The Last Hellion

by Loretta Chase

  She thrust the child at Lydia, who stiffly exchanged her notebook and pencil for it. Him.

  Lydia saw little ones all the time, for children were one commodity London’s poor owned in abundance. She’d held them in her lap before, but none so young as this, none so utterly helpless.

  She looked down at his narrow little face. The babe was neither pretty nor strong nor even clean, and she wanted to weep for him and the short, wretched future awaiting him, and for his mother, who was destitute and scarcely more than a child herself.

  But Lydia’s eyes remained dry, and if her heart ached as well from other causes, she knew better than to give those futile yearnings any heed. She was not a fifteen-year-old girl. She was mature enough to let her head rule her actions, even if it couldn’t altogether rule her heart.

  And so she only quietly rocked the infant as his mother had done, and waited while Mary slowly dragged the pencil over the paper. When, finally, the very short note Mary took such pains with was finished, Lydia returned Jemmy to his mother with only the smallest pang of regret.

  Even such a small regret was inexcusable, she chided herself as she left the Bridewell’s grim confines.

  Life was no romantic fable. In real life, London took the place of the palace of her youthful romantic imaginings. Its forgotten women and children were her siblings and offspring, and all the family she needed.

  She could not be their Lady Bountiful and cure all that ailed them, but she could do for them what she’d been unable to do for her mother and sister. Lydia could speak for them. In the pages of the Argus, their voices were heard.

  This was her vocation, she reminded herself. This was why God had made her strong and clever and fearless.

  She had not been made to be any man’s plaything. And she most certainly would not risk all she’d worked for, merely because a lout of a Prince Charming had raised a flurry in her unruly heart.

  Three nights after she’d nearly run down Vere and Bertie, Lady Grendel tried to break Adolphus Crenshaw’s skull in front of Crockford’s club in St. James’s Street.

  Inside, Vere and Bertie joined the crowd at the window at the moment she took hold of Crenshaw’s neckcloth and shoved him back against a lamppost.

  With a grim sense of déjà vu, Vere hurried out of the club, advanced upon her, and firmly grasped her waist. Startled, she let go of the cravat, and Vere lifted her up off the pavement and set her back down well out of reach of the gasping Crenshaw.

  She tried the elbow-in-the-gut trick again, but Vere managed to dodge it while still keeping a firm grip on her. He wasn’t prepared for the boot heel crunching down on his instep, though he should have been, but he didn’t let go then, either, even while pain shafted up his leg.

  He grabbed her flailing arms and dragged her away, out of hearing of the group of men gathering at Crockford’s entrance.

  She struggled with him the whole way, and he struggled with a strong temptation to throw her into the street where an oncoming hackney could do London a favor and crush her under its wheels. Instead, Vere hailed the vehicle.

  When it halted before them, he told her, “You can get in, or I can throw you in. Take your pick.”

  She muttered something under her breath that sounded like the synonym for “rectum,” but when he pulled the door open, she climbed in quickly enough. Which was too bad, because he wouldn’t have minded in the least hurrying her with a slap to her rump.

  “Where do you live?” he asked when she’d flung herself onto the seat.

  “Bedlam, where else?”

  He jumped into the hackney and gave her a hard shake. “Where do you live, curse you?”

  She mentioned a few other body parts he resembled before grudgingly admitting to a lair in Frith Street, Soho.

  Vere relayed the direction to the driver, then settled onto the seat with her, where he made sure to take up more than his share of room.

  After they’d traveled a good while in angry silence, she let out an impatient huff. “Lud, what a fuss you make,” she said.

  “A fuss?” he echoed, taken aback. “You were the one—”

  “I wasn’t going to hurt Crenshaw,” she said. “I was only trying to make him listen. I had to get his full attention first.”

  For a moment, Vere could only stare at her in blank disbelief.

  “There was no need to make a scene—and in St. James’s, no less,” she said. “But I suppose it’s no use telling you. Everyone knows you delight in making a spectacle of yourself. You’ve been brawling from one end of England to the other for this last year at least. Sooner or later you were bound to bring your special brand of pandemonium back to London. Still, I did not think it would be this soon. It’s only three months since your infamous carriage race.”

  He found his tongue. “I know what you’re trying to do—”

  “You haven’t the least idea,” she said. “But you are not interested in determining the facts of a situation before interfering. You jump to your own wild conclusions and leap in. This is the second time you’ve come in my way and caused needless complications and delay.”

  Vere knew what she was doing. The best defense is a good offense; this was one of his own modes of operation. He was not about to let her veer him off course.

  “Let me explain something to you, Miss Gentleman Jackson Grenville,” he said. “You can’t rampage about London pummeling every fellow who crosses your path. So far you’ve been lucky, but one of these days you’re going to try it with a man who hits back—”

  “Perhaps I will,” she cut in haughtily. “I don’t see what business it is of yours.”

  “I make it my business,” he said through clenched jaws, “when I see a friend in need of help. Since—”

  “I am not your friend and I didn’t need any help.”

  “Since Crenshaw is my friend,” he went on doggedly, “and since he is too much of a gentleman to fight back—”

  “But not too much of a gentleman to seduce and abandon a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  That broadside took him unawares, but Vere quickly recovered. “Don’t tell me the chit you tried to start a riot about is claiming Crenshaw ruined her,” he said, “because I know for a fact she isn’t his type.”

  “No, she’s much too old,” said the gorgon. “Quite ancient. All of nineteen. Whereas Crenshaw likes plump rustics of fourteen and fifteen.”

  From her pocket Madam Insolence withdrew a crumpled wad of paper. She held it out to him.

  Very uneasy, Vere took it, smoothed it out, and read.

  In large, round schoolgirl script, the note informed Crenshaw that he had a two-month-old son who currently resided with his mother, Mary Bartles, in Bridewell.

  “The girl is in the Pass-Room,” the virago said. “I saw the infant. Jemmy strongly resembles his papa.”

  Vere handed back the note. “I collect you announced this to Crenshaw in front of his friends.”

  “I gave him the note,” she said. “He read it, crumpled it, and threw it down. I’ve been trying for three days to run him to ground. But every time I called at his lodgings, the servant claimed Mr. Crenshaw wasn’t in. Mary will be sent back—to her parish workhouse, most likely—in a few days. If he will not help her, the child will die there, and Mary will probably die of grief.”

  The dragon lady turned her glacial gaze to the window. “She told me the babe was all she had. And there his father was, going to Crockford’s, to throw his money away on cards and dice, when his son is weak and ill, with no one to care for him but a mother who’s a child herself. You have some fine friends, Ainswood.”

  Though Vere considered it unsporting for a man of nearly thirty to seduce ignorant young rustics, and though he considered his crony’s reaction to the forlorn note inexcusable, he was not about to admit this to Miss Self-Appointed Guardian of Public Morals.

  “Let me explain something to you,” he said. “If you want to get something out of a man, dashing out his brains against a lamppost isn’t the
way to do it.”

  She turned away from the window and regarded him levelly.

  And he wondered what malignant power had created this shockingly beautiful monster.

  You’d think the carriage’s gloom would dull the impact of her extraordinary face. The shadows only lent intimacy, making it impossible for him to view her with detachment. He’d seen her in his dreams, but dreams were safe. This wasn’t. He had only to lift his hand to touch the silken purity of her cheek. He had only to close the smallest distance to bring his mouth to hers, plum-soft and full.

  If the impulse to touch and taste had been less ferocious, he would have surrendered, as he usually did to such impulses. But he’d felt this powerful pull before, in Vinegar Yard, and he wouldn’t play the fool again.

  “All you had to do was smile,” he said. “And bat your eyelashes and thrust your bosom in his face, and Crenshaw would have done whatever you wanted.”

  She gazed at him unblinkingly for the longest time. Then, from a pocket hidden in her black skirts’ heavy folds, she fished out a small notebook and a stump of a pencil.

  “I had better write this down,” she said. “I do not want to lose one priceless syllable of wisdom.” She made an elaborate ceremony of opening the battered notebook and licking the pencil point. Then she bowed her head and wrote. “Smile,” she said. “Bat eyelashes. What was the other thing?”

  “Things,” he corrected, leaning closer to read what she’d written. “Plural. Your breasts. You stick them under his nose.”

  Hers were right under his and mere inches from his itching fingers.

  She wrote down his instructions with a ludicrous appearance of intense concentration: eyes narrowed, the tip of her pink tongue caught between her teeth.

  “It’ll be more effective if you wear something lower cut,” he added. “Otherwise, a fellow might wonder whether you’re hiding a deformity.”

  He wondered whether she had any inkling of the ferocious temptation the long parade of buttons represented, or of how the masculine cut of her garments only made a man more conscious of the womanly form they so rigidly encased. He wondered what evil witch had brewed her scent, a devilish mixture of smoke and lilies and something else he couldn’t put a name to.

  His head dipped lower.

  She looked up at him with the smallest of smiles. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you take the pencil and notebook and jot down all your fantasies, in your own dear little hand. Then I shall have a keepsake of this delightful occasion. Unless, that is, you’d rather breathe down my neck.”

  Very slowly, so as not to appear disconcerted, he drew back. “You also need lessons in anatomy,” he said. “I was breathing in your ear. If you want me to breathe down your neck, you shouldn’t wear such high collars.”

  “Where I want you to do your breathing,” she said, “is in Madagascar.”

  “If I’m bothering you,” he said, “why don’t you hit me?”

  She closed the small notebook. “Now I understand,” she said. “You made the fuss in St. James’s Street because I was hitting someone else, and you don’t want me to hit anyone but you.”

  His heart sped from double to triple time. Ignoring it, he gave her a pitying look. “You poor dear. All this scribbling has given you a brain fever.”

  To his vast relief, the carriage halted.

  Still wearing the pitying expression, Vere opened the door and very gently helped her out. “Do get some sleep, Miss Grenville,” he said solicitously. “Rest your troubled brain. And if you don’t recover your reason by morning, be sure to send for a doctor.”

  Before she could frame a retort, he gave her a light shove toward her door.

  Then, “Crockford’s,” he told the driver, and quickly reentered the hackney. As he pulled its door shut, Vere saw her glance back. She flashed him a cocksure smile before turning and sauntering, hips swaying, to the drab house’s entrance.

  Lydia had a natural talent for mimicry that allowed her to slip easily into another’s personality and mannerisms. According to Ste and Effie, Lydia’s father had possessed similar abilities. He’d failed as a thespian, apparently, because theatrical success required hard work as well as aping skills, and all he worked hard at was drinking, gaming, and whoring.

  She’d put the gift to better use. It helped her capture on paper with vivid accuracy the personalities of those she wrote about.

  It had also helped her develop fairly quickly a degree of camaraderie with her male colleagues. Her rendition of Lord Linglay’s speech in the House of Lords months earlier had won her an invitation to her fellow writers’ Wednesday night drinking bouts at the Blue Owl tavern. Nowadays, the weekly gatherings were considered incomplete if Grenville of the Argus wasn’t there to do one of her hilarious impersonations.

  This night, Lydia entertained Tamsin—whose new name, Thomasina Price, was eschewed in private—with a lively re-enactment of the encounter with Ainswood.

  They were in Lydia’s bedroom. Tamsin sat upon the foot of the bed watching Lydia perform before the fireplace.

  Though Lydia’s usual audience tended toward the latter stages of intoxication, and Tamsin was sober, she laughed as hard as the men usually did.

  At least the girl was amused, Lydia thought as she took her bows. Lydia ought to be as well, but her customary detachment eluded her. It was as though her soul were a house in which nasty things had suddenly taken to crawling out of the woodwork.

  Restless and uneasy, she moved to her dressing table, sat, and started unpinning her hair.

  Tamsin watched her for a few minutes. Then, “Men are such odd creatures,” she said. “And I begin to think the Duke of Ainswood is one of the oddest. I cannot quite make out what he’s about.”

  “He’s one of those people who can’t abide peace and quiet,” Lydia said. “If there isn’t a stir, he has to make one. He constantly picks fights, even with his good friends. I’d thought people exaggerated about his troublemaking. But I’ve seen for myself. He can’t let well enough alone. It wasn’t enough to simply put me in the hackney and send me on my way, for instance. He must plague me all the way home as well. I’m not at all surprised that Dain pounded him a while back. Ainswood would try the patience of a saint.”

  “I had not heard Lord Dain was a saint,” Tamsin said with a little chuckle. “From what I can gather, he and the duke are two sides of the same coin.”

  “That may be, but Ainswood had no business picking a fight with him on his wedding night.” Lydia scowled into the small mirror. “The brute might have considered Lady Dain’s feelings at least.”

  She didn’t know why she was still so outraged about the mill in Amesbury.

  Dain was nothing to her except a very distant relative. Her mother had come from a lowly cadet branch of the Ballisters, and they’d ceased to admit her existence once she had married John Grenville. So far as Lydia knew, no living person was aware of her connection to the Ballisters, and she was determined to keep it that way. The trouble was, she couldn’t keep herself from caring about Dain, though he was, as Tamsin said, Ainswood’s match in wickedness.

  Lydia had stood outside St. George’s Church, Hanover Square, on Dain’s wedding day. Like her fellow journalists, she’d come only for the story. But when Dain had emerged from the church with his bride, his ebony eyes glowing in a most unsatanic way while his lady looked up so lovingly into his dark, harsh countenance…Well, the long and short of it was, Lydia had come perilously near bawling—in public, amid a crowd of her fellow reporters, no less.

  It was absurd, but she’d felt an aching affection for him ever since, and an even more ludicrous protectiveness.

  She’d been furious with Ainswood when she’d heard how he’d spoiled Dain’s wedding night with the stupid brawl, and the anger lingered, against all reason.

  Tamsin’s voice broke into her thoughts. “But the duke was highly intoxicated, wasn’t he?”

  “If he could keep on his feet and utter coherent sent
ences, he couldn’t have been as drunk as people seem to believe,” Lydia said. “You have no idea the capacity such men have for liquor, especially overgrown louts like Ainswood.” Her eyes narrowed. “He was only pretending to be blind drunk. Just as he pretends to be stupid.”

  “Yes, and that’s what I meant about finding his behavior so odd,” Tamsin said. “He isn’t in the least inarticulate. Obviously, it wants a very quick intelligence to keep up verbal sparring with you, Lydia. If that had been a stupid man in the carriage, I’m sure you would have tied his tongue in knots. Instead…” She paused, frowning. “Well, it’s difficult to say who won tonight’s war of words.”

  “It was a draw.” Lydia took up her brush and angrily dragged it through her hair. “He had the last word, but that was only because of the push he gave me before I could answer. And shoving me was so childish, I could scarcely keep a straight face, let alone trust myself to say anything without going off into whoops.”

  “Oh, look what you’re doing!” Tamsin cried. “You’ll be tearing out clumps of hair and making red welts in your skin.” While she spoke, she came off the bed and crossed to the dressing table. “Let me do it.”

  “You’re not my maid.”

  Tamsin took the brush from her. “If you’re vexed with His Grace, you should not take it out on your own scalp.”

  “He let Crenshaw get away,” Lydia said tightly. “And now he’ll make himself scarce, the swine, and Mary Bartles will have to go home and be treated like filth. She isn’t like the others—”

  “I know, you told me,” Tamsin said.

  “She isn’t used to hard treatment,” Lydia went on angrily, despite the soothing strokes of the brush. “Men are so despicable. He will get away without doing a dratted thing for the poor girl.”

  “Perhaps the duke will speak to him,” Tamsin said.

  Lydia jerked away from the brush. “What the devil does he care?” she cried. “I told you what he said after reading Mary’s note. He went straight back to provoking me.”

  “Perhaps his pride would not allow—”