Three Weeks With Lady X (16 page)

“Manufacturing iron bars, for the self-defense of ladies,” he said readily. “I have a factory that could make them. We could use scrap metal. Perhaps with a slender end for women with smaller hands.”

She stared at him a moment, then broke into laughter. “Is that how you made your untold millions?”

God, she was gorgeous. Dangerously so. He wrenched his mind back to the reason he’d invaded her privacy. “India, would you care to explain what that statue is doing in my bedchamber?”

“Don’t you like your room?” she asked, a naughty smile glimmering in her eyes.

In fact, he did like it. And she knew it. “The walls are red,” he pointed out.

“The devil should have a lair that suits his disposition,” she replied, obviously unperturbed. “A background, you might call it.”

“You’ll have to change it.”

India shook her head. “I’m finished appointing the house. Your guests begin to arrive tomorrow, and I must ensure that Lala’s mother adores you, which frankly will be a bigger challenge than the whole house put together.”

“Bedchamber aside, India, you did a hell of a job. The place is dazzling.”

She sat up straighter, and a hank of her hair fell over her breast. The lock was long and curly, and the breast was as lush and delectable as it appeared when she was dressed, though she tended to wear gowns with all the appeal of a governess’s.

He had to get out of her bedchamber. “Right,” he said, jumping to his feet. “I’d better go prepare for Rose’s arrival. She’ll be along in the carriage presently.”

For one second, India looked disappointed, but then she said regally, “You ought never to enter a lady’s chamber.”

“Vander arrives tomorrow,” he told her, ignoring her rebuke. “That’s Lord Brody, future duke. Don’t wear that dress I last saw you in. Haven’t you any gowns that might seduce a man?”

“I’m not going to seduce Lord Brody!” India said, brows drawing together like a thundercloud.

“I’m friends with Vander, but I can’t guarantee that he’s anything much in bed,” Thorn said, grinning. “If you like his looks you should try the merchandise first. I’ve never been partial to tow-heads, myself.”

“I am ignoring you.” India swung her feet out of bed and poked around with her toes for her bedroom slippers. She had the prettiest feet he’d ever seen: slender and white and silky looking. And her ankles were as delicate as the rest of her.

An image of the scars that slashed across his thighs popped into his mind. Her head bent as she poked her feet into her little slippers; all he could see was her incredible hair.

She straightened up. “You must leave now. Marie, my maid, will arrive soon.”

“Does she simply walk into your room in the morning?”

“Of course.”

“She’ll have to change that once you’re married.”

India didn’t even glance at him as she went to the dressing table. He didn’t like to be ignored, so he said, “Vander might be a morning man.”

She turned around as she pulled on a dressing gown, and he saw faint puzzlement in her eyes. “A man rolls over in the morning and finds himself ready,” he explained. “He wakes up hungry, and if there’s a soft body next to him, he’ll make her a happy woman. Which he would want to do without a maid interrupting.”

Her face flushed pink. Thorn grinned and decided to leave with that thought. He got himself out of the bedroom and downstairs to alert Fleming to the existence of Rose—only to discover that India had informed him about everything, including the need to keep Rose’s presence in the dower house a secret for the time being.

He spent a half hour poking around the kitchens, butler’s pantry, silver closet. “Where the hell did she get all this stuff?” he asked Fleming, staring into a closet full of silver platters. Some had great domed lids; some, little feet.

“Lady Xenobia is acquainted with Messieurs Hannam & Crouch. She trusted me to visit their store on Monkwell Street and acquire the basics for a household of this size.”

Thorn picked up one of the platters, one without fussy little feet. Of course, he’d seen silver like this on his father’s table. The duke did not believe in hiding his silver under a barrel, as it were.

But he had never thought about owning any himself. The piece he had in hand was an oval with some decoration.

“This seems good enough,” Thorn said.

“The platter has a gadrooned border, and the field is engraved with a diaperwork pattern,” Fleming said. “A crest could be added at a later date, should you wish for it.”

“You might as well get to know me, Fleming. The answer to that is, when hell freezes over.”

“Quite right, sir,” the butler replied, without flicking an eyelash. He took the platter and handed it to the footman, who had been trotting after them like a puppy. “Put this in my pantry, Stevens.”

“Why?”

“We have handled it, and the platter must be polished before use.”

Thorn was losing interest in silver. “I don’t give a damn whether it’s polished or not, as long as it has food on it.”

“I gained that impression, sir, when you paid Hannam & Crouch, although they neglected to send you an inventory of the objects you had bought.” Fleming’s tone was wry; Thorn suspected they would get on very well.

He shrugged. “You realize I’m a bastard? It gave my butler in London indigestion, until at last he left for the good of his immortal soul.”

“I too am a chance-child, as we call it in the Highlands,” Fleming said.

Thorn broke into a crack of laughter. “How in hell did she find you?”

“I have served under the Marquess of Pestle, and most recently as head footman to the Duke of Villiers.”

“Ah, she stole you from my father.”

“Everyone in service knows of Lady Xenobia. If a man would like to move households, he hopes, if not prays, that she will pay the house a visit. I met her two years ago, when she spoke to every person in His Grace’s household. She did not forget my ambition to be a butler.”

“Does she always speak to every person in service?”

Fleming nodded. “From the butler to the scullery maid. You can imagine that she learns quite a bit about the household.”

She was brilliant, that woman.

As Thorn entered the library, the image of India in her bed came back into his head. He would have guessed that ladies wore white flannel to bed, perhaps with a bit of lace around the neck and the wrists. To cover up.

India had been wearing pale blue silk. And there had been a lot of lace, and it hadn’t been doing much to cover anything up.

A crunch of carriage wheels interrupted that interesting train of thought, so he went out to greet Rose. She climbed down, clutching Antigone and looking uncertain. He probably should have traveled with her, even though Twink and Clara were descending from the carriage as well.

Thorn stopped and held out his arms. “Rose!”

Her face was tight, and he waited while she thought about it. Finally, she trotted toward him, and he scooped her up. “How’s my girl?” he asked her.

“I am not your girl,” she said, with that awkward earnestness that characterized her.

“You most certainly are,” he said. “On loan from your papa.”

“Oh.” She looked unconvinced. Thorn had never had trouble persuading members of the female sex to like him. Until, that is, he met Rose. She held herself apart, no matter how much he tried to charm her.

“We’re off to the dower house,” he told her, hating that fact. He understood the necessity, but it didn’t suit him to hide Rose away, as if she were someone to be ashamed of. It made her seem like a by-blow, whereas she was the perfectly legitimate product of holy matrimony.

But when he had informed Laetitia about Rose and the dower house, she had nodded instantly. “My mother is . . . difficult,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. He knew what she was really saying: she needed him to rescue her, and he would.

“Where is Lady Xenobia?” Rose asked now.

“She’s in the house, I expect,” Thorn said. “Would you like to see her?”

Rose nodded vigorously. “I know that she will want to see the progress that Antigone has made.”

Thorn glanced at Fleming.

“Lady Xenobia will undoubtedly join you in the dower house, Miss Rose,” the butler said. “For a visit.”

Chapter Sixteen

M
iss Laetitia Rainsford was supervising as her mother’s maid packed Lady Rainsford’s trunk for transport to Starberry Court. This was not because Abigail needed supervision but because her mother insisted, and Lala had learned long ago that it was easier to do as her mother willed than try to resist it.

“Take care with that gown,” Lady Rainsford said, from where she reclined on a day bed across the room. “That is Valenciennes lace on the sleeves.”

Abigail already knew that, and always took care. But Mama liked to catalogue the valuable things in her possession. Almost as much as Mama liked to catalogue her ailments. But not quite as much as Lala liked to make unkind comments in the back of her head, where no one could hear them.

It was a sin, and she knew it. She nodded, and said, “Yes, Mama,” and watched as Abigail painstakingly folded the gown between lengths of white silk to keep the lace from snagging or wrinkling.

“I’m still unsure about this visit,” her mother said fretfully. “A bastard, to call a spade a spade! My daughter marrying a child of shame. Who would have thought it? Not I, not when I was the most beautiful woman in the
ton,
and I chose your father to wed.”

“Mr. Dautry
is
the son of the Duke of Villiers,” Lala ventured to say, not for the first time, nor even for the tenth.

“Who is as scandalous as his offspring,” her mother said, raising a hand limply in the air and letting it fall. She had applied a paste of cucumber and fuller’s earth, guaranteed to eradicate all wrinkles, to her face that morning. It had dried solid, and now it had begun crackling like the bed of a dried-out pond.

“Your father should be appalled at the very idea of linking his blood with such an immoral man as Villiers, let alone a bastard slip from the tree.”

Abigail had finished the gown and was placing a last layer of silk on top before closing the trunk’s lid. “Papa is quite impressed with Mr. Dautry’s holdings,” Lala reminded her mother. She had been repeating two concepts over and over: “duke” and “wealth.”

But she dared not utter any of the things she’d like to say, which included pointing out that no one considered her more than a pretty face, if not a dunce. And that her father was weary and gaunt with anxiety about money. And that he needed Lala to marry quickly, and not cost him another season.

Frankly, her mother should have been kissing Mr. Dautry’s feet. It was a miracle she’d met Mr. Dautry, given that he hadn’t attended the usual events of the season. He’d never seen her stumbling along in a conversation, trying to find the right words, trying to come up with something witty or even merely fitting, and failing. She would try to say something, and her face would begin to feel tight and she could feel color creeping up her neck.

But Mr. Dautry didn’t seem to expect her to be clever, which made it all easier. He was so interesting that she found herself actually paying attention to what he said.

He wasn’t a man she would have selected if she’d been given a choice. She liked men who were far less aggressive and masculine. For almost two years before she’d debuted, she had been infatuated with their vicar, who had a slender, intelligent face and no hair on his head at all. She attended church so regularly that her mother started calling her Goody Two-shoes.

“Dautry is rich,” her mother said fretfully. “But who would have thought that I,
I,
would have to sell my daughter in the open marketplace to a bastard with a purse of gold? My exquisite daughters should have been snatched up by the highest in the land the moment they debuted.”

“Mariah had four excellent offers,” Lala reminded her, ringing the bell to summon footmen to collect the trunk.

Her mother’s clayey face cracked into a smile at the memory. “Yes, Mariah is a true beauty. What a wonderful season she had! Everyone was whispering about her, casting wagers about who she would accept . . .”

Lala didn’t know why there had been any speculation: her father had simply accepted the largest offer for Mariah’s hand. Unfortunately, he didn’t think that any of the men who had proposed to Lala had offered adequate recompense for her beauty. Instead, he held out for a better offer—and then the season was over.

The very thought of having to endure another season made her heart pound. If Mr. Dautry didn’t marry her, she’d have to go through all of it again, knowing everyone was whispering about her, not because she was beautiful but because they thought she was a simpleton.

She had even overheard some girls giggling and calling her “a spoony Sally.” She hadn’t entirely understood what they’d meant—who was Sally?—but it was obviously no compliment.

Abigail opened the bedchamber door and stood back, letting the footmen fetch Lady Rainsford’s trunk. It would be sent on immediately, allowing the gowns to be aired and re-ironed before they followed tomorrow afternoon.

“I just wish you would be a little more vivacious, Lala,” her mother went on, taking no notice of the men’s presence. Lady Rainsford was not one to notice servants unless she wanted them to do something for her. “Though to be fair, it’s hardly your fault that you’re daft, but you
could
do something about your hips.”

Lala clenched her teeth and willed herself not to cry. It would be ridiculous to get teary simply because two footmen were watching.

“It gives you such a lubberly air,” her mother went on relentlessly. “I swear it would be easy. If you would just stop eating for a couple of weeks, you could have the same slim figure as your sister. We wouldn’t be scraping the bottom of the barrel like this, lowering ourselves to visit the house of a by-blow.”

“The Duke of Villiers will attend the party, Mother,” Lala said, adding with some desperation, “and I’m certain that he will be greatly offended if you allow your feelings about his son to be evident.”

“No one can say that I’m not the soul of tact,” her mother said, with a blithe disregard for the truth. “Abigail, I’ll thank you to shut the door after the footmen. There’s a draft coming in that will likely go to my lungs and finish me off before I manage to get my last daughter off my hands.”

She swung her legs from her bed and pointed to her silk wrapper. Lala draped it around her mother’s bony shoulders.

“I should like a tisane, brewed with a touch of honey. Meanwhile, it is time for you to take a brisk walk around the park. Three times a day, remember, and you haven’t even been out of doors today. It’s already ten in the morning. Laziness is the downfall of your figure.”

Lala had been dancing attendance on her mother since daybreak, but she bit back a comment. There was no point. No point.

She kept repeating that to herself until she was out the door and heading to Kensington Gardens.