A Man Above Reproach (14 page)

“Is it any wonder that some of us prefer the company of scholarly papers to the cacophony of the ballroom? Who can help but be entranced by verse and cutting wit within the leaves of a good book when the rest of our lives are filled with interactions that are little beyond the prescriptions of politeness that have ruled our society since time immemorial?”

—F
ROM THE
C
OLLECTED
E
SSAYS OF
L
ORD
E
LIAS
A
DDISON
,
TREATISES FROM
H
ARROW AND
O
XFORD

Elias felt ill at Lady Graham’s ball, where he stood next to his mother and nodded and nodded and nodded. He thought his head might fall off, or split at the neck, spilling precious champagne on the dangerously polished floors, sending dancers slipping over themselves and landing in a heap. Elias was standing in a crowd of the duchess’s friends, doing his duty to show his face. Miss Francis was also at his mother’s side, like having been forced into the position. Just across from them, Nicholas entertained the matrons. Elias was covetous of Nicholas’s ability to charm people even in mundane conversation.

Elias realized he was staring vacantly at a certain Miss Francis.

“I say, Duke,” Thackeray interjected, his voice theatrical, at once charming the ladies and annoying Elias. “Have you reserved any dances with this delightful young woman yet?”

Miss Francis blinked up at him. Once, twice. Pause. Again.

“I most certainly did, Thackeray. And as I recall, you have expressed interest in her friend, Lady Sherlock?”

Nicholas scowled behind his hand at Elias. Lady Sherlock was a buck-toothed horror with a personality that far outran her visage. Her conversation was ceaseless and vulgar.

“You mistake me for Lord Blawnox,” he returned.

“Good show,” Elias told him in an aside, before turning to the larger group. There was always a “larger group” to turn to at these balls. “Perhaps I can get the ladies more punch?”

Miss Francis handed him her glass daintily. He wondered what she thought attractive about all the blinking she did. He could not understand it.

Refilling the glasses was merely a chance to break away from the hens, which was Elias’s chief aim at balls and dances. He passed a tight gaggle of girls and heard his miserable nickname on someone’s lips. He couldn’t help overhearing the rest.

“Shame that such a beautiful man is such a bore,” said a girl he could not identify, rigid blond ringlets crowding a cupid face.

“Have you talked to him? I tried, mark me, I did. Somehow he began to natter about papers he had written at Oxford. Shakespeare, Wollstonecraft, that horrid De Quincey, tosh. Those eyes, though. I might be able to endure it.”

The girls giggled and Elias moved on, with his so-called spectacular eyes and tiresome demeanor. It was becoming a Sisyphean task. There was a spectre in his mind all the time: He saw Josephine in each dress he observed, he saw himself swirling her across the floor, he saw her raise a glass to her lips and make the horde around them laugh. She could do what he could not; she could charm them. He might be able to enjoy a dance, for once.

A hand clapped on his back and he jumped.

“Elias, my boy! It has been too long since I have seen your face.”

When he turned, he could not believe his luck. He was looking at his Uncle Harrington, his mother’s brother, from Staffordshire. A tiny smile of triumph crept onto his face.

“Uncle Harry, what an altogether pleasant surprise.”

“I should have addressed you as duke, eh? I was too eager to see you to mind my manners.”

Lord Benedict Frost, the Earl of Harrington, was one of Elias’s favorite relatives, a man of good humor—a surprise, since he was the brother of the fearsome duchess. He was also the father of Elias’s cousin and childhood chum, Sebastian, who would be the next earl. Naturally, Elias had been thinking about him yesterday when Josephine mentioned Staffordshire in the fog that the courtyard had thrown over her defenses. He had decided immediately to write to Uncle Harry, so this could not be more convenient.

“What brings you to London?”

“Oh, I am expected to be at every one of Lady Graham’s balls. She and Lord Graham have been our dear friends for the last thirty years.” He glanced around with barely masked disdain. “Regardless, I do so hate the city during the Season.”

“And your lovely wife?”

“Also here. She would not miss this… delightful… soiree. I believe she has gone to seek out your mother.”

“Godspeed to her. I am retrieving drinks. Walk with me?”

“A pleasure, my boy.” He clapped his nephew on the back one more time. “How are you holding up being thrust into the position of patriarch?”

“I suppose I am acquitting myself. Things seem to move very fast.”

“We have every faith in you, Elias. Should you need anything—I know that I am primarily in the country, but I will do anything in my power to make the transition smooth.”

“Actually, Uncle,” he initiated, handing the empty glasses to a servant and lowering his voice after a circumspect glance around. “I have a friend who is looking for an old acquaintance he knew around your part of the countryside. I thought either you or Sebastian might know, but your son is still in India the last that I heard. It is fortuitous that I find you here. My information is limited and I would have to ask your utmost discretion. It would have been around ten years ago that she
left Staffordshire. She was the daughter of a titled man who separated from his wife when the child in question was seventeen. That might have been scandalous; in fact, I expect it would have been a huge gossip item. Does any of this sound familiar to you?”

“Hmm,” Lord Harrington pondered. The servant had returned with the drinks; he bowed his head and took instant leave. “Vaguely, but a lot of what comprises gossip never reaches my ears. I cannot tolerate the pecking. I can inquire around if you wish—discreetly, of course—and see what I can find. I must ask, though, is this one of Thackeray’s harebrained schemes?”

Elias laughed. “No, no. A respectable guess, however.”

They wandered back toward their family, none too quick. For the Uncatchable and tedious Duke of Lennox, the excitement of the evening had already reached its zenith.

Josephine closed the shop while helping Sally move into her new home, all courtesy of the debonair Lord Thackeray. When she returned home that afternoon, sweaty and exhausted from effort, Lennox was sitting inside. He was reading quietly while his valet stood in the corner, just as tall and shadowy as his master. Elias’s legs were kicked up on her table, shapely in a different pair of boots than the day before, though they still brought back the image of him running one up her stockings. It was irritating that he just sat nonchalantly, as if he had any right to be there. He looked as if a speck of dirt would dare not touch him, whereas she looked as if she had been sweeping chimneys.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, more than frazzled.

“Reading Peacock. What rot.” He closed it with a snap. “Waiting for my fake mistress.”

“You did not send word.” She pulled off the tatty bonnet she had worn because it would not have been prudent to dress as a lady when one was a woman, a woman pushing an armoire into a more advantageous position of a room.

“I do not believe I am required to, am I, Dryden?”

“No, Your Grace,” the valet replied. “Not generally… in these types of arrangements.”

“Oh, that will never do,” she protested.

“It must. It is expected that I will pay you afternoon visits. I have not brought my ducal carriage, of course. Dryden will retrieve me before dinner. It is a common occurrence, you know, darling. You wrote all about it.”

“My neighbors will think…”

“Your neighbors will think you lucky.” He widened his eyes just a touch, playful. He slid out of the chair in one smooth movement. “They will certainly respect you. I daresay, Josie, your business will improve.”

“You do not realize what a bad idea this is, Your Grace.”

“Stop. Calling me. That.” He advanced slightly on her and she could not help moving back; it was a reflex.

“Dryden, I need to speak with Miss Grant.” The duke waved his hand as a dismissal. “Please come back at five.”

“Five! It is two! You cannot be here for three hours!” She was aware of her voice rising to a yelp. By the time she had gotten halfway through her disapproval, Elias’s valet was gone.

“Are you going to ask me about the ball?” He was too close again and her voice had deserted her. “It was endless. All I could think of was you.”

“Eli, stop,” she entreated. “Drama is the last thing we need.”

His nose wrinkled. “You smell awful. What have you been doing?”

“How very polite.” She tried to shrink away from the handkerchief that he had produced from his pocket, but he began dabbing her face.

“Hopeless,” he sighed. “You must bathe. Fortunately, I knew that no one would be able to dissuade you from manual labor with Thackeray’s ladylove and I prepared for this eventuality. You’ll find a hot bath upstairs.”

“I think not, you rake,” she muttered

“Oh, do not be missish; I shan’t look. I will finish reading this ghastly book and we will talk. I told you I would take no freedoms, but for our little scheme to work it does have to look like we are enamored, which means making it look like we spend time alone.”

Blast, blast, blast.

“You realize this is going too far,” she admonished, brushing past him. No matter the source, she did need to bathe, and it was not often she had a hot bath in water that she had not fetched herself.

“I do,” he said behind her. “Three hours alone. I must say, even I am impressed with myself. That is, unless you have some appointment that I do not know of, which I very much doubt. I tend to be rather…”

They had stopped just outside of her bedroom.

“… thorough in my research.”

Josephine considered for a beat and then turned the knob on the door to her sanctuary.

Or, though she could not bear to be honest with herself, the ghost of her former self turned the knob on the door to her sanctuary.

“Very well. You will not leave me alone. Fine. My mother told me that I should wait for the most persistent bastard of a man and then give him a chance. You fit the bill. I have given you every opportunity to go away. You will have only yourself to blame.” She pushed the door open, imperially awakened. “You want to become intimates? You want to talk. Fine, Elias. Come in.”

His self-assuredness ground to a fine powder and blew away when she started the first syllable of “very” in that monster of a voice, that commanding-a-ballroom voice. She was frightening. She was different. She was certainly not a peasant.

His first sight of her room was her bed, rumpled sheets, surrounded by stacks and stacks of books in no apparent order. Maybe alphabetical. Whatever it was, clearly only she understood it.

“What the devil are you doing with all of these books in your chamber?”

“I am putting them away. Organizing them. Exactly when else was I supposed to attend to that while you molest me, keep me out late at the Dove, and your friend takes away my shop girl?”

“There is much to attend to, yes. I will send some footmen over and…”

“Oh, you will not,” she barked, yanking a towel from her vanity. He glanced once over at the steaming water, tendrils of heat coming off of the surface in graceful swirls, and resolved it would be the last time he would look there. “You will do no such thing. Turn around. If you go to the third book down in the ‘A’ stack, you will find your book of essays. Perhaps you would like to sign it for my collection? I should have known you would write portentous treatises.”

“Not under ‘L’ for Lennox? Nonsensical. People would look for my title, if they were looking for my book. Perhaps ‘A’ for Addison is your logic?”

“No, Eli. It’s under ‘A’ for ass.”

He heard her shed her chemise and step into the water. Turning around would be an inexcusable breach of trust. She sounded amused, at least.

“Did you bother to read it?” he asked. “Or am I above your notice?”