A Loving Scoundrel (6 page)

“I
’VE A PACKAGE TO DELIVER
to a Lord Malory. Would ye ’appen to know where ’e might be found?”

“Heard tell there’s a Malory family lives over in Grosvenor Square.”

“And where would that be?”

“New to town, are ye?”

“It’s that obvious?”

A chuckle. “You’ll find Grosvenor north o’ here. Head down the block, then turn right and just keep going that way till you come to the rich houses.”

An address would have helped, but then again, probably not. Danny would need a map for that and didn’t know where to get one, wouldn’t be able to read one either, for that matter. An address would have helped only if she could afford to hire a hack, which she couldn’t.

She was so out of her element it was beyond pathetic. She was keenly feeling the disadvantage of her lack of education, too. She would have given up by now if her anger weren’t goading her on.

She had found a nice quiet alley to sleep the day away in, but didn’t actually sleep that long. Her hunger woke her much sooner than she would have liked, and the headache it was causing lent desperation to her situation.

She had to find a job fast. If she had to resort to stealing just to eat, then she’d be no better off than she had been. This was an opportunity to
better
herself, not slip back into the gutter and old habits. But it wasn’t going to be easy. She knew, because she’d tried before.

Lucy used to cover for her absence when Danny would go out to look for a respectable job. The problem had always been her appearance, and her lack of even a basic education. To apply for a man’s job that didn’t require being able to read and write did require muscle, which she couldn’t muster. To apply for a woman’s job she’d need some female clothes first, which she didn’t own. And no matter what job she could talk her way into getting, she’d need a roof over her head and some coins in her pocket to last her till her first pay.

She’d thought she’d had that solved at one point. The job of a maid often came with room and board, which was ideal for someone starting out completely broke. She’d borrowed one of Lucy’s dresses for the interview and had been so thrilled to get hired—for all of two hours. The butler had given her the job, and only because he’d been fascinated by her looks. As soon as she met the housekeeper though, she was fired. They were a middle-class household trying to move up the social ladder, which meant they wanted only a better class of servant, at least none that sounded like gutter trash or looked like whores.

Danny had been so disappointed and discouraged by that experience, she’d stopped looking for decent work for a long time. Then when she did start looking again, she simply had no luck.

Recalling her many failures, she got angry. The fact was, she’d hunted for a job sporadically, maybe four or five times a year. She’d never done it daily because she hadn’t really been ready to go out on her own. To be alone. But she had no choice now, and she didn’t have the luxury of taking her time about it. She needed to find a job immediately, that very day. And she needed to find some food even sooner. Calling herself ten kinds of a fool for not holding back at least a few of the pound notes Malory had given her, instead of giving the whole wad to Dagger, wasn’t going to feed her.

She didn’t like being on her own. She was finding that out firsthand, but she’d known she wouldn’t. She’d grown up with a houseful of children around her. She wanted that back, but she wanted them to be
her
children, so she could have a say in raising them proper. She needed a husband to help with that, though, a good man, and one with a respectable job. That had been a goal of hers for a long time, she’d just never been able to get serious about it while she was still living the life of a boy.

She wasn’t going to find a husband around the next corner though. And food was a necessity, which meant a job of her own came first. Then she could start looking for a husband to start raising a family with.

She got lucky with the food. She found that one of the rings from Heddings’s stash had fallen through the little hole in her coat pocket to the lining underneath. She couldn’t sell it by normal means, since it might be one of the stolen pieces being looked for. But she remembered Miss Jane selling a ring all those years ago to buy food.

She hadn’t thought of Miss Jane in years, not since the nightmares had stopped. She wasn’t sure why they had stopped. They’d plagued her from as far back as she could remember—which was the short time she’d spent with Miss Jane. And they’d usually been the same, filled with blood and screams, until a club fell on her head to end it.

One dream she had far too infrequently was very nice and left her feeling warm and comfortable. It was a dream of a young woman, one she’d never met, but the lady had white-gold hair just like hers, though arranged in one of those fancy styles she’d only seen ladies wear. A beautiful woman, dressed elegantly, like an angel she was, walking in a field of flowers.

Lucy had figured the angel dream really was an angel calling to her because she was supposed to have died all those years ago but didn’t. Of course Lucy had been fanciful. But Danny had been even more fanciful, figuring the beautiful lady was herself, something she could aspire to. The dream gave her hope.

She needed hope now, and a lot more. The ring had fetched her less than a pound note. Very disappointing, but then the best she could get from a total stranger who’d only looked as if he could afford a good deal.

Her predicament was entirely that young lord’s fault. If he hadn’t been so high-handed, if he’d just accepted her refusal and instead found himself someone who would have been thrilled to do what he wanted, she wouldn’t be worrying about where her next meal was going to come from.

He owed her. And he could bleedin’ well pay up, or she’d let Lord Heddings know where his stash of stolen jewelry had trotted off to. Well, she wouldn’t
really
go that far, but Malory would get the idea.

She finished the meal she’d bought in a nice restaurant and thanked the waiter for the food and his directions. She didn’t see his frown. If she had, she wouldn’t have realized it was because she didn’t know to leave a tip for him. Ignorance was sometimes bliss, or it could have been.

In this case, the waiter was annoyed enough that he wasn’t going to let her remain ignorant. He followed her outside to shout at her, “Cheap bastard! And after I gave you directions, too, which I didn’t have to do!”

Danny swung around, realized he was yelling at her, though she couldn’t imagine why. “Wot are ye talking about, eh? I paid for the bleedin’ meal.”

“Shows how dumb you are! You think service is free? I should have known better than to let your kind through the door.”

Her kind? That stung and made her cheeks bloom with color. She’d picked the first restaurant she’d come across, hadn’t really noted that it was in an affluent business district, with well-dressed people everywhere she looked. A crowd was gathering because of the waiter’s shouts. And she heard other angry murmurs now.

“A thief, no doubt.”

“Better check your pockets if he’s been working this area today.”

“Better check
his
pockets.”

“All I wanted was some food,” Danny said quickly to the waiter. “Which I paid for. If I didn’t pay enough, ye could ’ave just said so. Ye didn’t ’ave to insult me.”

The fellow looked as if he realized he had overreacted. But too many of his regular customers were about now for him to back down and apologize.

“Just get out of here and don’t come back,” he warned. “This is a respectable district. Go back to the slums where you belong.”

D
ANNY WALKED AWAY
from that restaurant trying to hold her head high, though it took every ounce of will she had to accomplish it. She wanted to run instead, had an overwhelming urge to do so, but she had no doubt someone would try to detain her, because running would make her look guilty. They wouldn’t consider that she just wanted to find a deep hole that she could crawl into and cry, she was so heartsick and embarrassed.

She’d experienced that kind of snobbery before, when she’d looked for jobs in the past. She shouldn’t have let it crush her as it did. It merely pointed out just how hard it was going to be to find a decent job.

It took a while to push the hurt aside. When she finally did, it was replaced with unease, because for the second time in two days, she felt that someone was watching her, following her. This time it was probably just someone who’d been in that crowd, making sure she left their neighborhood.

But turning to look, she saw nothing out of the ordinary, at least, not close to her. A lordly type entering an office building. A delivery boy. A lady with a maid following behind her bogged down with packages, a few couples walking along arm in arm, and dozens of other people going about their business. For the next two blocks, the feeling just wouldn’t go away, but every time she looked over her shoulder, she couldn’t imagine who it might be. There were just too many people on the street in this part of town.

She finally ducked into a shop, then got yelled at when she kept on going, running through the back, which was restricted to employees only, and out the back door. For the next ten minutes she ran, backtracked, passed through other buildings, and finally, the feeling went away. If someone had been following her, she was satisfied she’d lost them.

It was a long walk to Grosvenor Square. Night arrived before she got there. And there was a definite lack of nice alleys in the areas she’d been passing through. There were parks, though, lots of them, some so big she worried that she’d wandered out of the city by accident. She finally curled up in some bushes to wait for morning so she could get her bearings again.

Dawn brought the hunger again, and even more anger because of it. But that was pushed aside when she actually looked around her and
recognized
the park she was in, though she’d never been in that part of town before to her recollection. She’d barely seen any of the park last night, it was so dark. But this morning, the benches along the pathway, the giant old oak shading them, the child running through a flock of pigeons to scatter them, laughing in delight. She blinked, and the child was gone, had never been there. A memory!

Danny sat back down, shaken to her core. It was the first memory of her past that had ever come back to her, and it had come to her because it was the first time she’d ever been to a place that she must have visited as a child. Had her parents lived in this part of London, or had they only been visiting? There had been a hotel on one side of that park, along with a middle-class neighborhood, though she found more fancy houses on the other side when she left in that direction.

She tried to remember more, to recognize other things, but nothing else stirred any memories, and it was giving her a headache to try. No, the hunger was doing that again. So she hurried now, had to question a few more strangers for directions, and finally arrived at the Malory house around midmorning.

It was a bleedin’ mansion! It stood by itself, was fenced in, even had grass all around it, and nice flowers and shrubs, hardly what she’d been expecting. She was too intimidated to approach a house like that, especially after what had happened at that restaurant yesterday, so more time was wasted while she waited around for someone who looked like a servant to leave the house. A young woman finally did, dressed in a maid’s uniform—well, not so much a uniform, but not a fancy lady’s dress, so Danny took a chance and hailed her.

“G’day, ma’am. The ’andsome Malory live ’ere?”

“That’s rich, dearie,” the woman replied in a good-natured tone. “They’re all handsome.”

“’Ow many Lord Malorys are there?”

“In this household, three.”

“With black ’air and—”

“No, the earl lives here, with his two sons, none with black hair. You must mean his brother Sir Anthony. His house is over on Piccadilly. Or you could mean his nephew Jeremy. Those two lords both have black hair.”

“I’ve this package to deliver,” Danny said, tapping her pet’s box, the best excuse she could come up with to gain access to Malory. “It were a young lord that placed the order, around twenty-five ’e was.”

“That’d be Jeremy Malory then. Lives with his father in Berkeley Square.”

Danny blushed, forced to lie again to get directions. “I’m new to the city. Could ye point me to Berkeley?”

The woman did, and it didn’t take all that long to find the square, which was crowded at that time of the morning with pedestrians and carriage drivers pulled up to the curb, waiting on their passengers to leave their fancy houses. So she easily got pointed again to the house she needed. It wasn’t quite as imposing as the other one. She knew enough to go around to the servants’ entrance from all her job hunting.

But it just wasn’t her day for luck, she was beginning to fear. Jeremy didn’t live there anymore, had moved out just last week to his own residence over on Park Lane, near his cousin’s house. As if Danny gave a flipping hoot for all the extra information the friendly cook’s helper passed on as she tried her best to flirt with Danny.

More directions, more walking. Tarnation! She’d never walked so bleedin’ far in her life. It was a nice street though, that she finally reached, at least she thought it was, because one side of it bordered a park in full summer bloom. But even getting there in good time, another hour was wasted before she found someone who pointed her to the right house. Since Malory had only just moved in, most of the passing servants on the street didn’t know which house was his.

Now after all that running around, she didn’t expect to find Malory at home. At the rate her luck had been going, tomorrow would be more like it, or even the day after. Which meant another night or two sleeping in parks. But at least one was near to hand. And as long as she kept her expectations low, she could keep her anger to just simmering. But that young lord
was
in for a ripping earful, when—if—she ever clapped eyes on him again.