An Early Engagement (6 page)

Geoff nodded. “Downy cove, m’brother. Even Wellington said so, asked him to join his own staff. Too bad Ev’s not staying around long enough to set your uncle straight.”

“He’s leaving tomorrow?”

“That’s what Thorny said.”

“But he’s in London tonight?”

That sudden note of hope warned him. “Don’t even think it, girl. London’s over six hours away. It took Thornton the better part of two days to get here, and putting up at an inn overnight.”

“But he had the carriage, and Cynthia. If we took the horses, and rode cross-country ...” She was thinking aloud.

Geoff gulped. So was he. “We?”

She didn’t hear him, or pretended not. It was a good idea, maybe brilliant. It was also her only idea. She had enough of the household money left to change horses, and they could carry food and ...

“Listen, Emmy, we don’t really know that Ev didn’t leave early. We don’t even know if he can do anything about this mess.”

“You said he was a knowing one.”

“But he’s got no time, and he sure doesn’t have any of the ready to spare. If he did, he would have sent it down to Aunt Adelaide like always. And besides, a girl can’t ride into London in the midde of the night! Even I know it just ain’t done.”

* * * *

So it was that Lady Emilyann Arcott crept up the back stairs of her home and changed into some mismatched, foul-smelling, overlarge clothes pilfered from the grooms’ room over the barn while Jake and the stable crew were at dinner. She used a likewise borrowed shears to lop off her hair any-which-way, consigning the hatcheted locks to the bottom of her wardrobe, with good riddance to the plaguey mop.

While she was at it, she cut a piece of the drapery pull cord to hold up her falling breeches. She stuffed money in her sock, a pistol in her boot, and some bread and cheeses and apples into one of the deep pockets of her filched friezecoat. Into the other pocket she tenderly placed Smoky’s gift, still wrapped for safekeeping. The coat looked, and smelled, like something used to transport a poacher’s booty but, she told herself, beggars—or borrowers—cannot be choosy. She rolled the sleeves up twice, crammed a moth-eaten cap over her shorn hair so the peaks and clumps didn’t show, just a pale, ragged fringe around her face, and she was ready.

She patted an odoriferous inside pocket of her coat one last time, to be certain of her “insurance.” There, among leaves, hairs, and worse rested a kerchief wrapped around three papers: a parchment document with official-looking seals, a creased and tattered letter, and that miserable, misintended special license.

Captain Everett Stockton, Lord Stokely, mightn’t have much money, and less time, but he did have something Lady Emilyann needed desperately. She grinned. Wouldn’t Smoky be surprised!

“Cap’n Stockton ain’t to home now.” And never would be to the likes of these callers if Private Micah Rigg had anything to say to the matter. Rigg was his lordship’s batman, valet, butler, and sometimes watchdog. It was a position the older Rigg much preferred to being cannon fodder at the front, so he was bound to see his employer stayed alive and well, and happy with the service he got. Which he’d never be, if Rigg admitted these two scruffy boys to his temporary quarters at the St. John’s Hotel, an establishment favored by the itinerant military.

“But it’s three in the morning,” squeaked the smaller, dirtier lad out in the hallway. “Where could he be?”

The other boy kicked him. “Stubble it, Em. We said I’d do the talking, remember?” He tugged at his jacket and turned back to the mustachioed soldier. “I appreciate the inconvenience, my good man, but I am Geoffrey Stockton, Lord Stokely’s brother, and I really must see him tonight. Could you tell me where he is?”

Brother, was it? Rigg raised his candle higher. This one did have the look of the cap’n about him, the same dark hair at least. The cap’n had given strict instructions that that other bloke, the starched-up religious fellow, wasn’t to be admitted again, ever. He hadn’t said anything about refusing any other brothers. “You wouldn’t be the one as keeps getting sent down from school, would you?”

Geoff bowed. “The same.”

Kinship to the officer showed more and more in the cheeky lad. He was likely in some bumblebroth or other, expecting his lordship to go bail, which he would if Rigg was any judge. Whatever the trouble, it could only get worse out on the streets of London in the middle of the night. “The cap’n’s out with some officer friends,” Rigg told Geoffrey, ignoring the grubby companion entirely. “It’s anybody’s guess where they are, but I expect he’ll be in soon ‘cause it’s early reveille tomorrow if we’re to be on time for the ship sailing. You can come wait in here, I s’pose, but
he”—
with a whisker-twitching grimace in Em’s direction—“has to stay out in the hall.”

“Why, you—” Em began, and Geoffrey kicked her again.

“I’ll vouch for my friend,” he said quickly, stepping around the short batman and dragging Em behind him by the sleeve of her coat.

There was a smallish room, with a bed, a dresser, and two chairs drawn around a table cluttered with books, papers, and bottles. When Rigg shut the other open door to the dressing room, where his own cot was set up, Geoffrey flopped down into one chair, exhausted. Rigg pointedly took the other. Em glanced yearningly toward the bed, but the batman’s glare discouraged her quickly, and Geoff’s grin did not help matters. She sniffed her disdain and found a place on the floor. At least the carpet was thick. She was so tired she let the wall prop her up until she caught herself starting to slip sideways, half asleep. She fumbled her way out of the bulky overcoat and curled up in it like a kitten, using part as a blanket, part as a pillow. A short nap was all she needed, waiting for Smoky.

* * * *

“Bella, bella señorita, mi corazon necessite,”
sang a remarkably loud, off-key baritone. Footsteps staggered to the entry and a hand fumbled for the latch before Rigg could get the door open and his master inside.

“What’s that, shush? Me shush? Oh, company, you say? Good, good. I told the lads the night was still young. Here, who is it, Rigg? Don’t look like any of the army fellows.” He wrinkled his nose. “Don’t smell like one either.”

“It’s your brother, sir,” Rigg informed him, grabbing for his master’s hat, sword, and gloves before they ended on the floor. “Your younger brother, Cap’n, Geoffrey. I’ll just go fetch some coffee, shall I, sir?”

“Capital idea, Rigg, my brother’s here.”

“Yessir.”

When the batman left and a grinning Geoffrey was being pounded on the back, Emilyann stayed quiet in her corner, horrified. She hardly knew this man! She had not seen Smoky in, what? three or four years, and then briefly, but how changed he was, how much older he seemed than his twenty-four years. She did not recall him being so large either, surely not so broad-shouldered under his scarlet uniform jacket. His hair showed some silver at the long sideburns, his face was pale and gaunt, with a new red scar following along his jawbone, and worse, Captain Stockton was more than a little disguised. She huddled back into her coat.

“Devilishly glad to see you, bantling,” he was telling Geoff while tugging at his neckcloth. “If I had more time, I would have sent for you from school, but you wouldn’t have been there anyway, right? Ain’t it lovely how things work out? By the way,” he asked, shrugging out of his jacket, “what was it this time? Wine, women, or song?”

Now, Geoff had declared himself the spokesman while on the road lest anyone recognize Emilyann for a girl; he desperately wanted
not
to be the talker now. His frantic glances in Em’s direction brought no salvation.

“Your abysmal grades, eh? You’ll come about. Give me a hand with these boots, will you?”

“It ... it was the pig,” Geoff blurted out, giving a pull on one well-polished boot, then the other as his brother leaned back in one of the chairs. “It was a runt, you see, and the farmer was taking it to market anyway, and the little thing couldn’t keep up—oh, Lord.”

Stokely had unbuttoned his shirt and was starting on his breeches when a squawk from the corner made him turn around. “That had better not be the pig, my boy,” he said awfully, eyeing the pile of rags.

“It’s Emph, um, hm.”

“Gads, you’d never make a soldier. Speak up, Geoff, it’s a what?”

“It’s Emilyann.”

“Holy Mo—” Pants were hastily fastened, shirt tucked in. “You imbecile, how could you bring her to London like this, to bachelor quarters? Don’t you have anything in your brainbox at all? The pig would have been better!”

“That’s not fair, Ev. When was the last time you tried to talk her out of anything?”

Indignant, Emilyann started to get up, but a thundering voice ordered her to “stay. I’ll deal with you next, miss.” Stokely ran his fingers across the scar on his cheek. Lord, what if his friends
had
come back with him? All he could see of her in the shadows were two huge eyes in a face that was ghost-white where it was not mud-streaked, topped with clumps of colorless hair. Arms and legs poked out from the rags like sticks, and an aura of what?—kennel, kitchen, swamp—hung over the whole corner like a bad dream. At least no one would recognize her for a lady. Hah!

“You still look like an unfledged nestling,” he told her, finally beginning to see the humor of anyone mistaking this guttersnipe for a gently born female. He headed back toward the chair, apologizing that she improved with the distance, and where the hell was Rigg with that coffee anyway? “For I think I am going to need all my wits about me when I hear what you two cawkers are up to.”

He was smiling. He was the Smoky she had always known, but oh, dear, where to begin? It wasn’t as if he was going to be happy with the idea, she could see that now. She sent a silent appeal to Geoff for help, and he nobly rose to the occasion.

“We, that is, Em, needs to get married.”

The amiable gentleman was instantly replaced with a snarling beast, his hands at his brother’s throat, lilting him clear off the ground. “Why, you—”

“Not me, Ev!” Geoff croaked, and was dropped.

The earl turned to Emilyann in disgust. “What was he, some good-looking stablehand, or some smooth-talking basket-scrambler? Or maybe he’s already married. Is that it?” He sneered. “And what do you think I can do about it? I’m not exactly in prime fiddle to force a duel on some dirty dish so he’ll marry you.”

Now Emilyann found her voice. No one, not even Smoky, was going to talk to her like that. “Why you ... you miserable mawworm, how dare you think the worst of me like that. As if I would ... And here I came to you for help. Some help, a jug-bitten old soldier”—she emphasized the
old—
“back from a night of hellraking, giving orders and suspecting everyone else of behavior as bad as yours!”

She stood there, arms on her hips, blue eyes flashing, and he laughed, partly in relief that she hadn’t been led down the garden path, and partly in memory of a tiny scrap of a girl giving Thornton what-for over some slight. He held his arms open. “Hallo, Sparrow,” he said, and she walked into them, rags, aroma, and all.

“Hi, Smoky.”

Rigg almost dropped the tray, coming back to the room to find his master holding the raggedy urchin. “That will be all, Private.”

Rigg shut his mouth enough to say “yessir.” He set the tray down with a thump and about-faced to march to his own room, shaking his head and vowing to burn that shirt the captain had on.

There, she was safe now, protected in Smoky’s arms. She could tell her story, ending with “I really had no choice. I just couldn’t stay there, not after he hit me.”

He held her away from him and gently cupped her chin, turning her face to the light. His eyes narrowed to steel-gray slits when he saw the bruise there, under the grime. “What did you do then?”

“I ... I kicked him.”

“Where I taught you?”

She just nodded, looking down.

“Good girl.”

Geoffrey cheered. “I hope you put paid to
his
getting the heir, Emmy,” he said, which earned him such a scowl from his brother that he decided a nap might be in order. Yawning mightily, he sprawled across Stokely’s bed, his back to the other two.

“Such subtlety,” complimented the captain, indicating that Emilyann take Geoff’s vacated seat. She poured him out coffee first, and then, deciding a slightly fuddled Smoky might be easier to deal with after all, poured some brandy into his cup, too, while he was busy finding his slippers.

Smoky finally settled, the cup on his knee. “All right, my girl, let’s hear what feat of derring-do you expect from me. I’m sure you’ve some feather-headed scheme in mind.” He took a sip of coffee, only raising one eyebrow at the taste.

Then she said, “I want you to marry me,” and he spilled the hot liquid down his shirt.

“Damn, Sparrow, you shouldn’t say such things to a fellow.”

“But I am serious, Smoky. I need you to marry me. You are old enough, and have a title and property and you’re even a hero! There is no way Uncle Morgan could withhold his permission, not when my own father once approved.”

His lordship stopped dabbing with his napkin at the brown stain to look at her again: a bedraggled, undernourished elf in ragpicker’s hand-me-downs pouring coffee like a duchess.

He shouldn’t have laughed. He knew it the moment her spine stiffened and a very determined nose, slightly tilted, lifted in the air. Maybe it was the alcohol clouding his mind, but damn if he didn’t laugh again.

Lord Stokely may have been in his altitudes, but Lady Emilyann Arcott was very much on her dignity.

“Laugh now, my lord,” she announced in a frigid tone, unfolding one of her documents, the special license. “But marry me you shall. I don’t think you’d find it funny in the least when I take you to court for breach of promise.” She unfolded a second paper. “Our fathers agreed to the marriage in a legal contract.”

“And rescinded it later.”

“But not on paper.” She unfolded her last page. “You wrote me a promise, swearing to marry me anyway.”

“I was sixteen! You were a lonely little girl at school.”

“It’s evidence.”