How to Master Your Marquis (6 page)

A loud bang rattled the books in their bindings. The pens stopped scratching. Stefanie spun about.

Sir John Worthington stood in the doorway, hands on hips, judicial robes dangling from his shoulders, white wig just a trifle askew. Stefanie’s hand itched to set it right.

“What the devil is going on here? Turner? What’s this racket?”

“Sir, I . . .”

“Dash it all! I’m off to court in”—a glance at the clock—“seven minutes precisely, and you look quite distinctly as if you’re about to have an apoplexy on the floor of my chambers. Bad form, Turner. Very bad form.”

At these damning words from his employer, Mr. Turner’s scarecrow throat seemed to clog with fear, or rage, or nervous anxiety, or some other emotion beyond the power of Stefanie’s comprehension. “Oh, but sir . . . Mr. Thomas, sir . . .”

Thunderous. “What about Thomas? Spit it out, man!”

“He . . . he . . .” An asthmatic wheeze.

All at once, Stefanie understood. She was a princess, after all; she had witnessed more than one underling turned into primordial jelly in the face of Royal Disapproval. Perfectly natural, if not particularly brave. Her heart softened. In such cases, the strong must naturally protect the weak.

“The thing is, Sir John,” said Stefanie, casting her eyes down contritely, “I was being cheeky.”

“Cheeky!”

“Yes, sir. Very, very abominably cheeky. A bad habit of mine, I’m afraid.”

“I say. Is this true, Mr. Turner?”

Mr. Turner’s mouth worked. He cast a desperate glance at Stefanie. He straightened his bony shoulders, clutched his hands to the small of his back, and tilted his chin. “Cheeky, sir?
Cheeky
does not begin to describe the scope of Mr. Thomas’s insolent lack of respect for his superiors. This . . . this
young fellow
”—as he might say
young fornicator
—“this young fellow had the temerity to ask for an office, sir. An office! With . . . with a window!”

“And a rug,” Stefanie said modestly. “So much easier on the feet.”

A swift twitch disturbed the stern line of Sir John’s judicial mouth. “Shocking. Shocking, Mr. Thomas. You should be aware that in these chambers, only I and my fellow counsel Mr. Norham are privileged to inhabit private offices. The clerks and secretaries perform their duties in a shared space, in order to promote that atmosphere of open-minded collegiality without which learning and innovation cannot take place.” He waved a withered hand to indicate the open-minded collegiality, the learning and innovation with which the atmosphere apparently vibrated.

“I see. Of course,” said Stefanie. “Quite laudable, sir. I shall keep that in mind henceforth.”

“You will allow me to observe, Mr. Thomas, that you have not made a particularly auspicious beginning to your law career. It is not yet nine o’clock on your first morning, and you have already demonstrated a propensity to both tardiness and”—another twitch—“cheekiness. This must be nipped in the bud, Mr. Thomas. In the bud.”

Someone coughed at the back of the room. The sound echoed delicately from the ceiling plasterwork.

“Yes, sir.”

“You must endeavor to keep your cheeky remarks to yourself in these chambers. You will also keep strictly to the stated hours of business.”

“Strictly!” piped up Mr. Turner, with raised finger.

“To that end, Mr. Thomas, I shall assign you to prepare a summary of the relevant case law for a matter just brought to my chambers on Friday. A most extraordinary case. Mr. Turner will give you the necessary details and direct you to the necessary resources. I expect to find this summary on my desk when I arrive in these chambers tomorrow morning. Is that understood?”

“Tomorrow morning at half past eight!” shrieked Mr. Turner. “Not a minute later!”

“Yes, sir,” said Stefanie.

“Mr. Turner, my briefcase,” said Sir John.

Mr. Turner scuttled into the office like a bony black beetle, leaving Stefanie and Sir John in the vast book-lined hall with the battered desks and the identical clerks and the monochrome clock ticking steadily away. Sir John’s eyes were grave and slightly pink at the corners. “Mr. Thomas,” he said, not unkindly, “I perceive you are not a young man accustomed to discipline. But the law is exact and demanding, and you must learn to adjust your own habits, for I assure you the legal system of Great Britain will not adjust itself to yours.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I admire your pluck, however.” He turned in a swish of black robes, just as Mr. Turner emerged through the office door, bearing a large leather suitcase in his hands as if it were a holy chalice. “Thank you, Mr. Turner,” he said, and strode to the door.

“Wait, Sir John!”

The man turned in an astonished jerk, eyebrows high.

Stefanie walked up to him and reached for his head. “Your wig. It’s gone lopsided, I’m afraid.”

A gasp rent the air behind her.

Stefanie tugged the wig into place and stood back critically. “Much better.”

Sir John’s lips trembled. A flush pinked the tip of his nose. “I will have that summary on my desk on the dot of half eight, Mr. Thomas, or this day in my chambers will be your last. And Olympia can bloody well hang himself.”

And he stalked out the door with a crash of his briefcase against the wood.

B
y eight o’clock in the evening, Stefanie’s back felt as if it had turned into metal wire and been left out in the rain to rust.

A summary. It had sounded so simple. A summary: How difficult could that be?

Very difficult indeed, as it turned out. Thirty or forty pages’ worth of difficult, of deciphering the dry legal language in the books stacked at her desk and on the floor next to her feet. Of organizing and describing each precedent, its similarities and points of departure to the case in question. All this, when she had no earthly idea of British law, or any law at all, for that matter. Thank goodness she retained her Latin, or rather thank the diligent and determined Miss Dingleby, because goodness had had nothing at all to do with it.

Stefanie glanced at the clock, that dashed tyrannical clock on the shelf, and allowed herself to link her fingers together above her head and stretch. Oh, heaven. Long and high, that was it. Her startled vertebrae rattled together like dominoes. The swathes of linen binding her chest strained and strained. She’d imagined that dressing as a man would free her body—all those skirts and petticoats and corsets, how she’d hated them—but this was just as bad, in its way. Just as constricting. God, what she wouldn’t give to loosen them, to let her poor crushed bosom breathe for a moment. An instant or two of physical freedom, just a taste of her old feminine self.

Stefanie cast a speculative look at the window. The glass had gone black long ago, the other clerks had left for their comfortable dinners and comfortable beds. She was quite alone.

Why not?

Stefanie twiddled her fountain pen between her thumb and forefinger, and then she set it down and shrugged off her jacket. She unbuttoned her drab waistcoat and pulled her shirt from her beastly black trousers, and then she slid her hands upward along her soft female skin to the edge of the linen band and . . .

The door flew open.

“Hullo there, Thomas!” called out the cheerful voice of the Marquess of Hatherfield. “I’ve brought you a spot of supper, what?”

Stefanie whipped to face the bookshelf, stuffing her long white shirt in fistfuls back down her trousers. “Supper!”

“Yes, supper! Sir John informed me of your little, er, predicament, and I said to myself, dash it all, that’s no way to . . . I say, I haven’t caught you out, have I?”

Stefanie’s fingers flew at her waistcoat buttons. “Not at all. Only . . . just . . .”

“Making yourself a bit more comfortable, eh? Nothing to be ashamed of, old boy. We’re all guilty of it, from time to time.” A plonk, as of something soft and heavy on a wooden surface.

Stefanie tugged her buttoned waistcoat in place, along with her dignity. She turned. The Marquess of Hatherfield it was, right enough, standing before her like a Thoroughbred in the sales ring, hair glossy, eyes bright, clothes molded lovingly around his triangular torso. She aimed her gaze between his arrow-straight eyebrows, the better to avoid the mesmeric power of those dancing blue eyes. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean. Is that Bordeaux?”

“Rather. A sixty-two Mouton Rothschild, if you like that kind of thing.”

“Egad.”

“I thought a celebration of some sort was in order. Your first day of gainful employment.” Hatherfield set down the bottle and swung his jacket from his shoulders, arranging it about a nearby chair with a bullfighter’s flourish. He plucked a corkscrew from the hamper and applied himself to the matter at hand. “Ghastly place, these chambers of Sir John’s. The flesh positively shuddered at the thought of you slaving away all night, not a soul for company.”

Stefanie was trying to keep her eyes fixed on the bottle, instead of the play of muscle beneath his white shirt as he twisted the corkscrew. Her brain was still reeling in shock. Hatherfield. Here. Amid the books, the battered desks. A few feet away, gathering up all the meager light and energy in the room and radiating it back outward like a beacon of divine hope. Apollo come to life. “I can manage well enough.”

“Ah. You were planning to work all night with no sustenance at all?” The cork slid free with a faint relieved pop.

“I . . . well, I hadn’t thought of that.” Which was quite true. Stefanie hadn’t given supper the slightest consideration. After all, food simply arrived at the appointed hours, didn’t it? Borne by servants, prepared to varying degrees of excellence, piping hot and accompanied by the appropriate garnish.

Except when one was a lowly law clerk slaving away unnoticed and unaccompanied in Temple Bar.

“You see?” Hatherfield tapped his temple and poured out two glasses. The liquid slid downward in a silky curl. Stefanie’s mouth tingled.

“It was very kind of you to think of me. To come all this way.”

“I hadn’t anything better to do.” He handed her a glass. “To your health, my good fellow.”

“To your health.” She clinked and drank. Oh, heaven. A masterful vintage, a masterful wine, thick and plummy and perfect, all the more so for arriving so suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of her loneliest hour. She opened her eyes, which had closed briefly in ecstasy, and found the gaze of the marquis fixed intently upon her face. “Sir?” she said, and her voice, good Lord, it
squeaked!
Stefanie had never squeaked in her life, not even when confronted in the middle of the night by the mayor of Huhnhof Baden while exchanging his prize bull for a rather bad-tempered white goat.

But that
gaze
of his
,
all blue and alive. God in heaven. You could almost touch it. You could die from it, if you weren’t careful.

The obvious question began to form in Stefanie’s discombobulated brain: Why, exactly, had the eminent and Apollonian Marquess of Hatherfield troubled himself to bring the unremarkable Mr. Stephen Thomas a picnic supper in Temple Bar this evening?

“Ah. You’re probably wondering why I’ve troubled myself to come so far this evening,” said Hatherfield. “Cheese?”

“Yes, please.”

Hatherfield brandished an ivory-handled knife, sliced a wedge, and placed it on a soft white roll. “To be perfectly honest, Mr. Thomas, I’m curious about you.”

“Curious. About me?” Stefanie accepted the bread and cheese with her best innocent air. She was rather good at innocent airs, or so she flattered herself. God knew she’d had ages of practice. When the Archduke of Schleissen-Pleissen stormed downstairs to breakfast complaining publicly of a bed short-sheeted the night before, an innocent air might prove the only thing standing between a certain mischievous young princess and a week spent with the solid weight of a Gutenberg Bible balanced atop her head.

“Yes, Mr. Thomas. About you. You don’t seem the ordinary sort of law clerk at all.” Hatherfield served himself and slumped with massive masculine grace into the chair behind him, dangling his wine from one hand and his bread and cheese from the other, glossy blond hair flopping in an irresistible wave onto his forehead. Apollo transformed to Dionysus.

Hmm. Stefanie rather liked Dionysus.

She slumped into her own chair, not to be outdone, and propped her foot upon the desk for good measure. “For that matter, your lordship, you don’t seem the ordinary sort of marquis, if you don’t mind my observing. All this rowing business. Fetching supper for lowly clerks, unannounced. Haven’t you a club in which to drink yourself silly and gamble away your fortune? A mistress on whom to get a bastard or two?” A luxurious sip of wine. “Explain yourself.”

Hatherfield coughed. “You first.”

Stefanie gestured outward with her wine hand. “Nothing to tell. I am as you see me. Humble fellow seeking to make his fortune in the law.”

“Really.”

“Really.”

Hatherfield bit into his bread and cheese and ate without hurry. His gaze settled at the top of her head and traveled warmly downward, bite by bite, lingering on the buttons of her waistcoat, the seam of her trousers, until he reached the tip of her shoe where it rested atop the desk. He swallowed his last. “How fortunate, then, that you can count on the patronage of the Duke of Olympia in your quest for professional glory.”

Stefanie’s skin tingled, her clothes itched. Could he see the lurch of her heart beneath her waistcoat? She kept her limbs still under his lazy stare, her face mild, but the effort required all her concentration. He’d asked a question. What was it? “Olympia?” she said feebly.

“Yes. A lucky coincidence, having such a powerful chap so thoroughly in your corner.”

“We are related. On my mother’s side.”

“I see. Eat your supper, Thomas. You need your strength.”

Stefanie, not ordinarily an obedient sort of girl, found herself biting into her bread with vigor. “And you, sir?” she asked, through her full mouth, as slovenly and unfeminine as she could manage. “Isn’t your mistress expecting you this evening?”

“I don’t have a mistress, Mr. Thomas.”

Was that a trace of emphasis on the
Mister
? Was that a smile lurking at the corner of his mouth? Stefanie lifted her other leg to the desk and crossed it over the first.