Miss Delacourt Has Her Day (17 page)

“I see,” Anthony mused, though he most assuredly did not.

“Don’t fret, boy! I mean for you to get your due, regardless.”

Anthony inclined his head. As the property was entailed and the succession ensured, his uncle’s regard was extraordinary. “Is anything amiss?” He longed to add, “Anything other than your dying?” but felt the query a bit insensitive in the glare of his uncle’s apparent hale heartiness.

“No, not at all. Why do you ask?”

Anthony opened his mouth to speak, but there were no words to be had. Resisting the urge to look about the room for an indication he had entered the wrong house entirely, he stood biting his lip and waiting while his uncle scribbled notes and cackled to himself at regular intervals.

Finally, when he could bear it no longer, Anthony managed to formulate an appropriate question. “Sir, have I come all this way for naught?”

“But of course! Now, do be off,” the duke insisted. “I believe you are expected elsewhere. No doubt you’ll be as late to your next appointment as you were to the last.”

Too relieved to puzzle long over the strange interview, Anthony sketched a bow and turned to flee.

“I know what you’re thinking, young man,” the duke insisted, forcing Anthony to turn and face the long-expected tirade. “That I’m too old to know my own business. I know better what I’m about than a whippersnapper such as yourself. You leave my business to me, just as you had better be about yours!” the duke shouted, pounding his fist on the bed so that papers scattered hither and yon. “I meant what I said about that girl of yours, and I expect you to achieve all three tasks, or I’ll find her a husband who can! Now scarper out of here, and have my man attend to me at once! At once, do you hear?”

Anthony heard, only too well. Gone was his suspicion that someone had replaced his uncle with a younger, healthier version of himself. No one could read a lecture like his uncle, the duke, except perhaps Grandmama, and there was no mistaking one for another despite the startlingly similar sharply pinched nose they shared.

“Freestone!” Anthony bellowed in a dead-on imitation of the duke. Anthony prayed the hard-pressed valet would ascertain his master’s need and wait on him forthwith. Meanwhile, Anthony was down the stairs and out the front door of Crenshaw House before one could say Jack Robinson.

It wasn’t until he was safely behind the reins of his conveyance and had whipped up a smart pace for his return journey that he had leisure to reflect on how he was to carry out the three tasks upon which his uncle insisted before giving his blessing to Anthony’s marriage. Surely his uncle’s threat to find Ginny a more accomplished husband, one who could box and race and fly a balloon, was merely hot air. Grandmama would never allow Ginny to be packed off and wed to some old crony of the duke’s. Or would she? Anthony shuddered. It was not worth thinking on. It was impossible. Indeed, it was horrifying !

Whipping up the horses to greater speed, he cudgeled his brain for a way to beat the greatest race time on record, one held by Old Q, the recently deceased Duke of Queensbury. The fact that the record, more than nineteen miles per hour for a chaise and four, was achieved sixty-five years prior was troublesome. The fact that no one had achieved that speed either before or since was irksome. The fact that the chaise in which this phenomenon was enacted was specially made with silk tracings and harnesses of lightest whalebone was worrisome in the extreme. By the time he arrived at Bond Street, he deemed it impossible to meet Old Q’s time, let alone beat it.

However, he could not allow the possible fate of his second task to determine the end result of his first. Putting the carriage race firmly from his mind, he entered the boxing acad emy looking every inch the confident man his tailor would have him be. Jackson, of course, was a gentleman about the change in plans, and the kind Sir Hillary, along with all of White’s, it would seem, was in attendance to see how his faux bet proceeded.

The fight was swift and satisfying. Conti went down in one blow, saving both his dusky complexion undue discoloration and Anthony’s already much-abused knuckles the same. As Anthony pulled the valet to his feet amid cheers and jubilation from the spectators, his worry for the fate of tomorrow’s feat returned in full force, denying him any sense of victory.

Conti, however, would not allow his master a moment to feel downcast. “Eef you have but the right question, my lord, I have the right answer.”

“You have my utmost attention,” Anthony adjured.

“Thees is not a question, but I will answer nonetheless. The daughter of the Duke of Queensbury!”

Anthony quelled an itch to hit the Italian enigma right in his aquiline nose. Again. “And how does this answer anything?”

“She, my lord, ees my cousin.”

Anthony felt a lightness of heart so sudden, it threatened to create a great and abiding love for his obnoxious valet.

“In that case, what are we waiting for?”

tinny sat at her dressing table puzzling over a note she had received shortly after consuming an excellent breakfast of hot chocolate and rolls. As unexpected as were the contents of the note, she had no doubt as to whom it was from; it was Anthony’s seal impressed in the wax that held the missive closed.

“Why should he make such an odd request?” she murmured.

“Well, what does he say?” Nan insisted.

As it was her third query, Ginny refused to be nettled by her companion’s cross demeanor. Ginny’s reluctance to answer was due only to the fact that she found it difficult to speak when a deep apprehension had her throat so tightly in its grip. With trembling hands she lifted the note and once again read, aloud this time, “Go nowhere. I pray you, feel no anxiety on my behalf.” She let the vellum flutter from her grasp. “Why should I not go where I have planned? And he doesn’t say why I shouldn’t be anxious on his behalf. It is a bit of a puzzle.”

“Perhaps he spotted that man with the mangy of bear out and about today,” Nan suggested with a shudder. “He knows how much it distresses you to see that chain about its neck. Why people hand over good coin to see such sights is one I cannot credit!”

“Nan, dear, I would gladly brave the bear in order to buy my bride clothes, and I mean to dedicate myself to that end. Today! Besides which, I’m persuaded a mangy old animal is not so great a fear that he should feel the need to allay it. I think I might know what this is about, but I must go out to learn what I can”

“But, miss, he asked you not to!”

“Nevertheless, I shall go, and you shall accompany me”

“Me?” Nan asked, her eyes wide with horror. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know what to say to anyone. It is the of dragon you should take along.”

“Yes,” Ginny said, turning to the glass to check her appearance one last time. “But I’m persuaded Grandaunt Regina would endeavor to keep me at home. Besides which, she knows what it is Lord Crenshaw refuses to say. What’s more,” she said, turning to bestow a warm smile on her friend, “you are in need of an outing!”

Nan cringed. “But the bear! I can’t abide that bear, miss!”

Ginny bit back a smile, thinking it was high time Nan owned up to her fear of the bear. “I know you can’t, dearest, which is why I shall fetch you a hat with a thick black veil from Grandaunt’s room. You shan’t be able to see a blessed thing.”

“Well,” Nan said, hesitating, “if I am to wear such a fine hat, I can hardly go out in my everyday clothes.”

“You shall have one of my gowns,” Ginny said, jumping from her seat and going to the clothespress. “Here; it’s my black from when Father died and should fit you well, for all the flesh I’ve put on since. To think I used to be as rail-thin as you,” she said with a tsk.

“Rail-thin, and no wonder Sir Anthony never spared you a glance,” Nan exclaimed as she took the gown and held it against her scrawny form. “And here I am, still thin as a stick and you a regular go-er!”

“Now, Nan, there shall be no such cant if you are to ride with me today. Promise you shall be on your best behavior!”

“Yes, miss, o’ course. I shall go directly and change”

Ginny collected her gloves, reticule, and paisley shawl, then donned her chip straw bonnet with the wide satin ribbon and tied it firmly beneath her chin. There was nothing like a lovely poke bonnet to protect one’s complexion from the sun and one’s carefully coaxed curls from being pulled this way and that by the wind, especially since she had requested the hood of the carriage be folded back. She would be more likely to spot any clues to Anthony’s doings with the carriage fully open.

Once again she fingered the note and wondered exactly what it meant. In her heart of hearts, she knew he would never cry off, that he would move heaven and earth to marry her. Therefore, he could not possibly object to her shopping trip, at least not in and of itself. There must be some other reason he did not want her to go out, and the rumored boxing match was the most likely culprit. Whether or not it was the case, she fully intended to discover on her own.

John Coachman would doubtless have some light to shed on the matter, and the moment she was able, her hand in his as he handed her up the steps of the precariously swaying carriage, Ginny posed her question.

“Pray tell, where is the boxing academy in relation to Regent Street, where I am to do my shopping today?”

The driver scratched his head and surveyed her from the corner of his eye. “You don’t want to be going there, miss. After two in the afternoon, Bond Street is only for gentleman. No lady of quality would be seen walking there”

Ginny settled her skirts around her and reminded herself she was to be a duchess one day. Holding her chin high, she said, “We needn’t walk. I daresay a drive along the street past the boxing academy would do well enough.”

The carriage dipped and swayed as the driver took his place at the box and turned to give her a rather imperious glance, one to which Ginny took great exception. For the first time she realized her expedition was a bit on the bold side, her dubious safety in the hands of this unknown quantity-minus Grandaunt’s presence, no less.

“If ye don’t mind me being so bold, miss, I would say a drive down Bond at this time of day would be the end of your ‘opes and dreams to marry the young lord, though I’m meaning no disrespect, miss,” the driver said with an obsequious tug at his forelock, an action at great odds with his assertive manner.

“Very well, then,” Ginny said with what she hoped was an authoritative air. “In that case, might we merely come close? I hear there is to be a great fight today, and I am wishful of learning which of my friends will be in attendance”

There came a rumbling sound from the driver’s seat that shook the entire carriage. As Ginny clutched at whatever was at hand to steady herself, she gradually realized the shaking was caused by the driver’s laughter, and it seemed he was laughing at her.

“Miss, ye don’t want to be seen anywhere near the place, and you ain’t gots no `friends’ who are feebleminded enough to attend. It’ll just be men. A proper young miss has no men friends, if’n you know wots I mean”

“Well!” Ginny said for Nan’s ears only. “If it be that beyond the pale, Lady Avery is sure to be there with a feather in her cap” The thought of Lucinda having access to Anthony’s activities while Ginny did not was a thought past bearing. Turning again to the driver, she attempted a different tack. “Is there a possibility of perhaps crossing over Bond Street on our way to Regent Street?”

“There’s no other way but to cross Bond. There will be naught to see of the academy, though, unless we take Berkeley Street all the way down to Piccadilly so as to meet Bond at the right end. It’ll take half-again as long, but it can be done”

“Oh, lovely!” Ginny cried and was relieved when the driver merely grunted and took up the reins to begin their journey.

“Isn’t it exciting, Nan?” Ginny said, laying a hand on her companion’s arm. “I promised I would take you along on many adventures if you would only come with me to London, and here we are! I shall buy you whatever you wish: ribbons at the Pantheon Bazaar, gloves if you like, even an ice at Gunter’s on our way home. Oh, and we shall be sure to stop at Hatchard’s Bookshop, as we shall pass right by it. I daresay I shan’t have time to read a word between now and the wedding, but it will be nice to have a book or two at hand for later.”

Nan groaned. “I think I shall be sick!”

“Oh, dear! We are going at a spanking pace, are we not? I daresay not being able to see is making things worse,” Ginny said, lifting Nan’s veil from her face. “We are sure to encounter no bears in this part of town, so you might as well be comfortable.”

Nan sniffed. “I am persuaded it was yourself who was afeard of the bears,” she said in her loftiest air. “I shall be just fine, now that I am able to look about”

“And I shall be just fine once I learn what it is Lord Crenshaw is at such great pains to hide from me,” Ginny averred.

“Pain is what you’ll get from that grandaunt of yours once you get home again. She’ll not take kindly to your going off on your own this way,” Nan warned.

Ginny hadn’t considered the matter from that perspective but had to admit to the truthfulness of Nan’s words. Grandaunt would be furious once she learned Ginny had gone off into the heart of London in the company of mere servants. The promise of any number of ribbons, even should they be every shade of old rose, had not the power to diminish the unpleasantness of Grandaunt’s sharp tongue upon their return. Ginny pondered the matter and arrived at an excellent solution.