Bexley-Smythe Quintet 02 - Rhyme and Reason (3 page)

“I don’t believe she has any broken bones, ma’am.” The gruffness of his tone seemed out of place, causing Mattie’s attention to focus squarely on him. “But be sure the doctor checks her anyway. With all the excitement, she might not feel all the places she’s hurt yet.”

Mrs. Benson shooed him out of the way. “Let us tend her, sir. Back down the stairs with you, now. Mr.
Sadler will be wanting to speak with you about all of this, I can assure you, and Lord Teasdale, too.”

The housekeeper bent over Mattie on the bed, dabbing a
cool cloth against her temple. The gentle pressure she applied stung.

Mattie sucked in a breath, her eyes trained upon the unknown gentleman who’d carried her all the way from the cliffs. He looked so troubled that she
smiled for his benefit, hoping to reassure him of her wellbeing for whatever reason.

His lips twitched in response, but then he inclined his head
toward her and backed out of the room.

Lizzie flitted anxiously about the room, pacing with her hands moving animatedly about her. Her lips were moving, but no sound came from them. She looked like a madwoman.

Mrs. Benson kept pressing the cloth against Mattie’s forehead. “If you can’t do something useful for her ladyship, Lizzie, then kindly take your frayed nerves and remove them somewhere else. I’m sure there are floors that need cleaning or beds that need making.”

“Yes, Mrs. Benson.”
The maid bobbed a quick curtsey and scurried out the door, while a parade of other servants passed her on their way inside, quickly followed by Bea and Lady Teasdale.

Eyes as wide as teacups, Bea sat on the edge of the bed and took Mattie’s hand gingerly in her own while everyone else bustled about in trying to care for her.
“What on earth happened? You really ought to have waited for me and Rose to join you.”

“I must have slipped,” Mattie said, wincing against the pain of each word to issue from her lips. “I just needed some air.”

Yes.
Air
. She’d gone on ahead of Bea and her younger sister Rose because of the note from Sir Lester. She had needed to walk and breathe so she would stop worrying herself over whether word had reached his ears finally about any of Percy’s many scandalous exploits. It was all starting to come back to her, leaving her head pounding harder than before. Her chest tightened again, the same sensation which had caused her to race out on her own initially.

Now that her rescuer was no longer holding her, she felt cold. There was no fire in the hearth, and while the servants tending her were trying to help, the cool cloths Mrs. Benson was using to daub against Mattie’s forehead were only m
aking her colder. She shivered.

Lady
Teasdale barely disguised her harrumph. She kept her distance, as she was wont to do of late when forced to be in Mattie’s presence, standing to watch over the proceedings from near the open window. “Dr. Evans has been summoned to see to your injuries, Lady Matilda.” The baroness’s voice was cool and detached.

Perhaps the doctor would order a fire built in her room.
She hoped he would.

“
Thank you, ma’am.” But as much pain as she was experiencing, and as baffled by the turn of events as she may be, Mattie had only one thing really on her mind. “Might I ask who the gentleman was who carried me home?”

She’d finally discovered the proper word for how she’d felt in his arms: cherished.

That thought melted her heart until it dripped all the way to her toes, and at the same time left her more confused about her feelings than ever before. Wasn’t it terribly disloyal to Sir Lester to feel such a thing with a strange man?

Thomas crossed his arms over his chest, hating that he felt so defensive all of a sudden. “I couldn’t very well assist Lady Matilda if her maid was beating me senseless with a parasol.”

He’d done nothing wrong.
No matter how hard Lord Teasdale tried, he wasn’t going to succeed in making Thomas feel guilty for protecting himself.

He was
seated in the baron’s study while Teasdale and his butler, Sadler, jointly interrogated him about the afternoon’s proceedings. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to decide which of the older men was more intimidating. Teasdale’s eyes were narrowed into steely lines as he sat behind his massive mahogany desk, but the butler stood over Thomas’s wingback chair like a surly sentinel.

Teasdale
somehow narrowed his gaze further, which drew the graying line of his eyebrows together until they were almost a single line across his forehead. He lifted his cheroot to his mouth and took a draw from it, his lips turning downward. “You couldn’t have simply taken the parasol from her and set it aside?”

“What would have stopped her from
picking it up and assaulting me all over again? I’ll purchase a new parasol, my lord, but I won’t apologize for protecting myself from a rabid maid by whatever means lent themselves to me at the time. Particularly not since it allowed me to bring Lady Matilda here faster than I could have if I was being struck repeatedly. I’d think such a fact would be appreciated instead of scorned.”

Silence met his words. It wasn’t exactly the brightest thing he’d ever done, telling a peer of the realm what he should and shouldn’t do. Thomas knew Danby would never have allowed such a thing, and he couldn’t imagine Lord Pritchard would have either.

“The maid is unharmed, I presume?” Thomas said then, hoping to move the conversation away from his presumptive behavior before Teasdale or his butler took further exception to his behavior. “I never lifted a finger against her. I only defended myself from her assault.”

Sadler
let out a sneering sort of grunting sound.

Thomas
lifted a brow. “Shall we see how long you might last while being struck with a stick, Mr. Sadler? I’m certain we can find something similar nearby.” For that matter, he doubted it would be very difficult to find a maid or two within the household who’d be willing to strike the butler, if given the opportunity. He oughtn’t to have said anything at all, but the words had already left his mouth. “I’ll purchase a new one. I’ve already said as much.”

“Regardless of your reasons for dispensing with the parasol,” Lord
Teasdale drawled, “the question still remains: why was Lady Matilda so startled she lost her footing? Lizzie claims you cursed, quite loudly, in their hearing. No doubt I needn’t explain to you how abominable I find it for anyone to use such coarse language in a lady’s presence.”

He would never have
dreamed of cursing in such a public setting in the first place if not for Danby and his ridiculous notions about who Thomas ought to potentially marry. Yet the fact remained, he
had
let out an oath. A rather loud oath, by his recollection. Denial would serve no purpose. “I did, my lord, although I would normally never do such a thing in the hearing of anyone, and particularly not a lady. I apologize to you, and I will be certain to make my apologies to both Lady Matilda and her maid, once the lady’s care is seen to.”

“Will you
? And what makes you think we’ll allow you to go anywhere near her again? I imagine you’ve already done more than enough.” The baron eyed him haughtily. “I’ve never seen you in Town for the Season, and you’ve yet to tell me your name. The sole reason you weren’t escorted straight outside and into the custody of the local magistrate is because I had questions that needed to be answered.”

Thomas had almost been waiting for this—the moment when his low birth would incite
Teasdale’s outrage that he’d even dared to breathe in the esteemed presence of such a lady. But it was worse than that. He’d had her in his arms. He’d touched her in ways someone of his position ought never to touch a personage of her status.
I felt her luscious curves curled against my body and let my thoughts drift to places they ought never to go.
It was true he’d done all of these things in order to ascertain the degree of damage her fall had caused and to get her home to safety and care, but that didn’t really matter. Not in the eyes of so many men of Teasdale’s station.

“Goddard,” he said finally
, recognizing the pointlessness of delaying his response any further. Dithering would serve no one. “Thomas Goddard.”

Teasdale
’s head snapped up to attention and he leaned forward, stubbing his cheroot into a dish and passing it into Sadler’s care with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Goddard?”

The butler left them silently, his movements
measured and precise.

The baron
’s sudden interest in their discussion was inherently perplexing. Why in blazes would he excite, simply from hearing Thomas’s name?

“Danby said we ought to expect you, but I didn’t imagine your arrival would take place in such a…well, in a manner such as this.
I’d expected you to call upon her in the afternoon, to take tea with her or some such like a reasonable suitor would do.”

Call upon her?
A suitor?
Could a tongue double in size simply from shock? Suddenly parched beyond measure, Thomas tried to swallow but failed. “Danby said…to expect me?”

“Of course he did. I trust you have the marriage license he sent
?” Teasdale sat back in his chair again, his hands forming a steeple where they met over his lap. “What am I saying? Of course you do. Danby said you would.”

But
Thomas didn’t have the license, and he certainly didn’t think it would have anything to do with Lord Teasdale or Lady Matilda, or anyone else here in Scarborough. The other licenses Danby had sent were for ladies who lived elsewhere, with explicit instructions as to how Thomas should travel to their homes and collect his bride.

There’d been no reason he should expect this one to involve a young lady who was already in town, so h
e’d torn the bit of paper to shreds and tossed it into the ocean without even really looking at the name upon it. The mere sight of the single, solitary word
Lady
had been all he’d been able to handle.

It couldn’t
have been this Lady Matilda, whom he’d carried all the way from the cliffs, could it? And even if the marriage license had borne both of their names upon it, Thomas had signed no contracts and made no promises. He hadn’t offered for anyone, so he couldn’t be honor-bound to uphold anything.

Danby damned well couldn’t force him to marry anyone, by Jove.
He was a grown man. He made his own decisions.

“Of course, her fall today might have hampered things a bit,”
Teasdale said entirely too jovially, oblivious to Thomas’s discomfiture. He sorted through a stack of papers at the side of his desk, pulling one aside and rearranging the order of them. “We will have to wait to see what Dr. Evans has to say, but you should be able to court her properly quite soon I’d imagine. Or you could just take her off to church in the morning and be done with it, since you’ve already got the license. Danby truly thought of everything, the old codger, didn’t he? But you’ll know that this Sir Lester…well, never mind him. You’ve got the license, so he doesn’t really matter.”

Few things in Thomas’s life had shocked him to the core quite like this conversation was proving to do. Unless he was mistaken, he must look the part of the slack-jawed nincompoop. “Court her?” he somehow got out. He stood and paced to the hearth and back. “
Take her to the church in the morning? I’m afraid there has been some mistake.”

Teasdale
stopped fussing with his papers, suddenly still again. He stared at Thomas, blinking. “A mistake?”

“I am not here to marry this Lady Matilda.”

Twice more the baron blinked, his expression thoroughly imperturbable. “You
are
Thomas Goddard, as you said?”

“Yes, but—”

“The same Thomas Goddard who is Danby’s grandson? The grandson who runs his horse breeding venture here in Scarborough?”

“Yes—”

The baron lifted a single graying eyebrow. “There’s been no mistake. That was why we arranged our holiday here, you know, and the only reason we brought Lady Matilda along with us. To deliver her to you.”

After a few more moments of flipping
through the stack of papers on his desk, Teasdale drew a single slip forward. He held it out toward Thomas, an imperious expression on his countenance. “Ah, yes. Here. I have the marriage contract, the terms agreed upon by both His Grace and Lady Matilda’s brother Lord Stalbridge. Lady Matilda will bring a reasonable settlement into the marriage in trust, and Danby has already provided you with a home and a living. The contract only requires your signature and the marriage license Danby said he would send to you.”

Sadler
moved over to stand beside his employer, having returned as silently as he’d left. He took the contract from the baron and carried it over to Thomas, thrusting it into his hands.

At present, the pulse in Thomas’s temple was throbbing so intensely, it was a wonder he hadn’t struck his head upon the limestone as Lady Matilda had done
while they were out on the cliffs. “But I can’t marry her!” he fairly shouted.

“Of course you can.”
Teasdale stood, then strode with purpose toward the door. “The particulars have all been settled. If you aren’t here to marry her, why in blazes have you come? We’ll expect you for tea tomorrow, unless Dr. Evans informs us Lady Matilda cannot receive guests. If that’s the case, I’ll send you word. Good day to you, Mr. Goddard.”

Without allowing Thomas the opportunity to answer, he quit the room
, the butler moving to stand beside the door and passing a
look
in Thomas’s direction. What, precisely, that look meant was a mystery—one Thomas wasn’t certain he wanted to solve. In fact, he was positive the opposite was more in line with the truth. He wanted nothing to do with Teasdale, with the blasted butler…not with any of it.

Good lord. Did Lady Matilda know about all of this? What did she think of it?

Perhaps more importantly, how on earth was he going to escape this farce without destroying any sense of honor he once possessed—and how could he avoid damaging either Lady Matilda’s reputation or her sensibilities in the process?

“We’re to be…
married
?”

With a sudden attack of dizziness threatening to once again overwhelm her
, Mattie sat back against the plush settee in the red drawing room and put a hand to her temple. After sleeping most of the afternoon yesterday, the blinding headaches caused by her concussion had passed. Her dizziness had seemed to be a thing of the past, and she’d begun to feel much more herself today.

Until now.

Lady Teasdale poured herself another cup of tea, adding so much sugar and cream it nearly turned Mattie’s already suspect stomach. “Why did you think we’d allowed you to join us on holiday, Lady Matilda? Your brother arranged it all with the Duke of Danby during the Season. He didn’t tell you?”

The baroness
needn’t sound so pleased about the circumstance.