Judith Ivory (10 page)

The bald young man, she thought, the nosy fellow behind her. He’d disappeared at some point. Oh, criminy.

“Anyway,” said the viscount, “I must put through a few more cheques, because five hundred isn’t quite enough, even though”—he clicked his tongue in mock sympathy—“it’s going to make you look like a bigger thief still. A shame, but I need the money.
C’est la vie
.” He shrugged, then shook his head in honest appreciation. “It’s so much simpler to cash them this way, isn’t it? As this other fellow? And no one says a thing. It’s even my signature.”

Emma blinked. Oh, fine. She put her hand to her mouth. She felt dizzy, faintly nauseated.

He made a gracious nod. “I simply can’t thank you enough. I’ve had a devil of a time with the flow of my monies up till now. I think you’ve f—” Did he start one word, then in a blink change to another? If so, he did it so quickly she couldn’t be sure.

“—solved the problem.”

The small shifts. The protracted vowels. Emma would think she heard them, then not. They remained missing long enough that, each time one came up, it seemed new, unexpected. His speech flowed over them.

With perfect lack of logic, or care for personal safety, she stood there, hand to mouth, heart in throat, hanging on the possibility of more words out this peculiar human being’s mouth, wanting the cadence of them: The strange poetry—the personal song—of an adept, quick-witted adult in control of a stutter.

There was no awkwardness; it was fluid, in fact. He didn’t even think about it, she suspected, so perfectly in harmony he was with it, like riding a bicycle. It was why it was so hard to discern, why it was so hard to pinpoint the “country”: It was his own personal “foreign” accent.

When he crossed his arms and grew quiet, just staring at
her, she took matters into her own hands. “Listen, Stuart—” she began.

He cut her off with a snort—it could have been humor or not; it was certainly startlement. “Stuart?” He brought his boot to his knee and gave it a light slap. He flexed the ankle and stretched his calf. “Yes, of course, you’d know my given name. You’ve signed it often enough.”

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

He thought a moment. “Well, for one thing, that you stop using the account. I’m going to be very busy with it.”

She closed her eyes. Oh, God. She let out a long airy breath, resignation. “All right. I already had. But you truly shouldn’t—”

“Stop complaining. How did you know how to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Make it work? Fix the books?”

“I used to do it in London. Years ago.” When she saw the look on his face—he was interested!—she said, “Oh, no, don’t imagine you can extend it in any way. In fact, you must close that account. It’s a nightmare waiting to happen. They’ll catch you.”

“Actually, it is probably you they’ll catch.”

“Perhaps. Though only if you’re careful and quick. Look here,” she said and let out a breath. “The only reason what I did worked was because it was small. If you bilk your account for large amounts, it will become an embarrassment to the bank, and they’ll put private people, private money behind finding the culprit. What I did can’t bear that kind of inspection.”

He tilted his head at her and said, “You know a lot about ‘bilking banks,’ as you call it, don’t you?”

She only rolled her lips together, making a line of her mouth. She wanted to say no, but the answer was obviously, sadly yes. She said nothing.

He likewise simply contemplated her for a moment. Only
God knew what was going on behind his large, dark eyes. He had thick, high-arching eyebrows, black slants that began at the brow bone to rise over deep sockets to an outward angle, before a quick downward bend. These gave his face, even at peace, she suspected, the perpetual air of frowning. They went with his thick, kohl black eyelashes, which outlined the roundness of his eyes, eyes set deep to further the impression in his face of dissatisfaction, if not outright anger, and sadness, melancholy: Though all of it could be an illusion of facial structure, the mere set of his features, as could also be the look of keen intelligence in his peculiarly attentive manner of speculation. His eyes looked sharp, savvy, emphatic, dramatic—their whites snowy white, their irises Moorish black.

These eyes seemed to come to a decision. They blinked, as he tilted his head, and said, “I want your help.”

“Help?” She laughed nervously. “With what?” Thinking he meant the account, she answered her own question. “Bamboozling the British banking system? I wouldn’t know how. I’m small-time.”

“No, I know how to do what I need there, thank you. And I’ll finish up quickly, as you suggest. Very kind of you to point that out. But, no, I need help with something a little more delicate. Were you always?”

“Was I always what?”

“Small-time.”

She looked at him, blinked. “No. I was in on the Big Game half a dozen times, played small parts in it.” To hear it out her mouth was shocking. The admission of it. But also—more so—the small, old note of pride was still, inappropriately, there. Few had ever played the Big Game. It was the cream of confidence games; it took capital, experience, and skill. Zach had known it, run it—and nearly gotten them all killed the last round, seen most of them arrested, people shot, Emma one of them, and his own sister had died in jail.

“The Big Game?”

Why was she saying this? It was his blessed eyes. The eyes of a priest, she decided. They just concentrated on you, implying the patience of Job, the understanding of a saint. They held no judgment, while they implied they could see right through you, so you may as well tell the truth.

The truth. Well, there you had it, Emma thought: Confidence games were stupid. Pride indeed. There was no glamour to them. Talking about them to anyone who thought there might be was like talking to a tourist at the Tower of London, showing him where queens and archbishops and earls had knelt while having their heads cut off.

“The Big Store,” she explained. “The Wire. It has a dozen names. It’s complicated, and you run it with a lot people, usually, for a lot of money, which inevitably makes it extremely dangerous. People get upset over losing small fortunes and downright murderous over large ones.” She shook her head. “I’m out of it now and glad. It was an unnerving way to live. I haven’t done it for a dozen years.”

His expression, though, had changed. He’d sat up straight, not properly put off at all. “London,” he repeated. “How exciting for you.”

“Not exciting enough,” she said and rolled her eyes.

This won another rare enough laugh out of him, a dry, short burst. “And started up again: on me.” He shook his head. “My dear,” he began, “my uncle, whom you are aware of, took some things from my house that I—”

Ah, the uncle. This time, though, Emma was already shaking her head so vigorously, Mount Villiars knew enough to shut up. There was no point in continuing to describe what he wanted from her: She was having no part of it. Just in case though, if her unspoken refusal wasn’t enough, she put it emphatically. “I won’t do it. I can’t. Never again. Not ever. Not for a million pounds sterling.”

She met his gaze levelly, letting him see she couldn’t be manipulated. She’d said as she meant it: a million ways, no.

“Fine,” he said.

She let out a sigh of relief. She’d stood up to him, and it had paid off.

He hopped off the bed and came forward, grabbing hold of her arm. She was startled, then puzzled as he took her sideways so fast she could barely keep her balance. And there was that smell again—of the Orient, faintly citrusy, lemony, perhaps bergamot—so slight, she couldn’t pinpoint it, yet very pleasant, masculine. Clean. Him. As suave and civilized as his coat. And in direct counterpoint to the fact that he lifted her by the arm so high, she was on tiptoe to stay in touch with the floor.

“What the—” She tried to twist away.

He had quite the grip, this smooth, loose-limbed Londoner. Cool as you please, while turning her, walking her backward, he reached to his neck and unknotted his cravat. It slipped easily against itself, then a little
zizz
of foulard silk as he yanked, pulling it through the fold of his white, starchy collar. It jerked free, loose in his hand.

“Oh, no!” Emma understood and started to fight.

She bucked. She jerked. She bent over, folded, tried to back out of his grasp, all to no avail: His grip on her was vaguely akin to that which she put on a sheep when she wanted to mark it with hot pitch after clipping. They wrestled earnestly, strength for strength. What she lacked in power she made up for in wiggle and squirm.

Inarticulate to the end, Emma managed the identical phrase again, when he scraped a chair out, a small one that had been pushed under a corner writing table. “What the—” Which in no way expressed her confusion and fear as he thrust her into it.

What the
, indeed. It was obvious the next second what he was doing. And that she was losing their battle on every front.

“I’ll scream,” she threatened as he took her wrists behind her.

“Do. I’m sure the sheriff, or whoever comes to help, will
understand that I had to subdue the larcenous Miss Muffin or Peep or whoever you are”—that dry laugh again, which she definitely didn’t like—“in order to detain her for arrest.” He tsked. “With all that money sitting there, why, I’m appalled.”

“You can’t—
oofm-mm-m
—” She fought, more for air than anything else, as a whole noseful of that smell came up against her face: He lashed her hands to the chair’s lattice back, bending over her from the front with her cheek and nose smashed up against his chest. He literally lifted her and the chair, teetering them both back onto two legs, her own legs off the ground, holding her against him as he applied the cravat in back.

Round and round, he wrapped her wrists to the chair with silk. It happened so quickly that it was over and done, then he turned her, letting the chair’s legs come forward with a sharp enough clap that her jaw snapped shut.

He stepped out of sight.

“This is not going to help your cravat, you know,” she told the near wall. Where was he?

He laughed from somewhere off to her right, just out of her line of vision. “What happened to the sweet, yet now somehow insipid, Miss Muffin?” he asked, then snorted. Approvingly. Perfect. A miscreant who liked to tie “tigers” to chairs.

“Your neckcloth will never tie properly again,” she insisted.

“Not at my neck. We’ll save it for your wrists. Our extra little plaything.”

She twisted her mouth. He was only trying to scare her. She turned this way, then that, trying to find him over alternating shoulders. Nonetheless, a shiver ran through her that couldn’t quite shed the word
plaything
. “This is
so
unnecessary,” she said. “I
told
you I won’t use the account. I’m done. It’s yours. I can’t help you with the rest. I’ve lost my nerve, among other things. And gained my head, my good sense.” It sounded so reasonable. Why wasn’t he listening?

She could feel him behind her, busy, as she caught a glimpse of the toe of one boot. It put him down on one knee.
Pressure and tugs meant he was threading the neckcloth through the lattice better, wrapping it, affixing her to the chair as securely as a goose being trussed up for Christmas dinner. Then—oh, fine—she felt his hand grab her foot, the ankle of her muck book.

“Ugh!” he said suddenly as if he’d grabbed a snake. “These are terrible!” And, like that, he yanked both off. She was suddenly in her stocking feet. Worse and worse.

He took her foot, then the other. He’d found something—a ruffle off her own petticoat, because she recognized the quick pop of stitches releasing in a path around her, when he ripped off the second piece—with which he bound her ankles to the chair legs. Lovely.

She was trying to take it in stride. Yet her voice sounded strange, small, even to herself when she said, “Stop.” She pleaded, no doubt about it, “Oh, please, stop.”

Right at her ear she heard an exhalation, a light breath—he could move suddenly, appear from nowhere in a new place: and sound cynical without so much as uttering a word.
Ha,
she heard him breathe, then whisper, “Oh, that is pretty. Taking me for fifty quid, then begging sweetly as if it shouldn’t count.” He let out another of his aggravating snorts. “I am feeling, oh, let’s simply sum it up as
violated
.”

Violated
. The word made her stiffen, a fine time to hear it with her legs spraddled to the chair’s.

He continued. “My uncle has taken me, and now you have been into my private account. I am up to my chin, my eyeballs with a sense of invasion, my privacy shattered, my life in shambles because other people have taken liberties—”

Liberties. Other people taking liberties.
No, she didn’t like the sound of this any better.

Emma opened her mouth, deciding to take her chances on screaming, then her voice caught in her throat as the whole chair with her in it suddenly went over backward. She had just enough time to brace herself for hitting hard, when, with a jerk, reality altered: Her descent stopped. The ceiling was
overhead one moment, then the next—
flop
—there was nothing at all: The hem of her dress fell up over her face.

Upside down and blinded by her own skirts, she lay breathing hard, frightened, helpless. Her body hovered on the chair seemingly in midair. Then gently, it sank backward till, behind and overhead, she felt the
clop-clop
of the chair’s upright posts, their slightly uneven meeting with the floor.

Then nothing. No sound except her own: kicking, squirming, blowing, trying to spit her own skirts off her face.

E
MMA
lay in the dark of her own skirts upside down, tied to a chair, her legs bare but for knickers and her old gray wool stockings with a hole at each toe. She’d kill him, she thought. If Mr. Take-Liberties here was ever unwise enough to let her off this chair, she’d tie
him
to it and set it on fire.

So much anger. Though the main purpose of it seemed to be to hold her fear at bay. She lay there dumbstruck, terror-struck, fuming. Who would have thought a bloody member of Parliament could be so surprisingly agile and ruthless: not a gentlemanly reservation in him? Willing to turn her upside down, leave her helpless, breathing like a bellows and frightened out of her blooming mind?

After a lot of kicking and struggling, all to no avail, the fabric of her skirt slid down on its own, revealing Stuart Aysgarth’s face three feet above: directly, squarely above—which put the man who had just discussed
violation
between the chair’s legs and thus coincidentally between hers. He stood bent over her, bracing his weight on the seat edge with
one hand, his other long arm extended—it was his finger, she discovered, that moved her skirt down her cheek as delicately as if dusting dirt from the face of a child.

There was nothing childish at all, however, in how his finger continued over the curve of her jawbone to her neck, taking the hem of her dress down her tendon all the way to her collarbone. His eyes followed his finger to the hollow of her throat, where at last he hesitated, paused, then—thank goodness—stopped. She shivered, involuntary, tried to speak, but ended up only wetting her lips, dry-mouthed.

The path his finger had traveled left a tiny, traceable impression down her neck to her clavicle, a trail so warm and particular it seemed traced by sun through a magnifying glass.

“You”—he said finally, then paused in that soft, slow way he had that was mildly terrifying now under the circumstance—“are a very hard woman to frighten, do you know that?”

She blinked up at him. “I can assure you, you’re doing a good job. You can stop, if that was the goal.”

He laughed. A rare sound, genuine, deep, though she definitely didn’t like his sense of humor, now that she heard it. For a second more—with him leaning on both arms, his shoulders bunching, pulling at his shirt where they held his weight—he hovered over her, surveying her in that very disarming way again. Then stood up completely.

Good God, was he tall. From her angle, his head seemed to all but touch the ceiling.

He stared about them, perplexed for a moment, as if he’d lost track of what he was doing, then seemed to remember. And backed up.

To take a gander at his handiwork, it seemed. Over her knee, she watched him back two feet to the windowsill and sit his buttocks into it, his back flattening lace curtains. There, he crossed his arms over his chest, tilted his head, and viewed her incapacitation from this new angle.

He then said, “Do you know, I think I could do anything to
you, absolutely anything, and there would be nothing you could do about it.”

“What a cheerful piece of speculation,” she said, a little incensed.

“Save complain. Which you do very well.”

She shut her mouth, advising herself to take John’s advice and be humble. Or at least quiet.

Mount Villiars laughed again, entertained by his own iniquitous turns of mind. “And whatever I did, afterward, I could hand you over to the sheriff, and, even complaining, he’d just haul you away.” The sarcastic jackanapes shook his head as if in earnest sympathy. “Such is our legal system and the power behind the title of viscount. I love being a viscount. Have I mentioned that? Despite all the trouble that arrived with my particular title, I find it’s worth fighting for. By the way,” he added, “I like those knickers.”

Oh, fine, she thought. On top of everything else, he was making fun of her underwear—they were old and faded, flannel. Humble, Emma. Humble. She glared, biting her tongue.

“They’re threadbare,” he said. “What is it about the mystery of a woman, where a hint is almost better than knowing? You can almost see through them in places, which purely tickles the imagination, doesn’t it?”

She blinked. “N-na-no,” she got out. No one was tickling anything here. Then, before she knew her mouth was even moving, she found every expletive in her head suddenly out in broad daylight, a stream, as if she were the village idiot unable to stem the flow. “You no-good, ratbag, bad-penny, humbug bastard—”

“Now, now.” He laughed out loud this time—it turned out he wasn’t all that melancholy, but only needed the right reason to laugh his asinine head off. “What a vocabulary, Miss Muffin! Does Mother Goose know about this?” He couldn’t contain himself enough to continue. All he could do was laugh, raucous, his head back, moving the curtains. His laughter rumbled in his chest, a low sound interspersed with a kind of
bass staccato in breaks where he’d catch his breath. A villain’s laugh, she decided.
The arsehole, devil’s own, son of a
—

Was she muttering?

She must have been, because her chair came up an inch—he seemed to have hooked the toe of his boot under the top rung and lifted, making her stop short. He said with a smirk, “Son of a viscount, and don’t forget it. From whom you stole. And make no mistake: Having you arrested for it has its appeal. Once I get a bit more money through that account, of course—”

She shook her head. “Oh, you mustn’t. You really can’t—”

“Why? You know what the best part is? I’m not even certain I’m doing anything wrong.” He chuckled some more. “If they ‘caught’ me, what would it be for exactly? Signing my own checks with my own signature? Depositing them at a branch of my own bank?” He lifted his hands, helpless. And amused by it. After a pause, though, he repeated very seriously for what had to be the third time at least, “Of course, if they catch anyone, it won’t be me, will it?”

Emma closed her eyes, pressed her lips between her teeth, then wet them. “I—I’ll fix it,” she offered. “I’ll give you back what I took. The lamb doesn’t matter this much.” An understatement.

Like some sort of joke, he asked, “What lamb?”

Their eyes met. Hers widened, as from jolting down into a rabbit hole one didn’t know was there.

His also, with dawning knowledge. He jerked back, a man repelled. His arms unfolded and dropped to his sides at the same moment her chair clonked down again. He stood up straight onto both legs. While full realization spread into his countenance the way light could preternaturally wash across dark countryside from overhead thunderclouds suddenly illuminated by lightning.

“You’re the sheep woman!” he said. “Fifty-six pounds! I should have known!”

A kind of fury brought him forward with a clap of bootheels, till he towered over her head.

Looking down from six or more feet above, he said, “Why wouldn’t you take the bloody ten pounds? I couldn’t afford fifty, you ninny—”

“You most certainly could. Why, that carriage alone—” she pointed out.

“My uncle’s. I took it from him. He’d bought it with my money, painted my coat of arms on it. And left every ha’penny tied up in lawsuits.”

“You could have sold it.”

“I could have. And walked. And fired all the people who maintained it.”

Emma, so Emma to the bone, she would think later—insane—argued from the floor. “And—and—there’s all that rebuilding going on at your house—”

“On credit.” He turned away and paced. “All of it on credit. I kept trying to think of ways to maintain appearances enough so I could sign loans on the strength, the promise, of my name. A name that, if I was to have it, I had to win with an army of lawyers. We were in two courts plus the College of Arms at one point.”

“How could you afford the lawyers?”

“They take their fees at the end. They’re all sure I’m good for it.”

He was, wasn’t he? Oh, blast, English lords didn’t deal in shillings and tuppence. He was lying. Yes, yes, she thought (though it was perhaps a tiny bit stupid to keep confronting him, with his being loose and now pacing within inches of her, while she was rather affixed at the vertex of his steps). The devil take him, he could still have paid what he owed. Look at his coat over there on the bed, for one thing. “You could have spared fifty pounds,” she insisted.

“My de-e-ear,” he said and stopped cold; she wished she’d been quiet. He bent down to her, again talking into her face,
though upside down this time and much, much closer, bent over. “What do you think it costs to pack up three households into trunks, then trek them from Russia these days? And I expected to have money once I arrived here. What I did
not
expect was a near-million-pound inheritance I couldn’t touch—still can’t, even today, not easily or in any large measure, not till you, thank you—not without a week of correspondence with the College of Arms or so they tell me; I’ve yet to have that work. Nor did I expect, while the money was sealed off from me, I’d be handed huge apologies, then eighteen properties and fifty-seven servants, with not a shilling to run any of it. It is a nightmare. I keep thinking I’ve solved everything, when a new twist appears—the bank in York has, as of this week, an injunction now which does not allow me more than a hundred pounds in any one transaction until my lawyers can settle with a tailor, no less. A bloody tailor to whom my uncle—don’t ask—owes one thousand seven hundred twenty-two pounds six shillings. And for
that
, I can’t pay the French chef that came with Dunord the amount he deserves.”

Pay the chef? His cook? He couldn’t pay his cook?

Stuart continued, “And that doesn’t count the twenty people I brought over myself. What was I supposed to do with
them,
I ask you? Leave them? Most of them have been with me from England, halfway round the world, then back again.

“And, foolish me, I felt rather secure, since I brought with me what I thought were fifty thousand pounds in rubles. But, no, no one likes rubles at the moment. The exchange rate is in the gutter, because England is a little unnerved by some new group calling themselves Marxists who are marching in Petersburg, wanting not the tzar but someone else, themselves presumably, to rule Russia. Nonetheless, I changed the rubles anyway, taking a beating, just to keep things going.”

He stopped long enough to take a breath, then said, “My dear, I can’t help these things. I’m just caught in them—a very rich man forced to move three households across two
seas into eighteen properties, all with my hands tied behind my back, so to speak, by politics, exchange rates, and an uncle who took my English monies and properties precipitously, running up debts for which we still can’t get a full tally.” He threw up his hands. “Untie you? You’re lucky I don’t pick the chair up and throw you and it out the window. A sheep!” he said and pivoted, pacing off, presumably to cool down.

Good. He needed to. Emma let out a long exhalation herself. Goodness!

But he wasn’t quite finished. He merely circled once and came back, pointing one of his long, slightly crooked fingers—that strangely attractive upward-arching tip—down into her face. “And you! I was down to a hundred twenty-seven pounds they would actually let me have in my pocket, when you—
you!
—came after me: I was flat out broke with more properties than any one human can use that came with seventy-seven people, you idiot woman, all of whom look to me for support, while I was trying to convince all of jolly old England that I was financially sound enough to loan thousands to!” His voice had risen loud enough that she had some hope of people hearing, of help rushing over from the next room. Oh, please, she thought.

She didn’t like to see it: He grew more agitated—she had an excellent view of his boots as they clicked on the floor past her head. Snug, black, taut, butter-soft leather, laughably severe, now that she thought about it. He was going to kill her. Indeed, throw her out the window. Or, no, maybe he’d kick her to death with these strange boots that came up higher in front, covering an inch of his knee, with a tassel at the top, cut away at the calf so the back of his leg bent freely. Yes, he could get a good momentous kick going here with his Russian boots.

“Nothing I did shook you.” He spun himself around at the bedpost. “Nothing satisfied you. I couldn’t lose you. You are relentless! Why didn’t you take the ten bloody pounds!” he asked again.

“I—I—” Why didn’t she? “I don’t know.” She blinked. “It would be fine now. If you’d like to untie me, give it to me, I swear, I’d leave, your lordship.” Dotty. The man was certifiable.

He continued to rant. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t! God. I should drop you out the window and tell the sheriff you jumped.”

“No, no.” She shook her head vehemently against the back slat of the chair. “No, I’m quite happy here on the floor, very comfortable.”

A lunatic. An evil, wild, stuttering lunatic with a penchant for overspending. Dishonest to his bone, possibly violent. God save her, she thought as she stared up at him—or at his boots actually as he strode by again. Old Stuart—long-legged, well dressed, handsome as blazes, clever, cultured, and possibly trying to save the world or at least seventy-seven servants in it—old Stuart here was a madman.

And she was, as the saying went, in his clutches. Up to her eyeballs. Up to her threadbare flannel knickers.

Stuart stayed by the window, his back to her, presumably staring through the curtains, his back widely filling out his generous shirt for the fact that his arms appeared to be folded in front again. Silence. While he gathered himself, Emma hoped.

Finally, though, it was she for whom the silence dragged on too long, and an admission found its way her mouth. “I suppose,” she offered tentatively, “you might be having a wee bit more of a hard-go than I’d imagined.”

Without turning, he said, “Thank you.” It took another full minute before he twisted to look over his shoulder—down between the tops of her knees at her face. He asked, “Why would a lamb be worth fifty quid?” It was an honest question.

And his eyes, their sad angle: she felt a twinge of sympathy for him. “Do you suppose we could discuss this with the chair at least upright?” she asked. “My hands are going to sleep.”