Again, My Lord: A Twist Series Novel (10 page)

“She’s won all
of Peabody’s blunt, three quarters of Anderson’s ready cash, and nine guineas from Mr. Alan Smythe.”

Standing beside Tacitus in the doorway, the constable stroked his white whiskers as they studied the tableau in the taproom. Behind a cloud of cigar smoke, Calista Holland sat at a table with three of the inn’s other guests, all men. A fan of cards was clutched in her fingers. The arrangement of her satiny dark hair had disgorged tendrils that now hung loosely over her shoulders. To her right was a half-burnt cigar, its smoke rising in a white curl to join the smoke from the other cardplayers’ cheroots. A pile of coins, bills, and scraps of paper—vowels, no doubt—graced the center of the table, and stacks of chips sat by each player’s hands.

“They have been there all day?”

“Aye, my lord, according to Mrs. Whittle. None of them have moved in hours. She served them lunch some time ago, but they barely ate it. Shame to waste all that food.” He gave his head a rueful shake.

“And you say Lady Holland is winning?” he asked. “Against all of them?”

“Aye. Nine out of ten hands.”

Tacitus studied the men’s faces. They were drawn, worried, frustrated. These men were not accustomed to being beaten at cards by a woman.

“Who is that one? With the fine waistcoat?” The only one of the three not frowning.

“Mr. Alan Smythe,” the constable said. “Comes through here with his brother’s family twice a year, on their way to London in this season, and back home in the summer. The brothers are importers, and very successful. Mrs. George Smythe is a great hostess, they say.”

Tacitus had never heard of them. Petty gentry, no doubt. But this Smythe watched Calista like he had something on his mind other than cards. And it made Tacitus unreasonably cross.

But she was not watching Smythe. Her attention was fixed entirely on the cards. There was fevered desperation in her eyes, the sharp-edged gleam of the confirmed gambler.

Tacitus knew of her deceased father’s reputation for gambling beyond his means. The new earl, Ian, whom he and Peyton had gone to school with back in the day, was doing what he could to shrug off his father’s unsavory mantle. Ian still played cards, but moderately and honestly. Mostly he was breeding fine racehorses. Ian was not political; Tacitus never saw him at Westminster. But in his own way he was trying to remake the earldom into a source of pride for his family.

Apparently, however, his sister was cut in the old earl’s style.

The serving girl, Molly, passed by them at the doorway with a coffeepot and stacked cups. Setting them quietly on the table beside each player, she poured Lady Holland’s first. Behind her, another patron scraped out his chair, Molly’s hand jerked, and coffee splashed over Lady Holland’s hands.

“Oh!”

“Oh, milady! I’m that sorry, I am! I’ll fetch a rag right quick.”

Lady Holland slapped her cards face down and snatched up a table linen to wipe her fingers.

“From this day forward, you clumsy girl, I insist that you not come near me with a pot of coffee. Not for any reason. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes, milady! I beg your pardon, mum.” Molly’s lips quivered as she hurried past Tacitus and the constable toward the kitchen.

As the dealer collected the cards and shuffled them, Lady Holland lifted a hand to swipe a lock of hair from before her eyes, and her gaze followed Molly’s flight from the room. Then it shifted aside to him.

It changed. For an instant, pleasure shone in the crystal blue.

Then—swiftly—bleakness.

She returned her attention to the dealer and Tacitus remembered to breathe again.

Since the previous night he had wondered why she let her son go off with Lady Evelina when the separation clearly pained her. Perhaps she knew she could not care for him, not when her attention was all for the card table. Perhaps she was voluntarily relinquishing him out of apathy, in the manner of most gamblers regarding all except the game, and only briefly the evening before had regretted the loss. Perhaps her husband thought her an unfit parent because of her gambling, and was separating her from their son for the boy’s benefit.

Perhaps …

Whatever the case, it seemed obvious enough that six years ago he’d had a near miss. But if fate had been kind to him then, why now, watching her in this state, did he feel like he was being punished?

Calista slept poorly and awoke
to the gonging church bell crosser than usual. Turning over, she dragged the bedclothes over her head, waited for the bell to ring its seventh evil toll, and let herself fall into sleep again.

For most of the day she slept between tolls. When she finally climbed out of bed, sunlight slanted tentatively through the window. But she felt just as cross as she had at dawn.

She washed, dressed swiftly, did not bother packing away the statue, and descended to the ground floor.

She found the innkeeper bustling about the kitchen between pots and plates. She watched her as she dressed a giant slab of meat, set it in a pan, and put it in the oven, her round cheeks flaming even more than usual from the heat. Then she hurried across the room to another table, took up a bowl, and began stirring it vigorously, while her eyes darted from a pile of potatoes on the counter to several onions to a round of dough to three fat hens that had yet to be plucked. Her lips moved in silence as though she were cataloguing the tasks she must still do to prepare dinner.

“Mrs. Whittle?” Calista said, moving into the room.

“Oh, good day, milady!” She smiled. “I thought you’d sleep the day away, I did. I know you meant to drive out this morning, so I guess you’ve heard the news of the flood. I sent Molly up to knock on your door, but she said you must have been sleeping. May I pour a cuppa for you?”

“I’m actually famished,” she said, thinking of how many breakfasts, lunches and dinners she could have purchased with the money she had won the day before if it had not disappeared overnight when the church bell reset her calendar yet again. “But first I wonder if you could tell me where to find Molly. I’ve a—well—I have something to say to her.”

“She’ll be in the back, blubbering over that cow.”

“Thank you.”

Finding her way to the rear entrance of the inn, she went out into a small, enclosed yard oozing with mud despite a layer of straw. A handful of chickens and a cock pecked at the mud beneath the straw on the other side of the yard. A shed-like barn stood at a right angle to the back wall of the inn on the opposite end, flanking the tall stone wall of the church. Molly sat in the nascent winter sunlight on a stool about three feet from a piteously lowing cow.

Calista picked her way across the yard, her toes and heels sinking into the mud and ruining her slippers. It didn’t matter, of course. They would be fine again tomorrow. And after the bath she had taken in the street three todays ago, the mud in this livestock yard seemed tame in comparison.

“Molly?”

The girl’s head swung up. “Oh, milady,” she said more wanly than usual, and popped up from the stool. “How may I be helping you?”

“Good day.” Calista moved toward her, and the cow turned its big white and red head toward her. She shied back. “Does it bite?”

“Nell?” Molly said with obvious surprise. “No, mum. Nell’s as sweet as a buttercup.”

“A buttercup?”

“Surely.” Molly moved to the hulking beast’s head and cupped her hand beneath its mouth. “She’d never hurt a fly. You can pet her if you’d like.”

“Um. No, thank you.” She clasped her hands before her. “Molly, I said something to you yesterday that I should not have.”

Molly’s lower lip protruded. “I don’t remember—”

“You wouldn’t. But do trust me, I have not been entirely kind to you. Or, rather, kind
at all
. And I want to apologize for it.”

“Apologize to
me
? If you’re set on it, milady, I don’t guess I can tell you nay.”

“Thank you. I do beg your pardon for it, and I shall try to be kinder for the remainder of the day.” As many times as the day happened. Lord Dare’s words from two days earlier would not leave her. She had tried to forget them, to lose herself in activity and to ignore his presence in the village entirely. But even the satisfaction of winning all of that money at cards when Richard and her father had always told her she was a hopeless idiot at cards—a hopeless idiot at everything—even that had not lessened the nauseous sting she felt in her stomach remembering the marquess’s eyes as he told her precisely what he thought of her.

She had never thought herself an unkind person. But at some time, she didn’t know exactly when, she had grown so accustomed to misery, and so constantly furious at her father and Richard and—
yes
—Lord Dare for entrapping her in a life she hated, she had stopped paying attention to what she said to others. She had grown careless with other people’s feelings. Selfish. She saw that now. With a few direct words, Tacitus Everard had made her see it.

“Thank you, mum,” Molly mumbled, obviously uncomfortable.

Calista didn’t know what else to say. She looked at the cow, then at the stool, then at the empty pail beneath the cow.

“Were you milking it?”

“I was trying, milady. With Mr. Whittle across the river and Mrs. Whittle over-busy with a full house and trying to fix dinner and everything else for everybody, I thought I’d help. We’re out of milk, you know.”

“I had heard that.” She glanced at the pail again. “You are not having any success? Is it … That is to say, is there any milk in the cow to be gotten?”

Molly giggled. “Yes, milady. She’s got plenty of milk in her. But she likes a right-handed milker, like Mr. Whittle.”

“Ah, you are left-handed, I guess.”

“Not at all, mum.” She held up her right hand. “It’s only that I can’t get a purchase on her, you see.” The hand lacked a thumb and forefinger.

Calista’s throat seized up. “Good heavens,” she said weakly. “How did that happen?”

“It was a cleaver. I weren’t twelve at the time. The trouble of it is, I was terrible clumsy even before that. So now I’m a sore burden to my aunt.”

“Your aunt?”

“Mrs. Whittle.”

“Oh, I see.” Her chest felt leaden. “Good luck with the milking, Molly.”

“Aunt Meg’ll have to do it herself after we’ve finished dinner. And by then poor Nell’ll be moaning and groaning something awful.”

“I daresay no sound can be worse than that horrid bell.” She glanced up at the church tower that loomed over the yard. “I don’t suppose anyone will mind a cow’s groaning.”

Molly shrugged. “No one but the cow herself, mum.”

Calista returned to the inn in a muddled humor and immediately encountered Lord Dare in the passageway to the foyer. He filled up the space, a big, tall, handsome man of worth and position, and stiff as the statue on her dressing table in the room above.

“Good day,” he said.

“Good day.” Her cheeks were hot with shame, but not because he had seen her in her shift. She hurried past him.

“Lady Holland?”

She turned. “Yes?”

“I don’t mean to pry, but I understand that you were abed all day. Are you … well?”

Not remotely
. “Yes.”

“All right.” He nodded. “Then. Good.” He bowed. “Forgive my intrusion.”

“It was kind of you to ask.”

“Given your parting with your son last night, I thought you might be missing him today.”

She stared. Not even Evelina understood how much it hurt her to part with Harry.

“But perhaps I have made a hasty judgment.” His stance became abruptly uncomfortable. “I was very close to my parents, you see, and they to me. We were rarely ever apart until I went to school. Good Lord, I will go on, won’t I? Again, my lady, forgive my lack of propriety.”

She caught her unbidden burst of laughter between her teeth. It was too rich,
him
apologizing to her for lack of propriety.

“I see.” His lips tightened and he began to turn toward the stairs.

“No. Forgive
me
. You must not believe that I am laughing at you.”

“Because I’ve no precedent for believing that, to be sure.” His eyes glimmered.

Her heart did a hard thump.

“You continually surprise me,” she said quietly.

“I do? Continually?”

“With your self-deprecating humor. I think … I think perhaps that you are a truly humble man.”

“Not at all, madam.” His back went rigid again, his shoulders perfectly square. “After all, I am
Dare
.”

There was complete silence between them for a stretched moment. Then a crooked smile shaped his mouth.

This time she allowed her laughter. “Indeed.”

He nodded, still smiling, and started up the stairs.

“Wait.” She stepped forward. “Did you—”

He paused on the first riser.

This was ridiculous
. “Did you know that Molly lacks two fingers on her right hand?”

“The serving girl? No, I hadn’t noticed that.” He tilted his head.

“I realize that was a non sequitur.”

“Are you perhaps remembering a conversation you have had with someone else, yet thinking it was me?”

“No. No one else.” Only he who made her heart feel both light as sunshine and as heavy as stone.

The door to the private parlor opened and the Smythe family moved into the foyer.

“Good day, my lord,” Mr. George Smythe said affably. “Aren’t we all a cozy little gathering here at the Jolly Cockerel?” He looked meaningfully at her.

“Lady Holland,” the marquess said, “allow me to introduce you to Mr. Smythe, Mrs. Smythe, and Miss Smythe, of Hammershire.”

The matron nodded, then lifted her chin and perused Calista’s simple traveling gown. The maiden cast her eyes to the floor as she performed an admirable curtsy.

“Good day,” Calista said with her best daughter-of-an-earl hauteur. She would curtsy for Mrs. Smythe when Nell sprouted wings and flew. From all Calista had seen of her, she seemed an atrociously puffed-up mushroom.

“My lady, my lord,” Mr. Smythe said. “We would be delighted to have your company in our parlor for dinner this evening. Wouldn’t we, Mrs. Smythe?”

“Of course, Mr. Smythe,” she drawled and peered down her nose again at Calista. She needed only a lorgnette to be as stuffy as the Duchess of Hammershire herself.

“Thank you,” the marquess said. “I should like that very much.”

Calista was not surprised. He was unlike any man of birth and rank that she had ever known, but she was becoming accustomed to his peculiarities.

“My lady?” Mr. Smythe said. “What say you? Will you join our little party?”

“Yes, Lady Holland,” Mr. Alan Smythe said as he came out of the parlor and around his niece to stand before her. “Do accept my brother’s invitation, or you will condemn us to uneven numbers at the table.”

She allowed herself to smile. “I cannot allow that, can I?”

“I was certain you would understand,” he said with an appreciative smile. He was an attractive man, dressed in the high fashion she saw only in catalogues that her mother sent from town. And he looked at her now as he had yesterday, as gentlemen had looked at her during her all-too-brief season in London: like she was a beautiful girl of noble birth, not the haggard, unhappy woman she had become.

While playing cards he had said something about silk trading, and she thought he and his brother were perhaps in business together. It mattered little. His conversation was light and insubstantial and made her feel like this nightmare of endless repetition was only that: a very bad dream from which she would awake tomorrow.

“Thank you, Mr. Smythe,” she said to George. “I will be happy to join you for dinner.”

“Splendid, splendid,” he said.

She offered him a nod, and a smile to Alan Smythe, and turned toward the inn door, catching for an instant Lord Dare’s sober regard upon her before he pivoted and continued up the steps.

The stable was less than fifty feet from the inn. She walked across the yard, sidestepping puddles, with heated prickles climbing up the back of her neck.

He was displeased with her. That she knew this from a moment of his intense gaze proved only that she had become overly sensitive to a man’s disapproval of her. Richard was forever finding fault with her, just like her father had. That the Marquess of Dare did too was only more of the same ground they had trod six years ago.

If she wanted to flirt very mildly with an attractive man who found her attractive too, there was nothing to stop her from it now. She believed in the sanctity of marriage, and though hers was a tragic mistake, she would never betray her vows. But flirting was not adultery. Anyway, she had kissed
him,
which was much worse than flirting.

But now she was trying to convince herself that she had been justified in kissing him, which was every sort of insane.

She pushed open the stable door and the scents of damp straw and warm horses surrounded her. She thought of her elder brother, Ian, who often smelled like horses when he was up at Dashbourne, which according to her mother and Evie was frequently now that he was building his stable. Ian was a roguish devil. But he was trying to repair what her father had destroyed, and for that she admired him. And because he was a good man at heart. He would never force their younger sister to marry if Evie didn’t wish it.

On the last occasion when Richard had left a bruise on her that she could not hide, across her jaw, she had considered writing to her brother about her situation. But even in such an instance, Ian would have no authority over her son. Only Richard did. And so her pen had remained silent.

Straw and horse were not the only scents in the stable. The sharp tang of whiskey met her as well.

“Mr. Jackson?” She had not seen her coachman since the first today, when she had scolded him for drunkenness and taken away his bottle. She walked farther into the building. “Mr. Jackson?” she called.

The stable boy came running from the opposite end, his skinny legs carrying him with great speed past her.

“Young man,” she called out. “Where is Mr. Jackson?”

Still running, he looked over his shoulder. “Sleepin’ in the tack room, mum.” He darted out the stable door and she saw him streak across the yard and away from the village center.

Mr. Jackson was indeed in the tack room, passed out. She had nothing really to say to him, and nothing that would not prove entirely irrelevant tomorrow—if tomorrow were today again. She only needed to speak with someone who knew Harry. Like most of the servants at Herald’s Court, the coachman adored her son. She wanted to talk about her little boy with someone who loved him too. Missing him was an ache that widened inside her with each hour.