by Wilma Counts
The next day he met Lady Henrietta in the morning room and they went through the motions of yet another lesson. Both knew he was as ready as he was likely to be for his big come out. He was sure that she was as reluctant as he to give up these sessions that allowed them simply to be together. They sat side-by-side at the glass-topped table, books and papers scattered in front of them. She had convinced him to read that new novel, Pride and Prejudice, and they discussed it after exhausting news items and gossip that appeared in both the more respected press and the tabloids.
“Do you not agree that Elizabeth Bennett is just as arrogant as she accuses Mr. Darcy of being?” he asked as much to tease her as to elicit a considered response. They were only now getting into the third volume of the book.
“No. How could she possibly accept the suit of a man who not only holds her family in such contempt, but must force himself to accept the fact that he loves her?”
“What if the situation were reversed? What if his status and his connections were of such dubious worth that she would be demeaning herself to accept him?”
He held her gaze until she looked away, her gaze directed, unseeing, at the wet foliage just outside the French doors of this room. She shifted slightly in her seat before saying, “I think Elizabeth would be in a very difficult position, given that her family has such limited prospects.”
“But what about him? And her? Would she throw caution to the winds and love him anyway?”
She brought her gaze back to his and said slowly, “She—she might do so. If she truly loved him enough.”
He knew that neither of them was discussing the book any longer.
“And does she?” he asked softly.
“Perhaps. Probably.” She looked down at the open book and her tone was filled with a resigned sadness. “But it is not merely a matter of loving another person, is it? The world always has a way of intruding.”
He leaned closer to her and placed an arm around her shoulders, aware of that woody-floral scent she always wore. “Devil take the world,” he said in that same soft tone and kissed her very, very thoroughly.
She put her hand to his cheek and responded in kind, emitting a small moan of desire, but she quickly pulled away when they heard footsteps outside the door that had, as usual, been left ajar.
“That intruding world,” he whispered and leaned back in his own chair as the footman Baker knocked perfunctorily, entered at her bidding, and handed her a message on a salver.
She opened it and said nervously, “The invitation to Rebecca’s ball. She made certain to include you.”
* * * *
Besides being called upon to report for his usual lessons, Jake was also still being asked to accompany Lady Henrietta on certain outings. Thus he and Annie attended her on a visit to a modiste for a fitting of the gown she would wear to Rebecca’s ball. From there she went to a shop specializing in buttons, ribbons, lace, and other decorations for ladies’ dresses and bonnets. Jake found this sort of outing utterly boring, but he remained alert as he waited outside the shop. The weather being relatively dry this day, he leaned against the outer wall of the shop a few feet from the entrance. He saw a hackney cab pull up and position itself immediately in front of the Blakemoor carriage. Jake exchanged a glance with the Blakemoor coachman who merely raised an eyebrow and shrugged. The cab did not move and Jake was about to stroll over to ask if there was a problem when Annie emerged from the shop with her arms full of parcels. Lady Henrietta was in the open doorway apparently saying farewell to the shopkeeper.
Suddenly, the door to the cab opened and a man jumped down to hand a buxom, middle-aged woman to the pavement. The woman wore an expensive brown traveling cloak and far more make-up than any respectable matron would be wearing in public. Before Jake realized what she was about, the woman had grabbed Annie’s arm, forcing the maid to drop her packages.
“Now, I’ve got you, you little slut! There will be no running away from me again!” She pushed Annie toward the man who stood near the open door of the cab. Lady Henrietta saw what was happening and instantly jumped into the fray, screaming and shoving at the woman as she tried to get hold of Annie herself, grabbing at the maid’s cloak. Now the man was trying to force a fighting, yelling Annie into the cab. Lady Henrietta rushed at him and tried to keep Annie away from the open door. The buxom woman was slapping and punching Lady Henrietta. At this point, with no regard for what was supposed to be the fair sex, Jake shoved the older woman hard enough to set her on her backside on the curb.
“Just get ’er in the cab and go!” the woman yelled at her companion.
He, however, was having a hard time fending off Lady Henrietta, who still had hold of Annie’s cloak. She pulled hard and she and Annie fell into a noisy heap of flailing arms and legs near the step of the cab. The man kicked at Lady Henrietta and tried to make another grab for Annie. Jake threw a strong punch at the man that, in the melee, hit the man’s shoulder and spun him around. At this point, the hackney driver, probably seeing the quality of the folks involved in the altercation and aware of the attention it was garnering, decided he wanted nothing to do with it, whipped his team into action, pulled his vehicle into the street, and dashed away.
The scene had transpired in only a very few minutes—maybe seconds—but it was accompanied by yells, screams, and loud grunts. Customers from the shop and the one next door, as well as other shoppers on the street began to gather and gawk.
“Someone go for a watchman,” Jake ordered. “There must be one in this area with all its shops.”
“Be a while,” a male bystander said. “Office is three streets over, don’t you know?”
“Just go!” Jake yelled, keeping a firm hold of the man and shoving the woman back down as she tried to get to her feet. “You just stay right there,” he ordered.
“You got nothin’ on me,” the woman screamed, partly at him and partly for the benefit of the gathering crowd. “That girl is a runaway an’ she belongs to me.”
Annie and her mistress had struggled to their feet; Lady Henrietta’s bonnet was askew and Annie’s lay on the ground. Annie picked up her muddied bonnet, put it back on her head, and stood strangely quiet, a blank look in her eyes. Shock, Jake surmised.
Lady Henrietta placed an arm about the maid and replied, “She ‘belongs’ to no one! She is her own person!”
The woman managed to get to her feet and made a grab at Annie. “She’s mine. Bought and paid for.”
Annie squealed and Lady Henrietta gave the woman a very unladylike punch to her face. The woman screamed and clutched at her nose. Her man jerked away from Jake and tried to intercede for her, but Jake punched him again, catching him on the chin this time; the man slowly sank to the pavement and did not move.
The woman yelled, “You’ve killed him!”
“I doubt that,” Jake said. “And you’d best stop your caterwauling until the watchman gets here.”
“Better do as he tells you,” someone among the bystanders said. “That fellow packs a wicked punch, he does.”
The crowd seemed interested in the show, but Jake felt they mostly favored him and Lady Henrietta, who had now helped Annie into the Blakemoor carriage and stood nearby as the woman in brown persisted in trying to win over the bystanders. “He’s got no call,” she argued. “I paid good coin for the girl’s services and that one”—she pointed at Lady Henrietta—“just stole her right away from me.”
“Hey! I know her!” a surprised male bystander yelled out, pointing at the woman who was holding a handkerchief to her nose. “That is,” the man said, suddenly seeming embarrassed, “I know who she is. She’s the madam at The Bird’s Nest, a brothel out in Spitalfields area.”
“A brothel! Well, I never—” said a well-dressed woman next to him in a shocked tone as she backed away from the scene, but not so far away that she would miss anything.
Now the crowd w
as firmly against the woman in brown. Her protests turning feeble, she seemed to accept defeat as they awaited the watchman’s arrival. She kept looking at Jake, her brow furrowed in curiosity and anger. Jake ignored her stare, but a twinge of apprehension kept nipping at him.
Finally, she said, “Hah! Now I remember where I seen you before! Years ago—more’n fifteen at least—you was with a bunch of college boys come to my place an’ ’bout destroyed it.”
Jake looked directly at her and shook his head. “You are out of your mind, woman.” He had recognized the name of that brothel, The Bird’s Nest, and reaching into the recesses of memory, he brought up an alcohol-soaked vision of a bunch of overzealous and overly drunk university students who let themselves loose on the town one spring. As he recalled, that was one of the incidents that had been the last straw for his father. Ordinarily the woman’s accusation would have been meaningless, and Jake could have shrugged it off. But he had to protect his identity at this point. Now, more than ever.
“I never forget a face,” the woman said.
“Well, you have the wrong one this time,” he snapped, turning away from her and catching the speculative gaze of Lady Henrietta.
A few minutes later the watchman, a tall, thin man who might have fulfilled the role of the “First Footer,” arrived with enough enforcements to take the two miscreants into custody. He jotted down the names and addresses of the principals in the incident and those of a few willing witnesses on a pad, then turned to Lady Henrietta. “I doubt you will be called to testify when this comes to court, my lady, but the magistrate will surely want to hear from your maid, so it would best if you see that she remains available.”
“We both shall be,” she replied as Jake handed her into the carriage to sit beside Annie; then he climbed in himself to sit opposite them. A young man handed in the packages that had been dropped; Lady Henrietta thanked him and signaled the coachman to go before turning her attention to the still distraught Annie. Both women bore evidence of their encounter: patches of mud on their skirts, mud and scratches on their faces. Lady Henrietta has lost a glove in the encounter.
“Oh, my lady,” Annie wailed, “I knowed it couldn’t last. You never should’ve took me in like you did. Now ever’one will know I come from that—that place, an’ it’ll come back on you.”
“Never you mind, Annie. You are going nowhere,” Lady Henrietta said, putting an arm around Annie’s shoulders.
“But when the countess comes back and the whole house knows, you’ll have to sack me. I know you will.”
Lady Henrietta gave the girl a firm shake. “Stop that now. I have put far too much effort into training you as a proper lady’s maid to give you up at this point. Unfortunately, there are people who will hold your past—which you could not help—against you. Some may even hold it against me. But those are people of small minds, people lacking in charity towards others. As for the countess—we shall deal with that issue when we must, but now—”
“Oh, my lady.” Annie dissolved into a fresh spate of sobs.
In part to help bring Annie around, Jake said in a calm voice, “Would you care to explain what that incident was all about?”
Lady Henrietta sighed. “Annie was twelve when that—that female—bought her from the mistress of a flash house. She’d already been put on the street as a pickpocket, but those two beldames took another look at her and decided a pretty young thing like that would bring in more coin in the brothel. The madam put her to work immediately.”
“In the brothel.” Jake was careful to keep his tone neutral for Annie’s sake.
“In the brothel,” Lady Henrietta repeated. “God knows how many times that despicable woman sold Annie’s ‘virginity’ or quite how she managed that trick, but she did.”
“She done it to lots a girls.” Annie’s sobs devolved into hiccups, then sighs.
“By the time a judge is through with her, she will be lucky if she is selling her wares in New South Wales,” Jake said.
“Transportation?” Annie asked wonderingly.
“Transportation,” he affirmed. “Kidnapping is a hanging offense and that is precisely what she had in mind. Actually, she will be lucky if she is merely transported to a penal colony.”
Annie sat silent for a few moments, then said, “Still, I don’t want to bring shame to you, my lady. Mayhap Miss Fairfax can place me as a scullery maid or some such.”
“Absolutely not. I will not hear of it,” her ladyship replied. “I do not want to hear of it from you again, either.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Annie said.
“Now,” Lady Henrietta said decisively, looking directly at Jake. He thought she looked decidedly fetching despite a streak of mud on her cheek, her bonnet askew, and strands of hair flying about with each breath she took. “Just what was that business about college boys tearing up the premises of a brothel?”
He knew this was coming, but he merely shrugged. “The woman was clearly mistaken.”
“As Lady Davenport was mistaken?”
“Can I help it if I have a very common visage?”
Her ladyship merely sniffed and turned back to comforting Annie.
Chapter 18
For a full day and into the night Retta had struggled with what she thought of as “the Jake dilemma.” When the bet was won—or lost—he would leave Blakemoor House. The thought of no longer sharing time with him had become far more devastating than the prospect of losing Moonstar. She could not face the possibility that he would not be there to offer his take on what the newspapers were reporting or arguing with her about the actions of some government minister who was making a mistake—or had got something right. Lately, she had introduced into their lessons more discussions of literature. The Pride and Prejudice novel of course, but also works by some of her favorite poets and she was delighted to find he enjoyed the works of Blake and Wordsworth as much as she did. She challenged him on that—how had someone with the limited education he claimed to have be familiar with such works. He shrugged off her questions with “I’ve been reading—that is, I have read a great deal in many areas since I left the vicar’s day school.”
She did not push the conversation regarding his own learning—she dared not bring her doubts into the open yet, but she was sure there was more to it than he admitted. Soon enough she would have the truth about this man. In thinking about it later, she was surprised that she was able to control her curiosity enough not to push him. Instead, she had shifted the subject to the general topic of public education and was pleased to find his views more or less coincided with hers on that topic. “Though the Methodists have a narrow goal in mind,” he said, “their insistence that people of all classes should learn to read is most laudable—as a start at least.”
When he was no longer there, she would profoundly miss little personal things about him: the way he twisted his mouth when he was contemplating an idea, the twinkle in his eyes when he was teasing her, the way his fingers coaxed music from piano keys, that faint twitch of a smile when they both happened to think of the same thing in the midst of company, and his touch—accidental or not.
If I am to lose all that, she told herself, I will, by all that is holy, seize what I may while it is still possible. “Carpe diem” as the ancients said. Was she being too impulsive, just as she had been with that infernal bet that had brought Jake into her life to start with?
Probably.
But she would not be deterred.
She waited until she was quite sure that all the inhabitants of the house were settled into their own chambers and likely off in dream land. She threw back her covers and donned a silk dressing gown over her nightgown of thin lawn. She peeped from her own bedchamber into the adjacent sitting room to be sure both her aunt and her companion had retired to their own rooms, then she crossed that room and cautiously opened the door to the hall. She listened for any activity there, and f
inding nothing but silence, she let herself out the door, and hurried down the hall, and down the stairs to the floor on which she knew Jake’s room to be. She stood before his door for a moment. Am I really going to do this? Before she could answer that even in her own mind, she knocked softly.
She heard him rustling about, then he opened the door. “My lady?” he asked in surprise. “Is something wrong? Why . . . why are you here?”
She had planned to be ever so sophisticated—a true woman of the world at this point, but that plan was lost as the words just came tumbling out. “You told me to let you when I was ready for an affair. I am ready.”
“What?” His eyebrows shot up.
“Don’t make me repeat it, Jake,” she pleaded.
He took her hand, pulled her into the room, and closed the door. “Are you sure of this? I mean, really sure?” He still held her hand and gazed into her eyes. His touch and the raw hunger in his gaze were doing strange—wonderful—things to her body.
She saw that he had partially undressed, having removed his shirt and his boots and tossed a dark blue robe over his breeches. She recognized the robe as having once belonged to her brother Gerald. She saw that he had been reading in a big overstuffed chair. The lamp beside it and the one on a night stand next the bed were both lit. The bed had not been turned down. At least I am not disturbing his sleep, she thought nervously, then reminded herself that was precisely what she had in mind.
“Yes, I am sure,” she said.
“Well, ah—”
“You don’t want me.” She turned away, acutely embarrassed, her cheeks virtually on fire.
“Oh, yes, I do. I do.” He pulled her close and kissed her fiercely, then whispered, “I do indeed want you, Retta. It is just that you caught me by surprise.”
