The Last Hellion (7 page)

In any case, Lydia told herself, she had far more important issues to consider, namely, Miss Prideaux. Who was probably weeping into her pillow at this very moment, poor dear. Her clothes could be replaced, along with the spectacles, if they couldn't be repaired. And she wasn't alone and friendless, because she'd stay with Lydia.

But the jewelry, the precious keepsakes… oh, that loss must pain the child deeply.

If only that dolt of a duke had taken the bawd to Bow Street, they would have had an excellent chance of retrieving the girl's things. Obviously the thieves had been working for Coralie, because she'd played this game before. Several of her girls were adept pickpockets, and the bawd's bully boys had no scruples about assaulting defenseless girls.

But Ainswood hadn't been interested in Miss Prideaux's problems because he wasn't a noble and chivalrous hero. He only
looked
like Prince Charming, and a dissolute wreck of one at that.

If there were any justice in the world, Lydia told herself, he would have turned into the toad he was the instant his wicked mouth touched hers.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

It would have soothed Miss Grenville's troubled spirit had she known that Lord Ainswood suffered worse indignities than turning into a toad.

He was used to causing talk. Being a born troublemaker, he was almost constantly at the center of one spectacle or scandal or another. Since he'd come into the title, the world—and especially the newspapers—followed his doings more avidly than before.

His contretemps with Dain on the latter's wedding night, an episode featuring Beelzebub's bastard son a week later, and a debacle of a carriage race in June had used up miles of paper and tons of ink. Vere's acquaintances had roasted him unmercifully as well.

The published satires and caricatures, along with the private jokes at his expense, had rolled off him as easily as he rolled off an endless series of harlots, and were as easily forgotten immediately afterward.

But on previous occasions, Vere's opponents had been men, and the affairs were conducted according to manly, sporting rules.

This time, his opponent had been a woman.

And now Vere didn't know which was worse: that he'd stooped to arguing with a female—when everyone knew they were the most irrational creatures on God's earth—or that he'd fallen, literally, for one of the oldest fighting tricks in history.

What Lady Grendel had done was the same as playing dead, and he—who'd been scrapping since he was a toddler—had dropped his guard.

He was soon wishing he'd dropped
her
, right on her obstinate little head. That might have made up in some small way for the chaffing he endured in the following days.

Everywhere he went, his fellows couldn't resist exercising their limited wit upon him.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

When he took Trent to the Fives Court in St. Martin's Street, for instance, someone had to ask why Vere hadn't brought Miss Grenville as sparring partner.

At which every would-be pugilist in the place fell down laughing.

Everywhere Vere went, some sapskull wanted to know when the next match would be, or if His Grace's jaw had healed enough to allow him to eat soft foods, or if he reckoned so-and-so's grandmother was up to his weight.

Meanwhile, all the illustrators in London vied with each other for Most Hilarious Portrayal of the Great Battle.

Three days after the event, Vere stood, simmering, before a bookshop window.

Displayed therein was a large print whose caption read, "Lady Grendel Gives the Duke of A______a Drubbing."

The artist had drawn him as a great, hulking brute wearing a stage villain's leer.

He was reaching for the gorgon, portrayed as a dainty slip of a female. Above his caricatured head, the bubble read, "Why, my pretty, haven't you ever heard of
droit de seigneur
! I'm a duke now, don't you know?"

Miss Grenville was posed with her fists upraised. Her bubble said, "I'll show you a
droit
—and a
gauche
as well."

The feeble play on the French words for "right" and "left," he explained to a baffled-looking Trent, was intended to pass for wit.

"I got that part," Bertie said. "But that droy dee signew-er—ain't it French for two sovereigns? I thought you only offered a pound for the little gal."

The
droit de signeur
, Vere explained through stiff jaws, was the right of the feudal lord to deflower his vassals' brides.

Trent's square face reddened. "Oh, I say, that ain't funny. Virgins—and new-wed besides." He started for the bookshop door, doubtless intending to set matters straight in his own inimitable style.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

Vere drew him back. "It's only a picture," he said. "A joke, Trent, that's all."

Recalling the adage "Out of sight, out of mind," he steered his would-be champion to the curb and started to cross the street with him.

Then he had to haul Bertie back, out of the way of the black vehicle bearing down upon them.

"Well, I'll be hanged!" Trent cried as he stumbled back to the footway. "Speak of the devil."

It was she, the cause of the unceasing stale jokes and witless caricatures.

As she barreled past, Miss Boudicca Grenville saluted them in coachman style, touching her whip to her bonnet brim, and flashing a cocky grin.

Had she been a man, Vere would have hurtled after her, pulled her from the vehicle, and knocked that cocksure smile down her throat. But she wasn't a man, and all he could do was watch, smoldering, until she turned a corner a moment later… out of sight but far, perilously far, from forgotten.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

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The Duke of Ainswood's mood might have lightened had he known how close Lydia came to driving into the corner—and the shop standing there—rather than

'round it.

Though she collected her wits in time, it was in the very last tick of time, and she narrowly averted overturning as it was.

Not to mention she'd nearly run the two men down only seconds before.

This was because Lydia had no sooner recognized the tall figure at the curb than her brain shut down. Completely. No idea where she was or what she was doing.

It was only for a moment, but that was a moment far too long. And even afterward, she hadn't fully recovered. Though she'd managed the cool salute well enough, she had a horrible suspicion that her smile had been far too wide and…

well, stupid, not to mince matters. A stupid, moonstruck smile, she reflected angrily, to match the idiotish pounding of her heart. As though she were a silly girl of thirteen instead of a hardened spinster of eight and twenty.

She lectured herself all the rest of the way to Bridewell prison.

When she entered the fortress of misery, though, she put her personal troubles aside.

She went to the Pass-Room. Here, pauper women claiming residence in other parts of England were held for a week before being sent back to their own parishes, the prevailing philosophy being, "Charity begins at home."

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

A row of low, narrow, straw-filled stalls lined the wall facing the door. The door and fireplace interrupted a similar line of stalls on that side. About twenty women, some with children, occupied the chamber.

Some had come to London to seek their fortunes; some had been ruined before they came and fled disgrace; and some had run away from the usual assortment of troubles: grief, poverty, brutality.

Lydia would describe the place for her readers in her usual style. She would sketch in plain and simple terms what she saw, and she would tell these women's stories in the same way, without moralizing or sentiment.

This wasn't all Lydia did, but she didn't think it was her reading public's right to know about the half-crowns she surreptitiously distributed to her interviewees, or the letters she wrote for them, or the people she'd later speak to on their behalf.

If, moreover, it frustrated Grenville of the
Argus
that she could do so little, or if her heart ached the whole time she listened to the women, these emotions would not enter her published work, either, for such feelings were nobody's business but hers.

The last interview was with the newest arrival, a fifteen-year-old girl who cradled an infant too weak and scrawny even to wail like the others. The boy lay limply in his mother's arms, now and then uttering a weary whimper.

"You must let me do something for you," Lydia told her. "If you know who his papa is, Mary, tell me, and I'll speak to him for you."

Pressing her lips together, Mary rocked to and fro upon her dirty heap of straw.

"You'd be amazed at how many fathers agree to help," Lydia said.
After I'm done
with them
, she could have added.

"Sometimes their pas take 'em away," the girl said. "Jemmy's all I got now." She Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

paused in her rocking and gave Lydia a troubled look. "You got any?"

"Children? No."

"Got a man?"

"No."

"Ever fancied one?"

"No."
Liar, liar, liar
, Lydia's inner devil mocked. "Yes," she amended with a short laugh.

"I was yes and no, too," Mary said. "I told myself I was a good girl and it was no use wishing for him, as he was miles above my touch and such like don't marry farm girls. But all the no was in my head, and every way else I fancied him something fierce. And so it ended up yes, and here's the tyke to prove it. And you'll be thinking I can't take care of him as he needs, which is true." Her bottom lip trembled. "All right, then, but you needn't speak for me nor write for me. I can write it myself. Here."

She thrust the child at Lydia, who stiffly exchanged her notebook and pencil for it. Him.

Lydia saw little ones all the time, for children were one commodity London's poor owned in abundance. She'd held them in her lap before, but none so young as this, none so utterly helpless.

She looked down at his narrow little face. The babe was neither pretty nor strong nor even clean, and she wanted to weep for him and the short, wretched future awaiting him, and for his mother, who was destitute and scarcely more than a child herself.

But Lydia's eyes remained dry, and if her heart ached as well from other causes, she knew better than to give those futile yearnings any heed. She was not a fifteen-year-old girl. She was mature enough to let her head rule her actions, Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

even if it couldn't altogether rule her heart.

And so she only quietly rocked the infant as his mother had done, and waited while Mary slowly dragged the pencil over the paper. When, finally, the very short note Mary took such pains with was finished, Lydia returned Jemmy to his mother with only the smallest pang of regret.

Even such a small regret was inexcusable, she chided herself as she left the Bridewell's grim confines.

Life was no romantic fable. In real life, London took the place of the palace of her youthful romantic imaginings. Its forgotten women and children were her siblings and offspring, and all the family she needed.

She could not be their Lady Bountiful and cure all that ailed them, but she could do for them what she'd been unable to do for her mother and sister. Lydia could speak for them. In the pages of the
Argus
, their voices were heard.

This was her vocation, she reminded herself. This was why God had made her strong and clever and fearless.

She had not been made to be any man's plaything. And she most certainly would not risk all she'd worked for, merely because a lout of a Prince Charming had raised a flurry in her unruly heart.

Three nights after she'd nearly run down Vere and Bertie, Lady Grendel tried to break Adolphus Crenshaw's skull in front of Crockford's club in St. James's Street.

Inside, Vere and Bertie joined the crowd at the window at the moment she took hold of Crenshaw's neckcloth and shoved him back against a lamppost.

With a grim sense of déjà vu, Vere hurried out of the club, advanced upon her, and firmly grasped her waist. Startled, she let go of the cravat, and Vere lifted her up off the pavement and set her back down well out of reach of the gasping Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

Crenshaw.

She tried the elbow-in-the-gut trick again, but Vere managed to dodge it while still keeping a firm grip on her. He wasn't prepared for the boot heel crunching down on his instep, though he should have been, but he didn't let go then, either, even while pain shafted up his leg.

He grabbed her nailing arms and dragged her away, out of hearing of the group of men gathering at Crockford's entrance.

She struggled with him the whole way, and he struggled with a strong temptation to throw her into the street where an oncoming hackney could do London a favor and crush her under its wheels. Instead, Vere hailed the vehicle.

When it halted before them, he told her, "You can get in, or I can throw you in.

Take your pick."

She muttered something under her breath that sounded like the synonym for

"rectum," but when he pulled the door open, she climbed in quickly enough.

Which was too bad, because he wouldn't have minded in the least hurrying her with a slap to her rump.

"Where do you live?" he asked when she'd flung herself onto the seat.

"Bedlam, where else?"

He jumped into the hackney and gave her a hard shake. "Where do you live, curse you?"

She mentioned a few other body parts he resembled before grudgingly admitting to a lair in Frith Street, Soho.

Vere relayed the direction to the driver, then settled onto the seat with her, where he made sure to take up more than his share of room.

After they'd traveled a good while in angry silence, she let out an impatient huff.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

"Lud, what a fuss you make," she said.

"A fuss?" he echoed, taken aback. "You were the one—"

"I wasn't going to hurt Crenshaw," she said. "I was only trying to make him listen. I had to get his full attention first."