“Sword canes are more useful out-of-doors, where I have room to swing and thrust. For indoors, a cudgel is the better option, or two cudgels.”
She passed over the second cane, which was sturdy indeed. “Why must you go about armed even in your own home?”
He used both canes to maneuver to a couch arranged along the inside wall. “You don’t ask about my unsteady balance. Thank you for that. If you wouldn’t mind sliding that hassock—”
Abigail gave the hassock a shove with her boot. The thing would have been hard to move for a man using two canes.
“How often do you fall?” An impolite question, but then, Lord Stephen was not a polite man, and he’d already reported falling “regularly.” He was mannerly when it suited him, and Abigail suspected he was kind to those he cared for. He would never tolerate a slight, and never leave a debt unpaid.
That he occasionally went sprawling offended her on his behalf. He wasn’t nice, but in his way, he was honorable, a far more worthy virtue in Abigail’s opinion.
“In my youth, I toppled over constantly. Boys do not carry canes, and I hated that I was different. I’d forget where I put my canes, leave my room without them. For my Bath chair, I spewed maledictions too vile to blight a lady’s ears. I was not reconciled to my fate, and thus everybody around me had to suffer as well.”
He rubbed his knee as he spoke, which required that he bend forward rather than rest against the cushions.
“Shall I remove your boots?” Abigail asked.
“You’d play footman for me?”
“I will remove your boots so you don’t get dirt on the hassock.”
He left off rubbing his knee. “Do your worst. My boots aren’t as snug as some. They can’t be or I’d never endure their removal.”
His boot in fact slipped off easily. It wasn’t much larger than one of Abigail’s men’s boots, though the calf was longer. The second boot was a trifle more closely fitted. She set them both within his reach and took the place beside him.
“Does massage help?”
“Yes, but Miss Abbott, I must forbid—damn it, Abigail. That’s not fair.”
She’d wrapped both hands around his knee and made the same smooth, slow circles he’d used. “That you have a bad knee isn’t fair, and if the knee has become unreliable, the ankle and hip are likely in pain as well. Am I pressing firmly enough?”
He flopped back against the cushions, gaze on the ceiling. “My dragon’s name is Abigail. I’ve been waiting for inspiration to name her, and lo, the appellation fits.”
“You are trying to make me blush. Flattery is pointless, my lord. The joint isn’t quite as it should be, is it?” Not that she was well acquainted with the particulars of a man’s knee bones.
“You have a gift for understatement, Miss Abbott. Allow me to offer a reciprocally understated observation: Ladies do not apply their hands to the persons of ailing gentlemen. Desist, if you please.”
He was protesting for form’s sake, bless him. “You are not ailing. You were injured, long ago. How did it happen?”
He gave her a peevish look. “My father decided in a drunken rage that a boy with a bad leg would be a more effective beggar than one who could scramble out of range of Papa’s fists. He later intimated that stomping the hell out of me was an accident. I was the accident, and his violence toward me was quite intentional.”
Abigail kept her hands moving in slow, steady strokes, though Lord Stephen’s recitation upset her. “I try not to take cases involving children. Such matters can provoke me to an unseemly temper.”
“Abigail, please stop. You need not exercise your temper on my behalf. I had my revenge.”
She ceased massaging his knee but remained on the sofa beside him. “Good. A man such as your father deserves a thorough serving of retribution. That he spent coin on gin instead of providing for his children was his shame, not yours, and that he’d do violence against his own small son…”
Would that she was merely blushing. Instead Abigail felt tears welling. They were not for Lord Stephen, or not exclusively for him. They were for fatigue, and homesickness, old lost love, and all of the children who could not be protected from horrid fates.
“I miss Malcolm.” The stupidest words ever to escape from a woman’s mouth.
“Miss Abbott…Abigail, please don’t cry.” A linen handkerchief so fine as to be translucent dangled before Abigail’s eyes. “You must not cry. I had my revenge. I killed the old devil, so nobody need ever cry for me again.”
She took the handkerchief, which was redolent of his exquisite scent. “You don’t fool me, my lord. Your father needed killing—my Quaker family would disown me for that sentiment—but I killed my mother, and I know taking the life of a parent is a difficult wound for a child to heal regardless of how it happens.”
Chapter Four
As a youth, Stephen had occupied himself with deciding which day had been the worst of his life. The day he’d killed his father had not made the list. The day his father had smashed his knee hadn’t either. At the time, a very young Stephen had shrugged it off as just another beating from old Jack Wentworth. Slower to heal and more painful than others, but all in a day’s suffering.
The day he’d fallen face-first into the grass of Berkeley Square while trying to manage two canes and deliver an ice to a viscount’s blushing daughter was on that list. So was the day Quinn had been marched to the scaffold for a murder he hadn’t committed. What had been Abigail Abbott’s worst day, and why did she weep for the company of an ill-mannered terrier she didn’t even own?
“Did you slip some rat poison into your mother’s gin?” Stephen asked, surely the least genteel question a gentleman had ever asked a lady.
She looked up from his handkerchief. “You laid your father low with rat poison? Very enterprising of you, my lord.”
Nobody had ever referred to Stephen as enterprising in quite those admiring tones. “I was lame, eight years old, and my sisters’ sole protection. Jack was making arrangements to…making arrangements for them I could not countenance. Quinn had gone off somewhere to earn coin, and I had to make do. Quinn was old enough to fend for us, but he lacked the legal authority to take us away from Jack. I remedied the situation as best I could.”
Nobody else outside the family knew this story. Duncan, Stephen’s cousin, had the basic facts, but Stephen didn’t discuss what he’d done with even his siblings. Better that his sisters not know how close they’d come to dwelling in hell itself, better that Quinn never learn of it.
“You saved your sisters’ lives,” Miss Abbott said. “And that is understating the matter.”
To hear the words spoken with such conviction, by a female as decent and estimable as Abigail Abbott, was unsettling.
“Tell me about your mother.” Stephen kept the query general rather than ask specifically how the lady had died.
“I killed her simply by being born. She survived a month past my arrival, but she never stopped losing blood.” Miss Abbott sniffed at Stephen’s handkerchief and bowed her head. “I was too big.”
Those four words held a world of sorrow and despair.
Also a world of injustice. “You were not too big. Babies are whatever size the Almighty decides they should be, and I have it on the authority of no less person than Jane, Duchess of Walden, that her smallest baby gave her the worst trouble in childbed. The larger brats seemed to have some sense of how to go about the business, but the littlest one was contrary. She still is, in fact.”
Miss Abbott’s profile belonged on some martyr of ancient renown. “But the midwife said…”
Clearly, nobody had ever walked the formidable Miss Abbott through some basic reproductive facts.
“Is this why you haven’t married?” Stephen asked. “You punish yourself for biology you had no power to change? Do you know who ought to be examining his conscience? The rutting fool who got your mother with child. Women do not conceive absent the involvement of some fellow or other, unless
you’d have me believe divine intervention occasioned your existence? You do know where little dragons come from, don’t you?”
She swung her gaze on him like the port authority swiveling harbor cannon on an enemy fleet.
“Why haven’t you married, my lord? You are in line for a dukedom, you are a gun nabob, and not hard to look upon. Surely if one of us is behindhand matrimonially, you are.”
Stephen rejoiced to see the glitter of battle returning to Miss Abbott’s eyes, rejoiced to earn her upbraiding. That she’d light upon the sad reality of his situation was entirely convenient to his plan.
“You and Her Grace will get on famously, Miss Abbott. She likes you. My entire family will second your opinion that I am behindhand matrimonially, and in a variety of other regards. This is precisely why you must give up on your plan to die for Lord Stapleton’s convenience.”
Miss Abbott folded his handkerchief and rose, stuffing it into a pocket. “Stapleton will not stop, my lord. Nothing less than a permanent end to me will suffice to ensure my safety.”
Why was she so confident of that conclusion, and what exactly had been in those letters?
“Stapleton bides here in London at present, and yet he had the ability to set six ne’er-do-wells on your tail in godforsaken Yorkshire. He nearly managed to have your household drugged, if we accept your version of events, and that took both careful attention to your circumstances and a ruthless exercise of power. Do you suppose he won’t have your corpse dug up, Miss Abbott?”
Grave robbers were a sad fact of life. Miss Abbott’s expression said she hadn’t calculated on Stapleton retaining their services.
“And what if,” Stephen went on, “you die and his search for those letters goes on? Does your companion suffer his wrath? Is Malcolm’s well-being imperiled again? You, being ostensibly dead, could not intervene to protect them. I surmise that if you had the letters, you would have surrendered them, but for two things: A client asked you to keep them safe, or client privacy means you cannot surrender them. That also means you aren’t at liberty to destroy the letters. Destroying yourself won’t destroy the letters.”
Miss Abbott took the seat behind Stephen’s desk. “You really can be quite detestable, my lord.”
“Nonsense. You have been anxious, exhausted, concerned for your household, and had nobody with whom to think the situation through. A half-daft, wealthy marquess makes a formidable foe. What you detest is being out-gunned and out-maneuvered by him.”
She tapped a fingernail against his blotter, like a cat switching its tail. “I hate that too, but I cannot carry on my business expecting every coach I climb onto will be stopped and searched, and every roast I serve will be poisoned. Dying will at least stop the attempts on my person.”
She was magnificently stubborn, and that quality was probably why she had so many happy clients.
Stephen, however, had learned to be stubborn as a matter of survival, and now he would be stubborn for her sake as well.
“The attacks will stop,” he said, “only until Stapleton figures out that you are not, in fact, deceased. What of your family, Miss Abbott? Will you leave them to grieve your passing with no explanation? They will inherit your personal goods, I’m guessing, and Stapleton might well turn his attention in that direction. A passel of peace-loving Quakers up against a man who resorts to armed criminals and poison. How well do you think your thee-thou aunties and grannies would fare against such odds?”
“You would like them,” she said, balancing the point of his favorite silver letter opener on the tip of her finger. “Their unwillingness to use force of arms means they are ingenious about other means of persuasion.”
“If you’d like to put your feet up on my desk, please feel free.” Stephen could picture her like that, at ease, feet up, her grand decorum for once set aside.
She put down the letter opener, shoved out of his chair, and returned to his side on the sofa. “I would not risk my family for anything. You know that, which is why you are herding me into a corner of your choosing. I do not appreciate the manipulation, my lord, so let’s just hear your brilliant plan for thwarting Stapleton’s mischief.”
“Kiss me.”
Her scowl was thunderous. “That is not a plan, my lord. That doesn’t even qualify as a jest.”
“And eau de napping hedgehog is not an enticing fragrance, Miss Abbott. If my plan is to have a prayer of working, you must be able to suffer proximity to my person.”
Wariness joined the disapproval in her eyes. “I am proximate to your person now.”
“A salient fact.” Stephen sat up enough to brush his lips over her cheek, then pulled back to survey her reaction. “That went rather well. If we’re to be engaged, you must weather at least that much affection from me, and it appears you are up to the challenge.”
Oh, damn. Now she was looking bewildered. “You are eccentric. I know that. I counted on that. A near genius, in the opinion of many, but a difficult man. I wanted exactly that sort of help when I came here, and now you are kissing me and spouting nonsense. I had best be going.”
He caught her hand rather than let her fly into the boughs over a mere peck on the cheek.
“Miss Abbott, be reasonable. Stapleton is a marquess. He has breached the citadel of your home. He has sent his minions against you. He thinks you are a mere lady inquiry agent, a member of an obscure profession and one not much respected except by those needing your services. Your family, while doubtless dear to you, has no resources equal to Stapleton’s, but I do.”
He had her attention. God bless a woman with a rational mind.
“Go on.”
“Stapleton will not expect you to recruit an ally whose standing exceeds his own, whose wealth exceeds his own, whose connections in Yorkshire and elsewhere exceed his own. Ally yourself with me, and you are safe.”
She studied their joined hands. Her hands were nearly as large as Stephen’s, but oh, they were so much more lovely. She cared for her hands. When dressed as a man, she doubtless had to wear gloves, or those pale fingers and tidy nails would give up the game.
“You spoke of an engagement, my lord. Why would a duke’s heir choose a Yorkshire nobody for his duchess?”
Did she truly think of herself as a nobody? Stephen knew for a fact that at least one duke and duchess had relied upon her good offices to solve a very, very delicate matter.
“Let us consider the practicalities, Miss Abbott. I must marry, but I was born in the gutter.”
She looked him up and down. “You have overcome your origins rather handily.”
He kissed her knuckles for that. “In your opinion, which I value highly, but not in the opinion of the matchmakers who matter. I cannot dance, I cannot walk in the park, I cannot amble along the wooded paths of Richmond, and otherwise ingratiate myself with the darlings making their debuts each year.”
“You can play cards, you can make witty conversation at formal dinners, you can—” Miss Abbott waved a hand.
“I can engage in the activities leading to procreation?”
Her expression became wonderfully severe. “One surmises you can—and do.”
“One surmises correctly. I am not, however, considered a good catch. Impecunious viscounts can out-court me, and because I can never overcome the circumstances of my birth or the limitations of my disability, that will always be the case.”
Miss Abbott disentangled her fingers from his. “So you’ll bow meekly before your fate and marry an Amazon of humble origins?”
“The Amazons were warrior queens, to a maiden. Quakers are bankers, and His Grace of Walden, being a banker himself, has all manner of Quaker associates. You are from the north—from my home shire, as it were. My family thinks highly of you, which is no small accomplishment, and you will be an original in the Mayfair drawing rooms. You might even—I blush to suggest it—enjoy being my intended.”
This speech was coming off all reasonable and businesslike, but Stephen waited for Miss Abbott’s reply wi
th inordinate anxiety. That Stapleton hadn’t succeeded thus far was due to chance. Stephen had reason to know that the marquess was as stubborn as he was arrogant, and he was very arrogant.
Miss Abbott considered Stephen’s boots, which she’d set neatly next to the sofa. “You do not suggest a real engagement.”
“I would not presume on your future to that extent.” The most honest, humble truth he’d ever offered a lady.
“Kiss me,” she said, half turning to face him. “Kiss me as if you’re stealing a moment with the woman you love. Make it convincing so I’ll know what to expect should such a performance ever be needful.”
In some dimly functioning rational part of his mind, Stephen concluded that Miss Abbott doubted her desirability. Either he inspired her to question that conclusion or he’d have to find some other scheme for keeping her safe.
If she found his advances distasteful, she could lay him out flat with a single unwelcoming shove. That thought brought him some comfort—she’d lay out flat any man whose advances she found distasteful.
Stephen did not want to come up with another scheme, and he did want to kiss her.
Very much. In his present state—randy and sentimental and all that—stage kisses were a stupid idea. But then, he had desired Abigail Abbott from the moment he’d set eyes on her, he esteemed her even more than he desired her, and she was an addled goose to think herself anything less than delectable.
“Very well, then,” he said, taking her hand, “convincing, I shall be.”
“A woman that size does not simply disappear.” Honoré, Marquess of Stapleton, stated that observation calmly. He never raised his voice with subordinates, and Tertullian, Lord Fleming, was a subordinate in every regard.
Fleming was a mere earl’s heir, his family’s fortune barely qualified as modest, and his intellect was similarly limited. He was loyal, and he longed to marry Stapleton’s widowed daughter-in-law. Harmonia was, of course, free to remarry wherever she pleased, provided her son remained in the care of his doting grandpapa.
How to Catch a Duke Page 5
