No Place for a Dame (37 page)

“Louis’s mother died in childbirth and Louis himself was sickly from birth. It was the reason the marquess remarried so quickly. He knew Louis would never live to inherit and he needed an heir. The new marchioness was a convent-raised girl blessed with a fine intellect and strength of character. She was also, if I might say, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. And she loved Louis as if he were her own.”

“She sounds wonderful,” Avery said, blushing lightly. She was comparing herself to this paragon, Travers surmised, and believed she fell short. Good heavens, did she really not understand her own beauty?

“At first, it seemed like the marriage would be a success. The marquess showered his new bride with gifts and in short order she produced
two children, just as bonny as herself. But for all that the marquess always loved Louis best.

“He didn’t see Louis as bizarrely small, with a twisted back and stunted limbs. He only saw his beloved son. The new marchioness and Giles and Julia loved him, too. Deeply and sincerely.”

“They were happy,” Avery affirmed softly.

Travers shook his head. “The marriage soon faltered. The marquess either could not or would not give his wife the one thing she craved: companionship. The marquess did not understand her dissatisfaction. After all, he lavished her with wealth, consequence, money, and freedom.” He picked up the cup of hot chocolate and stared into it, his thoughts sifting through the tangled memories of the past.

“When Louis was twelve, he became bedridden. The family did whatever they could to comfort him. The marchioness would sit by his bedside for hours reading to him, and Julia—well, Julia had always had a religious bent. She spent hours in the chapel praying. The marquess retreated to his studies.…” Travers frowned thoughtfully.

“And what did Giles do?”

“He laughed.” He shot her a quick, apologetic look. “Oh, not at Louis.
For
Louis. For his mother. For Julia. Even for the marquess.”

Avery looked at him askance.

“Everyone was so grim, you see. The marchioness’s smiles faded as soon she quit the sickroom and Julia could be heard weeping at her prayers. Their grief exhausted poor Louis. In spite of the fact that he was dying, he always seemed to be the one comforting those who would survive. Except for Giles.

“Giles was his only respite.
Their
only respite. He was so alive. So hale and beautiful and audacious. He made Louis laugh at the tales of his misadventures and his mother smile over his ridiculously overwrought compliments. Even Julia tittered at his blustering obliviousness and cocksure conceit. He never seemed to take anything seriously and somehow that allowed the others to be a little less serious, too.

“It was all an act, of course.” He looked at her sadly. “One he kept up even after Louis died. He’d learned the value of being easy company, you see. Soon after, the marchioness, who had only stayed for Louis’s sake, left. She wanted to take both her children with her but the marquess refused and Giles, who by this time was away at boarding school,
begged to stay near Killylea. He had always loved the place and took most seriously the knowledge that he would someday be heir to it. In the end, the marchioness acquiesced and left with Julia.”

He glanced up and saw the indignation in her face. “The old marquess was not a bad man, Avery, just a very stupid one. He was more comfortable with facts than the subtleties of human nature. He never did see beyond the persona Giles had adopted to the man beneath.”

“But how could he not know his own son?” she cried.

“The old marquess never realized that the role Giles had adopted had been one of the few things that provided respite during the long years of Louis’s decline. He only saw a gorgeous, cocky boy apparently insensitive to the sadness around him. He considered him a popinjay, nothing else.”

“But if he could see past Louis’s exterior, why could he not do the same for Giles?” Avery asked, her expression tense with outrage.

Travers regarded her unhappily. “I don’t know. Perhaps the effort was too much. Perhaps he didn’t have it in him to love another son.”

“But Giles was just a boy!”

“You can’t give what you don’t have, Avery.” He looked down at his cup of hot chocolate. It had gone cold. “You knew what the marquess was like.”

“Yes. I knew what the marquess was like,” she admitted. “But nothing you’ve said explains”—Avery struggled to find the word, gave up, and swept her hand across the room in an encompassing gesture—“this.”

Travers nodded. “Until their argument about the commission, I don’t think Giles really understood in how little esteem the marquess held him. The incident left him badly humiliated, and deeply wounded. And angry. Pray remember he was only a lad and do not think too harshly of him.”

“Harshly? For what reason?”

He met her eye. “Giles went to London and proceeded to live up to all of his father’s worst expectations. He gambled deeply and drank deeper still. He spent extravagantly, on tailors and horses and boot makers, on anything that took his fancy. Or anyone.” His gaze skittered away from hers. “He took up with the most raffish set and soon became their leader. He mocked and drawled and dueled. Everything he did, he did
to excess. By the time he was twenty-one, he was well on his way to becoming a libertine and a wastrel.”

He heard her breath catch.

“But then something happened. I’m not sure why, but even though he remained one of the ton’s most celebrated rakes, there was a change in him. He seemed more cynical.” He shook his head, trying to find some way to explain. “At the same time more… vulnerable. He would come home to Killylea more often after that, looking burnt from within. He tried to make peace with his father.”

“That makes no sense,” she said, frowning.

He shrugged. “You asked what happened to him. I’ve told you what I know. You must speak to him to find out anything more.”

Someone knocked on the hall door and he called out, “Enter.”

“Travers!” Avery whispered. “I am not in my costume!”

“It’s all right,” he said as the door swung open on a breathless Burke, still in greatcoat and hat, carrying an armload of ladies’ gowns. Travers stood aside and the young footman strode briskly to the bed and heaved the dresses atop it. He spied Avery and straightened, his gaze sweeping over the curves revealed by the thin banyan with obvious masculine appreciation.

She colored brightly.

“Ah, Miss Quinn, I presume?” Burke bowed neatly at the waist but when he looked up his eyes twinkled. “And right pleased I am to make your acquaintance, miss. I was beginning to wonder about my, er, masculinity, seeing how your smile always made my—”

“That is enough, Burke,” Travers hastily interjected.

“I don’t understand,” Avery said, her gaze flying between Burke, the dresses on the bed, and Travers. “What is going on here? Where’s Strand?”

“Here I am, my dear,” a deep voice said. Strand closed the door behind him. “As far as what is going on, it’s quite simple really. You are going to die.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

M
r. Avery Quinn was not long for the world.

The sad news came as no surprise to Lord Strand’s servants. Burke had witnessed his lordship carrying the young man into the house the night before, blood flowing freely from a wound on his head. A doctor had been called in, of course. Mr. Travers had let him in in the wee hours of the morning and later reported the dismal findings.

Surprisingly it was not the head injury that the doctor anticipated putting an end to Mr. Quinn’s short life, but the sudden appearance of a congenital…
something
. The details were a bit vague given the quack’s use of a long, Latin-sounding phrase. Not that it mattered, it generally being acknowledged that dead is dead no matter what the cause.

The news quickly made the round of London’s best drawing rooms, coffee houses, salons, and gentlemen’s clubs where it was tacitly agreed that the entire affair must be tedious indeed for poor old Strand, who didn’t even know the lad that well. Only in the hushed meeting room of the Royal Astrological Society were heads bowed and prayers offered up for the sake of what everyone who’d read the boy’s
monograph considered a shining intellect in the world of astronomical research.

Making the situation doubly sad, but nonetheless blessedly serendipitous, earlier the very same night that Mr. Quinn had met with mayhem, his sister, Ava, had arrived to surprise her only sibling with a visit. Burke, who always took evening duty, had received her. Apparently the young lady had instructed him not to bother waking the other servants, so he’d shown her to the room alongside her brother’s.

Such a propitious arrangement! But it was all so very sad.

And yet, during Mr. Quinn’s swift and woeful deterioration, the young lady managed to maintain her good spirits and contrived to offer more smiles than tears. In fact, no one ever actually saw her shed a tear, the brave lass!

Indeed, in a private exchange with Mr. Travers, Mrs. Silcock had declared she had never seen more dissimilar siblings, not only physically—Miss Quinn being curvy but lithe and Mr. Quinn being round and podgy—but in temperament. Miss Quinn was self-effacing, respectful, and undemanding, and asked Mrs. Silcock’s opinion on, well,
everything
!

Clearly, though Miss Quinn was not wealthy—her gowns were not only out-of-mode, but did not particularly fit well, a problem endemic, Mrs. Silcock cannily explained, with country seamstresses—she came from genteel stock, as evinced by her masterful self-containment in the face of such misfortune. True, her manners might be a tad unrefined—when asked to pour tea, she was woefully out of her element—but there again, Mrs. Silcock pointed out, country society is not the same as London Society.

It turned out Lord Strand was acquainted—some vicious tabbies said “well acquainted”—with Miss Quinn. He had met her some years before at the home of mutual friends far north, in a tiny hamlet. No one had ever heard of the hamlet, but then how many unimportant hamlets did one hear of? And if some people speculated that here was finally the answer to why the Marquess of Strand had taken up a protégé, that being that he was seeking to ingratiate himself with a would-be conquest, decent people considered this nothing but nasty speculation.

Besides, what Miss Quinn lacked in social refinement, she made up for in looks. She had a lush, womanly figure and handsome face, with brilliant, thickly lashed blue eyes and fine dark brows. She wore her hair au courant, a tumble of glossy auburn locks of similar hue to her brother’s—though Burke opined they were actually quite a bit darker and, after some debate, the other servants had to agree.

She quite riveted the eye, another fact the gentlemen’s club members noted with interest. And it was noted that one pair of eyes in particular could not seem to tear themselves away from her.

After all the years, after all the various young ladies who’d cast their nets in his direction, and the line of demi-reps and opera dancers with whom he’d shared his bed if not his heart, Cupid’s arrow had finally found the well-hidden vessel lurking in Lord Strand’s chest.

The Marquess of Strand was smitten.

And as evidence of how wrong were those who suspected a previous “relationship”—there was one particular, nonsensical rumor that Lord Strand had been seen in a passionate embrace with Miss Quinn just before rescuing her brother—Miss Quinn always acted like a proper lady. She blushed when Lord Strand spoke and her eyes dropped shyly before his ardent gaze. But tellingly, her eyes brightened when he entered a room and her gaze lingered after him long after he’d gone.

Mrs. Silcock was in transports.

Avery hurled the lady’s magazine against the bedroom wall. Her
new
bedroom wall. The one she occupied as
Ava
Quinn.

She’d considered throwing a book but feared the noise would only bring the staff running. It had been almost two days since Giles had announced a plan that would protect her reputation, a task he seemed to view with tiresome dedication, guarantee that her name would be forever attached to her comet, ensure that her research was treated with proper respect and given due consideration, and allow her to live freely as a woman.