“And well she should be. She shot me, Man. And stop My Lording me.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
Lark came in wearing a jonquil muslin morning dress ten years out of date, and three sizes too big, two silk rosettes hanging by threads upon her skirt. She still wore the mismatched pair of shoes in which she came to him, not quite dry after their bath.
Since Ash was forced to remain on his stomach, given the location of the wound she had inflicted, he saw her shoes best but decided to forget for the moment, what still needed improving. “Where did you get the dress?” he asked, looking all the way up at her, shocked anew by her beauty without the soot.
“It was either your mother’s or your grandmother’s.” She smoothed her skirts in an erratic, uncharacteristic movement, and dislodged another of the rose ribbon florets. “I believe Mim found this and another in the attic.”
Ash nodded with a clearer head than the night before, and realized, as he should have then, that perhaps his bride would need a bit of wooing before he tried to bed her again. On the other hand, would he survive another attempt? “Did you hear?” he said, testing her. “Some thief broke into the house during the night and shot me.”
“I shot you.”
“Hah! I did not think you would own up to it.”
“I own up to everything …” Eventually. Lark made a promise to herself in that moment that she would tell him about cheating him into marriage, but not today. Not until Micah arrived, at the soonest, or in a letter, after her death perhaps, at the latest.
“You do not appear so menacing in women’s clothes,” her surprised bridegroom said.
Which is why I wear men’s clothes, she thought. “I will remember that you are of the opinion the next time I wish to menace you.”
“I have created a fiend,” Ash said to himself. “But now that I see you clean with your honey curls tamed, I find that I can no longer, in good conscience, call you Arky. It smacks of an expression for casting up one’s accounts. As if I might say, “he’s had so much to drink he’s arking all over the place,” which I still feel like doing, by the way.”
“You drink too much, which is why you feel the roiling need.” Lark knelt, all skittering nerves, beside his bed, at amazingly close eye level with the man about whom she had dreamed for years. She had forgot the beauty in his pale gray eyes, the way his mahogany hair flowed as if from that one remarkable point upon his brow. She wished she dared move that lazy lock from his eyes.
“Why Arky?” he asked. “‘Tis a terrible nickname.”
She agreed with half a nod. “When I was a babe, the word Larkin emerged from my small mouth as Arky. It stuck.”
His teeth were perfect, his smile deadly. “Unfortunate,” he said.
“So is your drinking and gambling. Is that why no woman would have you?”
“What?”
“Why were you jilted? Your friends made the task of finding a bride for you sound impossible.”
“Because society women are aware of my situation.”
“And should this situation concern me?”
“No, for it is better, by far, than the one I took you from.”
“Most situations would be, but I did fear you would hurt me last night.”
“So … you hurt me, first?”
Lark regarded her hands and fisted them to hide her broken nails. “It is the only way I know. You were deep in your cups when I peeked in, and not in your right mind.”
He granted as much with a grimace. “Perhaps we should become better acquainted for the nonce, while I recover, without drink, so that we may form a more prudent opinion of each other for the future.”
“I bathed again this morning,” she said, surprising him, by the look of him.
“I am prodigiously pleased to hear it. You will not be required to chase pigs here, by the way. We leave that to others. But I would be delighted if you bathed regularly.”
“Now that I am here, what will I be required to do, besides bathing, I mean?”
“Be my wife … and all that entails.”
Lark remembered the way he looked, and she felt, after he gave her his shirt in the maids’ room, her cheek against his naked chest with that mat of hair that appeared coarse but felt the way silk must. She shivered. “I do not understand the meaning of “all that entails.”
“We will address it in time, and when I am no longer indisposed with a gunshot wound, we shall try again.”
The skittering inside her trebled. “Try what?”
“Becoming better acquainted, to begin with. Fair enough?”
Lark hesitated. “Fair, I suppose, to begin with.”
They learned more about each other as they played cards through the first week of his recovery, because Ash liked to gamble and Lark appreciated every opportunity to test her skill without cheating.
She usually only cheated people who deserved it, of course, the same with picking their pockets, and she usually never shot anyone. Ashford was an exception in every way.
Marrying him had been another exception, with something greater than integrity in the balance. In her eyes, Micah’s future made Ash—the best man she knew, when not in his cups—fair game, or foul, however you regarded the issue. Besides, he had admitted to being desperate for a wife, so she had done him a favor, had she not?
“I cannot believe I am admitting this,” he said, at the end of the second week, “but I am sick unto death of gambling.”
Lark stopped shuffling her cards. “The stakes are likely not high enough,” she said.
“I had Grim bring some books. Perhaps you would read to me?”
“I, ah, have a scratchy throat from screaming last night,” she said in panic. “Perhaps, you could read to me?”
At the beginning of what Lark expected to be his third week of recovery, she found him in his chamber, dressed and champing at the bit, handsome as ever, and attempting to walk with a cane. “I must escape this room,” he said. “Have you toured the house yet?” He offered his free arm.
Lark took it and felt the heat of his nearness to the pit of her belly. “I wandered a bit, but the house is so large, I feared becoming lost. “I have noticed, however, that there are several paintings missing. Did you realize?”
“What makes you think so?”
“The squares of bright wallpaper here and there.”
Ash winced. “I had not thought them so obvious. The large library painting paid my father’s gambling debts. The one from my study satisfied his tailor. The three in the south parlor replaced five cottage roofs. The one over my bed shall be shortly sold to pay my voucher to your father.”
Lark nodded. “Good, then you have not been robbed.”
“Only by my father and my own stupidity.”
Lark grimaced inwardly, certain his regret must extend beyond losing the painting to being stuck with her. “I have spent some time outdoors,” she said to steer him from the conclusion. “Yesterday, after you took your medicine and slept, I stumbled upon a field of wild lavender, in blues and purples, just coming into flower, a breathtaking sight.”
Ash nodded. “One of my mother’s favorite spots, mine as well. She used to dry the flowers and place them in vases about the house.”
“Would she mind if I did so?”
“Not at all. I miss the scent about the place. Let us start our tour with the house, however, shall we, for I do not think I can walk quite as far as the lavender field today. I’d like to take you to the attic, so as to find you more gowns. You may think two will do, but until I can arrange to have a new wardrobe made for you, I would like to see you with more.”
Ash could barely raise the leg on his wounded side the height of a step, so Lark hooked his cane on her wrist and placed an arm about him. He gave her a sidelong glance as he leaned upon her and they started up. Did he doubt her sincerity? After last night, who could blame him?
“Thank you,” he said, releasing his breath, several steps later.
“‘Tis the
least I can do.”
He raised a speaking brow. “The very least.”
Amid a musty disharmony of discarded furniture, beside grime-glazed windows, spider-webbed corners, with the faded scent of lavender about them, Ash absorbed Larkin’s delight as she rummaged through a score of life-scarred old trunks.
To her, every unearthed buckle and feather appeared new and unequaled. Seeing the world through her guileless eyes gave Ash a glimpse into her true nature—not a dyed-in-the-wool gutter rat so much as a stalwart mouse, raised in the gutter, open to better … desperate for better.
Nothing jaded about his bride, not when it came to female fripperies. Every striped ribbon and scrap of lace a treat, her face alight, she stepped audaciously away from real life for a time as if to play at dress up.
She found two cambric night-shifts with sleep-jackets and night-caps from the last century and fell in love with them. He thought they must be his great-grandmother’s, but little did Larkin Rose care. She adored them. She found a threadbare chemise next and claimed that too.
The corset she wrapped about herself over her clothes made her groan as if in pain and roll her eyes, so she tossed that back like an undersized fish into a lake.
Ash sighed for losing the corset, as he tossed the night-caps after it. “I prefer your hair unadorned,” said he, certain that his appreciation of her tresses would not be welcome at this early stage.
When he found a cream high-waisted afternoon dress with burgundy overskirt, that he liked, she sighed as if to humor him and stepped behind an old Chinese screen to try it on.
“Must be one of my mother’s more recent purchases,” he said as she emerged wearing it. “It fits you well.”
Lark shrugged, returned behind the screen and came back folding it. Though damned near fashionable compared to the rest, the dress got placed in the trunk, rather than with the treasures she wished to keep. “I am not ready to meet your mother,” she said, her gaze trained guardedly upon it.
“You will tell me when you are?”
She sighed with relief, until Ash claimed the dress and slipped it beneath his arm. “I like it on you,” he said.
“I like these better.” She indicated her choices and turned away, as if dismissing the subject, or him, or both, only to unearth a trunk filled with nothing but slippers. Dozens of matched pairs in every hue and fabric. With a squeal, she knelt like a child over a new box of toys.
Ash sat careful and off-side on a previously plundered trunk, so as to observe her, a new and simple pleasure.
“I am in heaven,” said she as she placed her two shod feet before him, to show off a pair of blue-satin heeled slippers with silver buckles. “I have seen none so fine.”
Oddly pleased to be included in her enjoyment, Ash rifled through the trunk as well, found an embroidered pair in jonquil to match the dress she wore most often, and she let him slip them on her. A minute later, they each held one of the same pair, which amused her no end. Ash realized then that he had never really “seen” his unlikely bride. With the least attention and happiness, she, like a butterfly, emerged, a specimen of rare beauty.
She found five pairs of matching slippers that fit, no less in her glory at finding them than at the notion of wearing them.
Ash added his mother’s dress to her hoard. “We will send a maid for these later, for you will need both arms to help me down the stairs.” He thought she might remove the dress he liked from her stack, but when she saw that he watched, she shrugged and made to precede him out the door.
A papered polygon hatbox tied with tasseled red ribbon stopped her. She pointed it out. “What is that?” she asked with the excited curiosity of a child, so much so, that Ash was pleased to take it down.
“Untie it and look inside,” he said.
Larkin’s anticipation told him he’d made the right decision. She removed the lid, sounding as though she savored a sweetmeat deep in her throat and tore through the treasure. “Look, brocade bells, ribbons, silver stars, bows and rosettes.” Her face softened. “Fine-cut snowflakes made of parchment, almost as perfect as the real thing.” She regarded him as she stroked the snowflake in her palm. “Did you ever look at a real one? It’s a work of art.” She regarded him quizzically. “What do rich people do with such beautiful things?”
“They’re Christmas decorations. We place them about the house for the holiday,” he said, “at least we used to when my mother was—”
“I never saw Christmas.”
“What, never?”
She shook her head. “Same day as any other at the pub. I would not have known it was Christmas but for the rogues who stopped for a pint with holly in their buttonholes. That’s how I first knew you were a rogue.”
“So you knew, did you?”
“How does holly make a man a rogue, Ash?”
“‘Tis not the wearing of the holly makes him one,” Ash said with a wink. “‘Tis what he does with the sprig later that counts.”
CHAPTER SIX
“What does a rogue do with the holly in his buttonhole?”
Ash dropped a handful of parchment snowflakes over his naïve bride’s head, which made her lips twitch and her eyes twinkle. If he didn’t know better he’d think that Larkin Rose sometimes hid a giggle beneath the surface. “At Christmas, I will be pleased to show you,” he said. “If you will allow me.”
“Promise?”
“I certainly do.”
Lark collected the scattered snowflakes, from her hair, her shoulders, and even the floor, nowhere near as interested in his roguish nature as Ash would wish. “We can make more snowflakes,” he said. “They’re only paper.”
“I do want to learn how to make them,” she said, “and I will have you show me, but I’d like to keep these as well.”
“We will have to give you a rousing good Christmas this year to make up for the ones you’ve missed. I shall roll out all the old traditions.”
Her eyes widened. “What kinds of traditions?”
Ash told her about evergreens and kissing boughs with bells and ribbons in them, and the big cedar their old German estate manager, Stan Redman, who still lived in the dower house, had brought right into the picture gallery the year before he went to fight Boney. They had decorated the tree with nuts and pinecones, and ribbon rosettes that Stan’s wife Olive had made.
That had turned out to be his mother’s last real Christmas.
“I want a tree too,” Lark said, “a big one, and a Yule log, but may I take some of these decorations downstairs now, just to look at?”
“You may take anything you want. This is your home now, too,” he said, catching the glimpse of wonder his statement brought to her expression.
Ash spent the rest of the day in his office going over estate issues, problems, and expenses. He found so much work, after his weeks of recovery, that he failed to see his bride for the next two days as well, though he looked in on her every night as she slept.
He watched her throughout dinner at the end of that week, thinking he might have missed her, and saw that she took in everything he did, from the way he used his fork, as if she’d rarely seen one before, to the way he spooned his soup. He almost wished they weren’t economizing so that she could entertain him with her self-effacing eagerness to learn through several more dinner courses.
She’d changed into a simple green satin evening dress, not quite as new, or well-fitting, as the cream and burgundy afternoon dress he preferred, but not bad all the same, though it did already have a new tear at the shoulder, and it matched a pair of the slippers they’d found. Ash caught her every so often—whether in the dining room, the drawing room, or even walking outside—raising a foot and pointing her toes, so as to admire her slippers.
For a consolation prize of a bride, she had potential did this new wife of his. Ash cut a piece of beef and wondered how she’d react when he climbed into her bed later that night.
He toyed with the notion of preparing her for his nuptial invasion, by
warning her in advance, but he feared she’d simply bolt if he did, so he kept his own counsel. “You might have noticed,” he said, “that we are running the house with a quarter the normal staff.”
Lark shrugged. “You might have noticed,” she returned, “that where I come from nobody runs the house but me, so I wouldn’t know a normal staff to save me life.”
Ash nodded, stifling his grin, and giving her half an apology for his careless statement. “Likely then you will not fall into a fit of the vapors at my news, but I find myself very nearly without funds.”
“Your pawned paintings tell that tale,” she said with a dollop of sarcasm. “You gamble too much.”
“That too.” He sighed. “As my new wife, you should keep me otherwise occupied,” he teased, “and I’ll never have the desire to venture forth and gamble again.” But Ash could see from her blank expression that Larkin did not understand the nature of his insinuation.
“At any rate,” he added. “Cook is also the housekeeper of sorts. There are two maids, Mim and Nan, and Grimsley is my valet who also acts as butler. Brinks is not only the coachman but the stable-hand. I am not only the master but my own man of affairs and estate manager.”
“Everyone works very hard,” Lark said. “Especially you. I had noticed that.”
“My father kept the outside of the house in good repair—I must give him that much credit—but as for the inside, I hate these telltale signs of a depleted fortune, up to and including a short staff, but I will do what I must to keep the Chase. As for running it, old Stan still lives in the dower house with his wife, Olive, and acts as my advisor. They are a hard-working lot, my staff. I’m glad you’ve noticed. I want them to know and respect you as well. I’ll present you formally tomorrow.”
“Good, because I can help.”
“You know how to run a staff, then?”
“I know how to scrub a floor and change a bed and I could dig a ditch too, come to that.”
Ash winced. “Which my bride will most assuredly not do.”
Lark rose at his tone. “Then what the bloody blazes will your bride do?”
Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) Page 5
