Three Weeks With Lady X (35 page)

Chapter Forty-one

Q
uite some time later, Thorn returned the velvet bag to India’s lap, insisting that she humor him and open it.

Her mother’s necklace and earrings fell into her lap. The settings were tarnished, but there was a flash of diamond, the gleam of old gold. . . .

India’s hands flew to her mouth, and a little scream broke from her lips.

“Where did you—” She turned to him, horrified. “You risked your life to salvage my mother’s jewels for me?”

He nodded.

“But you hate the river, Thorn. And look what happened: it nearly killed you.” Her hand brushed back his hair, caressing the wound that would remain on his brow, a permanent gift of the river. “No jewelry is worth your life!”

“Your parents loved you, just as I love you,” Thorn told her. “They weren’t leaving you, just as I will never leave you. I shall prove it to you this very afternoon.”

India was completely confused. “How could you possibly prove that?”

“You believe yourself to be unlovable,” Thorn said, ignoring her question, “but I was in love with you after five minutes in your company, and Vander was only ten minutes behind me. All those men who asked to marry you—the ones you say wanted to marry you for your title—they were in love with you too. Not to mention the stonemasons, and painters, and the rest of the men whose hearts you stripped bare.”

“Oh,” she whispered.

“I did the same thing as you,” he continued.

“What do you mean?”

“I tried to keep you in your place, even to drive you away, because I could not believe that you would love a mudlark and a bastard.” His voice was raw with emotion.

A hot flush washed over India, a wave of feeling so deep that she could hardly put it in words. “You humble me,” she said, stumbling into speech. “You make me—”

The stones tumbled off the bed. No one noticed.

Later that day, a polite man by the name of Mr. Farthingale appeared in Thorn’s library and explained to India and Adelaide that he was a jeweler who had met, years ago, with the Marquess of Renwick.

“Oh,” India said, clasping Thorn’s hand very tightly.

“I know your shop quite well,” Adelaide said brightly. “Just off Blackfriars, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is, my lady,” Mr. Farthingale said, inclining his head. Then he gave India a kindly look and said, “Lady Xenobia, I understand that you wish to know more of my encounter with your father.”

“Yes, I would,” she managed, her heart thumping.

“His lordship was in possession of a diamond demi-parure, which had descended through his wife’s family. He asked me to value the pieces, as he was considering sale.”

India didn’t know what to think, so she nodded.

“The marquess and the marchioness were considering the sale in order to fund their daughter’s debut and dowry.” Mr. Farthingale paused delicately.

“For me?” India whispered.

“There was a reason your parents didn’t immediately sell the jewelry to Mr. Farthingale,” Thorn said, smiling at her.

Mr. Farthingale inclined his head, his eyes compassionate. “I believe they would have eventually consigned the pieces to me, but they wished to consult with their daughter, that is, with you, Lady Xenobia, before doing so.”

A few minutes later, India rose to say goodbye, feeling lightheaded, as if her head were filled with air. Her parents hadn’t been running away from her. They had loved her. They had been thinking of her future.

“Your news was very welcome,” she told Mr. Farthingale.

“If you ever wish to sell the pieces . . .” he murmured, bowing.

“Never,” Thorn intervened before India could say the same.

The pieces were her only tangible tie to her mother and father, and they represented all that Thorn had given her . . . and that which he had almost lost for her.

After they made love that night, India curled against Thorn’s side, staring into the darkness, allowing herself to remember her parents.

Her mother used to throw back her hair and laugh in a deep-throated, joyful way. Her father wasn’t much good at being a gentleman, or managing an estate, but she recalled how he’d sat with her for hours, helping her arrange glass tiles in just the right order. He taught her the skills that allowed her to make any room into an enchanting oasis.

She even remembered the way her mother would laugh and say, “I knew you would work it out, poppet,” when India went to find them to say that she’d succeeded in locating a chicken for supper, or had made mushroom soup.

Her mother’s cheerful confidence had pushed her to learn how to bake bread, how to apply stucco, how to polish silver.

Her parents had been the wind at her back in every house she had reorganized and refurbished, and she had never thanked them, or even realized it.

Thorn had given her parents back to her. They hadn’t been conventional, or particularly aristocratic, and certainly not protective. But they had loved her.

T
he following evening, Messrs. Bink, Dusso, and Geordie had the singular experience of dining at the grand home of a duke and duchess, who were deeply grateful to them for saving the life of their eldest son.

Not only were they seated across from the Duke and Duchess of Villiers, but another future duke, Lord Brody, had also joined the meal. News of Thorn’s near demise had spread through London, and Vander had turned up, as he said, “because he knew that Thorn’s head was harder than a rock but he wanted to see for himself.”

All that nobility at one table meant that Geordie, in particular, had trouble shaping a single word until Villiers’s butler took pity on them and brought tankards of ale to the table.

Thorn grinned at his father, who fastidiously declined the ale; his stepmother, who not only accepted it, but was drinking it with every sign of enjoyment; his closest friend, who had accepted defeat with utmost grace; and finally at the woman who would soon be his wife.

Earlier that afternoon the archbishop had reluctantly given Thorn’s solicitor yet another special license—this one not blank but specifying the union of Mr. Tobias Dautry to Lady Xenobia India St. Clair.

They would be married in the morning, the ceremony witnessed by a duke and duchess, and three members of the fraternity of mudlarks. Evander Brody, heir to the Duke of Pindar, would stand as Thorn’s best man, even though he was laughingly offering the bride a last chance to become a duchess.

“Never,” Thorn growled, pulling his fiancée close in an entirely improper manner and bending his head to drop a kiss on a neck that glittered with diamonds . . . restored through Mr. Farthingale’s expert ministrations.

“Those joowels looked like rubbish when Bink fished them up,” Dusso told the Duke of Villiers. “I’d never know they was the same, now they’re cleaned up.”

Dusso grinned, and so did Bink and Geordie. They’d been in the Thames, and it hadn’t conquered them.

Thorn felt the same. The river had almost killed him, but it had brought him India, and that was worth everything. If he hadn’t been a mudlark, he never would have become the man whom India wanted.

He held her hand tightly under the table.

With a wicked little smile playing around his mouth, the Duke of Villiers began telling India about why he’d sent Thorn off to Piggleston. “I thought that Tobias needed to be made to understand how much he loved you.” He raised his heavy-lidded eyes and glanced at his own wife. “He is my son, after all. We’re fools when it comes to women.”

Eleanor bent near, her hair brushing the duke’s magnificently clad shoulder. “My husband was playing Cupid,” she said. “He likes to do that.”

India laughed, and Thorn thought, once again, that he could spend his life listening to this woman, this particular woman, laugh.

The night he’d waited in Piggleston, believing India had been on the eve of marrying Vander, had scored him to the heart. But his father wasn’t wrong: it had also taught him what he most wanted.

Not just what he wanted, but the only thing that was important in life.

Under the table, he tightened his hand around India’s. Then he remembered that he wasn’t a gentleman—he was a mudlark, sitting at a table with three other mudlarks.

He caught India’s face in both his hands and kissed her. Her arms wound around his neck.

It was scandalous.

Outrageous.

Just right.

Epilogue

May 12, 1807

From Miss Adelaide Dautry at Starberry Court,

to her parents at 40 Hanover Square, London

Dear Papa,

I miss you very much. When are you and Mama coming home? Rose has been perfectly horrid to me all day. She says that now she’s 14, she shan’t play with me any longer. She hurt my feelings, and I did something bad, and now Mr. Twink says I have to write to you and confess. I want to say first that I’m not sorry, because she should have read me a story when I asked, and besides, she doesn’t play with Antigone anymore.

I cut a little bit of Antigone’s hair.

Please come home now. You’ve been gone for years.

Adelaide

From Miss Rose Summers at Starberry Court, to her guardians at 40 Hanover Square, London

Dear India,

I know you left only two days ago, but we’ve descended to the level of animals here, and civilization is but a dim memory. Remember when we visited Italy, and Papa read aloud
The Inferno
? That’s what Starberry Court is like at the moment. I know you will say that Addie inherited her temper from you, but there is no excuse for this: She cut Antigone’s hair short in the front! You know how I feel about Antigone. And now my poor dear has shorn hair and looks like a fever victim.

How can you both spend so much time at Starberry Court? I am positively dying of
ennui
. I have finished my study of Heraclitus and Xenophanes, but Twink can scarcely have a philosophical conversation when he’s busy chasing after Addie. I truly think she should have a governess, as should Peter. For myself, I am counting the days until I can return to school.

Please arrange for the baby to be born tomorrow, as I should like to share a birthday.

Love,

Rose

From Master Peter Dautry at Starberry Court,

to his parents at 40 Hanover Square, London

Dear Mama,

Mister Twink says I shud rite but I don’t like riting.

Peter

From Mr. Dautry at 40 Hanover Square, London to his butler at Starberry Court

Fred,

Thank you for sending on the children’s letters. Please inform our irritating offspring that babies arrive on their own schedule, and their mama and I will return to Starberry Court just as soon as their new sister or brother chooses to make an appearance.

Dautry

Daybreak

M
argot is perfect,” India whispered, one finger tracing her newborn daughter’s winged eyebrows. “And she’s so calm! I suspect she will be a better sleeper than Addie or Peter. Rember how Peter bawled?” The infant had opened her eyes just long enough to reveal that they were gray, like her father’s, and had promptly fallen to sleep again.

“I wouldn’t count on it.” Thorn was measuring one of the baby’s tiny feet against his thumb. “I suppose Peter and Addie were once this small, but it doesn’t seem possible. Rose is almost at my shoulder, and yet fourteen years ago her feet must have been this size.”

“But she was already reading,” India reminded Thorn with a choke of laughter. It had become a family joke that Rose claimed to have been reading “ever since I was born.”

“Margot, do you already know how to read?” her father asked the baby.

Margot would have said yes (she passionately wanted to be like her oldest sister in everything), but instead she slept on, even when her father pretended to bite her toes, when he put her foot down and kissed her mother, when she was in danger of being smothered as they whispered to each other.

She slept the dreamless sleep of an infant who would never be hungry, who would never scavenge in the Thames, who would grow up in the arms of a family so loving that even after the children had grown and left home, Starberry Court would remain their fulcrum, drawing them back with their spouses, and then their children, and, later still, their grandchildren.

In time, a new wing would be built, at least in part to house the overflow of books (mostly Rose’s, though Margot contributed quite a few as well). The kitchen would acquire new iron stoves, the water closets would be replaced by bathrooms with ceramic bathtubs, and the house would be the first in the county to be electrified. Peter’s grandson would proudly drive one of the very first automobiles into the courtyard.

No matter the modernizations that Starberry Court underwent, it remained the glowing, comfortable home that India created in 1799: the heart of her family and her descendants, where they learned to laugh, to dance (for the pink ballroom became famous through three counties), to love . . . in short, to
live
.

And even two hundred years later, the chandelier that India had found in Venice on their first trip to Italy still hung in a place of honor in a dining room decorated with swallows.

A Note about Toy Shops, Stethoscopes, and Rubber Balls

I
must confess that I toyed—pun intended—with history at several points in this novel.
Three Weeks with Lady X
takes place in 1799, a date predetermined by the fact that Thorn first appears as a mudlark—Juby/Tobias—in two of my earlier novels,
This Duchess of Mine
and
A Duke of Her Own
. I envisioned the boy, once grown, as a man whose years as a mudlark led him to recognize value in materials others had discarded, and at some point I became stubbornly attached to the idea that Thorn and India between them would rescue a failing rubber factory. Rubber’s early uses in England included making it into a kind of string, which was then incorporated into fabric, creating a gathered look called “shirring.” The problem? The rubber threads melted in the heat, making a shirred bodice a risky proposition.

Unfortunately, the first rubber factory in England wasn’t established until 1811, and it wasn’t until 1844 that Charles Goodyear patented the vulcanizing process, which stabilized rubber. India’s “rubber band” first appeared with that usage in 1849. By 1850, many stores were selling India rubber toys, such as balls (and yes, the various puns on names—India rubber, as well as Rose and Thorn, were deliberate). Obviously, I played fast and loose with the dates of vulcanization in England: in my defense, other methods of curing rubber have been dated to prehistoric times. Indigenous peoples, for example, amazed Columbus’s crew with rubber balls.

I also took liberties with Dr. Hatfield’s “ear trumpet,” which was a simple device at the time, without articulated joints. His trumpet is an early version of the stethoscope, which wouldn’t be invented until 1816.

Lest you think that everything in the book was made up by me, the toy shop that supplied Rose with her wonderful doll, Antigone, was indeed called Noah’s Ark. It was opened in 1760 by Mr. Hamley in Holborn, London. The bookshop that provided Thorn with fourteen Bibles for Starberry Court’s library was the Temple of the Muses bookshop in Finsbury Square. The owner, Mr. James Lackington, specialized in buying entire libraries from grand houses.