No Place for a Dame (17 page)

He could not put her out of his mind, however, and decided that before he left Killylea he would win a laugh from her, somehow flush the beguiling joy from wherever she hid it. As she was ubiquitous within Killylea’s halls, he could pursue every opportunity.

She was not receptive. Not at first. She seemed to view every comment he made as a test, every subject as an opportunity to prove she’d made good use of the education the marquess had provided. His father encouraged her to exhibit her vast amount of knowledge, seemed even to take pride in her achievements.

But, eventually, as Giles refused to play the “quiz Avery” game and it became apparent that he would not judge her based on her academic achievements, her stiffness faded and she relaxed her vigilance.

Finally, one day while they were taking lunch with the marquess, Giles said something that made her laugh. To this day he could not recall what it was. He only knew that it hadn’t been anything witty or sophisticated but it had been enough to free the same delighted, joy-filled laughter he’d heard on his arrival. It had made him catch his breath. And in the next instant, he had to catch it again as she peeped at him from beneath the thick sweep of her lashes and an unexpected dimple appeared in her cheek.

An image of her lying beneath him, her face flushed with the afterglow of lovemaking, her eyes glittering with that same soft joy, waylaid his imagination and left him dry mouthed and yearning.

His father’s gaze had swung from Giles to Avery and as soon as lunch
was done, he’d requested Giles to join him in the library. Once there, he had rounded on him.

“What do you think you are doing?” It would have been better if his father had been angry, but he was not. He had been aghast, shocked. “Avery’s father entrusted her welfare to me as well as her education. I thought you understood that.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“I saw the way you looked at her. I may not be one of your sophisticated ton friends, Giles, but I can see clearly enough when a man has designs on a woman.”

He wanted to protest but he could not, because no matter how innocent his motives might have been to begin with, in the end desire had proved paramount. He did want her.

“You’ve been trying to seduce that girl for days and now you’re on the cusp of achieving it and I will not stand for it. Do you hear me? You are not going to make Avery Quinn your mistress. She is better than that. She has a greater vocation in this world than pleasuring you!”

His words were as effective as a blow and just as painful. Anger boiled in to replace the guilt the accusation had awoken. “Oh? And what vocation is that?” Giles drawled. “At which college is she going to teach? Which scholar is going to accept her as their associate? What press is going to publish her? Where will she continue her research?”

The marquess’s face had turned bright red.

“What do you think
you
are doing?” Giles had countered. “Giving this girl a false sense of her own worth. Encouraging her to make assumptions about a future that will never materialize.
She’s your gamekeeper’s daughter
, by all that’s holy. And now she has no place in
any
society, either that to which she was born or that which her father serves.”

His father stared at him, the bright color slowly receding from his cheeks. He furrowed his brow, peering at Giles as though seeing something unexpected. “I confess, I find it surprising you’ve given the girl any real thought.”

Giles turned away. “Of course you are.”

“But that doesn’t change the fact that she is under my protection.” He put his hand on Giles’s shoulder. It been years since his father had
touched him and Giles could not keep from turning back towards him. His father’s eyes bore into his. “I would consider it the most morally reprehensible of offenses if you were to offer her any other sort of protection. I would not like to think you capable of such a thing.”

“Not even the protection of my name?” He didn’t know what made him say it. Perhaps he’d just wanted to shock his father.

Instead of flinching, her father simply shook his head rather sadly, for all the world as if he’d actually pondered such a thing himself. “Your name would be no protection at all. You would simply make outcasts of you both.

“I know how well you love Society. If you wed her, soon enough you would abandon her for your mistresses and then she would be unutterably lonely.” He gave a half smile. “And bored.”

So much for his father’s good opinion. But he had made his point.

Not that Giles was considering marrying the girl. She was sixteen. She knew nothing of the world or men. She was prickly as a hedgehog and about as unsophisticated. He was a sophisticated man with sophisticated tastes. And very sophisticated sins.

He rarely saw Avery after that visit. Each time he ventured home she seemed to be gone, installed in the home of some newly hired professor or expert far away. It was probably for the best.

But for all these years he had kept close to his heart and cherished the knowledge that he had once made Avery Quinn laugh.…

Chapter Sixteen

T
hree days later Avery had still not decided what to ask of Strand in payment for his debt. Not that she could have collected even if she had, for she hadn’t seen him since the night they’d played cards. Once again, he vanished early, ate out somewhere, and returned only after she’d retired for the evening.

She might have been tempted to sneak out again herself if it hadn’t been for the book she’d purchased. It kept her riveted. Like a miser with a bit of cheese, she’d parsed her reading out in two-hour allotments, tucking herself away in Strand’s library every afternoon where she eagerly cracked open the pages of the anonymously written
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
.

Which is where she was when Travers found her.

“Here you are!” he said, hustling in to the library. He carried her coat over his arm and in his hand held her hat and a pair of gloves. “Lord Neville is in the front saloon waiting for you! He says that it’s been arranged that you would go driving with him.”

She bolted upright. She’d forgotten all about Neville Demsforth,
including her plan to write him a note declining his offered carriage ride. “Oh, dear. I forgot.”

“Clearly. As well, apparently, as your promise to Lord Strand to stay out of the public eye.”

Heat piled into Avery’s cheeks.

Travers clucked his tongue, looking over his shoulder to make sure they were not overheard. “Nothing can be done about it now. Lord Neville is expecting you. You are hardly dressed for an excursion in the young lord’s company, but that can’t be helped either. You can’t keep him waiting. He has far more consequence than you
or
the character you pretend to be.”

Guiltily, Avery stood up. “Please, can’t you tell him something?”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m indisposed? Unavailable? Ill?”

“No. I cannot. A gentleman would have sent word if he were discommoded and, even if you are not a gentleman—a fact, I daresay, which will soon become clear to Lord Neville if it hasn’t already done so—Lord Strand is, and
he
would never allow his protégé to be so cavalier with another’s time.”

“But you said yourself that I oughtn’t go,” Avery countered worriedly. It was one thing to gull a young man for an hour in a room filled with other distractions; it was another to do so while closeted with him in a carriage. Not to mention the whole “carriage” aspect of the outing. She didn’t trust the high-wheeled contraptions young “whips” insisted on driving. “He’s bound to find me out. I shall make any number of mistakes, I know it.”

“It’s too late to think of that now.”

“What will we talk about? I have nothing to say to him.”

Upon hearing the panic in her voice, Travers relented. “You say no more than necessary. You keep your face averted as much as possible while still remaining polite. Remember, you are a young man. Do not titter.”

The idea of her giggling like some idiotic girl acted as bracingly as a face full of cold water. She sniffed. “I have
never
tittered.”

Her outrage did not impress him. “Do not start now. And do not attempt to emulate the manner of a young buck. Promote yourself instead as being that which you are: a scholar. At least no one can doubt the
veracity of
that
representation. Anything else is bound to raise speculation if not downright skepticism.”

He fussed about her person while he gave his advice, brushing off a few bits of toast left over from the morning’s meal and tugging at her feather-augmented corset, the billowy parts having shifted to her side while she sat curled in the chair.

He motioned for her to turn around and held open the coat he’d brought. She obliged, sticking her arms through the sleeves. He came round to her front and buttoned her up. Then he draped a scarf around her neck, handed her the gloves, and plopped her hat atop her head. Finally, he picked up the glasses she’d left on the table and seated them on the bridge of her nose. He stood back, eying her with what she could only think was extreme misgiving.

“I have reconsidered.” He shook his head. “Do not talk at all. Your best hope of success lays in drawing as little attention to your face as possible. Say you have a sore throat and leave it at that. And do not, for any reason whatsoever, remove your glasses.”

Avery stared unhappily up at Lord Neville’s carriage. It shone black as a cormorant’s wing, a pair of light gray horses, perfectly matched in height and conformation, shifting restlessly in their traces. High, high above her, perched on slender black springs, awaited a seat upholstered in rich, claret-red leather.

With all the excitement of a boy with a new toy, Neville hurried to the driver’s side of the vehicle and clambered up. He settled himself, took up the reins, and looked down at her expectantly. Abruptly, she realized he was waiting for her to climb aboard unassisted. Of course he would. She was supposed to be a healthy—or at least relatively healthy—young man from the country.

But she didn’t know how. She had never ridden in such a vehicle before. It looked dangerous. She’d only ridden in rented hacks or, on rare occasion, with the marquess in his barouche, a low-slung, cumbersome vehicle. Carriages like this one invariably seemed to be traveling too
fast, the horses barely under the control of their red-faced and often terrified-looking owners as pedestrians, livestock, and fowl fled from beneath thundering hooves and screeching wheels.

“Come along, Quinn. Me cattle’s getting restless.”

The “cattle,” weren’t just restless, they were fraught. Their ears lay flat back against their heads as they blew vapor clouds out of dilated nostrils and stomped impatiently.

Dubiously taking hold of the rail, she raised a foot high up on the metal step forged to the side of the carriage. The alien and altogether indecent sensation of having her legs spread so wide apart caused her to blink. Neville looked down at her. “Is something wrong?”

“No!” she croaked, scrambling up the side and into the seat next to Lord Neville.

He regarded her approvingly. “I confess I wondered whether we ought to have Strand’s footman fetch a block of steps but you are certainly light-footed for someone so…” He broke off, the color rising in his cheeks.

She took pity on him. “I know what I look like and you are correct. I am more agile than one would suppose,” she said, hoping conversation would distract her from the height of the carriage and its team of feral horses. One rolled its eye towards her in malicious promise. She could see the white of it.

He turned to her gratefully. “And
I
suppose I shouldn’t expose you to the elements like this, but she was only just delivered to me and I could not stand to let her sit idle.”

Avery looked about for the “she” to whom Neville referred and caught his eye.

“The curricle,” he explained, with a return of the pitying expression he’d worn in Giles’s drawing room.

“I see.” Apparently young men were wont to ascribe inanimate objects a female gender. How peculiar. But then, given what she knew of female aristocracy, perhaps not so peculiar. Certainly this curricle had more personality than most of the grand ladies she’d encountered. Not that she’d met that many. When she’d been living with her various tutors, she had not spent any time in the company of the mistresses of the establishments and she had been kept entirely from associating with any
daughters of the house lest, she supposed, something as indecorous as genius be contagious.