“No, you cannot,” he agreed. “What is Barming thinking?”
Betsy snorted. “He’s thinking about Poxley’s deep pockets, what else? Father’s a bit low tide these days, and Poxley’s offering a settlement that would keep him solvent—and Uncle Ashley in port—for years to come. I would be flattered I’m worth so much, though I’m certain Poxley wants me for a broodmare and nothing more. He has no heirs, you know. The other day he mentioned how much he hoped I had Elaine’s fecundity. Fecundity! He actually used that word. Over tea. With Father listening on as if it were the most normal thing in the world to say to me. I wanted to cast up my accounts all over the both of them then and there, but alas, I have too strong a constitution.”
He’d forgotten just how much his little sister could talk.
“You cannot marry Poxley,” he reaffirmed with a shudder. “He is definitely a gothic villain.”
“I knew you would agree,” she said smugly.
“When Father finds out you are here, though, there will be hell to pay. The law is on the earl’s side, Betsy.”
Suddenly Betsy looked a lifetime older than her sixteen years, all of her flippancy cast aside. “I know. But I can’t marry that man. I’ll die, Evie,” she said quietly.
For once, Marlowe didn’t mind the nickname. And he feared that her death would be a less than metaphorical event should she wed that reprobate.
“You won’t have to,” he said grimly. Over his dead, cold corpse, would she be marrying Poxley. Though how he was going to manage this, with the banns begun and his father on the warpath, he hadn’t a bloody clue.
She threw herself at him and wrapped her arms around his torso, squeezing hard. “Thank you,” she cried. “I knew you’d help me.”
He wasn’t used to embracing anyone in affection but his children, and they came in a much smaller package. But after a moment’s hesitation, he wrapped his arms around the girl and held her tight. He hadn’t had much to do with Betsy over the years, had seen her only a handful of times since he’d gone off to the war. She’d only been four when he’d left, and even before that he’d not been around her a great deal, as she’d been sequestered at the earl’s estate all her life.
He’d liked his father’s second wife about as well as he’d liked his father, which was to say not at all. He’d, thankfully, avoided having much to do with either of them over the years, since he’d spent most of his time away from the family seat, first at Harrow, then at Cambridge.
He’d seen Betsy on the unavoidable holiday visits and tolerated her attentions as well as any impatient young man could the attentions of a small girl-child. Though to her credit, even at such a tender age, she’d had the rare good sense to prefer his company to that of Evander.
But Marlowe had learned to be wary of his family the hard way, and after his return from the war and the fall out that had followed with Caroline, he’d rather lumped Betsy in with the rest of the Leightons as People to Avoid at All Costs.
The handful of times he’d been in her company in the last few years on her rare visits to Elaine’s, she’d done very little to convince him otherwise. She’d reminded him either too much of Evander with her manic enthusiasms, or too much of his stepmother, one of the most vapid, frivolous human beings he’d ever encountered.
But he’d never stopped loving her. Just as he’d never stopped loving the earl or even Evander, despite his best efforts to exorcise them from his heart.
Maybe he was too soft and—good Lord—fluffy.
He now realized it had been a mistake to have kept his distance from Betsy. He shuddered to think what would have happened if she hadn’t turned up on his doorstep . . . or windowsill, as the case may be. He would have never even known about her marriage until it was too late—his father would have seen to that. Betsy had shown a surprising amount of sense in running away, despite the risks she had taken on the road. Perhaps he’d been mistaken in her character.
She lifted her head and smiled up at him sunnily. “You won’t regret helping me, Evie.”
He rolled his eyes. “I already do,” he said without heat, feeling a surprisingly strong surge of affection for her.
“I have a plan, you see,” she continued.
That didn’t sound good. “Really.”
“Father can’t marry me off if I’m already married. And I have the perfect candidate. Someone so scandalous that father will disown me altogether.”
Not good at all.
“You’re not marrying anyone,” he said firmly. He’d thought that was the whole point she’d been trying to make by running away. “Not until you’re at least thirty.”
She pulled away from him with a pout and crossed her arms stubbornly. She looked shockingly like the four-year-old girl he remembered. He feared he’d not been totally wrong about her character after all.
“You’ll not stop me from a love match, Evie. You didn’t stop Elaine.”
“I was thirteen. And nothing short of the Apocalypse could stop Elaine,” he grumbled.
Betsy shook her head at him as if she didn’t understand how he could be so dense. “Do you think I would be any different?” she asked as if she truly wanted an answer.
He narrowed his eyes at her. Perhaps she was more Leighton than her mother after all. More like Elaine.
That was not reassuring.
“Who is the other half of this love match, then?” he demanded, praying that she had not progressed so far in her scheme that she had chosen her groom. “It’s not Sir Thaddeus Davies, is it?”
“What?” she cried, aghast.
“Well, weren’t he sniffing around Barming last year?”
“It is not Sir Thaddeus. Good grapes, I think I might prefer Poxley over that squint.”
“Then what poor soul have you decided upon?”
She huffed and pretended to smooth out the wrinkles in her dress, her cheeks heating in what he hoped was embarrassment and not some other frighteningly passionate emotion. “Mr. Essex, of course,” she said.
“What!” he spluttered. It was the last name he would have ever suspected.
Her cheeks grew even ruddier at his reaction, and her brow wrinkled in annoyance. “Christopher Essex,” she said slowly, as if talking to an imbecile. “The poet. Surely even you know who he is.”
“I know who he is!” he said, his voice strangled. “And that is a terrible plan!”
Her scowl deepened. “I don’t see how.”
He did. Very much so. “He could be anyone!” Like her much older half brother, for instance.
“He is perfect. I don’t care what he looks like. One only has to read his verse to see the beauty of his soul.”
Oh, for the love of . . . To be sixteen again. “He could be worse than Poxley!” Or, again, her much older half brother.
“No one could be worse than Poxley,” she retorted.
Well, she had him there. But still. His skin crawled at the idea that his little sister was . . . infatuated. With Essex’s beautiful soul. His beautiful soul.
“You’re a Misstopher!” he hissed. He knew he sounded like a scandalized old maid, but on this occasion it seemed appropriate. It was horrifying enough to know Essex had such a strangely devoted following—the majority of them distressingly impressionable, distressingly young women—but knowing his own sister was among them was . . . wrong. Wrong, on so many, many counts.
Not for the first time, he regretted letting Sebastian talk him into publishing altogether.
He prayed she was like Miss Jones and only read his poetry and not those ridiculous, disconcertingly explicit works of fiction his more rabid followers wrote and circulated about him . . . or rather about Essex and his . . . conquests. Marlowe had made the mistake of reading one too many of those, and he’d been horrified . . . then aroused . . . then horrified at his arousal.
The thought that some young miss fresh from the schoolroom—Lord, he’d prayed that she was, at the very least, out of short skirts—had written smut that would rival a
ny act committed at the most disreputable brothel in the city was life-altering in the worst way.
He wondered if Byron had to put up with this shit.
Though Byron, the narcissistic little fop, would doubtless enjoy such attention. Marlowe, however, did not. His poetry was scandalous, but not that scandalous. And he really didn’t want sixteen-year-old girls lusting after him . . . or rather Christopher Essex. Who was him. Sort of.
The whole thing was extremely confusing. And nauseating.
But one thing was certain. Marlowe had to nip this particular problem in the bud.
“You are not pursing Christopher Essex, and that is final,” he intoned, wincing inwardly. He’d sounded just like his father then.
Betsy obviously thought so too, for she snorted at him and cocked her chin at her most stubborn angle. “We’ll see about that,” she muttered.
“Yes, we will,” he said. And then he wondered why he was even arguing with her. He, more than anyone, knew her little quest could never succeed.
She could spin her wheels all she liked on her scheme, just so long as it was on a man who didn’t exist. She was going to be a handful in the meantime, though, and that wasn’t even taking into account the drama that was sure to come when the earl discovered exactly what had become of his errant daughter.
He was cursed. It was the only explanation for the way he seemed to be accumulating stray females lately—and Misstophers at that. First a governess, and now a sister. Between his all-female staff (he really needed to hire more servants) and his family, his house was overrun by the opposite sex.
Though now that he thought about the governess, however, his panic receded slightly. Miss Jones was proving to be a more welcome addition to the household than he could have ever predicted. She had managed, after a few rough patches toward the beginning, to wrangle his daughters into some semblance of a routine in just a few month’s time—a feat no one had ever accomplished before.
She had also proved a distraction for him as he’d convalesced. He’d been taken by her unabashed wit and sharp tongue from the beginning. Few women—other than his sister Elaine, perhaps, and Astrid, Montford’s unconventional duchess—had ever challenged him so completely as Miss Jones did.
He’d never met anyone like her before, so buttoned down and plainly packaged on the outside, but with a hidden passion that he could glimpse burning bright behind her eyes—a stodgy grammarian on the one hand, and a secret Essex fanatic on the other. It was a fascinating contradiction, and he was self-aware enough to admit the gray-eyed enchantress of his current project looked an awful lot like his governess in his mind’s eye.
Miss Jones had inspired him when he thought inspiration out of his reach, and though he only had a pile of ruined foolscap to show for it so far, he had more hope than he’d had in years of finding his voice once again on the page.
And he also had a feeling that if anyone could bring Betsy to heel, it was the indomitable Miss Jones.
“Do you know, Betsy,” he began with a wicked grin, “I believe you are going to love my governess.
CHAPTER SIX
IN WHICH MISSTOPHERS OF THE WORLD UNITE
WHEN A MONTH had passed without Minerva losing a body part, she almost let herself relax into her new position. But she knew the twins better than that. Even though they seemed to genuinely like her and half the time deigned to obey her—a small miracle, considering the viscount and dour old Mrs. Chips never fared much better—they’d surely have their way with her eventually. They couldn’t help themselves.
But when yet another month passed, and the worst they’d done to Minerva was leave a frog under her pillow and steal her unmentionables—her sole pair of newfangled pantaloons had mysteriously disappeared just that morning—she began to truly believe that she might come out of the other side of her present circumstances without being maimed. She’d long since resigned her patience and sanity to the dustbin.
But then Mrs. Chips ambushed her in her bedroom one morning before the sun was even up with a summons from the viscount, throwing back the draperies and clanging about the room as if it were (a) her own and (b) not arse o’clock in the morning.
Not that Minerva was able to appreciate it at the time, considering her hatred of mornings in general, but it was the most the housekeeper had interacted with her directly in one go for the entire time she’d lived there. Mrs. Chips was not a verbose woman at the best of times, and her expressions were so inscrutable that Minerva had started to seriously wonder if the woman turned to stone at night.
Apparently not, since Minerva had yet to see any evidence the sun was even up at the present moment.
Mrs. Chips, despite the inscrutability, had also made it perfectly clear through cold teas, stale biscuits, and that truly vile pea soup she’d served to Minerva her entire first week in the household, that she didn’t like her and trusted her even less. Minerva suspected that had something to do with the legion of governesses who had tried and failed before her. But she’d thought Mrs. Chips was beginning to thaw, since the breakfasts she now received in the morning had become suspiciously edible.
The chilliness factor was now somewhere around a Scandinavian winter—nowhere near a warm Mediterranean spring, but better than the arctic blast of the first few weeks. Minerva had learned to take what she could get. And she’d take Mrs. Chips, pea soup, and her frigid disapproval any day over West Barming and the fräulein.
But this loathsome early-morning awakening, without even a tray of cold tea or stale biscuits in sight, seemed a step back to the early days of their acquaintance. Even though Minerva could read nothing on the housekeeper’s impassive face, Mrs. Chips was enjoying Minerva’s obvious misery far too much from the way she unhesitatingly turned up the oil lamp and flicked back Minerva’s draperies.
And, oh yes, there it was: a bit of wretched sunlight leaking over the sill. Morning, after all.
She put her pillow over her head and tried to ignore it.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Minerva was reluctantly dressed, halfway conscious, and en route to the viscount’s library, cursing her employer in her head every step of the way. And when she arrived there, she began to fervently wish she’d never left her bed in the first place.
Minerva had always considered herself a pragmatist. As the motherless daughter of a naval officer, she’d had very little choice otherwise. She had never doubted her father’s love, but no one would have ever called him a warm man.
Nathaniel Jones had found himself the sole custodian of his daughter after his wife died of childbed fever just a few months after her birth; he spent the remainder of his life shuffling Minerva from one distant relative to another while he was off fighting Napoleon’s endless war.
When he was on leave, it was obvious even to Minerva that he had no idea what to do with her. Sometimes—the best times—he’d seem to forget she was female entirely and would teach her things Minerva was rather certain were more suited to a son: how to shoot a pistol, how to swear like a proper navy man (these lessons tended to come after Captain Jones had been well lubricated by his Madeira in the evenings), how to fight dirty, and how to tie a proper sailor’s knot.
The impromptu lessons—even the drunken ones—had ended around the time the captain had returned home to find his daughter in the possession of a nascent bosom and a few other unmistakably female attributes that could no longer be overlooked. Minerva remembered being crushed by what she saw as her father’s rejection. The things she had loved most about having him at home were suddenly stripped from her, and for the longest time she’d not understood why.
It took one of her cousins—a rather mean-spirited boy who had lived to torment her for the six months she’d had to stay with his family—to point out the obvious: her father had lost interest in her because she was a girl. Of course, she’d always been a girl, but she’d just grown to an age where her father could no longer pretend she wasn’t. That realization had hurt.
All she had left by the way of fa
therly reassurance was the occasional gruff pat on the shoulder or—and she still shuddered at the memory—that awkward lecture on the dangers of men—perhaps the most mortifying moment of her life. Her father had delivered that one to her with the look of a man who’d rather be having his teeth extracted—exactly how she’d felt having to listen to it. The captain had loved her, but he’d never forgiven her for not being a boy.
In the two months living under the viscount’s roof, however, she’d discovered something unexpected about her employer: Lord Marlowe, for all his dogged efforts to exasperate her at every encounter, was the sort of father to his daughters that Minerva had always wanted for herself.
In her experience, men rarely spent so much time in the company of their children—especially girl children. That was what they hired nurses and governesses for. But the viscount seemed the exception to the rule. She knew he was far from perfect (his daughters had ended up at West Barming School for Recalcitrant Young Ladies for a reason). But she would have gladly taken all of his failings to have a father who’d loved her as unconditionally as the viscount loved his girls.
Perhaps in the past the viscount had not been as present as he might have been, but it seemed this last illness of his had done more than trim away his waistline. Since they’d arrived in London, the viscount had been surprisingly . . . well, normal was definitely not the right word to apply to the viscount ever. He’d come far too close to death, according to Inigo, and that tended to change a person. He rarely drank and spent most of his time either with his daughters or closeted in his library conducting business.
The most reckless he seemed to get these days were his morning rides, a habit he took up after he’d finally shaken off the lingering fever that had plagued him since West Barming. He’d come back from these rides bright-eyed, damp, and smelling of fresh spring air, giving Mrs. Chips fits from the mud he tracked in over her clean floors.
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