Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss

by Annie Burrows

  Well, he was not going to break faith with Cora. He might have kissed the woman, but that was only because he had been so sure, in that instant…

  He was just going to have to establish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was not Cora, that was all.

  And the quickest way to do that, he suspected, would be to walk back into that gin shop, and start to make enquiries amongst the people she associated with.

  But not straight away.

  He deliberately waited the few days it took him to regain his sense of equilibrium before returning to the gin shop where he had caught her carousing with…no, not scum. The men she had been with were at least honest and hard working. He paused on the threshold of the Flash of Lightning, scanning the room until he spied the men she had been with the night he had seen her, held her, kissed her…

  Muttering a curse, he stalked across the room to the very same table where he had committed that act of gross folly. And stood there, calmly letting the conversation dry up as the men, one by one, became aware of his presence.

  The one who had been sitting next to Cora, the one who had been so eager to rush to her defence, rose slowly to his feet.

  ‘Thought we’d seen you off for good on Friday,’ he growled. ‘You got no right coming back here.’

  The other men around the table growled their agreement.

  Rather than argue that he had a perfect right to enter any drinking den in London, or anywhere else he chose, Lord Matthison kept his expression neutral as he replied, ‘I have returned to compensate the landlord for any breakages that occurred. And to offer my apologies for poaching on your territory,’ he addressed Cora’s defender directly. ‘She bears such a remarkable resemblance to my late fiancée, that for a moment or two…’ He tailed off, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. ‘I hope you will believe me when I tell you I intended no insult to your…wife.’

  He had no idea what connection the red-head had to these men. But he had seen them all leap to her defence from what they interpreted as his assault, as if she was one of their own. If he wanted to find out more about her, this was the place to start.

  ‘Mary’s not my wife!’ Fred protested, turning red as a couple of the other men at the table sniggered. ‘But nor could I just sit there and let someone grab her like that. No, not if he was a royal Duke I couldn’t!’

  ‘Scurvy thing to do,’ said another of the group. ‘Taking advantage of a simpleton in that way.’

  ‘It was as well it was Fred as saw you trying to steal a kiss,’ said another, ‘after what Molly threatened not five minutes before you walked in.’ There was a moment’s thoughtful silence, then the entire group burst out laughing.

  ‘She’d have torn you limb from limb!’ declared the one who had been cuddling Cora’s female companion, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. ‘You couldn’t have employed that right hook against her!’

  Taking advantage of the relaxation in the atmosphere, Lord Matthison took a place at the table, and clicked his fingers for service. After he had ordered a round of drinks, Fred clapped him on the shoulder, admitting,

  ‘If it hadn’t been you, it’d uv bin someone else. There’s nearly always a fight in here of a Friday night.’

  ‘Usually a woman what starts it, too, one way or another,’ bitterly asserted a man on the other side of the table whose fists, Lord Matthison recalled ruefully, had made such an indelible impression on his ribs.

  When he told him as much, the man’s scowl turned to a grin of pride. ‘For a gent, you pack quite a punch yourself. Spar with Gentleman Jackson, I suppose?’

  He allowed the conversation to dwell for some time on the merits of the science that could be learned at such establishments, compared to the tricks learned in less salubrious surroundings.

  There was a slight lull when the serving girl brought their tray of drinks, and once they had all toasted his punishing right, he turned to the topic he had really come in to investigate.

  ‘What did you mean when you referred to…Mary,’ he forced himself to call her, though he was by no means certain it was her real name, ‘as a simpleton?’

  They had spoken of her that way several times, and attributed their defence of her largely to that cause.

  ‘Just that,’replied the one who had reminded him his name was Joe. His jaw, Lord Matthison noted with grim pride, was still rather swollen. ‘She ain’t all there. My Molly looks out for her at work, but…’ He raised his tankard, and took a long pull.

  ‘And she don’t like men,’ pointed out Fred, sympathetically. ‘No disrespect to you, sir, but she’s jumpier than an unbroke filly round men she don’t know well. Couldn’t let you go a scaring of a poor maid like that.’

  ‘Molly reckons,’ said Joe, setting down his tankard and aligning the handle with great precision, ‘she’s been took advantage of, before she come to London.’ There was a murmur of assent from the other men. ‘Not that she’s ever spoke of it. Says she don’t remember much of anything before she fetched up in town. Molly said she was a lot worse back then even than she is now. Headaches, and sort of fits, and that.’

  Lord Matthison went cold. The girl had no memory of the time before she came to London? Six years ago? Could that account for the blank look in her eyes?

  ‘Always having the doctor out to her…’

  ‘Ought to have the doctor out to some of them others, rather than turning them off when she’s wore ’em out,’ put in the bitter jarvey with the rib-crunching fists.

  He took a long pull on his tankard, listening to their diatribe on the lot of girls who worked for grim-faced old gorgons like Madame Pinchpenny, as they called her. The long hours spent hunched over their work that ruined their eyes, rotted their lungs and generally sapped their stamina by inches.

  ‘And all so the gentry can dance the night away in their silken gowns,’ muttered Fred with disgust. ‘They don’t care the girls what make their finery ain’t treated no better than slaves.’

  ‘It’s that old besom she works for I blame,’ Joe argued. ‘She don’t need to drive them quite so hard.’

  If this woman was Cora, Lord Matthison reflected, even if she had done the very worst he had suspected of her, she had more than atoned for it. He felt his anger towards her dissipate. She might have put him through hell, but she had been enduring her own form of purgatory. He recalled her pinched face, pallid in the lantern light. She had always been dainty, but on Friday night she had looked as frail as thistledown. As though one more blast of misfortune could shatter her, scattering what was left to the four winds.And the emptiness in her eyes…

  ‘Yougot no call toworry abouther,’Fredput in, misinterpreting the troubled expression on Lord Matthison’s face. ‘She didn’t seem too bothered by you kissing her.’

  ‘Well, the gin probably helped,’ Joe pointed out.

  Was this what Cora had sunk to? Drowning her sorrows in gin, like so many other working class women?

  No. He slammed his tankard down on the table. Her eyes had been blank. Not glazed. And she most definitely had not been drunk the morning he had chased her down Curzon Street. He should know. It was impossible to run that fast, or display such agility in dodging the crowds, with the senses dulled by alcohol.

  No. Something else had put that blank look in her eyes. These men all firmly believed she had something wrong with her mind. Something that had its origins in an assault she had sustained before she came to London. An assault that had left her afraid of men.

  He felt as though an iron hand had reached into his chest and squeezed his heart until it almost lost the ability to beat.

  There were only a few facts regarding Cora’s disappearance he knew for certain. She had gone out riding one afternoon, alone, and had never come back. The horse had returned to the stables in a state of terror, mud and leaves all over its foaming flanks. At first everyone had assumed she had met with an accident. It was only when they could find no trace of her after days of increasingly desperate searching that Robbie
had turned on him. After that, instead of pooling their resources to widen the search, each had shut the other out.

  He had often wondered if she had been attacked and robbed. But robbers would have left her lying in the forest where the crime took place, surely? That theory did not account for her turning up in London.

  He began to feel a bit sick. If this woman was Cora, then she had vanished from his estate, only to turn up several weeks later in London, so shattered by whatever had happened to her that she had never recovered her memory of it.

  He felt ashamed of himself for experiencing a glimmer of relief at the thought that somebody might have taken her, used her cruelly, then disposed of her. Because if that was the case, terrible though it was, it meant that she had not willingly left him.

  She had been taken. But she had not wanted to go.

  All he had been left with, after Cora had vanished, was the conviction she would not leave him. And now, if it turned out this woman was her…

  He breathed in deeply, closing his eyes on a surge of emotion he was completely at a loss to name.

  It had been so long since he’d permitted himself to feel anything much at all. For the last seven years only his rigid self-control had kept him functioning with any semblance of normality. But getting drunk, and raging at his fate, had been like setting the spade to ground frozen by winter’s hard frost. Now, one emotion after another was beginning to break through the fractures.

  Maybe he should have got drunk years ago. Mourned her. Let her go.

  But he had not been ready to let her go.

  His jaw hardened with determination. He was still not ready to let her go.

  If there was any possibility, no matter how slight, that this poor, abused woman could be his Cora, then he would do his utmost to rescue her from this life of drudgery, and restore her to full health.

  He would need to find a really good doctor. One who had experience in treating ailments of the mind, as well as of the body.

  He had half-risen from the table before he saw the flaw in his plan. How was he to get her to see such a man? He had no influence over her any more. As far as she knew, he was a stranger.

  He could not see any responsible employer letting one of her staff go off with a strange man. Especially not when the girl in question was afraid of men.

  There was little chance he might be able to earn her trust, either. He had already chased her, run her to earth in this drinking den, railed at her and kissed her. Any approach he made now was likely to terrify her. She might even do something as drastic as running away if he made his intentions known. He slumped down on the bench, a dark frown marring his features. It had taken him seven years to find her. He did not wish to scare her so badly he ended up spending another seven hunting her down.

  There was only one person who might be able to help him to persuade her employer to give her over into his keeping.

  Robbie.

  Robbie would only have to take one look at her, to know who she was! If his own judgement was clouded by wishful thinking, he could trust Robbie, at least, to look at the situation more dispassionately. He would never permit an impostor to take Cora’s place in his life.

  He would write to him, and tell him that he had found her. That he needed to come to London as soon as he could. Madame Pichot would not be able to argue with both her brother, and her fiancé!

  In the meantime, she was safe enough where she was, he supposed. Madame Pichot guarded all her girls, he gathered from Joe’s acid comments about the difficulties involved in seeing his sweetheart.

  A malicious smile came to his lips as he realised that at least he could instruct his lawyers to block any moves Mr Winters might make with regards to his quest to declare her dead.

  Cora would never be dead to him. And whoever this red-head turned out to be, he was not going to allow anybody to say she was!

  Chapter Four

  Kitty pounded up the stairs, poked her head round the workshop door, and panted, ‘Such a to-do, you’d best come quick!’

  Kitty worked mainly in the showroom because not only was she attractive, but she was also quite well spoken. But she never forgot the needlewomen hidden up in the attics. She would always try to alert them when someone really famous came in. Or, if she could not find an opportunity to do that, she would study the celebrity carefully, and give them her usually highly disrespectful impersonation of them later, in their bedroom.

  All but Mary immediately set their work aside, thrilled at having something to break up the monotony of their day.

  ‘You too, Mary, this time,’Kitty darted back to insist. ‘And hurry up, do, else we’ll miss all the fireworks!’

  After only the briefest hesitation, Mary toed off her shoes, as all the other girls had already done, and tiptoed across the bare floor. For once, she admitted, she was glad of an excuse to get up and walk away from work that no longer had the power to completely absorb her.

  The other girls were already crowded together on the top four treads by the time Mary reached the back stairs, those who had been swiftest pressing their faces up to the knotholes in the partition wall. Which meant the fireworks Kitty had promised them were going off in Madame’s private office. The knotholes that allowed them to peep into the showroom were all much further down the staircase.

  ‘Unless you take steps to put a halt to this outrageous affair,’ Mary could hear a strident female voice complaining, ‘I shall see your business ruined!’

  ‘Please calm yourself,’Madame Pichot replied, in an even, soothing tone. ‘I choose all my girls with great care, and watch them assiduously.’

  Mary had no problem hearing Madame almost as clearly as she could hear the complaining woman. The partition wall was flimsy, its only function to prevent Madame’s wealthy clients from the terrible misfortune of catching a glimpse of the conditions that prevailed beyond all the opulence of Madame’s plush showroom.

  ‘I can assure you,’ Madame said haughtily, ‘that neither Mary, nor any of my other girls, is having an affair with Lord Matthison.’

  The girls all turned to stare at Mary in mingled shock and excitement. She shrugged her shoulders, palms spread wide to indicate she had no idea what was going on.

  ‘Not yet, perhaps, but he certainly has plans for her! He is intent on making my daughter an object of ridicule!’ the first voice wailed. ‘First he wilfully compromised her, and now he is trying to wriggle out of marrying her by claiming to have discovered his long-lost fiancée.’

  Ah! The woman must be complaining about the handsome dark gentleman who had kissed her in the Flash of Lightning. His name was not Harrison at all. But Matthison. Lord Matthison.

  ‘…working of all things as a seamstress! When everyone knows she is dead!’

  ‘You are supposed to be dead,’ he had muttered, looking at her as though he had seen a ghost. Oh, the poor man! He must be so convinced she was that Cora person that he had gone to the complaining woman’s house, and told her…No, but wait a minute, Mary frowned. Something about all this did not add up. The woman said he had compromised her daughter. She shook her head, baffled. They could not be talking about the same man. The man she had met was so besotted with the woman who had died, she was sure he would never…unless this woman’s daughter looked like Cora too. That was why he had kissed her, after all.

  ‘There is no question of Mary agreeing to any such thing.’ Madame’s tone was still quietly contemptuous, in stark contrast to the almost hysterical tirade of the other woman in her office.

  ‘Girls of that sort will do anything for the kind of money Lord Matthison could give her!’ the other woman protested. ‘And even if she did not wish to go along with it, he is ruthless enough to compel her! He might kidnap her, and terrorise her into doing his bidding. He is evil, I tell you, evil!’

  It crossed Mary’s mind that it was mighty peculiar of the woman to insist Lord Matthison had to marry her daughter, if she really believed he was evil.

  ‘And if that
happens,’ the unbalanced female almost shrieked, ‘we will not be the only ones to suffer! I shall make sure you are ruined! What do you think will happen to your business once word leaks out that you supply girls for gentlemen with unusual appetites? For that is what I shall tell the world. Do you think you will still get earls and dukes bringing their wives here if they think it is just a front for a bawdyhouse? Do you think any half-decent sort of man will allow his daughters to be dressed in gowns made by…by harlots?’

  ‘My girls are all completely respectable.’ Madame sounded a little shaken. ‘There has never been any whisper—’

  ‘There will be more than whispers if Lord Matthison gets his hands on that Mary! There will be such scandal that your reputation will never recover!’

  There was a slight pause, then Madame said, in a voice that had regained its composure, ‘He will not. I shall make sure of it. You have my word. Now, if that will be all…?’

  She heard the determined rustle of expensive clothing, footsteps, and a door latch being lifted.

  So did the others, who scrambled swiftly on their stockinged feet back up to the workroom. Only when they were back at their respective stations, with the door to the back stairs safely shut behind them, and their feet decently shod, did the whispering and nudging begin.

  ‘Mary,’said Molly, through a mouthful of pins as she deftly tacked a length of silk chenille round the sleeves of a bronze-gold evening gown, ‘you won’t go doing anything daft, will you?’

  ‘Daft?’ echoed Mary, trailing her fingers distractedly through a dish of iridescent turquoise sequins.

  ‘Yes, like running off with that Lord they was going on about,’ Molly muttered.

  ‘But,’ objected Mary, ‘on Friday night you were saying that if he made me an offer I ought to accept.’

  ‘That was then, this is now!’ she snapped. ‘I thought then that if you could come to some arrangement, you could ask him for a big fat parting present, and you would be set up for life. I was going to suggest you ask him to set you up in a little shop so’s I could come and help you run it…what?’ She rounded on the others, who had begun to mutter behind her back. ‘Don’t say you wouldn’t jump at the chance to get out of here if you could do it!’ She turned back to her garment, jabbing a pin into its bodice with unnecessary force. ‘Now it looks as though I shall have to marry Joe and raise a pack of tow-haired snot-nosed brats.’