The Hero Least Likely

by Darcy Burke

  He’d closed himself off from society for a reason. Soulless cretins like Phineas Mapleton were perhaps the bottom of the barrel, but she had no doubt Bartholomew withstood countless questions and implied insults about his injury and his ability to still be a man, even if he laughed them off.

  Worse, she suspected, were the people who felt sorry for him. Who thought they were being kind when they showered him with pity or treated him like an invalid incapable of caring for himself.

  As a woman, she’d long been familiar with a world that dismissed her concerns, opinions and aspirations, simply because she was female. As a champion for the poor and the marginalized, she well knew the maddening, soul-consuming frustration of being discounted for something over which there was no hope to change.

  She had never thought it could apply to Bartholomew.

  The back of her throat tightened. ’Twasn’t right. One could not change one’s gender, or one’s parentage, or grow back a leg. But that didn’t make one any less important, any less worthy. And she certainly couldn’t do anything that would make his situation even worse.

  “About that…” she began, her voice unsteady.

  Bartholomew’s brow furrowed. “About what?”

  “About me crying off.” She bit her lip as she considered how to proceed.

  If she was the one to cry off, she would make him a laughingstock. Perhaps make it impossible for him ever to find a real bride.

  Bartholomew deserved better. He deserved to find love.

  “You want to do it now?” He darted a glance about the crowded room. “Don’t you need to wait until your birthday?”

  “Not here,” she said quickly, caressing his arm with her thumb. “And not until my birthday. But when I inherit my portion, I need you to cry off.”

  “Out of the question,” he said without hesitation. “It would ruin your chances of ever getting married.”

  Precisely why she couldn’t do the same thing to him. Not after all he’d been through. What she was still putting him through.

  “I don’t ever want to get married,” she reminded him. “You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  He shrugged. “I won’t do it at all.”

  “You must,” she said firmly. “Because I won’t do it, and we’re not getting married. You must cry off.”

  He laughed. “You cannot truly expect me to jilt you. It would be disastrous to your reputation under the best of circumstances. In our case, even worse. The gossip will already be horrendous. No man will ever play suitor to a woman even a peg-leg wouldn’t marry.”

  “Don’t say that about yourself,” she said fiercely. “My goals hinge on me remaining single, but your dreams do not. Your injuries won’t preclude you from finding a wife. Not if you’re the one who jilts me. I’ll make it known that you’re the greatest catch this town has ever seen. By the time I’m done, there won’t be a marriageable young lady in the entire country who wouldn’t give her last penny for a chance to catch your eye. I’ll—”

  Bartholomew spun her in front of him and grasped her wrists so hard she winced at the sudden pain. A mottled flush crept up the sides of his neck.

  “Wrong,” he snarled, nostrils flaring. “Don’t you dare turn me into one of your causes. I don’t want your charity.”

  He tossed her hands aside and turned and stalked away.

  SEVENTEEN

  Furious, Bartholomew flung open the tavern door and stormed inside.

  A few short days ago, he had walked out of the Ross town house because he could not, could not, listen to the woman he was protecting act as though he were the one in need of her protection. His mother’s lack of confidence in him was bad enough. He bloody well didn’t need it from Daphne.

  She was the one who had called upon him for help. He’d agreed to help her out of a scrape. Not to help her plot her next crusade for poor, peg-legged Major Blackpool. He didn’t need her to do him any favors. To throw away her future, just to improve his.

  She would cry off. He would ensure it.

  He’d be the largest thorn in her side, a constant nettle on her nerves, until she’d rather pull out her beautiful hair than spend another moment with her name linked to his. The morning of her birthday, she’d have retractions in every newspaper and scandal sheet in all of England.

  If he didn’t throttle her first.

  He spotted her red-gold ringlets across the tavern. Dratted woman. His ears pounded in exasperation. He shoved through the swarm of shopkeepers and drunkards until he was finally close enough to grab her by the upper arm and haul her away from buzzing voices and spilt ale.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

  “You came!” She had the gall to look delighted at his presence. “I didn’t think you’d remember.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be foolish enough to show,” he snapped.

  “This is Cheapside,” she admonished him. “Whitechapel is several blocks away. And what if it weren’t? The rookeries have as much right to self-improvement as anyone else.”

  “What right might that be?” He motioned toward the cracked, pungent tables. “The right to ruin your reputation beyond repair by traipsing unchaperoned through back alley pubs?”

  “Of course not.” She pointed over the heads of the men seated on the benches to a petite brown-haired maid cowering in the far corner. “You recognize Esther, don’t you? I’m perfectly respectable. Wouldn’t go anywhere without at least a lady’s maid. Especially since Katherine was too busy to join us today.”

  He couldn’t believe his ears. “You invited the Duke of Lambley’s cousin to accompany you to a Cheapside tavern?”

  Of course she did. He should have known. Given the motley guest list at Miss Ross’s soirée, the greater miracle was that the woman had passed on the opportunity.

  “’Tis better that you’re here, of course.” Daphne winked conspiratorially. “We can be a young couple in love, presenting a united front against the injustice of the government’s greed.”

  “What I would love to do,” he ground out, “is throw you over my shoulder and march you straight home.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She pointed behind him. “How would Esther get home?”

  He ran a hand through his hair to keep from making good on his threat. “How indeed. I suppose we should just stay here then, and hope no one notices us?”

  “I hope everyone notices us. The laboring class is counting on it.” She held up a sheet of parchment half-covered with scrawled signatures. “This petition is going to join dozens of others and be presented to the House of Commons.”

  He squinted at the paper. “What makes you think they’ll listen to you?”

  “Not to me.” She gestured over her shoulder. “Them. When thousands of righteous voices ally against a common injustice—”

  “Income tax isn’t an evil plot. How else do you expect the government to manage the National Debt? It’s at seven hundred million pounds and rising.”

  She blinked in surprise.

  He could’ve kicked himself. Now she’d suspect the truth. He hadn’t just perused newspapers during his convalescence. He read them assiduously, and paid as close attention to the details as she did. That didn’t mean he agreed with her methods. Such as an utter disregard to her name and her safety.

  Daphne lifted her chin. “I expect the government to manage its own finances, and to allow the rest of us to do the same.” She shook out the petition. “I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

  He plucked the parchment from her grasp. Name after name covered most of the front side. “Who are these people?”

  “Merchants, manufacturers, tradesmen. Landowners. Bankers. A better question is, who aren’t they?”

  He snorted. “Easy to answer. They’re not anyone with any influence. I don’t recognize a single name on that paper.”

  “Yes, well.” She bit her lip. “If you could ask a few friends in high places to—”

  “I will not have anything to do
with this or any other of your well-meant but ill-conceived notions. Nor will I presume to beg my friends to do so.” He rolled up the parchment. “Not that they would.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Just because you don’t agree with a cause doesn’t mean that the people shouldn’t have a voice before the representatives who govern them. Wasn’t the war you just fought in response to a tyrannical emperor who—”

  “Point made. Everyone’s voice deserves to be heard.” He glanced about the loud, boisterous room. “Can we leave now?”

  She shook her head. “Not until everyone has had an opportunity to sign the petition.”

  His jaw clenched in exasperation. “Where is the pen and ink?”

  “At each end of the room. I brought two sets. What are you…?”

  He scanned the tables for the closest inkwell and marched straight into the fray. When he got within reach of the first table, he slapped the petition onto its scarred surface, dipped the idle pen into the pot of ink, and handed it to the closest shopkeeper. “Stop talking. Sign.”

  Startled, the shopkeeper accepted the pen and scrawled his name below the others without more than a cursory glance at the heading across the top.

  “Excellent.” Bartholomew pushed the petition in front of the next one. “Sign.”

  The shopkeeper stared up at him in befuddlement. “What do you think you’re—”

  “Changing the future,” Bartholomew interrupted in an exaggeratedly pleasant voice. “Isn’t that why we’re all here? Income tax is high. Employment is low. Here’s a petition. Do you prefer to be compliant or triumphant?”

  The man quickly signed his name. Bartholomew moved on to the next one. Perhaps Daphne’s plan wasn’t as daft as it had first sounded. These men had given their time to join forces to try to have a voice before Parliament. Perhaps it would even work. If they set down their ale long enough to truly take action.

  He took another look at the long list of signatures covering the petition and grudgingly admitted that the strange sensation inside his chest was pride. His faux fiancée’s methods were unconventional, but he now saw how fortunate all her charities were to have her on their side. If anyone could save the miners and the weavers and the orphans and the Cheapside shopkeepers, it was Daphne.

  He headed to the next table of laborers feeling lighter than he had before.

  Daphne hurried to keep up. “You knew employment was low and there was unrest in the streets?”

  “I told you. I spent seven months with nothing else to do but read the papers.”

  “Then why didn’t you—”

  “—become an insurrectionist and try to spark a revolution? I don’t know. Perhaps because I’m an ex-Corinthian without a title or a leg to stand on. Literally.” He touched a finger to his chin and peered down at her. “Or perhaps because I’m not mad.”

  Her eyes flashed. “I’m not mad!”

  He grinned at her. “How do you know? All the best revolutionaries had a few bats in the belfry. How else did they get the courage to try and change the unchangeable?”

  She blinked in confusion. “You don’t… disagree with the idea?”

  “I disagree with you traipsing about taverns with no more chaperonage than that terrified chit hiding in the corner. Make-believe betrothal or not, I forbid you from taking unnecessary risks with your life or your safety. You won’t help anyone if you’re in a hospital or Bedlam or dead.”

  He collected the pen and ink and made his way to the next table.

  She gestured at the petition in his hands. “Are you just humoring me to keep me safe?”

  When he’d first found out about her charity work, that answer might have been yes. Four weeks ago, he would have dragged her out of the door and turned her over his knee if he had to in order to wake her up to the world around her.

  But somewhere along the line, she’d begun to wake him up to the realities around them.

  Did he think she and her shopkeepers would overthrow income taxation? Not a chance in hell. But he couldn’t help but admire her drive, her heart, and her courage. The passion she brought to everything she did, no matter how unlikely it was to succeed or how unworthy the recipient of her attention.

  If he pulled her onto his lap today, it wouldn’t be to scold her.

  It would be to kiss her senseless.

  EIGHTEEN

  No kissing, Bartholomew promised himself a few days later as he escorted Daphne to a dinner party at the Willoughby town house. No kissing, no matter how desperately he longed to taste her lips. He needed her to break off the engagement, not to compromise her into marriage.

  He’d devised a plan of attack. As long as he concentrated on rubbing her the wrong way, her wrongheaded campaign to salvage his image at the expense of her own should dissolve on its own. Fortuitously, they were seated right across the table from each other. There would be no escaping his onslaught of annoyances.

  He started by engaging the young bucks in his vicinity in conversation. The only topics of interest to them were phaetons, pugilism, and the proper folds of a neckcloth. Not only would Daphne consider all of these subjects to be typical ton frivolousness, they also happened to be areas in which Bartholomew had a great deal of expertise. Nothing would repulse her more.

  “The first time I was invited to Brummell’s toilette,” he began as pompously as possible, “’twas because he sought my opinion on whether the knot of his cravat should contain an asymmetrical cascade of folds.”

  The aspiring dandies were, as expected, utterly enthralled. Even a few of the young ladies stared in open fascination, their interest as likely due to the questionable propriety of mentioning one’s toilette in public as to the wonder of having been one of the select few Beau Brummell had invited into his dressing room to witness his infamous five-hour morning ritual.

  Bartholomew had done no such thing, of course, but since Brummell had recently fled to France to escape debtor’s prison, ’twas unlikely he’d walk up behind Bartholomew and spoil the Banbury story he was inventing as he went along.

  “Oh, yes,” he answered one of the young bucks with as much earnestness as he could muster. “Brummell always said that if it took less than an hour to fold one’s cravat, one was obviously doing it wrong. Each fold should be an expression of one’s inner passion.”

  Daphne cut him a look of utter disbelief. Not because she doubted his ability to overcomplicate a neckcloth—if Captain Xavier Grey were here, he might enquire whether Bartholomew was wearing a bed sheet and the four-poster canopy—but because he’d helped her during the demonstration. She now believed he had more rattling about his head than waistcoats and racing curricles. She imagined he might become a crusader.

  He intended to correct that misconception once and for all.

  “A gentleman must endeavor to put his best leg forward, Brummell always said.” Bartholomew leaned forward to wink at his crowd. “In my case… my only leg. He and I did get off on the right foot.”

  Daphne covered her face with her hand.

  He smiled. Good. One did not delay parting ways with someone one found dreadfully embarrassing.

  As he kept up a lively, nonsensical conversation about the proper temperature of pomade to style one’s hair and whether a gentleman ought to alter the color palette of his waistcoat before or after the vernal equinox, a curious thing began to happen. So curious, in fact, that it took him a prodigious amount of time to even determine what it was.

  He was having fun.

  It had been years since he’d discussed fashion—three and a half years, to be precise—and it was amusing to discover that he still could, despite a complete lack of knowledge about whatever intricacies of vogue and tailoring had transpired since then.

  He’d missed the latest technological advances in virtually every style of carriage. He hadn’t played faro or polo since before purchasing his commission. And if he visited Gentleman Jackson’s today, he doubted he’d recognize half the faces.

  Yet he was having fun.


  It struck him as so unlikely, so impossible a circumstance, that he froze with his serviette halfway to his lips in consternation. And guilt. Did he deserve to have fun?

  Enjoying life again despite being crippled would be nothing short of a miracle. But enjoying life again without Edmund seemed nothing short of a betrayal.

  He’d led his brother into danger and left him to die. There. He wasn’t worthy of happiness. Of fun and laughter. Question answered. He’d better not get too used to being on center stage. As soon as he’d completed his favor for Daphne, he’d shutter himself back in his shadowed town house where he belonged. No curricle rides. No dinner parties. No Daphne.

  This time, he’d finally let his valet go. It was cruel to keep someone of that talent tethered to a man who fully intended to live out the rest of his days as a recluse.

  Perhaps Captain Grey was in want of a valet who knew how to tie a proper bed sheet.

  “Almack’s,” Daphne breathed in response to some unheard question. Her eyes met his only briefly from across the table, but their glittering contempt was enough to chill his blood. “Why, no, I don’t have a voucher to attend a pretentious weekly showcase run by judgmental dragons who can think of no better use for their money or influence. Why do you ask?”

  He barely refrained from dropping his glass into his lap. Either Daphne recognized his game, or she’d come up with the same plan on her own. And was winning.

  “Gowns are very important,” she was saying earnestly to some poor bastard on her right. “Textiles have an unparalleled impact on the economic balance and living conditions of manual laborers in Lancashire and other areas. One needn’t be a Luddite to see the increase in displaced weavers makes entire families more susceptible to famine and disease.”

  This time, Bartholomew covered his face with his hands. No one was looking at him anyway. Every eye was trained on Daphne in horror.

  “Well, then.” Lady Willoughby rose to her feet. “I think its time for dancing. Are we all in agreement?”