No Place for a Dame (7 page)

At the thought of Jack, Giles gave the bellpull a tug then poured himself a glass of port. Thoughtfully, he lowered himself into an armchair.

He’d been surprised when Seward had sought him out a few months back and asked for his aid in finding a petty thief that had stolen an important government document. At the end of the war Giles had resigned from the Home Office’s Secret Committee thinking the government would have little need for spies during peacetime. Still, infrequently, his talents had been called upon by Sir Robert Knowlton, who, along with Sir Jameson, oversaw the Secret Committee. Even more infrequently, he’d actually agreed to undertake whatever request they made. In fact, he’d considered refusing Jack until his friend had made it clear it would be a personal favor.

It was to be a onetime arrangement. He would facilitate Jack’s entry into Society and little more. But things had gone terribly wrong. Jack had made discoveries he had never been intended to know and now Jack was suddenly gone along with his beautiful wife, Anne. Giles was almost certain Jameson was responsible.

Just before his disappearance Jack had broken rank with Sir Jameson, relating sensitive information to Jameson’s rival, Sir Knowlton. Jameson did not tolerate betrayal. Soon after, the Sewards had vanished.

Some part of Giles, tired and worn by the dark echoes of his past, wanted to leave it be, afraid he would discover they’d been killed. But there was still some portion of him that would not tolerate the thought of his friends being murdered. If Jameson had killed them, Giles needed to know and bring him to justice.

How quaint. After all he had seen and done, apparently he still had faith that justice could be served. He tipped his head back and drained the contents of his glass.

“Sir?” Travers had entered the room.

“Still playing the butler, you dog?” Jacob Travers had been his father’s estate manager from before Giles was born. After the old marquess’s death, he had continued on as Giles’s general factotum. “That was an amusing tableau you helped orchestrate this evening. Why ever did you agree to it?”

“She saved you from a terrible situation from which you were incapable of extricating yourself.”

“I assure you had I wished I would have—”

“No, sir,” Travers interrupted staunchly, “you would not. You were honor bound to marry that young woman and so you would have. You are, like your father, a man of integrity.”

Giles did not reply, feeling the burden of Travers’s faith as keenly as a dead weight.

“Miss Avery wants this, m’lord. She’s worked hard for it.” Travers broke his silence in a low voice. “She deserves it.”

Giles leaned back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the armrest. Travers had always been fond of Avery, though why remained something of a mystery. As a girl Avery had been a prickly little hedgehog. Brilliant, certainly, but she’d put him in mind of the fledgling crow Travers had found after a storm and kept. Josephine, he’d named her.
Travers had taught her all manner of tricks and yet he never could get Josephine to take a treat from his hand without drawing blood.

So it was with Avery, spouting Cicero and drawing metaphorical blood wherever she went.

“Whatever happened to that crow of yours, Travers?”

“Josephine?” Travers asked in surprise. “Why, she flew away, sir.”

“You must have had her a dozen years. What happened?”

“One day I took her out of her cage and she simply flew out the window. That was the last I saw of her.” He sounded more bemused than aggrieved.

“Perhaps she grew tired of her cage,” Giles said, thinking of how shocked he’d been when Avery had said she intended to leave Killylea. He couldn’t envision Killylea without Avery and even though in the last years they’d rarely been here at the same time, he always imagined her here, studying in the library, tromping through the orchards, stretched out on her back on the topmost crenellations and staring into the sky. Why, there’d been a time… but that was long ago when he’d been hardly more than a boy.

The pertinent point was that Giles had inherited Avery as part of his bequest. Despite what he owed Avery for her timely intervention with Sophia, he felt the obligation his father had incurred far more deeply.
Something
must be done with her and this, apparently, was what she wanted.

He poured himself another glass of port, fully aware of Travers’s expectant gaze, so different from Avery’s challenging glare.

She’d looked unearthly attractive standing on the ramparts this evening, her eyes so dark they seemed to have drunk the midnight hue from the heavens and her deep auburn locks coiling and dancing out behind her in the wind.

“How in the name of all that’s holy does she ever hope to fool anyone?” he muttered. “She is too… her form…”

“She has enlisted Mrs. Bedling’s aid in manufacturing a wardrobe suitable for a young country gentleman. She has a plan to deal with her, ah, her silhouette.”

Giles gave a short laugh. “Avery has a plan. Ah, well then, we’re all fine as five pence.” He heaved himself to his feet. “You might as well start packing.”

“Sir?”

“As soon as the Norths have left, we’ll ride at breakneck speed to the coast, cross to the Netherlands, and ramble about for a week or so before hieing ourselves back to London in all due haste that we might meet up with Mr. Quinn, whom I shall then inform all and sundry that I met while in the midst of said rambling. During which time I also happened to develop a sudden passion for stargazing. Oh, yes. No one will think anything smoky in that. Not at all.”

His sarcasm was lost on Travers. “But…
we
, sir?”

Giles was not above enjoying Travers’s discomfort. Between them, he and Avery had all but assured his own. He clapped the older man on the shoulder. “Yes. If this rattle-pated plan has a chance of succeeding, Avery will need an ally in the house. Someone amongst the servants who knows who she is and can protect her identity from the others.” He smiled. “You, my friend, have just been demoted.”

“Sir?”

“You’re Avery’s new valet.”

Chapter Seven

M
iss Avery was gone. She’d disappeared, having been last seen entering a private sleeping room in a coaching inn forty miles north of London. She never emerged to rejoin the stage coach on the last leg of its journey. But as the room had been paid for in advance and was left neat as a pin and with no hint of anything untoward having occurred within it except, perhaps, for a plethora of shorn mahogany-colored locks found in the waste bin, the innkeeper decided not to pursue the matter. Why, girls eloped all the time and in truth, Miss Avery had hardly been a girl, being clearly on the wrong side of twenty.

However, the stagecoach gained a new passenger to replace her. A small, fat, and flushed young man found shivering on the bench outside the inn early the next morning joined them. He gave his name as Mr. Quinn as he handed his single piece of luggage, an over-stuffed valise, up to the driver and climbed aboard.

For all his youth—and he
was
young, having skin as smooth and soft looking as a puppy’s belly—the matronly lady seated across from him gauged Mr. Quinn to be a rustic scholar. The scholar part she based on several observations: the pair of glasses perched on his nose, hands that
had certainly never seen manual labor, and the set of books bound with a leather strap he carried. Rustic she judged from his hat, a low-crowned and wide-brimmed felt one fashioned in the country style that shadowed his features, and from his coat which, though made of good, sturdy material, was ill cut and swiftly made. The matron had sewed enough clothing herself to be a fair judge.

Possibly he was a tutor on his way to his first employer, she thought. For his sake she hoped not. Boys could be so cruel. Especially to someone… different. Like this young man. For though his arms and legs were spindly, his torso had a pronounced spherical contour that began beneath his chin and ended at the tops of his legs, the effect being as if a melon had sprouted limbs.

A pity, she thought, for he might have been a handsome enough lad otherwise. He had even features and dark eyes from what she could see behind the glasses—though an unfortunate single heavy brow marched straight over the bridge of his nose—and a clean, clipped jawline. Curious creature. He’d spent the entire trip mute as a mummer and for the past half hour had covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief, his eyes watering.

She sympathized. She remembered her first visit to London and her own reaction to its potent reek. “You never been to London afore, have you, Mr. Quinn?” she said.

“No, ma’am.” He had a soft, raspy voice as if his throat had been injured at some point in time. Perhaps in his childhood. If he’d been invalided as a boy, he would not have the opportunity to pursue those activities that turned baby fat to muscle. It would also account for his lack of manners. He hadn’t even offered her his seat when she’d climbed inside and had even neglected to doff his hat. Mothers always tended to overindulge a sickly child.

“I been,” she disclosed with the serene satisfaction of the well traveled. “Many a time and always for the same reason, that being tending my brother’s nippers whilst his wife produces another. You get used to the stench and the air being so thick. Be folks expecting you?”

He nodded. She didn’t think him surly, but rather painfully shy and all her maternal instincts came flying to the fore at the thought of this babe lost in the Sodom and Gomorrah that was London. The stagecoach rocked to a halt.

“You have a job waiting for you then, Mr. Quinn?”

He shook his head. “No. That is, not exactly.”

So, he’d come hoping for a particular job but not yet having secured it. She studied him pityingly. She doubted he’d get it unless he was the only applicant. He hadn’t much to recommend him.

One of the postboys clambered down from his perch and yanked open the door, revealing the Gloucester Coffee House’s well-tended courtyard.

“Well, good luck to you, lad,” she said as she accepted the postboy’s hand and climbed down out of the carriage.

“You’ll need it,” she muttered and then her brother and at least a half dozen of her young nieces and nephews swarmed around her, shouting and laughing, and she forgot all about the unfortunately shaped Mr. Quinn.

How in the name of heaven did people live here?

Avery, last to climb down out of the carriage, shivered violently and stood in the courtyard, transfixed. Even though it was just past two o’clock in the afternoon, it was already dark. Well, not dark precisely, but dim, muted, the air coalescing into a thin, freezing mist, the pools of water standing in the courtyard rimed with ice. She pulled her coat closer around her throat and tipped her head back to stare in horrified fascination at the patch of sky revealed overhead. It was dingy and low, the indistinct disc of the sun sunk into it like a tarnished coin at the bottom of a dish of milky tea. It would be impossible to see the stars through that opaque mantle.

She had been to other cities in the course of her education, generally small university towns, but never to London. In her imagination it had loomed as a repository of all that was great in England: art, music, mathematics, science. But this was noisome and cold and
loud
! Horses neighed, dogs barked, hooves clattered, and axles squealed. Heavily laden carts rumbled over the cobbled pavement, an underscore to carters bawling, coachmen shouting, and vendors hollering.

And it stank! She pushed the handkerchief to her mouth again and looked about. Surely all of this great city could not be so foul?

“Here, boy!”

She turned in the direction of the shout and the stagecoach driver tossed her valise to her with so much velocity that she staggered backward as she caught it. He smirked. “London’s gonna eat you alive, youngster, lest you grow some muscle ’neath all that fat.”

She flushed, clasping the valise to her chest. She realized her disguise made her a target for censorious eyes, but there had been no practical alternative. After several hours of experimentation, she and Mrs. Bedling had agreed that the amount of constriction necessary to bind her bosom flat would have rendered her unconscious. So instead, they’d concocted a way to hide it amidst layers of padding sewed into one of Mrs. Bedling’s corsets.