Dangerous 01 - Dangerous Works (19 page)

“Ardmore, must you overfill my plate?” Ardmore’s countess, the former Eloise Hayden stretched out her nasal drawl but skillfully avoided slipping into a whine that guests nearby might perceive as low-class. “You know my appetite is dainty.” She rolled her eyes in disgust and tucked into the plate of delicacies from the Duchess of Murnane’s overflowing wedding breakfast.

Georgiana tore her eyes from the bride and groom and smiled up at her brother-in-law. Weak of chin, dim of mind, and plump of pocket, the Earl of Ardmore was perfect for her sister Eloise and harmless enough.

Eloise downed the lobster patties and cheese pastries from the Murnane House chef with more energy than she had exhibited for any other activity. Georgiana let her eyes drift back to the couple making their graceful way among their guests. Chadbourn leaned possessively over his bride, one hand at her back, guiding her. He stooped to whisper in her ear before each encounter to explain every distant cousin and interesting acquaintance. The new countess glowed with a calm joy that clutched at Georgiana’s heart.

“How can you stand to watch that performance and still eat, Georgiana?” Eloise demanded. “All that billing and cooing positively turns one’s stomach.” She popped another pastry into her mouth and licked her fat little fingers.

Marianna, youngest of the Hayden children tittered musically, a carefully modulated titter designed to strike a balance between appreciation of her sister’s wit and unseemly laughter. “They are overflowing with nauseating sentiment, are they not?” she said.

Her remark drew a sharp look from her mother. “Young ladies do not remark on the behavior of their hosts,” the Duchess pronounced. She shared a knowing look with Eloise and went on archly, “Even if the remarks are true.”

Marianna sunk back into her habitual pout. “One can become quite weary of being reminded of all the things young ladies cannot do,” she fussed.

“Catch a husband, Marianna,” Eloise said with a smirk in Georgiana’s direction, “and then you may do as you please.”

Georgiana squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and tried to let the barb fall away. Her armor wore thin after only one day in her mother and sisters’ company. She glanced up at her brother and pondered his remote look. The clockwork efficiency of his mind at work almost shown forth behind ice blue eyes. She wondered if he was busy maintaining the Sudbury estate on his father’s behalf, seeing to the welfare of the entire country, or managing the lives of all his friends to suit his own notions of rectitude. All of the above at once, she suspected, while delicately partaking of the wedding breakfast and never once leaving so much as a crumb on his pristine neck cloth.

Glenaire’s sudden movement caused her to straighten. He rose to his feet in one fluid motion and bowed over the bride’s hand before Georgiana realized the couple had reached their table.

“Lady Chadbourn, my congratulations,” Glenaire said, giving her a look that held more approval than warmth, a look that seemed to say he had inspected her and found nothing lacking. He probably had. He and the Earl exchanged an enigmatic look. Chadbourn nodded before turning to the ladies.

The Earl formally introduced his wife to the Duchess as “My Countess.” Georgiana’s formidable mother gave the woman a perfectly correct nod of acknowledgement, confident that her superior rank demanded no more. The Earl frowned slightly but didn’t look surprised.

“Lady Georgiana, what a pleasure to see you,” he exclaimed with a perception of warmth and (Georgiana suspected) some relief. “It has been too long. Let me make known to you my wife.” The word “wife” echoed with pride.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Lady Chadbourn,” Georgiana said.

The lady smiled back. “Call me Catherine, please. Will has told me how much your friendship and your brother’s meant to him growing up.” She tossed a teasing glance at Glenaire who smiled back.

The Earl chuckled. “I suspect we’re long past the need for titles, Georgiana. Can you bear it?”

Georgiana laughed back. “At least you didn’t call me Lady Georgie, like Jamie Heyworth did the last time I saw him,” she said. “Where is he, by the way? Hiding from matchmaking mamas?” A faint vibration to the table, the sure sign of her mother’s sharply stiffening posture, should have been a warning.

The Earl grinned. “Probably, but I actually believe he and some of my rapscallion cousins have gotten up a match in the billiard room where there is more freedom.”

“And drinks other than tea or lemonade.” The new countess said. More vibrations.

“I see you know our Jamie, already,” Georgiana replied. She bit back a grin.
Let my mother be shocked,
she thought.

Catherine smiled at Glenaire. “Not all of Will’s friends are quite so wild.”

Glenaire bowed in acknowledgement. “Nor so thoughtless. This is your day.”

“I’m just pleased Will’s friends are here to share his happiness,” Catherine said. “Even the less sober ones.”

“You haven’t met Andrew yet,” Georgiana blurted out helplessly. Chadbourn shot Glenaire a speaking glance; Glenaire merely raised one eyebrow. The table quivered ominously.
The Duchess must be ready to explode
.

“The major?” Catherine asked. “No, I have not. Will had hoped to invite him, but Glenaire told Will he still suffered from his wounds and assured us it was kinder not to invite him. I understand he was the scholar of the group, and I am anxious to meet this soldier-scholar. I think I will like him very much.”

Georgiana thought she heard an unladylike snort from her mother’s direction?
Surely not. Perhaps an outraged puff of air?
Looking at Catherine’s intelligent brown eyes, Georgiana found it easy to ignore the Duchess. “You would like him very much, I think,” she said. Her voice came out a deep and breathless murmur.

“I have no doubt of it. If we can’t get him here, we’ll have to come round to Cambridge and invade his solitude.”

A few more polite words, then they moved on. Georgiana felt a sense of solitude come over her like a cloak. One didn’t need to be the only one in a room, she knew, to know solitude. It was possible to sit among many people and be entirely alone.

As if from a distance, she heard her mother’s hiss. “Really, Georgiana. First names with that woman? The title at least gives her the facade of respectability. One must keep climbers like that firmly in their place. And Mallet! Did you have to mention that jumped-up schoolmaster’s son?” Outrage shook her jowls and pinched her mouth.

Georgiana watched Catherine smile up at Chadbourn as they floated to another table. The love she saw there pulled at her heart.
“She whom Aphrodite loved.”
Georgiana could see with absolute clarity that Catherine knew “what sort of roses the flowers are.”

She felt a firm pinch and turned back to the outraged face of her mother. “You’re becoming common, Georgiana. It will not do. You’ve been left on your own too long. You shall come back with us to Mountview for a good long while, long enough to pound some sense of your family’s consequence back into you. I shall insist on it.” With a flounce, she turned one sturdy shoulder to Georgiana and her face to her other daughters.

“A good long while.” Georgiana groaned helplessly. She thought she should warn Andrew.
Will he care?

Chapter 20

“If you ain’t going to eat, give a man warning so he don’t waste time in the kitchen.” Harley yanked a plate away.

I should hire a real cook
, Andrew thought. Work absorbed Andrew for the first six weeks since Georgiana had dumped work in his lap and left. He forgot about cooks until now.

“Take it back, Harley. Bread and cheese will do.”

“Fine then. Them I can buy. No need to muss the pots.”

Or burn the pots
. Andrew would fetch lunch at one of the little coffee shops tomorrow, if he felt like eating.

Harley dropped plates in a dry sink. Andrew ignored lunch; he ignored Harley, and he ignored muffled banging in front of his house.

Georgiana’s last letter lay spread out on the worn table. She sent two short cryptic notes during her journey to Mountview after Chadbourn’s wedding, each scribbled out in haste in a moving carriage. They looked it.

Muffled voices floated into the kitchen with the scent of rain. Andrew cursed the date on the last letter, three weeks past.
Damned woman gets to Mountview, and she forgets the work. She forgets me.
He tipped the paper toward the window light.

Harley’s voice sounded more irritable than usual. Andrew reread the letter, looking for something personal. There was none.

Chadbourn and his countess (Will’s beloved!) are four days gone on their wedding journey, and the Hayden caravan makes its way to Mountview in slow stages.

Georgiana consistently referred to the young woman as “Will’s beloved.” The Earl must be besotted. He had hoped Georgiana was as envious as she sounded. Three weeks without word made him less confident. He should have gone to the wedding. Will would have welcomed him.

“Sorry to barge in. Not
the way for a proper call.” Geoff Dunning stood in the doorway. Rain dripped down his neck and onto the shoulders of his professorial gown.

“Not at all. Delighted to see you!” The delight was genuine. Dunning promised to hint to Wallace Selby that Andrew waited for more work, something to keep his mind off Georgiana. “You have work for me?”

Dunning took the seat Harley offered. “Hot tea wouldn’t go awry,” he said with a twisted smile to Harley. “Beastly out.”

Harley grunted and put the kettle on to boil.

“Sorry, Dunning. It must be urgent to drive you out on an afternoon like this.” Andrew’s eyes continued to scan Georgiana’s letter.

“I am expected to stay until Michaelmas, if not longer,” she wrote. Michaelmas had come and gone without word.

“Not urgent. Going to Gran’s for early supper.”

Andrew forced his attention to Dunning. “Your Grandmother’s? Good of you to stop by.”

“Thought you should know soonest.” Dunning’s neck shown red in spite of the cold rain.

The misery of his expression made Andrew go as cold as the rain. “Know what?” he asked cautiously.

“There won’t be work. Sorry to be blunt.” Dunning looked away, embarrassed.

“Mallet? Do you hear? Can’t dress it up for you. No more work.” Dunning’s distress increased.

“No work?” Andrew repeated. He looked for misunderstanding. Dunning looked steadily back. There was no misunderstanding, and there would be no work.

“You had better tell me all of it,” Andrew said.

Dunning did. He left nothing out, not even the color of Selby’s face when indignant—puce. “Murchison wasn’t indignant. Fairly gloated. He …”

“Murchison? What did that slimy specimen have to do with it?”

“Didn’t I say? That was the worst of it.” Dunning reached up gratefully and took a mug of tea from Harley. “He’s taken on an assistant. ‘An assistant,’ Selby called him!” Now Dunning looked indigent.

“Murchison? He took on Murchison?”

“Man’s a fool, Mallet. Can’t see a grasping mushroom when one ripens in front of him.”

Bile curdled in Andrew’s belly. Murchison. He wanted to cast up his accounts on the tabletop. “Tell me again exactly what he said. Selby I mean, not
that snake Murchison.”

Dunning breathed deeply, “I don’t see how it would help.”

“Tell me again. Exactly.”

“‘Can’t have my reputation sullied. I worked long and hard for it. If the man can’t keep his mind above trivia, he shall not be part of my great work.’” Dunning mimicked Selby. He repeated, “‘My great work.’ Prancing pony thinks he’s Plato himself.”

“Trivia?”

“Praxilla. Can’t say how he found out. Old Featheringham perhaps.”

“Murchison.”

“How’s that?”

“Murchison,” Andrew repeated with greater confidence. “I saw him at the library that day. He must have bribed Featheringham.”

“Just the sort to do it. Lots of the lazy ones think they can get librarians to do their work for them.” Dunning’s brow furrowed. “Sorry, Mallet. Selby’s a prig.”

“Tell me again what he said.”

“Which thing? Took an assistant?”

“The rest. Did he really call Praxilla trivial?”

“Puce. Turned puce at the thought.”

Murderous rage froze Andrew with ice-cold intensity. Selby dismissed four months of Andrew’s work and ten years of Georgiana’s life as trivia. Hands clenched as if to squeeze the puce neck of the arrogant old windbag.

Three hours later Andrew remembered Georgiana’s letter, carried it to the study, and lay it next to the completed manuscript. Rereading it didn’t improve the words.

“It will be more difficult to correspond from Mountview.”

She should have said “impossible.”
The duchess, that scorpion, has had her in her poisonous clutches for weeks.

“These are the last of the translations,” she wrote. Georgiana thought the translations were finished. Andrew thought of the commentaries. His parts were complete, but they needed her approval.

He read the next line. “The work approaches an end, and that saddens me.”
Saddens her?
He almost choked on his anger. The end of their partnership loomed in front of him, and all
she had to say was that it saddened her?

She told him they would talk when the work was done. It was done, and yet she stayed at Mountview.

Damn it woman, what do you want from me
?

He could do nothing without further word from Georgiana. Now he had no work from Selby either, nothing to banish Georgiana’s ghost, the ghost that paced his book-lined study, gesticulating and peppering him with questions.

Andrew poured brandy in a glass and drank it down to banish the image, and another image replaced it—Georgiana looking sidelong at his bedroom with another question in her eyes.

Andrew commanded men. He bent unruly partisans to do England’s bidding. He outwitted two French colonels and survived the hell of interrogation with honor intact, but he couldn’t bend Georgiana. He couldn’t even write to her. She was at Mountview, and he sat like a pensioner waiting some scrap of attention from Lady Bountiful.

I’ll be damned if I sit here any longer and wait while her miserable family finds excuses to isolate her again.
Only one choice remained.

“Harley! You rogue, get up here. We need to pack.”

“On the contrary. She is lovely, and quite articulate.”

Georgiana’s words echoed through the Hayden family’s massive dining room. Utter silence greeted it. She regretted the urge to defend Chadbourn’s bride from the vicious description her sister had just spewed. Chadbourn’s countess didn’t need her defense, and it had no impact in any case.

Her Grace the Duchess of Sudbury paid Georgiana no heed. A faint pursing of lips was the only indication that she had heard. She nodded to a footman to serve the evening’s pudding, a fine cake with a hot caramel sauce, appropriate now that summer waned. She turned to Eloise, as though Georgiana hadn’t spoken.

“You couldn’t be more correct. The woman is utterly common, not one trace of grace. The entire wedding was an ordeal.” Her fat little hand, heavy with rings, lifted an excessively ornate silver spoon, signaling to the others that they might commence as well. His Grace, regal in habitual silence, sat in the great carved chair at the head of the table. He ignored the women’s conversation. Glenaire, the heir, on His Grace’s left, took his cues from his father.

Georgiana sat adrift in the middle and wondered what Glenaire found to occupy his mind during these interminable dinners. She thought she ought to ask him, as she could use help learning the skill.

Her mind drifted back to Chadbourn’s lovely wedding, and she felt sympathy for the new countess. No, not sympathy. Envy. The bride and groom had glowed with love for one another, and the woman didn’t need Georgiana or anyone’s support.

“One needed to attend, of course.” Georgiana’s mother droned on. “Her Grace of Murnane would invite the world to her brother’s wedding, and one could not refuse. How she could lend countenance to the bride I do not know?”

“His sister genuinely likes his bride, Mother. Imagine it.” Georgiana pointed out. She moved her spoon through the caramel with aimless motions. No one took note of her comment.
I am invisible again,
she thought.

“Perhaps you needed to attend, but really, Your Grace, was it necessary to involve Ardmore and me?” At twenty-nine, Eloise already wore her mother’s habitual sour expression. “Attending simply lowered oneself.” Eloise’s petulant voice
clashed with her fine lace dinner dress. She looked as if she had encountered an insect in her soup.

It might have done Eloise good to have actually talked to the woman
, Georgiana thought. She put her spoon down, appetite fled.

“Chadbourn always tended to be a bit déclassé—as was his father before him. The man practically doted on his children.” The Duchess sniffed as she spoke.

Georgiana’s stomach clenched. Loving one’s children just was not
done. Chadbourn and his lady were utterly besotted and made no effort to hide it, much to her mother’s disgust. Longing overwhelmed Georgiana when Will turned to face his bride in the church, love glowing from every inch of him. Once she wouldn’t have understood what she saw. Once she, too, might have mocked them. Now, she envied them. She knew “what flowers these roses are.” A very private smile crept, unbidden, to her face.

“Really, Georgiana, if you are going to fidget with your food and smile like a buffoon, you may as well leave the table. I command it.” The Duchess sneered down her nose in distaste.

Georgiana began to rise but froze like a frightened rabbit in the face of her mother’s disapproval. She despised herself for it.

Glenaire ignored his mother’s disapproving glare and rose smoothly to assist his sister. “Are you well?” He pitched his voice for her ear alone. Some of the old affection filled her.

“I am well. I prefer my room. Let it go, Richard.” The preference was real; humiliation stung.

Glenaire lifted her hand and kissed the top. “Perhaps tomorrow we can walk.”

“I would like that.”

“Do get on, Georgiana. Glenaire, you disrupt dinner. A gentleman does not disrupt conversation.” Voices faded behind her as Georgiana left the room. She used all her strength to avoid running.

Mountview’s air of menace, the constant threat of maternal abuse, followed her up the stairs. She vowed that when she broke free again she would never let them drag her back. She wasn’t sure what she would do, but she knew she would do nothing that threatened her fragile independence. Nothing. Ever.

Finely waxed floors and priceless carpeting led the way to an over-stuffed room at the back of the house. She knew it was slightly less fine than the better guest rooms, infinitely more luxurious than the upper servants, and a great deal shabbier than the quarters assigned to Eloise and Ardmore. She hated it.

Nothing there raised her spirits. Her notes, scattered on the table, were days old. The steady stream of correspondence with Andrew that flowed rapidly while she had been a guest of the Duchess of Murnane stopped when she came to Mountview.

Here in her father’s house, she feared discovery. Anything sent from this house was vulnerable to prying eyes. She feared that her letters reflected her love for Andrew. Even if they didn’t, fear of censorship made her reluctant to send her questions and ideas. At best, her work would be mocked. At worst, they might trap her here and attempt to prevent the work from going forward.

Georgiana lifted a fine gold chain from around her neck and pulled a tiny key from her bodice. She leaned under her bed and pulled out a strongbox, glad no servant would bother to interrupt the objectionable daughter while the family was still at dinner.

The box opened quietly. Andrew’s messages lay like treasured love letters wrapped in tissue.
Fool!
Each was signed simply, “
Yours, A. Mallet.”
Anyone reading them would know them for the business correspondence that they were. No one would mistake them for love letters. Yet, they lay wrapped in tissue and locked in a small strongbox as if she feared discovery.

Andrew had sent no letters in more than a week. She assumed that he was being cautious also or that he was waiting for her to write. Either way, it was safer, she knew, but she missed his letters terribly. She missed him.

She replaced the box in its hiding place and went to the window, as she did every night, and began to count the miles to Little Saint Mary’s Lane. She pictured the roads. She could be back in Cambridge in two days. Perhaps Glenaire would arrange it sooner. She would ask him again tomorrow.

She didn’t know if the man who wrote those careful, businesslike letters would welcome her. She wondered if he looked out his window and thought of her or if he was he absorbed in work. She had hurt him. He might not
wish to continue the connection. She did, even if she still had no idea what sort of connection she wanted.