Too Scot to Handle

by Grace Burrowes

  An hour with Anwen would be a delight by comparison.

  “I shall enjoy the air with you,” Miss Anwen said, taking Colin by the arm. “If I go back to Moreland House in my present mood, one of my sisters will ask if I’m well, and another will suggest I need a posset, and dear Aunt Esther will insist that I have a lie down, and then—I’m whining. My apologies.”

  Miss Anwen was very pretty when she whined. “So you will join me because you need time to maneuver your deceptions into place?”

  She shook free of his arm and stalked off toward the end of the corridor. “I am not deceptive, and insulting a lady is no way to inspire her to share your company.”

  Colin caught up with her easily and bowed her through the door. “I beg your pardon for my blunt words—I’m new to this business of being a lord. Perhaps you maneuver your polite fictions into place.”

  “I do not indulge in polite fictions.”

  The hell she didn’t. “Anwen, when I see you among your family, you are the most quiet, demure, retiring, unassuming facsimile of a spinster I’ve ever met. Now I chance upon you without their company, and you are far livelier. You steal birch rods, for example.”

  She looked intrigued rather than insulted. “You accuse me of thievery?”

  “Successful thievery. I’ve wanted to filch the occasional birch rod, but I lacked the daring. I’m offering you a compliment.”

  If he complimented her gorgeous red hair—more fiery than Colin’s own auburn locks—or her lovely complexion, or her luminous blue eyes—she’d likely deliver a scathing set down.

  Once upon a time, before Colin’s family had acquired a ducal title, Colin had collected both set downs and kisses like some men collected cravat pins. Now he aspired to be taken for a facsimile of a proper lordling, at least until he could return to Perthshire.

  “You admire my thievery?” Miss Anwen asked, pausing at the top of the front stairs.

  “The boys will thank you for it, provided the blame for the missing birch rod doesn’t land on them.”

  Miss Anwen had an impressive scowl. “Hitchings is that stupid. He’d blame the innocent for my impetuosity and enjoy doing so. Drat and dash it all.”

  She honestly cared about these scapegrace children. How…unexpected. “We’ll have the birch rod returned to wherever you found it before we leave,” Colin said. “Hitchings merely overlooked it when he left the schoolroom.”

  “Marvelous! You have a capacity for deception too, Lord Colin. Perhaps I’ve underestimated you.”

  “Many do,” Colin said, escorting her down the steps.

  He suspected many underestimated Miss Anwen too, because for the first time in days, he looked forward to doing the lordly pretty before all of polite society.

  And before Miss Anwen.

  * * *

  “What news, Tattling Tom?” Dickie asked, pushing his hair out of his eyes.

  As far back as they’d been mates, Rum Dickie had been asking for the news, and as best as Thomas could recollect, the news had always been bad.

  “Hitchings will leg it in June,” Thomas said, which came close to being good news.

  “So we’re for the streets by summer?” Dickie used a length of wire to twiddle the lock on the door, then hid the wire among the books gathering dust on the shelves.

  Wee Joe kept his characteristic silence. He was a good lad, always willing to stand lookout. Because of his greater size, he was also willing to take on the physical jobs such as boosting a fellow over the garden wall or putting up with Hitchings’s birchings.

  “Miss Anwen is worried,” Tom replied, trying to condense what he’d overheard outside the classroom. “Not enough funds to keep us fed, and Hitchings hasn’t got any useful ideas about where to get more blunt.”

  Wee Joe remained by the window—the detention room had the best view of the alley, proof that Hitchings was an idiot. If you wanted to shut a boy in so he’d sit on his arse and contemplate his supposed sins, you didn’t provide him a nice view from a window with a handy drainpipe two feet to the right.

  “Joe, come away from there,” Dickie said. “We’re supposed to be memorizing our amo, amas, amats.”

  Joe pointed out the window, so Tom joined him.

  “Cor, Joey. That’s a prime rig.” Not only did the phaeton have spanking yellow wheels, the couple on the bench looked like they came straight off some painting of Nobs Taking the Air.

  “Miss Anwen got herself a flash man,” Dickie marveled.

  Joe scowled ferociously.

  “That’s Bond Street tailoring, Joe,” Dickie said, “and the best pair in the traces Tattersalls has seen this year. Spanish, I’d say, not Dutch nags.”

  The gent got the phaeton turned about in the alley—no mean feat—and the team went tooling on their way.

  “Haven’t seen him before.” Tom was the designated intelligence officer in the group—Miss Anwen’s description of him—and he prided himself on keeping track of names and faces.

  “He’s Lady Rosalyn’s beau,” Dickie said. “Saw them at Gunter’s last week with Mr. Montague.”

  That earned another scowl from Joe, who took a seat on the floor beneath the window. Joe was blond, blue-eyed, and not a bad-looking boy, but he got cuffed a lot because he spoke so little. One of those blue eyes sported a fading bruise as a consequence.

  “I know I shouldn’t have been out on me own,” Dickie said, “but I go barmy staring at these walls, sitting on me feak, listening to old Hitchings wheezing hour after hour. If Miss Anwen would come read to us more often, I might not get so roam-y.”

  Restlessness affected all the boys, the longing to be back out on the streets, managing as best they could, free of Virgil and Proverbs—and Hitchings.

  “What do you suppose Hitchings will do when this place runs out of money?” Dickie asked.

  Hitchings wouldn’t last two days on the streets, but he certainly did well enough as the headmaster of the orphanage. Very well.

  “He’ll go for a tutor to some lord’s sons,” Tom said, “pound them with Latin and his damned birch rod, or kick them with his new bloody boots.” What would it feel like to put on a boot made for your own very foot?

  Joe swung his open hand through the air, mimicking a slap delivered to a boy’s face.

  “That too,” Dickie agreed. “Thank the devil we’re too big to be climbing boys.”

  Joe motioned jabbing the earth with a shovel.

  “The mines are honorable work,” Tom said, an incantation he’d overheard down at Blooming Betty’s pub.

  “The mines will kill us.” John climbed in the window as he spoke, making one of his signature dramatic appearances. “I had uncles who went down the mines. They were coughing their lungs out within a year.”

  He leapt to the floor as nimbly as an alley cat. The skills of a born housebreaker went absolutely to waste in this orphanage, as did Dickie’s ability with locks, and Joe’s pickpocketing.

  “Who wants a rum bun?” John asked, withdrawing a parcel from his shirt.

  Joe shook his head.

  “C’mon, Wee Joe,” John said, holding out a sweet and folding cross-legged to the floor. “It’s a cryin’ damned shame when a man can’t work his God-given trade. Me own da often said as much.”

  “Before the watch nabbed him,” Dickie muttered, snatching the bun. “You’ll get us all flogged to bits, John.”

  “I’ll get us all a fine snack,” John said around a mouthful of bun. “What was that gent doing here?”

  “Same thing we all do,” Dickie said. “He was falling in love with Miss Anwen.”

  “Lady Rosalyn won’t like that,” Tom said, tearing off a small bite of his bun.

  “Lady Rosalyn won’t care,” John countered. “She’s so pretty, all the gents want her. I should have stolen more buns.” He eyed the window longingly but remained where he was.

  “Don’t leave crumbs,” Tom cautioned. “Hitchings will see them, and we’ll be locked up in the broom closet next
time.”

  The broom closet stank of dirt and vinegar, and the boys were never incarcerated there all together, the space being too small.

  “Hitchings claims we’re running out of money,” Tom said, tearing off another tiny bite.

  “Hitchings has to say we’re nearly broke,” John replied, dusting his hands. “He has to keep them pouring money into his pockets whether or not there’s money in the box.”

  Tom studied his next bite of bun. “We could check. See what’s in the box. It’s been nearly a month. Never hurts to know the facts.”

  Nobody contradicted him, though sometimes it hurt awfully to know the facts. Tom had been the one to find his mum dead in her bed after the baby was buried. That fact still hurt a bloody damned lot.

  “I don’t mind it here, so much.” Dickie stuck his feet out straight in front of him. His trousers had no holes or patches, though the hems were a good three inches too short. His boots fit, and they almost matched. “For once, I didn’t spend all winter fighting for a place to shiver my nights away. That gets old.”

  “Nobody coughing himself to death here,” John conceded. “Damned consumption gets hold of a place, next thing you know, everybody’s being measured for a shroud.”

  “I say we should see how much blunt’s in the box.” Tom got to his feet and slouched against the wall near the window, not hanging out the window for all to see like some boys would.

  “Shite,” he whispered, pulling the window swiftly closed. “Hitchings is off somewhere.”

  “Whyn’t he go out the front door like usual?” Dickie asked, crowding in on Tom’s right. “Likes to be seen strutting down the walkway, showing off his finery, does our Mister Hitchings.”

  Joe snatched up his Latin grammar. Tom, Dickie, and John did likewise—Joe’s hearing was prodigious good—and a moment later, footsteps sounded in the corridor. By the time the door swung open, all four boys were absorbed in the intricacies of circum porta puella stat…or portal. Possibly portam.

  What did it matter, unless the puella was pulchra and amica?

  “He’s gone,” MacDeever said, holding the door open. “You have an hour of liberty, but don’t let Cook see you. One hour from now, you’re to be back here, looking sullen and peckish.”

  “Thanks,” Tom muttered, hustling through the door. John and Dickie followed him, Joe left last, bringing his grammar.

  MacDeever looked fierce, and he had the most marvelous Scots growl to go with his white eyebrows and tidy mustache, but he frequently foiled Hitchings’s worst excesses, probably risking his own post in the process.

  “One hour,” the groundskeeper said. “And if I see anybody climbing down the drainpipe in broad daylight again, I’ll deliver him in to Hitchings myself. What would Miss Anwen think if one of her boys were to break his head on the cobbles, eh?”

  What would Miss Anwen think if she knew that, every so often, her boys broke into Hitchings’s strongbox and took a detailed inventory of the contents?

  Chapter Two

  Anwen loosened her bonnet ribbons and nudged her millinery one inch farther back on her head, the better to enjoy the beautiful day.

  “Why don’t you take off your bonnet?” Lord Colin asked.

  He drove with the subtle expertise of one who knew his cattle and his way around London. Both horses were exactly the same height, build, and coloring, and they moved with the unity of a team raised and trained together.

  Anwen’s cousin Devlin St. Just, a former cavalryman who’d come into an earldom, would say these horses had an expensive trot. Muscular, rhythmic, closely synchronized, and to a horseman, beautiful.

  “A lady doesn’t go out without her bonnet, Lord Colin.”

  “Balderdash. My sisters claim to forget their bonnets when they want to enjoy the fresh air without wearing blinders. I have a theory.”

  “Are you the scientific sort, to be propounding theories?”

  He was the fragrant sort, though his scent was complicated. Woodsy with some citrus, a hint of musk, with a dash of raspberry and cinnamon. Parisian would be Anwen’s guess. Her sister Megan claimed Lord Colin was quite well fixed.

  “I’m the noticing sort,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I suspect you are too. A younger sibling learns all the best ways to hide and watch. My theory is that women wear bonnets so that men cannot be certain exactly which lady they approach unless the gentleman is confronting the woman head-on.”

  He halted the horses to wait at an intersection before turning onto Park Lane, so heavy was the traffic. For a moment, Anwen simply enjoyed the pleasure of being out and about on a sunny day. Helena Merton and her mama passed them, and Helena’s expression was gratifyingly dumbstruck.

  Anwen wiggled gloved fingers at the Mertons, the grown-up equivalent of sticking her tongue out.

  “Maybe, your lordship, the ladies wear their bonnets so they are spared the sight of any men but those willing to approach them directly.”

  Lord Colin gave his hands forward two inches and the horses moved off smoothly. “You would not have made that comment if any of your sisters were with us. Your sister Charlotte would have offered the same opinion, but you would have remained silent. If you were to pat my arm right about now, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Whyever—oh.” Anwen not only patted his arm, she twined her hand around his elbow. “Helena fancies you?”

  “That is the question. Does she fancy me, my brother’s title, my lovely estate in Perthshire, or any man who will get her free of her mother’s household? Your uncle is a duke, you’ve doubtless faced a comparable question frequently. How do you stand it?”

  Even for a Scotsman, Lord Colin was wonderfully blunt. “I love Uncle Percy. There’s nothing to stand.”

  That was not quite true. The social season was an exercise in progressive exhaustion, and each year, Anwen wished more desperately that she could be spared the waltzing, the fortune hunters, the at homes, the fittings, the…

  The boredom.

  “So every fellow who bows over your hand and professes undying devotion means it from the bottom of his pure, innocent, financially secure heart?”

  Anwen had not endured a profession of dying devotion from a bachelor for at least three years, thank heavens.

  “The gallant swains are merely being polite, as am I when I accept their flattery. You have younger brothers, am I correct?”

  “Three, each one taller, louder, and hungrier than the last. The French Army at its plundering worst couldn’t ravage the countryside as thoroughly as those three when they’re in the mood for a feast.”

  What would that be like? To have younger siblings? People to condescend to and look out for?

  “You miss them, Lord Colin. I can hear it in your voice and see it in your eyes.”

  The MacHughs whom Anwen had met—Hamish, Edana, Rhona, and Colin—were red-haired and blue-eyed. Anwen’s hair wasn’t red, it was orange. Bright, brilliant, light-up-the-night-sky, flaming, orange.

  Her male cousins had dubbed her the Great Fire when she was six years old.

  Lord Colin’s hair was darker than his brother’s, shading toward Titian, and his eyes were a softer blue—closer to periwinkle than delphinium. Helena Merton would fancy herself in love with those eyes, while her mama was likely enthralled with the family title—a Scottish dukedom, no less—and the settlements.

  “I miss my siblings,” Lord Colin said. “I miss home, I miss wearing clothes that don’t nearly choke a man if he wants to exert himself beyond a plodding stroll. I miss tramping over the moors with my fowling piece, and I sorely miss the smell of the wort cooking in the vats.”

  Did he miss a young lady who remained back in Scotland longing for him?

  “Be patient another two months or so, and you can return to your Highlands, your distillery, and your sheep, or whatever else you’re pining for.”

  To look at Lord Colin, Anwen would never have suspected he was homesick. He had a ready smile, and his manner was a trifl
e flirtatious. A dimple cut a deep groove on the left side of that smile and made his features interesting. Everything else was in gentlemanly proportion, though his nose was a touch generous, while that dimple pulled his expression off center, in the direction of roguish.

  When Frederica and Amanda Fletcher wheeled past, their brother at the ribbons of their barouche, Anwen lifted her hand in a more extravagant wave.

  “My thanks,” Lord Colin muttered, as he guided the horses to the leafy beauty of Hyde Park in springtime. “Those two hunt as a pair, and a man can’t dance with just the one sister, he must stand up with each in turn. Now that Hamish has gone off on his wedding journey, I’m the only escort Edana and Rhona have, so I’m always on picket duty.”

  A military term, though Mayfair’s ballrooms were hardly battlegrounds. “You served in Spain.”

  “And in Portugal, France, the Low Countries. War is in some ways quite simple. Your equipment is a gun, a bedroll, and a few cooking implements, all of which you keep in good repair. You shoot at the fellows wearing enemy uniforms. You don’t shoot at anybody else. Makes for a pleasing sense of order. London in springtime is a regular donnybrook by comparison. I considered it my job to guard Hamish’s back, but now your sister has taken that post.”

  Lord Colin reminded Anwen of herself in her third season. The first season was all excitement and adventure. Even if marriage wasn’t an immediate objective, it was at long last a possibility. In her second season, she’d enjoyed not being a debutante, not being so giddy and nervous.

  In her third season, she’d started dressing for comfort instead of display, and learned that sore feet, a megrim, a head cold, all had their places on a young lady’s spring calendar.

  Now, she simply endured, but for her work at the orphanage, which might soon close its doors for want of coin.

  “You abhor idleness,” Anwen said as the press of carriages required the team to slow to a walk. “Is that because you’re in trade?”

  The question was bold, but not quite rude between in-laws.

  “I am, indeed, in trade.” Lord Colin sounded pleased about it too. “I gather some people expect me to sell my distillery and pretend I’m content to raise sheep. Hamish was given to understand that his breweries are also not quite the done thing for a duke. Good luck getting him to give up profitable enterprises.”