Judith Ivory (4 page)

“Oh, there’s a fine idea. We’ll honor a—a—a man who thinks himself above the law, who thinks he can murder innocent sheep in the road and get away with it—”

“He dunna want t’ ‘git away’ with it exackly. He’s offered ta—”

“Or name his own terms. No. If you invite him to the New Year’s Fair, then don’t bother looking for me there.”

“Oh, Em. Don’ get yer dander up. Or his any further.”

“Don’t ‘oh, Em’ me. I’m right.”

“Being right ain’t ev’rything.”

She pressed her mouth, looked away, folding her arms, the legal papers flapping in the wind at her armpit. Then she glanced back, momentarily brighter. “Mabelle’s son studies law. He’s working with some barristers in London. He could—”

“
Ach
, for God’s grace, give oop.” John folded his bottom lip over his top one, like an envelope, then the lip flapped once, a
pah
, from the force of his letting out a long breath. He said, “Even if you could git yerself to the Ol’Bailey and hold the case, he’d only take it the next higher. Ye could end in the House of Lards.”

Emma laughed—she loved that he occasionally called them
lards
without cracking a smile.

John continued. “The man’s making his point. He’s a blewdy vee-count. He ain’t having nuthin’ to do with a hen making him dance o’er a lost lamb.”

Emma snorted, but she had “nuthin’” more to say.

And nuthin’ more to do: A legal battle in London was impossible. She hated the place anyway, even worse than she
hated arrogant
lards
—or
yahs
as her Scottish mother had called them: rich, public-school boys who thought they ran the world. For a moment she knew a drop of pure, glistening hatred for the stupid, bloody “vee-count” on the hill, for his arrogance, his money, and all the power at the beck and call of his entire class.

Then she let the feeling go. Ah, never mind. London was too far. She had a farm to work—her neighbors were offering their rams for raddling, and she should take them up on the offer, see her ewes set for next spring. Her life was busy. She was getting by. She hardly had the time, let alone the money, to do anything more over the matter.

It was done. She’d lost. By default. Outmonied, overpowered.

She glimpsed over her shoulder at the papers that ruffled and chattered in her fist. “Thank you, John. I suppose you’re right. I hate it, but you’re right.”

She turned with him, stuffing her gloved hands with the wad of documents into her pockets, heading back toward home. At the road, they parted, him for the village, her for her house across the meadow.

About halfway home, she found herself stopped though, reading the crumpled papers again.

York.
Her mind fixed on the word. The bank draft was on the York Joint-Stock Banking Company and would be “available onward from Thursday.”

York. The town was three hours away—an hour into Harrogate, then a two-hour train ride.

Don’t be daft, she thought.

Still, her gaze held, unbroken, on the bank cheque signed by the wrong name. The wrong name at least for a “large amount.”

She bent over, turning against the wind and smoothing the papers out against her coat, her skirts and legs beneath. The winter sun struck the cheque, bright, shadowless, as she stared, scanning it from corner to corner. This one was
printed with the viscount’s family name. Stuart Winston Aysgarth. Stuart. She claimed the name there and then, her tribute to a man who didn’t deserve any respectful titles.

“Well, Stuart,” she said to the papers at her knees and thrilled to the irreverent sound of it. Stuart.

Under the bank’s name was, again, the city: York.

It wasn’t daft to go to York. York wasn’t London. And she could be there and back in a day.

Stuart, Stuart, Stuart. She wanted more; there was more. She raised up, shuffling through papers until she was looking at the last page of one of the legal documents. It was filed on behalf of “Stuart Winston Aysgarth, The Right Honourable the Viscount Mount Villiars, Viscount Aysgarth, Baron Dar-caster of Kilnwick, Baron Aysgarth of Dare, and baronet, serving Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria.” The string of titles startled a laugh out of her. He sounded like a bloody army of men—all of whom relished laws and rules and regulations, being as he was a member of the class, race, and sex who’d invented them all and how to use them.

What a shame for him they didn’t play by them any longer she thought.

I
N
the hands of an expert, separating a sheep from its wool was a kind of ballet. A real artist could shear the fleece off a big, surly ram in a piece, slipping it off like a discarded vest down onto the floor: able to divest, as it were, the same ram who might, under different circumstances, be able, horns down, to chase a woman off his field. Rams could be so imperious, Emma knew, so self-important, downright dangerous. If a body were going to shear one, all the more reason to wield the clippers with a great deal of finesse.

Emma’s father, gone ten years now, had been the local shearer, sustaining his small family—himself, his wife, and daughter—on a few sheep of his own and the annual removal of the fleeces of everyone else’s. He was a taciturn man, who,
on the rare occasions when he did have something to say, almost always related it to his profession.
You never muscle a sheep into it. You dance him into it.
Emma had grown up full of awe of his skill and wishing she could do this dance herself, without the size or reach for it. She always thought that was where the idea of shearing people with Zach had taken root, what had helped to make it all right in London. Till that fateful afternoon when it had become decidedly otherwise, it had seemed a gentle game, where the one being sheared ended up a little frightened, but no true harm done, with a byproduct that was nothing but useful: money, gently removed from those whose own greed fairly well predicted they’d grow more soon enough.

Shearing. It was what she sat thinking of as she gazed out the tall, double-glazed—velvet-draped, gold-tasseled—windows of the York Joint-Stock Banking Company. Shearing a headstrong ram.

From this side of the glass, now that her cheeks and nose had thawed, she felt a pleasant sense of anticipation. In a warm bank—a virtual monument to English adaption, with its forced-air fireplaces and vast oriental carpet, holding winter at bay—she waited along with everyone else for their first sight of an elusive viscount whom no one had seen yet, despite his having arrived in the country more than four months ago. Mount Villiars. He was late. But he most assuredly would show up, since his signatures were required on papers he himself had initiated. Everyone—from the bank’s governor to the various officers all the way down the row of windows to the tellers—was alive with the knowledge, with expectation and curiosity that wafted in the air as tangibly as heat crackling in the several hearths, rippling in waves all the way to the high, coffered ceiling.

Emma herself suppressed her excitement, afraid to give it full rein. Patiently, she watched the snow she’d just trudged through outside. It whirled peacefully, white-flecked air currents, leaving deposits, near-blinding white, on rooftops, in
windowsills, collecting in wedges at the windowpanes. All in all, a fairly gentle Thursday morning for the end of December (three days past Christmas), a time of year when it could sleet sideways with the wind blasting so forcefully it could knock one off one’s feet.

There was much to be thankful for. She sat, for instance, at one corner of a long table as the designated amanuensis to take down all notes necessary—having been sent over by the Mason Krimple Temporary Record Keeping, Accounting, and Amanuensis Service, since, alas, the viscount’s personal secretaries, both of them, had taken leave abruptly. (With luck, no gentleman would think it seemly to discuss who exactly was paying her. No one was. She’d invented the agency after sending Mr. Blainey and his associate, a Mr. Harlow, into London on a wonderfully silly wild-goose chase.) The table was empty but for her and the governor to her left at the table’s head, the deputy governor at her right, Mr. Hemple and Mr. Fogmoth, respectively. A dozen empty chairs other than this, all in ready.

More for something to do, she shifted on her chair’s leather cushion, lifting her stenography pad, kicking up her skirts just enough to recross her legs in the other direction, then settled the notepad back onto her knee with the
shushy
noise of moving taffeta. Her movement drew the attention of both men at the table. She’d worn a rather risqué petticoat for the occasion, one that announced itself at every turn.

She caught the men’s gazes, one then the other, and smiled. After a brief hesitation, they each smiled back. She blinked, fluttering her eyelashes, and blushed shyly, deceptively, looking down as demurely as she knew how. She wore a rather fusty frock, wool and striped silk faded to pale blue, with a high collar and skirts that looped up at the sides and back. She liked it well enough, though it was hard to say how out-of-date it was, since it had been secondhand already when she’d bought it in London a dozen years ago. Still, it suited the purpose. It fit snugly, barely containing her gener
ous bosom. It was tight enough around her ribs and waist that she didn’t like to breathe too deeply for fear the buttons would give. As an extra precaution, she wore a steel watch (that had ceased to work, alas) pinned low on her right breast, on the off chance that anyone here might miss how wholly—that is to say, frivolously—female she was.

Even frivolously, it was surprisingly nice to feel female again. She hadn’t bothered to for so long, she realized.

Emma liked her voluptuous little body. It was generous at every curve, too full and short to be considered elegant, yet as feminine as the female form came. The snug dress and noisy petticoat worked with that notion rather than against it. Since she would be the only woman at the table, the only way not to stand out—to invisibility—was to become what men generally expected in a woman, a sweet piece of confection, all heart, no head: born to serve.

Alas, she wasn’t going to serve them as well as they thought. She didn’t know a stroke of shorthand nor how to type. She thought she had rather a nice knack, though, for scribbling as if she took shorthand. And she didn’t intend to stay around long enough to type anything. She was here strictly to see, firsthand, the viscount’s “particular” signature—and, all right, satisfy her curiosity for what the hard-driving, smart-mouth recluse was like in the flesh—then the “viscount” would write out a countercheque to cover the rightful cost of her lamb, and she would be off to submit the draft to a distant branch. Their amanuensis would disappear after tea, she imagined.

At the very moment, the room stirred, and Emma’s heartbeat picked up as not one but two large carriages rolled past the window: one of them familiar. How strange to see the exact same shiny, black-lacquered coach that had struck her lamb. How perfect! The viscount’s big, gorgeous carriage from months ago—with liveried servants hanging off it from all directions—rolled to a stop directly in front of the win
dow behind the second vehicle. Carriage doors opened. She could only see the backs of men as they poured from the carriage and the one ahead of it, the snowfall making of them a speckled blur of dark coats, canes, capes, and a lot of bobbing black hats. Oh, men were so amusing, weren’t they? she thought. Such a self-important sex.

A moment later, the bank’s double doors swung open. A gust of cold blew in that she could feel all the way across the lobby. It preceded two footmen in umber wool with greenish gold braid, the colors of the Viscounts Mount Villiars for centuries. These servants battled the heavy doors, holding them open as through the entranceway passed a parade of men: the first two in bowler hats, the next in a top hat, the three of them stomping their somber shoes, yet unable to stomp off the mien of solicitors; it was all over them. Two more men entered behind them, both sporting hamburgs, one with a foreign-looking mustache; they carried the sort of leather folders that accountants liked to cart about, or have someone cart for them. Two younger men came in behind them, then another young man, hurrying.

There followed a small space of time, a few heartbeats, before a presence—there was no other word for him—walked into the doorway: He took over the doorway, in fact, in his tall top hat and billowing greatcoat.

After months of trying to see him, there was no doubt: Stuart Winston Aysgarth, the Right Honourable the Viscount Mount Villiars, la la, she thought,
and all those other titles
. Yet, despite herself, Emma could not hold down a certain amount of awe. And surprise. What was she expecting? Not this.

The viscount stopped in the doorway, head bent, the round oval of his top hat gleaming, as he wiped his feet. No somber shoes for him: He wore high-polished black boots reminiscent of Hessians, as shiny as black mirrors, fitted, foreign-looking. Then he looked up, pausing to stare out
from the shadows of the brim of his top hat, leisurely—one might have said
lordly
—perusing the bank’s vast gallery, as if to decide whether the place were worthy of entering.

He stood there a long moment:
Stuart,
she reminded herself, trying to recapture—ground herself in—her own disrespect. Yet he wasn’t at all what she’d imagined: tall, slender, broad-shouldered, and younger somehow than she’d concocted in her imagination. She realized the boy who lived on the hill, taken away by his father at six, had been near her age at the time, which would make him presently one-and-thirty. His tailored form now, backlit against a sunny white afternoon, made the colors of the street behind him seem flat. Two half-timbered storefronts with swinging signs, a fading, out-of-season Christmas wreath under a doorway, all of it obscured by flurries: unreal. He looked for a moment as if he inhabited one of those children’s globes, the updrafts and downdrafts of rotating flakes as chaotic about him as though someone had shaken the town of York with his being the only fixed piece.

He stepped forward. Behind him, his footmen won over the heavy doors that closed with the
swooshing
finality of an airtight vault. And the Viscount Mount Villiars—the recluse who raced along country roads, the expatriate come home, the surly correspondent and careful, private, quarrelsome man Emma had not been able to get near till now—began toward them across the long lobby at a kind of march.

Within half a dozen steps, smartly clicking till his footfalls struck the carpet, he reduced the whole place to utter silence. Customers turned at the teller windows, gape-jawed. Employees tiptoed from the back only to stop dead in their tracks.

He strode beneath a long dark greatcoat that flapped close to the ground about his legs, trimmed at the hem, cuffs, and lapels in silver-gray fur as thick and dense as batting. Amazing fur; she’d never seen anything quite like it. It lay, silvery
and smooth, against vast amounts of dark wool. A simple style, yet…more somehow than most Englishmen would wear. Likewise, the coat was longer, more tailored across his broad chest and wide shoulders, narrower to his waist than English tastes allowed, while being oceans more voluminous about his long-striding legs.

Clothes. He was all clothes, she realized. She couldn’t honestly see him. Still. She found herself turned in her chair, craning.

The chair down one from her scraped. She glanced and realized one of the solicitors had claimed the chair next to the deputy governor; two other men were sitting down opposite them. The long table was filling in, and—oh, jings, double jings, he was almost surely going to sit somewhere down from her, out of sight: After all this time, she was not going to get a good look at anything but his hat and coat! No. It was simply too much. She had to make a closer inspection—get his scent as the old Zach would have said.

She pushed her chair back, setting her notepad on the corner of the dark wood table. “Excuse me.” She looked at the men on either side of her, holding her pen up. “My nib. I left the new one in my coat. I should replace it before we begin. I’ll only be a moment.” With that, she was up and off.

She walked briskly across the bank gallery, setting a trajectory for her coat by the door as she wove her way through the last of the viscount’s advancing phalanx: stepping sideways to maneuver her skirts and shoulders between the two young men who weren’t paying attention, the third giving way to her, the two footmen separating off to the sides. All the while she watched the viscount in her peripheral vision—then dropped her pen, looked down and to the right, presumably searching for it as she stepped back, turning. She backed up directly into Mount Villiars’s path.

The collision was a bit more successful than she intended: He walked smack into the back of her, mostly her buttocks,
then had to catch her or she would have been knocked off her feet. He weighed more—more solid, more mass in motion somehow—than she’d expected. Then more amazing still: As he caught her round the waist, with her twisting to grab his shoulder, his dark eyes did a kind of classic double glance. He looked once, then looked quickly back again, the second time down at her with what could have been called awareness, even approval.

Emma was nonplussed. As she turned, trying to get her balance, his hand went flat against the small of her back. The two of them did a kind of dance for a few steps that would have been risqué under any other circumstance. And still she couldn’t see him; he was a tangle of coat, a play of shadows under the brim of a hat. Though she could smell him, a warm, suede-soft odor so distinct it was like walking into a subtle, spicy cocoon of it, exotic: foreign. Meanwhile, she could have sworn he leaned, keeping them off-kilter a moment more than necessary, putting them both at risk of falling simply to extend their little pas de deux. Then, just as suddenly, he righted her and let go.

Which left her breathless, unable to speak. For one thing, she’d had the wind knocked out of her. For another—

Well, not that she considered herself unattractive. Far from it. It was just that she thought of herself as good, solid country stock (if a bit on the runty side when it came to height). She’d learned in London that men liked women, period. A girl didn’t have to be a variety hall showgirl to have a trail of fellows sniffing about. On the other hand, she carried a stone or two more weight than, oh, say, a Russian ballerina. It was a curvaceous two stones. Many men responded to her, appreciated her femininity. It was just that she wouldn’t predict a wealthy, handsome viscount—and, in a glance, Mount Villiars was handsome without any immediate accounting for how or why—fresh from the Continent and beyond to succumb within the near instant of meeting her. Yet he kept staring at her, there was no doubt.