Alec wished he had a flask of brandy in his cloak but he didn’t. He handed her his handkerchief. “Wipe your mouth,” he said, his voice remote.
She did. She didn’t rise, simply stayed where she was, looking into the bushes, wishing Moses would appear and the bush would burn, her with it.
Alec looked up and down the street, heard some men coming, and grasped her under her arms, pulling her to her feet. “I’d just as soon not be found with a puking boy in the middle of Baltimore.”
“I’m not puking. Not anymore.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
He supported her to the next corner. “Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t consider doing anything more than breathing.”
With those orders, he went into The Golden Horse. He returned with a bottle of whiskey. “Here, drink a healthy swig.”
Genny looked at the bottle. She’d never drunk whiskey in her life. But her mouth tasted awful. She tilted the bottle up and downed a goodly amount. She jerked the bottle away, gasping for breath. “My stomach’s burning up.” She started to wheeze. Her eyes watered. Alec grabbed the bottle and watched her. She was bent double, holding her stomach, trying to breathe. He felt not a moment’s pity.
This damned little chit was responsible for this. Not he. Well, he was, in a sense, but—
Two men went by, drunk as toads, paying them not a bit of attention.
“Better?”
“Hmm,” she said, her voice a croak. “How do you drink that stuff? It’s deadly.”
“Do you feel better?”
“By that do you mean do I want to retch again? No, I don’t.” She looked at him with glowing dislike. “I suppose I should thank you.”
“You didn’t get very far with your education.”
She shuddered and he gave her a glittering smile. “Didn’t you appreciate the man’s approach, the way he fondled her breasts, the way he stuck first one finger, then two, then his whole fist, into—”
“Stop it. That was disgusting and degrading. How would the man have reacted if she had done it to him?”
He laughed, deeply. She gaped at him. “It’s done, my dear boy. Believe me, it’s done.”
“But that’s not possible. Men don’t—” Her voice dropped off like a stone from a cliff.
“Men very much like women taking them into their mouths. Did you have a good chance to see how she worked him before you lost your nerve and ran out?”
It was too much. Genny turned stiffly and walked quickly down Howard Street. She never wanted to see Alec Carrick again. She’d done herself in, she admitted it freely, but if he hadn’t been so absolutely outrageous, baiting her as he had—
“I do believe I’ve had enough,” she heard him say from behind her, his voice more angry than she’d ever heard it. Enough what? she wondered, and speeded up. She felt his hand on her arm, jerking her back.
“It really is enough,” he said between his teeth. “Now, Miss Eugenia Paxton, I’d like to know just how the hell you talked your father into letting you play at being a man?”
He pulled off her hat.
Five
Genny didn’t move. She felt oddly calm, as if the waves of fate had washed over her, leaving her quite clean and quite drowned. It was odd how other things floated through her mind at that moment, bizarre things. She felt her thick braid slowly uncoiling down her neck like a snake. She felt cool night air on her sweaty forehead. It was wonderful to have that damnably hot hat off.
“Well?”
“Hello,” she said, still staring off at that bush, wishing it would magically catch fire and consume her. She wasn’t about to look at him, to see the distaste, the anger, the contempt for her in his eyes.
“Miss Eugenia Paxton, I presume?”
“Yes. You presume with great perception.” She turned away, still not looking at him, and strode down the street.
“Stop, Genny. Damn you, come back here.”
She speeded up, breaking into a dead run. She felt herself jerked back, a strong hand encircling her upper arm.
“Let me go, you cretin.” The anger came spurting out, full blown, ready to erupt all over the enemy. Anger at herself because he’d been the one to find her out and she hadn’t been the one to do the telling. When he didn’t immediately release her, Genny reared back, lifted her knee, and drove it upward toward his groin. Alec, a dirty fighter from his boyhood years at Eton, neatly turned in time, but the full power of her knee against his thigh made him realize that she would very nearly have unmanned him had that knee of hers connected with his manhood. “You damned—”
Her fist went into his belly, hard. He grunted, sucking in his breath.
“Let me go.”
He jerked her tightly against him, then managed to gasp, “That hurt.”
“I’ll do more than that if you don’t let me go.”
Alec held on, raised the nearly full whiskey bottle in his other hand, and poured its contents over her head. She yowled, struggling fiercely.
“Hold still, damn you. I’m not about to let a youngish lady walk alone in this city at night. I am a gentleman even though you aren’t. Now, calm down.”
Genny stood there, whiskey dripping off her nose, smelling as vile as any drunk lolling near the wharf on the lower end of Frederick Street. “I hate you.” Her voice was low, calm as the very devil, and he felt his own anger growing to new heights.
“You listen to me, you absurd female. You’re not going anywhere until I get some answers. None of this was my idea—well, the brothel was, but only to make you admit to your stupid charade. I haven’t the foggiest notion why you decided I was blind enough, callow enough, to believe you were a man for longer than the briefest instant. Why did you ever begin it with me?”
Genny looked at his long fingers still wrapped around her upper arm. She’d show lovely green bruises in a couple of hours. “You knew quickly that I wasn’t a Eugene?”
His hand that was holding the now empty whiskey bottle slashed through the air. “Don’t be stupid. Of course I knew. You have a woman’s hands, a woman’s face, a woman’s breasts, a—”
“That’s quite enough.”
“Well, to my eye, there was no question. You were lucky that your workers didn’t give you away, but again, it didn’t matter. I simply didn’t understand why you were doing it. I was amused at first; even meeting your sister was mildly invigorating. But then it was annoying when you persisted in your deception. I decided to bring it to an end this evening. Thus the brothel.”
“You succeeded admirably.”
“Yes, I did. I much prefer straightforward dealing. I don’t like playing silly games.”
“Oh? Just what do you call tonight?”
“All right, so I wasn’t straightforward with you tonight. You did get educated, though, didn’t you?”
“Go to hell.”
“A young lady, even one rather long in the tooth, doesn’t speak like that.”
“Go to hell, damn your eyes.”
He laughed. “You look like a drunken spaniel standing there with whiskey running down your nose, your hair in a tangle, spouting curses at me. If I were your husband, my dear girl, I would beat your bottom for speaking to me thusly.”
“Husband. That’s a nightmare of a thought. You’re a pig, an arrogant bastard, a—”
“Let’s get back to the subject, shall we? I want to know why you paraded your butt in front of me in a man’s breeches.”
She said coldly, her eyes on his silver waistcoat buttons, “You would have snickered and scoffed at a business letter from a Miss Eugenia Paxton. You men take only yourselves seriously. If a woman does something well that you touted specimens believe to be only your domain, you sneer at her, treat her horribly, insult her. As you so clearly said, a woman isn’t good for anything other than sex and bearing your children when you finally have to marry. I wasn’t about to be ignored, or worse, laughed at.”
“Why didn’t your father write to me?”
> “He didn’t want to.”
“Ah. So you went behind his back.”
“I told him right after I sent the letter to England. He hadn’t realized how grave our situation was, what with his bad health and all. I told him we needed capital and you were the one to provide it. I also assured him it was quite likely that you were one of those ridiculous English fops who had no interest in anything save the knots in their cravats and the pomade for their hair. Thus we would be able to retain control and continue doing things as we wished.”
“You were really quite wrong.”
“I wasn’t wrong about you being an arrogant bastard.”
“Your conversation is as tedious as watching you puke up your toes.”
Genny sucked in her breath. “Let me go. I wish to return home. You’ve had your sport.”
“You stink like an Edinburgh brewery. I can’t imagine what your father will say. Or what tale you’ll spin him.”
“He’ll hopefully be asleep. I shan’t tell him a thing, you may be sure of that.”
“Then I’ll tell him.”
“No.” She stared up at him. “You wouldn’t.”
“Perhaps not the brothel part, since I do carry a bit of blame there, but I shall tell him that we had a short evening out and that you finally ended your charade and that we had a violent argument and the only way to make you see reason, and not destroy my manhood, was for me to pour whiskey over your head.”
“Will you let me go now?”
“All right. Just don’t move.”
She turned, very slowly so he wouldn’t grab her again. “Can we start walking?”
He nodded and shortened his step to match hers.
“What will you do now?”
“About what?”
“Don’t be obtuse. You’re not stupid.”
“No, and I haven’t made up my mind. I really think I overdid it on the whiskey.”
She ignored that last. “Will you at least speak to my father? Will you at least consider doing business with us?”
“Doing business with a chit who dresses like a man?”
She stiffened up like a poker, but surprisingly, at least to Alec, she held her temper. “I have to dress that way at the shipyard. It’s difficult to climb over things in skirts. Too, when I wear skirts, the men look at me differently. I want them to see me as their boss, not a fancy piece, not as a—a commodity, the way you look at women. I suppose I’ve done it for so long that I don’t even think about it.”
“Are you known as the eccentric Miss Paxton?”
“I don’t know what people say about me. Father’s friends are used to me and don’t much notice, I don’t think. I don’t go out much.”
“You’re twenty-three?”
“Yes. A spinster, long in the tooth, past my last prayers, an ape leader—”
“That’s an impressive list. I didn’t realize that young women were castigated so very early in their lives if they’d failed to find a husband. Did you fail?”
“Fail? A husband?” There was such distaste in her voice that Alec felt his blood begin to boil again.
“I wouldn’t let a man with courting on his tiny mind get near me. All of you are little tyrants who expect women to be your slaves, to titter at your inane wit, to praise you when you manage to conclude some business satisfactorily, to—”
“That is really quite a catalog and more than enough.”
“—to bow and scrape. All of you want a big dowry so you can waste it away on your own insignificant, selfish pleasures. No, thank you.”
Alec grinned. “Most of that treatment sounds rather nice to me, all except your tyrant part.”
“You were married. I’ll bet your wife would have agreed to that.”
“Actually, I don’t think Nesta would have agreed with you at all.”
His voice was perfectly pleasant, but Genny, her ears sharp where he was concerned, heard something deep and raw. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought her up.”
“No. Now, I’ll make you a bargain, Eugenia.”
“Everyone calls me Genny.”
“The same as your sister, Genny?”
She said nothing, frowning at the deep hole in the walkway just ahead of them, right in front of the Union Bank.
“All right, Genny. You may still call me Alec. Hadn’t you ever before seen a naked man?”
“You’re shameless. How can you bring that up now?”
“Just to get you enraged. You’re almost amusing, you know, when you sputter and turn pink.”
“He was disgusting and old enough to be my father—”
“A pity, true. Your first sight of a naked man should have been someone young and virile.”
“Like you, I suppose. As I recall, I asked you to do the demonstrating, but you were too much the coward.”
“Actually, you’re right, that and the fact that I wanted to see your face when I made my comments on the performances. I really couldn’t see myself taking a whore with you watching. He was your first naked man, wasn’t he, and with a girl who was wonderfully young, probably younger than you. That’s the way of the world, Genny,” he added for a bit more bait.
“It’s as I said. All of you are pigs and tyrants and selfish bastards.”
“I didn’t say I agreed with it.”
“Nor did you say that you disagreed with it.”
He waved that away and said, stroking his fingers over his jaw, “Now, what the devil are we going to do?”
Mary Abercrombie of Hanover Street was one of the leading mantuamakers in Baltimore, or rather her sister was, Abigail Abercrombie. Mary was her sister’s assistant, even though she liked to tout her own talents to anyone who would listen. Mary did know the dressmaking business well, knew from the age of nine years old how to pander to wealthy ladies, and knew when a lamb for the fleecing walked through the door, a lamb whose day gown was not only five years out of date but too small in the bosom and too short in the hem.
Genny stood in the middle of the Abercrombie salon, staring about her at the various headless mannequins draped with beautiful fabrics. She hadn’t been to a mantuamaker since her eighteenth year. She was relieved that, for the moment at least, no other customers were in the shop.
Miss Mary was pleased also, for her sister, Abigail, was lying down upstairs with one of her headaches. Mary gave her a winning smile, and her marvelous memory clicked into place. “Why, it’s Miss Eugenia Paxton. How charming to see you again, my dear. How is your dear father?”
Genny was amazed that the woman remembered her. She, on the other hand, couldn’t recall having ever set eyes on the mantuamaker before. “Miss Abercrombie? Yes, well, my father is fine. I am here to buy several gowns. A ball gown, I think, and two or three day dresses. I, well, I need your advice.”
Mary Abercrombie wanted to dance, she wanted to sing. At last she could prove to her sister that she, too, could choose materials, and select proper patterns for customers. Thank the heavens that the young lady was well-looking, her figure quite slender, wonderfully proportioned, actually.
Mary pulled out bolt after bolt of beautiful material—satins, silks, the softest muslins, confiding in Genny that just because a fabric was from France and had an excessively long French name, that didn’t mean it was any better quality than a similar fabric from Italy. Genny agreed with this outflowing of confidences. She was quickly buried under mountains of information. She was just as quickly intimidated. At last, she threw up her hands, saying, “Miss Abercrombie, I leave myself in your capable hands. Mine aren’t at all good at this sort of thing. Please, select the materials for me and the patterns.”
Mary was beyond being delighted. She wanted to hug Miss Paxton. She managed to restrain herself, for two customers walked into the salon. She quickly bundled Genny out of the shop, telling her to return in three days. She drew a deep breath of vindication when one of the ladies asked for Miss Abigail. Well, Mary thought, she’d show them, her sister included. She would be the
one to select materials and fit Miss Paxton. In no time her name would be the one on all the ladies’ lips. She rubbed her hands together, smiled very politely at the women, and went upstairs to fetch her sister.
When Genny emerged from the salon, it was with a ferocious headache and a feeling of inadequacy that she, a female after all, didn’t have the slightest notion of how to choose fabrics or styles for herself. Even if she did have the choice of whether or not to have a fashion sense, she decided it wasn’t worth it. Being a female wasn’t worth it. It was annoying, it was tiring, it was painful. She absently rubbed her hip where one of Miss Mary’s pins had found its mark.
At least she would have new gowns. And since Miss Abercrombie was one of the best mantuamakers in Baltimore, she should look prime.
Alec was coming to dinner tonight. She turned into Charles Street and quickened her pace. Thank goodness she had one other gown that was presentable for evening wear. It was a pale green round dress of soft crepe decorated with two broad rows of embroidered white flowers with green leaves, one at the hemline and one a foot higher. It was a gown for a girl of eighteen, not a woman of twenty-three, but at least there wasn’t any lace on the neckline to tack down and draw attention to itself. The center of the bosom was already fastened down with a black jet clasp. She owned but one pair of gloves, which were soiled, and one still-nice pair of slippers. Unfortunately, they were black.
It wasn’t important. There was no earthly reason that she should even care what she looked like.
Alec Carrick, Baron Sherard, was only a man, and an Englishman at that. He was a beautiful man and she imagined that he was well aware of it, even though she hadn’t noticed signs of overweening conceit in him up to now. What had his wife been like? As beautiful as he was? Had they competed in beauty? She pictured him and a faceless woman seated side by side in front of dressing table mirrors, talking of powders and hairstyles, and she laughed.
At the sudden crack of thunder, Genny looked up. The Baltimore weather, perverse at best, was now fully prepared to dump gallons of water on her head. To mix with the remnants of any leftover whiskey, she thought, frowning up at the suddenly dark sky. It had been clear just three hours before. Baltimore! She gritted her teeth and hurried her step. By the time she reached home, she was soaked to the skin, her bonnet limp, her hair hanging in long wet ropes down her back, her boots squashing on her feet.
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