneath the ripped muslin gown. No one would ever mistake her for a lewd woman. A hissing, spitting she-kitten with claws, but not a lewd woman.
“Miss Jones will land on her feet; don’t you worry about her,” he muttered.
Bea looked somewhat appeased by his platitude—enough, at least, to leave off her scold. He mentally breathed a sigh of relief, though those eye-searing mittens now seemed to be staring back at him accusingly from the twins’ laps.
He did not squirm in his seat from his guilt. Much. But he did nearly leap to his feet despite the carriage’s low roof when Laura shouted in surprise and mashed her face up to the window. “It’s Miss Jones!” she cried. It was more life than he’d seen from her all morning.
Bea scrambled over the seat and tussled with her sister for a view out the window. Their argument ceased abruptly as both girls gasped, their eyes going wide at whatever they’d witnessed.
“What is it?” he demanded, reluctantly moving toward the window as well.
The pair turned to him, their hands on their flushed cheeks, half-horrified, half-amused expressions on their faces. It was the same look they wore whenever they’d done something hilarious but very, very naughty.
“I think the carriage startled her so much she jumped into a ditch,” Bea whispered.
Newcomb was rather cracking along.
“We must turn back for her, Father,” Bea said with those puppy eyes of hers.
Ugh. The last thing he wanted to do was play knight in shining armor. Though if Newcomb had run the creature into a ditch, he supposed it was rather on his head to see if she were still alive.
It took him rapping on the roof five times before Newcomb deigned to even listen to his request. Only with a very insolent groan and something mumbled under his breath about his wife wanting him home for the evening meal did Newcomb finally stop the carriage and turn around.
The only indication that someone had once been in the lane was an abandoned portmanteau and half-empty carpetbag perched on the cusp of a ditch. Marlowe bid his daughters to stay after assuring them he would rescue their teacher and stepped out of the carriage to investigate.
Something creaked under his bootheel, and he looked down to find a very familiar-looking book in the mud. A volume of sonnets—Christopher Essex sonnets. It must have fallen from the eviscerated carpetbag he spied not too far away, along with a trail of books leading into the ditch. He bent down and retrieved the book, shaking the mud off as best he could.
Midway through the action, however, he froze as the voice he remembered from the previous night drifted up from the ditch.
“Bloody buggering sheep-shagging bollocks.”
Ooh. How delightfully filthy.
He walked to the edge and peered down at Miss Jones, crouched over a growing pile of books, soaked through top to toe in muddy rainwater and looking ready to spit fire. “If I ever see that bloody son of a devil-spawned donkey, I swear I’ll scoop out his eyeballs with a meat hook.”
Something in Marlowe’s chest dropped to China and back at the sight—and sound—before him. It seemed that he’d been mistaken entirely in his assessment of Miss Jones. The evening before, it had been too dark for him to appreciate what he’d stumbled upon. And what he’d stumbled upon was . . . delightful. Either his fever was making him hallucinate, or he was in the presence of an actual fey creature—piskie or elf, or perhaps even a selkie, what with that pelt of sable peeking out from beneath her sodden bonnet.
Miss Jones may have been a small, pale little thing beneath all that tatty muslin and mud, but that was all that was small about her. This one, with her storm-cloud eyes flashing like lightning and alabaster skin, had an adamantine spine and the temper of a Greek god, of that he had no doubt.
And the mouth on her. Where the devil had a prim, proper schoolteacher learned such a delightfully creative vocabulary? He would have asked her, if he thought she wouldn’t attempt to claw his eyes out. As she crouched over her books in the mud, she wore the precise look Monty had worn at Harrow right before he’d punched out Marlowe’s back molars. That had been the start of a beautiful friendship, but Marlowe didn’t really have any more molars to spare (though he had a feeling that this one would focus her attentions below the belt, should they come to blows. And not in a fun way).
He was suddenly very glad he’d had Newcomb turn back. And that the carriage had not trampled her. He could already tell that Miss Jones was anything but boring, and he’d been nothing but bored for years. Instead of trying to relieve his ennui in every pit of vice and sin from London to Paris, perhaps he should have been keeping company with spinster schoolteachers in the arse end of Kent. A bit counterintuitive, it seemed to him, but then the best things in life usually were.
He began his descent, a clever plan formulating in his mind.
CHAPTER THREE
IN WHICH A DITCH ATTEMPTS TO EAT OUR HEROINE
MINERVA WIPED HER dripping face with the back of her sleeve, the only place on her person not covered in muck, and glared at the rear end of the oversize carriage careening down the lane and out of her life. The viscount, no doubt. No one else in this godforsaken backwater would be driving in something so grand and in such a disreputable manner. He’d probably hired a highwayman for a driver just for the bloody hell of it.
She cursed with all the foul language her late father had used when he thought she couldn’t hear him and gave the carriage a two-fingered salute—also a remnant of her father’s unintentional influence. She didn’t even care if the girls saw her . . . well, not much, anyway. Perhaps a little.
Fine, more than a little. They didn’t deserve her wrath. They hadn’t fallen on her or groped her bosom. They hadn’t sacked her and thrown her out on the coldest, wettest day this month. They hadn’t run her into a ditch and strewn all of her belongings in Kentish sludge so thick and stubborn it might well have been sentient.
She stared down mournfully at her mud-covered feet, where her entire collection of Mr. Essex’s works lay fallen in the muck like wounded soldiers on the battlefield. The old carpetbag she’d used to transport them had not stood a chance against the weather or her final, inelegant blunder into the ditch.
She would not cry. Even though those books were the only reason she was able to carry on some days. And if that wasn’t the most depressing thought she’d had all day, she didn’t know what was.
She crouched down, her boots squelching alarmingly in the mud, and began to gather up the volumes. She wouldn’t cry, damn it, but she was a sailor’s daughter, and she’d damn well put her unique education to good use, especially since there was no one around for miles to disapprove.
“Bloody buggering sheep-shagging bollocks,” she muttered as she wiped off a blob of filth from the spine of The Hedonist. “If I ever see that bloody son of a devil-spawned donkey, I swear I’ll scoop out his eyeballs with a meat hook.”
She felt better already.
“That sounds painful. But creative,” a deep baritone drawled above her.
Startled, she jerked backward, but her feet refused to move from the mud’s stranglehold. Instead, she fell on her arse in the mire, clutching the volume to her bosom. She peered in front of her at a pair of giant feet clad in muddy hessians, and her startlement began to transform into something else. She knew those boots from the previous night’s misadventure.
Her gaze rose over a pair of overlarge buckskins precariously cinched around a narrow waist, a billowing lawn shirt half tucked into said buckskins, and a wrinkled cravat with a suspicious, mustard-colored stain near the collar, all wrapped up in the dreadfully garish red Chinese silk banyan that was sure to give her nightmares for years to come.
Her gaze finally sett
led above the distracting muddle of his attire, onto a gaunt face with a stubborn, stubble-coated jaw and deep, dark, bruiselike marks ringing tired eyes. The man had either been in a tavern brawl or was in desperate need of a decent night’s sleep. With someone like the Viscount Marlowe, however, it was probably both.
And it was the Viscount Marlowe, even if, in the light of day, he barely resembled her shadowy attacker from last night, or the bloated, drunken specimen she’d encountered at the Montford Ball two Novembers ago—a man who had been living testimony as to why she could almost sympathize with the Jacobin cause to eradicate the aristocracy altogether. No, this man, rail-thin and pale, was a different beast altogether.
Though she’d recognize the eyes anywhere. And that battered Roman nose. It was impertinently prominent. Poor Beatrice had inherited both, along with his shaggy mahogany mane and devilish brow. Luciferian was not a good look on a little girl, but on the viscount . . .
Well, she refused to ever call him an attractive man for so many varied reasons—one of them being her present circumstances, for which he was entirely accountable. And if he’d stopped the carriage to confront her over the rude hand gesture she may or may not have made after being bullied into a ditch by his careless driver, she’d damn well stand her ground.
She really had no other recourse, for she was sunk into the mud past her ankles. Running away was literally not an option.
She glanced behind him to the top of the ditch, where the carriage had circled back. She’d not heard its approach at all, though she supposed that incendiary rage had a way of limiting one’s senses. The twins’ heads poked out of an open window, and they observed every movement she made with mischievous grins. They waved at her. She waved back half-heartedly before turning her attention back to the viscount, who was suddenly crouching in front of her and gathering up the books himself. The tops of his hands were covered in ink stains and angry red welts.
Regency Romp 03 - The Alabaster Hip Page 3
