How to Master Your Marquis (9 page)

For an instant, the image of young Thomas’s sea blue eyes flashed in his head. Her face, hair loose, lines softened, lying against a pillow. His breath caught in his chest.

“Can you not put him off until the houses are finished, Father? You can have half the profit. All of it, if you need it.” He’d have to start all over again, damn it all, but at least he wouldn’t have this ball of guilt lodged in his stomach. This dangling prospect of Lady Charlotte.

The duke’s cane struck the floor of the carriage. “Next summer, you mean! As if that would help!”

“It’s all I have for you. Investments take time and effort, unlike gambling.”

“At least say you’ll think on it, Hatherfield.” The duke’s voice was unrecognizable: low and edgy, as if it might crack at any moment. “Think on it, my boy. My own son. For God’s sake. You could save us all. Two unblemished centuries of dukes, the pillars of Great Britain, on whom thousands depend for their livelihoods. Do you really want to be the one who destroyed it all?”

Hatherfield didn’t reply. The monumental white facades of Eaton Square passed by, behind their black iron fences and scanty November gardens. The carriage turned down Belgrave Place, and still he didn’t speak, couldn’t speak; he forced down the boiling rage with a heavy iron lid, until the carriage rolled to a stop before the magnificent double-fronted house of the Duke of Southam.

“Why do you put up with it?” he said quietly. “Why do you put up with her?”

The duke’s voice snapped out as it always had, back to usual. “You will speak of Her Grace with respect, or not at all.”

The carriage door swung open. Southam lifted himself from the seat. “You’re not staying?”

“No. I’ll take the carriage to my own lodging, if you don’t mind.”

“Your mother will not be pleased.”

“Do present her with my compliments and deepest regrets.”

The door slammed shut. The carriage moved off.

Hatherfield slumped back in his seat and watched London slide by. His dash of morning joy had proved short-lived, after all.

S
tefanie drummed her fingernails along the edge of the leather briefcase on her lap. “You don’t think there’s anything the matter, do you?”

Sir John Worthington lifted his head from contemplation of a packet of densely written papers. A morning shadow slipped across his face from the carriage window. “I beg your pardon?”

“Lord Hatherfield. He wasn’t at breakfast.”

“Oh, one never knows when to expect him. He knows my door is open, whenever he should need it.” Sir John’s face turned back to his papers. How he could study them in this jouncing vehicle, lurching about the London traffic, wheeling heedlessly about the corners, Stefanie couldn’t imagine.

Of course there was nothing to worry about. She’d just been expecting him, that was all. Had risen at half six, despite having gone to bed only five hours earlier. Had dressed herself and brushed her hair carefully with the help of a mirror. She had made sure her collar was clean and straight, she had pinched her cheeks for that irresistible rosy glow, she had rubbed her lips furiously together. For what earthly reason? Did she really want the Marquess of Hatherfield to admire the beauty of Mr. Stephen Thomas?

Well, yes. Yes, she did.

Illogical, wrongheaded, muddled, and dangerous in the extreme. But there it was.

And when she had bounded down the stairs and entered the breakfast room and seen only Sir John and a cross-faced Lady Charlotte, she had felt a huge tide of disappointment well up inside her. No smiling, broad-shouldered Hatherfield, the potent antidote to Lady Charlotte’s venom. He had left her at Sir John’s door last night with a
That’s that, then, Thomas, pleasant dreams
, and an intimate smile that had hovered in her obediently pleasant dreams all night. Yes, all night. All night she’d kept company with the memory of Hatherfield’s smile, all night she’d looked forward to seeing that smile again at the breakfast table. She’d simply assumed it would be there.

“I see,” she said now, and Sir John made no sign that he’d heard her, no sign that she existed in this carriage with him. She fingered the fastening on her briefcase and looked out the window. They were jolting up the Strand, nearly there. Her paper lay on Sir John’s desk. She couldn’t even remember what it contained now; the last few pages had been composed in an exhausted blur.

Probably it was horrible. Probably he would read it in dismay. In horror. In—worst of all—amusement. She would be told to leave, to clear her desk, to clear her Spartan room on the third floor of the Worthington town house in Cadogan Square, and what would she do then? Make her way back to Olympia? Confess her failure? What then?

Oh, that Stefanie. Flighty, mischievous Stefanie, always getting herself in trouble, one scrape after another, and then charming her way out of it.

Only this time, there was no charming anyone. She wasn’t a princess anymore, dispensing favors and charm, forgiven for all her faults. She was nobody. She was less than nobody, a fugitive, breaking the laws of Great Britain simply by wearing the clothes on her back. On Sir John’s generosity, she was entirely dependent. And she had failed him.

The last of the morning’s sweet exhilaration vanished into the London fog.

The carriage stopped. The door opened. Sir John climbed down without a glance at her and disappeared through the entrance of his chambers.

Stefanie dragged herself in his wake, carrying his heavy briefcase like the lowliest lackey, like the clerk she was. “I’ll take that,” said Mr. Turner, appearing out of nowhere with his threadbare black arms outstretched.

“And good morning to you, Mr. Turner.”

“You may go to your desk, Mr. Thomas. There are a number of letters there awaiting transcription into clean copies.” Mr. Turner gave her a triumphant look and headed off to Sir John’s office, bearing the briefcase.

Stefanie turned to the desk in question and felt the room stir as four pairs of curious eyes dropped immediately away. Her desk, which she’d left less than eight hours before. On this chair, she had sat and composed her case summary. On that chair, the Marquess of Hatherfield had sprawled his magnificent body and smiled at her. Had devoted an entire evening to ensuring she was fed and safe.

Well, that was something, wasn’t it? She could take that memory with her.

Stefanie trudged down the aisle to her desk and squared the legs of the chair in an exact perpendicular relationship to the worn wooden surface. She inhaled the familiar smell of last night, that particular combination of leather and paper and wood, and her heart ached. A few forgotten bread crumbs lay in one corner. She lifted her hand to brush them to the floor and stopped herself. Hers or Hatherfield’s?

She brushed them into her palm instead, and from her palm into her pocket.

In the center of the old blotter sat a stack of clean white paper and a few sheets of crisscrossed scribbles, topped with a plain black marble paperweight. Stefanie removed the fountain pen from the drawer, gave it a little shake, and set to work.

The pens of the other clerks scratched around her. Someone coughed, a strangled and desperate cough that its owner tried heroically to suppress. Stefanie concentrated on her handwriting, which had never been her strong suit, or even her middling suit, particularly when set next to her sister Emilie’s perfect copperplate or Luisa’s grand strokes. Stefanie was a scribbler, fond of dashes and exclamation points and sentences that had no point at all, just a
dotdotdot
at the end, an unfinished thought, a suggestion, a wink.

She frowned now at the phrase before her:
Therefore, it is my studied recommendation that the witnesses belong to one of two categories: Firstmost, those who will establish the character of the defendant as one who upholds the highest standards of moral and physical law; and, Secondmost, those who will establish the ability of the defendant to handle matters of bookkeeping and finance in a rigorous and arithmetically adept manner, without regard to his personal interest.
So dreadfully dry. How on earth did these legal chaps read all this without falling into a drooling catatonic stupor? Stefanie’s pen hovered over the words
bookkeeping
and
finance
. She wondered whether anyone would notice if she changed them to
bookmaking
and
forgery
.

Clearly she wasn’t cut out for this work. Clearly she should have been apprenticed to a newspaperman instead, or perhaps a theater owner, or even . . .

A shadow cast across the page.

Stefanie glanced up, expecting to find the beetle face of Mr. Turner sneering down at her, about to inform her that she might gather her hat and coat and find another set of chambers to darken with her slovenly habits and her intolerable cheek.

But the sight that greeted her was far worse than that.

Sir John Worthington. Stern, gray-faced, his impartial dark eyes burrowing through her forehead to root out the corruption within. Before Stefanie could so much as leap to her feet and perform a ritual genuflection, he barked out, “Mr. Thomas. In my office, if you please,” and turned away in the obvious expectation of instant obedience.

Stefanie scrambled after him. On her back, she felt the weight of every clerkly eyeball, heavy with schadenfreude.

SIX

T
he telegram was waiting on Hatherfield’s breakfast tray, after he had bathed and shaved in the private if rather sterile comfort of his bachelor flat in Knightsbridge.

“Nelson!” he called out. “When did this telegram arrive?”

His manservant appeared soundlessly and miraculously sober in the bedroom doorway. “While you were bathing, sir. I have taken the liberty of putting out the brown tweed suit, sir, and the blue necktie.”

“Very good, Nelson.” Hatherfield selected a daggerlike silver letter opener from the secretary in the corner and tore open the thin white envelope with a neat slash across one side.

PERCEPTIVE STOP EXPECTED NOTHING LESS STOP GUARD WITH ALL DUE VIGILANCE STOP RETURN LONDON LATE TONIGHT STOP EXPECT YOU AT NINE SHARP TOMORROW MORNING STOP YOURS OLYMPIA

Hatherfield tapped the edge of the telegram against the secretary and swore.

Guard with all due vigilance
. What the devil did that mean? Guard the secret of her disguise? Or guard young Thomas herself?

He pictured her again, her sleek auburn head bowed over her desk and then turning up to greet him in delighted amazement. The way his blood had jumped in his veins at the sight. And later, her face shadowed and exhausted in the anemic glow of the Cadogan Square gas lamps, as she disappeared up the steps of Sir John’s town house. He thought of the clerks scratching away in those damned legal chambers, in full proximity to her dancing eyes and curving posterior, and the answer to his question rose up so violently in his throat, he could taste it.

Both.

As he had been doing, without instruction, already. Watching over her like a hen with a particularly adventurous chick, guarding her travels and providing her supper.

He looked down at the telegram once more.
Expected nothing less.

Damn Olympia. He’d planned it all out, hadn’t he? No accident at all, Hatherfield’s being present in that godforsaken castle in Devon when Mr. Stephen Thomas made his introduction to his new household.

Which begged the question: Who the devil was she, really?

And what the flying hell was Olympia up to?

“Nelson!” he called out. “Ring down for my hansom at once, please.”

“Right away, sir.”

Hatherfield gulped his coffee and reached for his shirt. His manservant, who knew better than to attend him while in the act of dressing, disappeared into the other room to ring the mews.

Half an hour later, Hatherfield’s hansom was zigzagging nimbly through traffic on its way to the City. He had an errand to dispose of first, before he could attend to Miss Thomas.

S
ir John Worthington had already positioned himself behind his desk, stiff-necked and imposing, by the time Stefanie stepped bravely after him into the office.

“Close the door, if you will, Mr. Thomas.” Sir John lifted the ends of his jacket and lowered himself into his chair.

The door made an awful echoing thump as Stefanie closed it, as of a prison gate shutting tight. This was because the office itself was large and high ceilinged and remarkably free of the usual layers of bookshelf and wainscoting, a spacious box of a room, uncluttered and well lit, with Sir John’s substantial desk positioned in the center and flanked by two chairs upholstered in leather. Also, the door was four inches thick of solid British heart of oak.

Sir John gestured to one of the leather chairs. “Sit, please.”

As if she were a dog. Stefanie stalked up to the chair and crashed into the seat with equal parts vim and vigor. If one were about to be dismissed summarily, one should face one’s fate with stubborn chin tilted.

“I have here before me your summary of the unfortunate case of Mr. Harding and the dustman,” said Sir John.