A Most Unladylike Adventure (9 page)

‘Well, I was going to tell you about that, Captain…’ Coste trailed off, casting a look at Hugh that begged him to take over explaining their misconduct.

‘We two bachelors proved too rowdy to satisfy Mrs Calhoun’s strict standards of behaviour and she took herself and her daughter off before there was any gossip about them being here with two rowdy bachelors like us,’ he obligingly admitted, nodding at Coste to make himself scarce while he still could.

‘I warrant she did,’ Kit replied grimly. ‘Don’t forget to bring that pie and a pint of porter along with tea for Miss Louisa,’ he urged his retreating manservant and watched Hugh with cold eyes. ‘I trust my sister was not caught up in that rowdiness,’ he added with such mild iciness that even Louisa shivered in her seat by the fire.

Hugh shifted in his chair as Louisa carefully stared into the flames and Kit sighed rather heavily. ‘Later,’ he said portentously and Louisa felt as if the two men were once more having a silent but fierce conversation
she didn’t understand, and that they had no intention of explaining any of it to her.

Hugh Darke wasn’t in the least bit overshadowed by her powerful brother. Despite her captain’s apparently subservient role in Kit and Ben’s empire, he acted as Kit’s equal and her suspicions about his true place in the world crept back and left her wondering why he took orders from even so compelling, and successful, a pair as her brother and Ben Shaw. She furtively surveyed her brother and her lover in turn, noting the similarities in their elegantly powerful builds and proud carriage. They were both dark-haired as well, of course, but that was about the end of any similarity between them and Hugh Darke was certainly the more mysterious and contrary of the two, even judged on appearance alone.

He had that strong Roman nose that looked as if it had been broken at some point in his varied career; emphatically marked dark brows frowned above his challenging silver-blue eyes and yet his mouth could have belonged on a poet or a troubadour, if not for the stern control he kept it under. She knew how sensitive it could feel against hers now, but the containment of it argued he’d been through a very hot fire to become the steely-eyed captain
he was now. A younger Hugh Darke would be almost too handsome and appealing for his own good; she imagined this complex and contrary man carefree and laughing, and was glad to be spared that pristine version of him, since she was far too impressed with the current one to need any more encouragement.

Louisa gave up on reading Hugh’s thoughts and tried her brother’s instead, seeing nothing but an austere lack of expression on his face that made him exasperating, even as she let herself realise how much she’d missed him. Grief and guilt had hardened her against loving anyone easily, but now she could let it go at last and remember her little brother as he was and it was as if her family had been given back to her. Kit was darker than the rest of them, of course, but Peter had looked so much like her it had hurt to look at herself in the mirror when he died. Who would ever guess that Captain Darke could give her little brother back to her as he was, instead of the reproachful angel guilt had painted him? She owed him a debt for that, which added to her confusion as they all sat in weary silence, carefully not discussing her eventful day.

Coste finally carried in a rattling tray, deposited it on the nearest table, then went back
for her tea. It wasn’t a very elegant repast, but they made short work of slices of pie and ham with the mustard and fresh bread and some pickles that looked much less ancient than the ones that had confronted her last night. After a while she refused anything more, sitting back to sip her tea and watch Kit and Hugh eat as if they hadn’t done so for a week.

‘The amount of food you gentlemen require to sustain life will never cease to amaze me,’ she observed at last.

‘Whilst we coarse males are continually astonished by how little a lady can maintain herself upon,’ Hugh returned with an unexpectedly boyish grin that somehow managed to warm her more effectively than the now-glowing fire.

‘Since I don’t subscribe to the idea that ladies should eat before they dine in mixed company, so we appear to possess the most bird-like of appetites, Captain Darke, perhaps I’m not a lady,’ she said with a shy smile.

‘I’ve always thought that a true lady doesn’t need to try to be one myself, Miss Alstone,’ he replied and surprised her into blushing at his implied compliment.

‘You’ll be sipping ratafia and exchanging remarks about the weather next,’ Kit interrupted
impatiently and Louisa decided she’d much prefer to put off the conversation he wanted to have until morning, except then she’d toss and turn all night worrying, so it was probably as well to get it over with.

‘Very well, what do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘So much I hardly know where to begin, but the name of your worm will do to start with. Then we can discuss everything else and what must be done about it once we’ve dealt with him,’ her brother said grimly.

Louisa annoyed herself by looking to Hugh for support and he nodded as if he was only waiting for that detail before storming off into the night to wreak havoc as well. ‘No,’ she said and prepared to be very stubborn rather than let him risk his skin once again.

‘All I need do is enter any fashionable lady’s drawing room tomorrow afternoon and flap my sharp ears towards the nearest whispered conversation and I’ll find out in five minutes,’ Kit threatened and she knew he was right. Such a juicy scandal would not even be silenced when the lady’s sharp-eared brother was in the room if the story really was running about the
ton
like wildfire.

‘Promise me first that neither of you will try to kill him?’

‘Does the man’s safety mean so much to you then, Miss Alstone?’ Hugh Darke said coldly.

‘No, but my brother’s does and even you are too good a man to soil your hands on a nothing like him,’ she told him fiercely and it was more than he deserved after the icy disdain he’d just glared at her.

‘My apologies, ma’am,’ he said stiffly.

‘His name, Louisa?’ her brother demanded.

‘First your promise,’ she replied stubbornly.

‘Very well, I promise he can live until morning.’

‘Not good enough, I’ll not have you banished for duelling or hung for murder either. I’ve already lost one brother and certainly can’t spare another.’

Kit looked thoughtful at that reminder, then nodded reluctantly. ‘I’ll find another way to punish the wretch, Lou, but don’t ask me to let him get away with what he’s done to you, for I just can’t do it.’

‘And you, Captain Darke?’ she asked implacably.

‘And I what, Miss Alstone?’

‘Are you going to promise not to chase my
would-be husband down with the carving knife?’

‘I have a perfectly good sword handy, as you no doubt recall.’

‘There will be no swordfighting, no furtive and stupid duel with pistols at dawn and no pretend-casual encounter at some club or at a mill, or anywhere else for that matter. If you don’t promise not to kill the man, I shall inform my uncle you two are on the rampage and the worm will be long gone before you get anywhere near him.’

‘Justice can be swift indeed, Miss Alstone,’ he argued.

‘That’s exactly what I’m worried about, you stupid man. Do you think I want any more deaths on my conscience, after carrying such a burden of guilt for so long?’ she said and made herself let her pain at the very idea of losing him show in her gaze.

‘I promise,’ he murmured, his eyes silently telling her it was only because of that burden of guilt that he reluctantly gave in.

‘And what exactly are you promising me, Captain?’

‘To find another way to make his life hell,’ he said with a grim smile.

‘I don’t mind that, then. Mr Charlton Hawberry
abducted me and, since he made my life hellish for a spell, whatever punishment you come up with might at least stop him doing it to some other female.’

‘Although I never heard his name before, he even sounds like the villain out of a melodrama,’ Hugh exclaimed disgustedly.

‘I told you he was a worm, didn’t I?’ she offered mildly.

‘He sounds more like some obscure breed of fly that needs squashing. Will you give me that promise back so I may do so, Miss Alstone?’

‘No, and need I remind you that I rescued myself from him, which must have gone some way towards swatting the horrible man and will have to do for now.’

‘I’d still dearly like to know how you managed it.’

‘As would I,’ Kit told her with a keen look that made Louisa wish she hadn’t used her misadventures to divert them from their manly wrath.

‘I waited for the right moment and got away from him,’ she said airily.

‘How?’ Hugh barked as if he had every right to examine her.

‘I found the only way to evade his bullies
and his revolting company that he’d neglected to close off and took it.’

‘Describe exactly how you did so, then,’ Hugh said implacably, as if very near the end of his tether. She wondered fleetingly why Kit was sitting back in his chair and letting his captain interrogate her, then decided she might as well get the tale over as quickly as possible and it didn’t matter which of them asked the questions.

‘I climbed out of a window,’ she admitted, because it could be any window, on any floor. She realised her mistake as soon as she recalled telling them she was imprisoned in Charlton’s bedchamber, and they knew as well as she did that most of the narrow town houses hired for the Season had their principal bedrooms on the second floor, three storeys and a basement above the ground.

‘With the aid of a rope of some sort, I trust?’ Hugh asked roughly, as if the very idea made him imagine all sorts of terrible consequences in retrospect.

‘Um, no,’ was all she could manage as she shifted in her seat by the fire and avoided both their gazes as she recalled her truly terrifying escape.

‘D
evil take it, Louisa! You’re not a wild girl clambering about the slums like some sort of human spider any more. You’re supposed to be a lady,’ Kit objected, which might have seemed bad enough, if Hugh hadn’t gone as silent and lethally furious as a tiger grabbed by his tail.

‘If I’d meekly sat there waiting for rescue, then I’d be well and truly wed to the insect-worm by now,’ she defended herself rather half-heartedly, as she remembered that appalling climb across the front of a house with fewer handholds than a sheer cliff might fairly be expected to have.

‘Not for long,’ Hugh finally said with a hiss of pent-up fury that made her wonder if
he was a gentleman of his word after all. Of course he was, she concluded as she met the barely contained rage in his icy-blue gaze, he wouldn’t be so irate at having given it if he wasn’t.

‘You wouldn’t have cared if I was wed to him or not, since you hardly knew me then,’ she reminded him, but it didn’t restore him to his usual cynical self somehow.

‘I would have cared because you’re Kit’s sister, but it would be my pleasure to beat Hawberry to a pulp now. And adventurers don’t start molesting females because it suddenly occurred to them, Miss Alstone, so I very much doubt if you are the first one he’s ever used such despicable tactics against.’

‘I’m not a victim,’ she insisted fiercely.

‘And I never met a female less likely to be anyone’s dupe than you are, my Eloise. He chose his target very badly this time,’ he asserted and at last she saw something in his silvered-blue gaze that could have been admiration.

‘Eloise?’ Kit asked as his sharp ears and even sharper brain picked up on that unfortunate nickname again. ‘Who the devil is this Eloise?’

‘I am,’ she said as uninformatively as possible.

‘Oh, good,’ Hugh said irrepressibly and she glared at him.

‘You keep out of this,’ she demanded and her glare was even more furious as his smile became wolfish and his gaze almost molten with heat at the memory of Eloise and her bold ways and even bolder tongue.

‘Spoilsport,’ he muttered a little too intimately and, if he wasn’t conscious of Kit’s eagle-eyed gaze shifting between them suspiciously, she felt it acutely.

‘Later,’ Kit promised ominously and Louisa caught a typical masculine resolve to punch each other until they both felt better flash between them and was tempted to stamp upstairs and let them get on with it, but she didn’t want either of them hurt.

It puzzled her how deeply Hugh Darke’s well-being had come to matter to her in such a short time and she fought a fluffy reverie on the intriguing subject of how instantaneously she took fire whenever he was near. It was almost as if someone had laid such a strong enchantment on them that they were helpless to resist it, but she was such an unlikely heroine
of a fairy tale that she reminded herself who she really was and glared at them both.

‘No, you don’t,’ she insisted sharply. ‘There’s enough to worry about without you two pummelling each other bruised and bloody just for the fun of it.’

‘You think we’d have fun?’ Hugh said, so blandly innocent she was sure of it and decided she understood the opposite sex even less than usual.

‘Yes, I do,’ she replied and silently dared him to argue, ‘and never mind Charlton, how do we find out who’s behind today’s plot against you, Captain Darke?’

‘What plot?’ Kit demanded.

‘There was one, however he tries to convince you otherwise. I foiled it and your captain was most ungrateful at being rescued from his enemies by a mere woman.’

‘Only because your sister thinks she’s justified in taking intolerable risks with herself any time she decides to pry into matters that don’t concern her, Alstone. A note to inform me of your suspicions would have done the job just as well,’ he accused her, turning the full benefit of his angry scowl on her rather than Kit.

‘There wasn’t time,’ she told him defiantly.

‘Yet you found plenty of it in which to organise a rather showy ambush and procure yet another disreputable disguise for yourself, let alone an even more absurd one for me?’

‘Would you have believed me?’ she asked after a long moment while his gaze on hers seemed to demand an explanation she couldn’t give, when she didn’t really understand why she’d had to secure his safety so personally in the first place.

‘Probably,’ he finally breathed as if in response to a far deeper challenge.

‘That wasn’t good enough, you see, I had to be sure.’

‘And if my lion-hearted sister decided you needed to be rescued, believe me, Hugo, rescued you were going to be,’ Kit intervened with what looked astonishingly like an approving smile.

‘Clearly,’ he responded, looking a little dazed by the notion that he mattered to anybody.

‘Don’t you want to know who I rescued you from?’ she demanded.

‘You might as well ask her, Hugh. My sister seems to be a mine of unwelcome information tonight,’ Kit said with a glance of fellow feeling at Hugh Darke that made Louisa want to
kick some inanimate object and flounce out of the room, except that would only make them more smugly masculine than ever.

‘I have a legion of enemies,’ Hugh said wearily.

‘You might have a new one,’ Kit said, offering up cold comfort.

‘New or old, he certainly puzzled me, Captain,’ she said, wanting to comfort him for his surfeit of foes for some odd reason.

‘He’s bewildering me at the moment, because I haven’t the least idea who he is, so why not part with his name, whoever you think he is, and let your brother and I add him to our list?’ Hugh said indifferently.

‘What list?’ she asked.

‘The one of all the people we’re supposed to punish for their sins without actually laying a finger on them, remember?’

‘And a very civilised form of retribution it will be, too,’ she said virtuously.

‘Tell him who it was then, Lou, so you can go upstairs and rest before you fall asleep in your tea,’ Kit advised and suddenly she felt the weight of the last night and day’s worth of adventures bear down on her.

‘I racked my memory for hours afterwards, but I’m nearly sure I’ve finally managed to
match the house to the man, although I still can’t quite believe it can be right,’ she told them.

‘For goodness’ sake, just give us your best guess and then go to bed,’ Hugh demanded impatiently.

‘It’s not a guess,’ she said with as much dignity as she could muster while battling against the after-effects of her demanding day. ‘I tracked the man who met your follower back to a house in Grosvenor Square. When he ran down the front steps nearly an hour later I could tell he was one of the
ton
from his dress and that air of owning the world you aristocrats seem to be born with.’

‘You should, since you have it yourself in spades. Now cut line and get on with your story, Louisa,’ her brother said shortly.

‘It took me a while to work out who he was because it’s so unlikely, but I went to a ball there once so I’m sure it was the Earl of Kinsham’s house. The man who had Hugh followed, Kit, was his lordship’s son and heir, Viscount Rarebridge, and what earthly reason could he have to do that?’ she said, barely able to believe it herself, so no wonder if they didn’t either.

‘The deuce it was!’ Hugh exclaimed softly,
taking her word for it, even while he visibly flinched at that name, as if the knowledge hurt.

‘Why would a man like his lordship have you followed?’ she asked.

‘I heard whispers that he was one of them,’ he muttered half to himself, ‘but I never let myself believe it.’

‘One of whom?’ she demanded.

‘My wife’s lovers,’ he explained bleakly and she felt her knees wobble with the stark shock of his words.

‘You have a wife?’ she whispered and wondered numbly how words could actually hurt on your tongue.

‘What?’ he asked, almost as if he’d forgotten she was there.

‘Your wife?’ she asked more firmly, rediscovering her temper under the goad of his impatience.

‘What wife? Oh, that one. No, my wife has been dead these three years and more,’ he replied rather vaguely, somehow not defusing her temper when he couldn’t seem to grasp what he’d done to anger her in the first place.

‘You have a lot of explaining to do,’ she informed him haughtily.

‘Later,’ he said, as if she was bothering him with foolish trivialities.

‘Now, unless you want me to march round to Grosvenor Square this minute and ask Lord Rarebridge why he’s so intent on pursuing you myself.’

‘That I don’t, it would be most unseemly’ he said primly.

‘Then tell me,’ she insisted, trying to look as if she was metaphorically picking out the right bonnet and gloves for the trip.

‘My wife took lovers. I stopped counting after the first one I found out about and left for my ship,’ he said so brusquely she knew he lied and every name on that list had hurt him. ‘Unfortunately, my father wouldn’t believe Ariadne anything other than the innocent she played so convincingly and she continued to live under his roof when I was forbidden it for slandering such a fine example of English womanhood. Better for her sake perhaps if she hadn’t, since she died there next time I was home on shore leave and raging about the neighbourhood like a wild bull, telling anyone who would listen to me about the injustice of it all, while they no doubt considered my plight a rare piece of entertainment. Looking back
at the rash young idiot I was then, he seems so young and silly that I marvel at my own folly.’

‘How did she die?’ she asked, certain from the shadow in his eyes there was far more to his wife’s death than the blunt facts he’d told her so far.

‘She was found strangled with one of her silk stockings and my elder brother lay dead outside her bedchamber door. He’d been shot in the back as if he was in the act of fleeing her bed and I, the wronged husband, was presumed to have found him there and murdered him in a furious rage. My estrangement from my wife and family was hardly news in the neighbourhood and I was the only suspect.’

‘How could they even think it?’ she asked, crossing the room to touch his arm and draw his gaze back to here and now; anything to take the stark bleakness from his blue-grey gaze and set mouth at the thought of that terrible night.

‘If not for an old friend vouching for me, I would have hung, Miss Alstone.’

‘Idiots,’ she condemned roundly and he managed a half-smile before looking remote again and carrying on as if he had to tell her the worst before he faltered.

‘I was so blind drunk that night that I’d
collapsed in the taproom of the local inn and been left there to sleep it off for half the village to see. According to Dickon Thrale, the landlord and my childhood friend, he left me lying there in the hope I’d wake up and realise what an idiot I was making of myself. I recall almost nothing of that night, but he certainly saved my life. Yet, because Dickon and I ran wild together when we were young, many in the surrounding area refused to believe I didn’t wake up, escape, commit murder, then crawl back to the inn to pretend I’d been there all along. Apparently there were signs that whoever did it must have climbed up the outside of the house to reach my wife’s bedchamber, so eventually my inability to even stand upright unassisted that night was accepted and I was declared innocent, if stupid and dissipated. Even now I sometimes wonder if I did it and my friend lied to save my skin, so I can hardly blame the whisperers for persisting in their claim that I had got away with murder twice over.’

‘You might fight with your brother, since you’re a man and it seems to me that’s what men do, and I’m quite sure you bellowed at your wife when you found out what she was up to with other men, but you couldn’t hurt a
woman or shoot a man in the back if your life depended on it, Hugh Darke,’ she informed him impatiently, wondering how he could even dream he ever would.

‘How could you know that?’ he demanded equally impatiently.

‘Because I know you.’

‘You know Hugh Darke, or you think you do after a very short acquaintance, which has hardly given you enough time to plumb my darkest depths.’

‘No, I know you. Whatever you care to call yourself, whoever you’ve been since you left your own home and old way of life, there is an essential core of honour and almost brutal honesty about you I would be a want-wit not to recognise.’

‘How can you know anything significant about a man you met one day ago? Come, Miss Alstone,’ he mocked as if her belief in him might become a danger in itself and therefore must be avoided at all cost, ‘I’m quite sure that you, of all people, know better than to trust your first impressions of anyone. You know society presents a smiling face in public and it’s really naught but a mask.’

‘Would that insight be gained over the years I ran wild through the slums of this unfair city
of ours, do you think, Captain? I admit the ones I spent with my so-called equals were a good deal less varied, but you’re right in thinking they taught me to recognise a person’s true nature, under all the pretty sham the
ton
use to disguise their power and ambitions, so I really don’t follow your current argument.’

‘Both your lives should serve to warn you I’m not a man to be trusted,’ he said roughly, as if she were being obtuse and not him.

‘Whether you’re striding about your quarter-deck or in your cups, you’re the man you’ve made yourself and, whatever else I might think of you, I’ll never believe that man a murderer. I met one or two of those in my youth and you don’t have either the heartless steel or the casual cowardice to make a good killer,’ she assured him, holding his gaze as she stepped closer to make her point, matching his hard palm to her soft one in a silent declaration of her faith in her lover.

‘I’ve killed for my country,’ he told her blankly, as if he couldn’t bear to be thought too much of, but he didn’t remove his hand from hers.

‘You were only there to offer and join battle
with our enemies. Please don’t take me for a fool, Hugh.’

‘And please don’t take me at all, Louisa, not now I’ve remembered who I really am and how little chance I’ll probably have to pretend I’m Hugh Darke for much longer,’ he asked, looking as if he truly regretted it when he removed the warmth of his palm from hers and retreated a step or two.