Nicola and the Viscount

by Meg Cabot

  Snooping, of course, and eavesdropping of any kind were activities greatly frowned upon by Madame Vieuxvincent. And Nicola wouldn't have stooped to either of them if Lord Farelly had troubled himself to answer her question.

  But as he'd seen fit to avoid the subject altogether, and not very subtly, Nicola felt she might snoop without compunction.

  Still, as she padded lightly down the carpeted hallway leading to Lord Farelly's study, Nicola could not help glancing anxiously over her shoulder several times, alert for lurking footmen or housemaids. She encountered none, however, and when at last she laid her hand upon the latch, was able to slip into the mahogany-paneled room quite without being observed.

  Lord Farelly had left for his office on Bond Street directly following breakfast . . . and Nicola's pointed question. His study, which also doubled as the family library, smelled pungently of the pipe his lordship liked to smoke when he was alone. The walls were lined with books and the occasional portrait of some past Bartholomew. None of his ancestors even came close to having been as blessed by nature as Lord Sebastian had been. In fact, the family seemed to run rather strongly to fat. The earl, at least, was no lightweight.

  But, Nicola reminded herself, she wasn't there to muse over how her future husband might look twenty years from now. She was there to snoop.

  And so, accordingly, Nicola commenced to snooping.

  There was an art to rifling through someone else's drawers without leaving any indication that one had done so. Nicola was an old hand at such tricks, as it had generally been left to her to rifle through Madame Vieuxvincent's desk drawers when the need for sustenance, in the form of midnight raids of the larder, necessitated obtaining the key to the kitchen door. No matter how many times, and in whatever ingenious place, Madame Vieuxvincent hid this key, Nicola found it. And when the next morning, as Cook was crying over her missing chocolate gateau, Madame demanded to know who had committed such an affront, Nicola had always been equally capable of uttering a bland denial. She had never once been caught, and rather doubted she'd ever been seriously suspected, either. She was, as it turned out, a master thief.

  It wasn't long before she knew victory in her current quest, as well. Midway through his lordship's middle desk drawer, Nicola found a bundle of letters from none other than Mr. Edward Pease himself. Settling in for an afternoon of reading, Nicola curled up beneath the earl's desk, so that any maid who happened to enter the study for some casual dusting would not discover her.

  What Nicola read confused and disturbed her. Mr. Edward Pease, it soon became apparent, worked for a company called Stockton and Darlington. Interestingly, Stockton and Darlington were towns not far from Beckwell Abbey.

  More interestingly, Mr. Pease seemed as fascinated by and interested in trains as Lord Farelly was. Most of his correspondence had to do with experiments in locomotion, such as something called a Blutcher, a locomotive engine currently in use at Killingworth Colliery. The Blutcher, according to Mr. Pease, could pull the weight in coal of ten cart horses, and do it time and time again, without resting between deliveries of its load, as horses needed to.

  Soon Nicola knew more about the Blutcher than she had ever cared to know about much of anything. How anyone could go on and on in such a vein about a machine—even a very revolutionary and new one—she couldn't understand. Lord Farelly, given his feelings about locomotives, undoubtedly found the whole thing highly fascinating, but Nicola was bored after only the second paragraph

  And, for all the trouble she'd taken, she'd found nothing at all that referred to her. Not a mention of her name, or any connection at all that might warrant Nathaniel's assertion that there was something suspicious about Lord Sebastian's affection for her.

  As for Edward Pease, why, he was only a man who apparently shared Lord Farelly's great enthusiasm for locomotives; that was all.

  Nicola was pleased—and at the same time a little disgusted with herself that Nathaniel had made her doubt the God. Worse, he'd made her doubt her own judgment, and that was upsetting. Nicola was shuffling the letters back into the order in which she'd found them when a small slip of paper fell from the pile and onto the carpet. She lifted it and was about, without so much as a glance at it, to stick it back into the pile where she thought it belonged, when something about it caught her eye.

  It was a piece of foolscap, smaller than all the other pages. Only instead of writing upon it, there was a drawing. At first Nicola could make nothing of it. She turned the slip of paper this way and that, squinting at it. It looked somehow familiar, and yet she could not tell how.

  And then it hit her. The squiggly line down the middle of the page was the river Tweed. She knew that river as well as she knew how to add bunting to an Easter bonnet. It was the exact river into which the stream that burbled by Beckwell Abbey—the same stream the Milksop had once tried to keep her from swimming in—flowed into. She was looking, she realized, at a map of the Northumberland region . . . her home.

  But while she recognized the river Tweed, she could not understand what the rest of the markings on the paper indicated. Killingworth Colliery—she recognized it by its place on the river—was marked with an X, and from that X extended a line that wound along beside the river, hatched every eighth of an inch like a ladder. The line seemed to wind right through the place on the map where Beckwell Abbey would be located, if the mapmaker had bothered to draw it in. It went straight along until it ran into Stockton, a town some miles away from Beckwell Abbey.

  Except that whoever had drawn the map—and Nicola supposed it could only have been Edward Pease, the author of all the letters in the pile she still held—had left off the abbey. Or perhaps he was confused. Because no such road—if that was a road, indicated by the hatch-marked line—existed between Killingworth and Stockton.

  And then, as Nicola sat there, turning the map this way and that, trying to make sense of it, it hit her.

  That hatch-marked line wasn't a road. Not a proper road, anyhow.

  It was a railroad.

  Nicola was convinced of it. It looked exactly like the track on which the Catch Me Who Can had run.

  And the track ran straight through the middle of Beckwell Abbey.

  So absorbed was she in the map that Nicola hadn't heard footsteps beyond the study door. In fact, she wasn't aware that she was not alone until she heard a cough. Crouched beneath his lordship's desk, Nicola immediately froze, hardly daring even to breathe.

  Straining her ears, since the desk blocked her from looking out, Nicola tried to determine who had entered the room. If it was one of the maids, or Jennings, the butler, Nicola would be all right

  But if it was Lord Farelly, and he attempted to sit down at his desk, and discovered Nicola there where his feet should go, she was, she knew, in very deep trouble.

  Someone coughed again. And then Nicola heard, "Ah, there it is. I told him he musta left it. I'll be sworn, he'd lose his head if it weren't sewn on."

  The back of Nicola's neck prickled with relief. It was only Mrs. Steadman, the housekeeper. Nicola, peeking out from behind the desk, saw her bustling from the room, holding one of the God's evening coats beneath her arm. Lord Sebastian must have left it behind accidentally the other night when his father had had him in for a brandy before bed.

  The study door closed firmly behind the housekeeper, and Nicola, alone again, was able to breathe freely once more. Hastily, she tucked the letters back where she'd found them. Climbing to her feet, she cast a swift glance around the room, wanting to make sure she'd left it as she'd round it. She saw nothing amiss. The only thing Lord Farelly might find different upon his return was his map, which would be missing. That was because Nicola had slipped it up her sleeve. The earl would surely wonder where it had disappeared to, but Nicola doubted she'd ever fall suspect of removing it. That was because she was, after all, a lady.

  A lady who had a call to make, and at once, megrim or no.

  CHAPTER TEN

  He was late.

 
Nicola supposed she couldn't blame him. It wasn't as if, given their last meeting—or next-to-last meeting, as she supposed it had happened to be—he had much of an incentive, or possibly even desire, to see her.

  Still, it was rude to leave a lady waiting. Particularly a lady who hadn't any sort of escort, and who was, with every passing moment, running the very grave danger of discovery. For if Lady Honoria—or, Lord forbid, her mother—should happen to arrive home before Nicola made it back, and found her gone, she would have some serious explaining to do. Ladies did not arrange surreptitious assignations with gentlemen in public parks . . . even with gentlemen to whom they might happen to be related.

  "Spare a penny, miss?"

  Nicola started. An old woman, wearing a heavy shawl about her head and shoulders—much too heavy, Nicola thought, given the late-afternoon warmth—stood beside the bench Nicola was seated upon, holding out a gnarled hand.

  A ha' penny?" the old woman asked hopefully. "Anything to spare, dearie?"

  Nicola, her heart still drumming rapidly—given what had happened the last tune she'd ventured into this very park, she thought it not at all unusual that she should feel so nervous—opened her reticule, found a penny, and laid it in the old woman's hand.

  "Lord bless you," the crone—for she was one, badly in need of a bit of cleaning up; had Nicola not been staying with the Bartholomews, she might have brought the woman home, and attempted it, for Nicola loved a project—said, and moved on to the couple occupying the next bench—a couple whom Nicola could not help noticing had either done a very good job of escaping their chaperon, or had just recently married, as they seemed unable to keep their hands to themselves, but instead were placing them all over one another. She had carefully chosen this bench because it was out of sight of the carnage path. Unfortunately, she was not alone in being desirous of such solitude. Thank goodness she and the God had a little more self-control than some people. . . .

  "Nicola?"

  Nicola jumped about a mile in the air, then, flattening a hand to her chest, turned and chastised her cousin.

  "You're late," she said. "And you frightened me half to death."

  Looking churlish, and without waiting to ask permission, the Milksop lowered himself upon Nicolas bench, flipping the tails of his sage green coat out from behind him as he did so.

  "I was holding a winning hand at whist," the Milksop said irritably, "at my dub when your message came. Did you expect me to just throw down my cards?" He made a face. "Don't answer that. Knowing you, I think I already know the answer to that."

  Nicola was not hurt Nothing the Milksop could say could hurt her. She was, truth be told, more offended by his person than his attitude toward her. While the coat of sage green might, on anyone else, have looked passable, Harold had chosen to pair it with a tartan—tartan—waistcoat, and red—red—breeches. Even at Christmastime, Nicola would not have approved of such an outfit. She wondered, not for the first time, if perhaps the Milksop suffered from colorblindness.

  "Would you mind telling me," Harold wanted to know, "what was so all-fired important that you had to drag me from my club to meet you in all this secrecy, and in such a dreadfully out-of-the-way place?"

  "Yes," Nicola said. "I mean, no, I don't mind telling you. I mean. . . ."

  "Spare a penny, sir?"

  The Milksop looked up and, just as Nicola had, started at the sight of the beggarwoman. Only unlike Nicola, he did not reach immediately into his pocket Instead he said, "Ye gods, woman, what are you about, pawing me like that? Get away with you, or I shall call a Bow Street Runner and have you arrested for vagrancy."

  The old woman hurried away, muttering beneath her breath. Nicola thought—again, not for the first time—how much she despised her cousin Harold. Then, guiltily remembering that her own fiance had reacted very much the same way to a much more appealing beggar, she reminded herself how vexing it was to constantly be approached with requests to share one's own hard-earned coin.

  "What is the name of the man who wished to buy the abbey?" she demanded without further preamble, in an effort to put a quick end to their interview.

  Harold turned to stare at her as if she were as demented as the poor creature whom he had just sent scurrying away. "You brought me all the way down here to ask me that?"

  "Yes," Nicola said. "Who was it?"

  "Edward somebody. Oh, that's right. Pease. Edward Pease." The Milksop's gaze roved toward the couple on the bench beside theirs. "Good Lord," he said. "What's going on here?"

  "Never mind that," Nicola said. Her heart had seemed to give a spasm at his words—his first words, not the part about the kissing couple—as if an unseen hand had reached inside her chest and took hold of that organ and squeezed. Edward Pease. Edward Pease was the man who'd made the offer for her home. Edward Pease, who seemed to want to put a railroad between Killingworth and Stockton. The only thing standing in his way, it seemed, was Beckwell Abbey, and her unwillingness to sell it.

  "Why all this interest in Pease all of a sudden?" Harold asked. Then his piggy eyes lit up. "Did you change your mind, then, about selling? Is that it? Want Father to contact the man, and go ahead with the sale? Because you've only to say the word, Nicola, and he'll do it for you. Father doesn't hold a grudge for the shabby way you've treated me. Though that's partly due to me, since I, of course, refrained from telling him the whole of your disgraceful behavior."

  Nicola, feeling the map in her sleeve, where she'd left it, said nothing. So it was true. That was all she could think. Everything Nathaniel had said was true. Harold, too, now that she thought of it. He'd said a fellow like the Viscount Farnsworth could never love a girl like Nicola. And it appeared he'd been right. Clearly the God was marrying her only out of some design of his father's, a friend of Edward Pease's, in order to help him get his hands on the abbey.

  But no. It couldn't be. Nicola thought back to all the happy times she and Lord Sebastian had shared. No, it wasn't possible. It couldn't have all been feigned. The God had to like her a little. Even the most controlling parent couldn't force his son to propose to a girl he didn't like. Sebastian had to like her. He just had to. That part about Beckwell Abbey and Edward Pease . . . well, surely that was only a coincidence. Surely that was all it was.

  Hardly knowing what she was doing, Nicola stood up and, without another word, began walking away. She was going, she supposed, back to the Bartholomews', but she did not consciously think of this until the Milksop reached out and seized her by the wrist.

  "Nicola," he said. "Where are you going? What's wrong with you? You send me running all the way down here to ask me some stupid fellow's name, and then that's it? You just leave me here?"

  "I'm sorry, Harold," Nicola said dazedly. "I—I suppose I'm not feeling very well just now. I . . . I think I had better go home."

  The Milksop looked torn between indignation and concern. He was still put out with her for what he considered her ill-treatment of him, but even he had to admit that, with her face suddenly drained of all color, she did not seem, just then, in her usual fighting form.

  "Nicola," he said. "Let me see you home, at least."

  Nicola didn't want him to—knowing the Milksop, he would probably invite himself for supper—but as she really did feel very strange indeed, she allowed him to tuck her into his carriage and drive her back to the Bartholomews' . . . where she found, much to her consternation, both Lady Farelly and her daughter had preceded her home. They looked quite surprised that Nicola, who'd been in bed with a megrim when last they'd seen her, should have ventured outside, and with none other than the Milksop, whom she'd made no secret of detesting.

  Nicola, even ill as she felt over her dreadful—and very confusing—discovery, was able to rally her spirits enough to think up a really capital lie to cover for her seemingly odd behavior. She told the ladies of the house that, having recovered from her headache, she'd remembered that she had something most pressing to discuss with her cousin, and that he'd very kindly met her
in the park . . . where her megrim had unfortunately returned with a vengeance.

  Both ladies seemed to find this monstrous lie quite believable. They urged Nicola to return to bed, which she did gladly, leaving the Milksop to the ministrations of the ladies Farelly. Things had gotten entirely too complicated too quickly for Nicola, and she honestly did feel ill. Madame Vieuxvincent, for all her careful teachings, had never said anything about how her pupils were to proceed in a situation such as this one.

  Once safely ensconced in her room, Nicola allowed Martine to fuss over her, until, satisfied her mistress was comfortable, the maid withdrew to her own room, with the admonition that this time, Nicola stay abed.

  Nicola was only too happy to oblige. She lay for nearly an hour beneath the bedcovers, staring unseeingly up at the filmy white canopy above her head. It couldn't be true, was all she could think. It simply couldn't. The God had to love her. He had to!

  But supposing he didn't? Supposing Nathaniel was right? And Eleanor. What was it Eleanor had said? "What is the viscount like as a person?"

  Nicola had to confess that, given this new, startling information, she couldn't, in all honesty, say. Or rather, she could: the viscount was the kind of man who wouldn't hesitate to strike an orphan in the head with his cane . . . or rob her of her only birthright.

  No. No, she simply couldn't believe that. Not of Lord Sebastian. Not of the God!

  All Nicola was sure of was that she couldn't possibly marry a man who didn't love her. No, not even the God. Some girls, she knew, might go ahead with the wedding, even suspecting what Nicola was beginning to. Some girls, Nicola supposed, would convince themselves they could make their husbands love them.