An Untitled Lady (9 page)

“Wetherby, leaving so soon?”

Her uncle rose to his full height, which matched Mr. Quinn’s, but the merchant had bulk and heft enough to dwarf him.

“I think Lord Wetherby has asked me to marry him?” Both heads snapped to her, mouths slack. Wetherby recovered first.

“She lies. I’ve done nothing of the kind.”

Maddie’s cheeks burned as if he’d slapped her. Confusion fed her anger, stanching the pinpricks of tears tugging at her eyes.

“Is that true?” Mr. Quinn stepped closer, taking her elbow. His face showed too much kindness. She could not hold back the tears, though she fought them every inch of the way.

“He said he’d take me up. A contract. Like with the earl.”

Wetherby snorted. “A contract, to be sure. For marriage? My god.”

The grip on Maddie’s elbow tightened painfully. She tried to shrug his hand away, but it would not let her go.

Wetherby rolled his eyes. “It’s nothing. I merely offered shelter to your wayward ward.”

“Shelter, my ass. You wish her on her back.”

“Crudity does not become you. I merely offered a business arrangement, the same as thousands of others enjoy every day. If she doesn’t wish it, she is free to say so.”

Maddie closed her eyes to stop the landscape from shaking. The tilting did not stop; it was she who was out of balance. A stranger’s hand was all that held her together. She was so stupid, just as her uncle said. Not a wife, a mistress—a whore. He wanted her to say she agreed, for all the world to hear. For the good man beside her to hear, to judge.

Never.

Someday, she might need to stoop to selling herself for money, someday soon perhaps, but never be to that man. She’d tried to give him her love, all those years ago, and he’d slapped her face with it. He would never get another chance.

Her thoughts racing beyond her, Maddie didn’t see her hand lift. When the key and its tail hit Lord Wetherby’s shoulder and fell to the stones, she was as surprised as he was. So unlike a lady, but for once, she did not feel ashamed.

The hand on her elbow slid into an arm across her shoulder blades. She sank into its strength.

“You have your answer, Wetherby.”

He did not stoop to pick up his key. “We paid for you. You are just another piece of Wetherby furniture.”

Her throat thickened with suppressed sobs. Mr. Quinn’s throat had no such trouble. “I see now why father took her away from you.”

“He paid for her, too. She’s your family’s furniture now. And well-used.”

Her companion growled deep in his chest. “You’ve said enough.”

“There’s no tax on speech.”

The security of his grip disappeared. She felt raw there. Mr. Quinn stepped forward.

Wetherby’s facile expression dropped as he saw what was coming, but wasn’t fast enough to prevent it. One blow knocked him to the ground, holding his nose.

“But there is.” Mr. Quinn turned back to Maddie. She could see blood on his knuckles. Wetherby’s blood. She blinked slowly, as if her vision had deceived her. This was not real.

“Are you hurt?” he said.

She didn’t understand the question. He seemed to be always hurting her, by his very presence. She stepped back, back, away from the bloody vision. In coming to her rescue, he’d assaulted a peer. He could be hung, or transported.

She’d killed him.

“Let her go. She’s not worth losing your life over, Quinn.” Wetherby spat blood onto the courtyard. “You are your father’s son, all right. Right down to his way of settling an argument. Too bad your roundhouse is so much weaker than his. And of course, you’re no earl.”

{ 10 }

Nash fought to control the rage and panic tightening his limbs. He had to quit this courtyard before he made any more fatal errors. Where had that come from? He’d never been so out of control. He’d frightened the lady, and he’d frightened himself.

Wetherby spat a second time, still sitting in the dust in those dancing tights he called breeches. The sound startled Miss Wetherby, whose eyes had taken on a terrible blankness. She turned away from them, walking and then running for the door leading to the outside gardens. With movements so stiff, and gait so broken, she looked as if she’d been shot, not merely spoken to.

Nash reached a hand out to Wetherby, who used it to lever himself upright. A stable boy was leading his mount to the ladder. Nash wondered who else had seen the fracas.

He hadn’t seen anyone but the lady and her uncle, locked in what looked like some mummers’ show repeated from their past together. Nash couldn’t shake the impression that the lady had changed into an automaton, a puppet, something not entirely human. Well, if she had, this Wetherby had made her so. People were as well as they were treated. Obviously, Madeline Wetherby had been treated very ill.

Wetherby mounted easily. His lip had stopped bleeding but it and his nose were already starting to swell. “We’ll not mention this to Shaftsbury.” Taking Nash’s silence for agreement, he gave his horse her head and departed.

Nash had dreamed of the day he would take that impudent jackass down a peg or two, but the reality lacked the sweetness of his fantasy. For all his rescue of the damsel, he couldn’t undo whatever blows she had already received. He had been estranged from his family all his adult life. But he never doubted that they were his kin, and if worse came to worst, they would take him back in. And never as a servant. He could barely imagine how it would feel to be told your family was not yours—that you were of no family—as a child of four. Would she even have understood?

And who would blame her for jumping at the chance to join with the next family that came her way? One with a golden little boy who thought she was an angel?

“She was just the sunniest child,” Mama had told him this morning. “Until her parents died. We didn’t see her for a while, and then one day she just appeared, in the stables. Looking for Deacon. Apparently, he had promised to protect her and marry her one day. Must be where Shaftsbury got the idea. The fancies of a child.”

“Did you see her? What did she look like?”

“Heavens, I don’t know. I was with you, remember? That was when you had the scarlet fever. Shaftsbury said Wetherby had frightened her. He was a stranger, and she’d been through so much already. He sent her straight off to school, and that’s the last I heard of her.”

Nash washed his hands at the pump and headed back inside. He needed a drink.

He knew that some in the peerage thought of people as possessions, as objects. He had seen enough grooms whipped for their owner’s carelessness and heard of maids sent from service for showing signs of babes their masters put there. But he had not thought much on it, assuming people would start acting better in these modern times.

Now he felt shame that he had not spoken out about it. It was a slippery slope from the thought that a person could be whipped like an animal to the thought that a person was an animal.

How could such people still keep on about maintaining lines pure of taint? Their own behaviors put the lie to the very idea of “purity.” What was in their blood that made them any more pure than their servants, than their tenant farmers, than the weavers? This last line of thought was dangerous. It was the very argument the weavers were using to demand suffrage. If men were created equal, as the American declaration put it, should they not vote?

He had seen many terrible things in the Navy, and even signs of abuse among the younger boys. But to call an infant furniture, tell a child who depended on you for everything, for her very life, that she was nothing to you? And he was sure Wetherby treated her as the lowliest of servants as well. The cock-of-the-walk would enjoy that. He’d probably even beaten her.

Deacon had taken the horsehair chair, and had two glasses and the decanter ready beside him on the table. “I do hope you have spent your untoward aggression, dear brother.” So much for his non-promise of secrecy.

“It was as well meant as it was deserved.”

“I suppose I must agree. Where is the chit now?”

“She ran off.” He didn’t blame her. There was nothing he’d like more than to gallop hard away from this place. “Perhaps I’ll follow her.”

“I think you should.” Nash speared him with a glance. Deacon held out a glass. “Truce, brother. I simply meant that she needs rescuing, and as you are the resident knight in the family, it’s only appropriate.”

“I might marry her, you mean?” The idea should have appalled him, as it had earlier, when Deacon first brought it up. But instead his breath quickened, his mind sharpened. Did he like the chit? Not a chit, a lady.

“Always at the extremes, aren’t we? I meant go and fetch her back. We don’t want her to miss tea time.”

Nash rolled the idea about in his head, the way he rolled the deep brandy over his tongue. Looked at in a certain light, the woman might be an asset. Excellent manners in company and an understanding of business that would lead her to accept his being away from home. She was not encumbered with odious relations he would have to kowtow to. She was beautiful in a tragic way, not an Aphrodite but a Helen.

He suddenly saw the appeal of it. She did need rescue; she surely would see him differently now.

Something about her called to him, stirred his blood: those sharp eyes and that husky alto, scared and strong, hummed like bee-filled honey in his mind. He could protect her; offer her shelter from her stormy childhood. She would be grateful, perhaps passionately so.

She did need a rescue. And then there was the money. “Were you serious earlier? About a dowry?”

Deacon sat up and set his glass onto the table, its contents pushing first to one side of the rim and then the other. “Are you?”

“I could use the five thousand. And I’d prefer not to be beholden to Heywood, especially as there’s no hope for you and his daughter.”

Deacon tapped his lip, thinking. Nash held the glass to his own lips to disguise his fraying patience, always bad during negotiation. A man should never prefer that a deal go through—the least-interested bidder got the best deal. But he found this simple subterfuge almost impossible at the moment. Stalking about punching peers was hard on the nerves.

Deacon pursed his lips. “She’d never take you. Would she?”

“Why ever not?”

“Don’t jump down my throat; I’m just thinking aloud. I admit, it would neatly solve our puzzle. But now that it’s in the air, I confess I’m a bit queasy. I wouldn’t want to see you made unhappy.”

Deacon’s voice carried such a note of wistfulness that Nash took a deep look at him. His brother did his best to shrug in that stylishly pinched jacket, and his thin lips trembled toward a smile. His brother wanted him happy. Nash’s ribs felt tight.

He might do this. Not just for the family, but for him. It would free him from the town biddies and their grasping, graceless daughters. And he liked the shape of this Miss Wetherby, the warmth. She fit his hands. She’d fit his bed, too.

“I’ll be happy enough.” He cleared his throat. “Just keep that idiot Wetherby away from me.”

Deacon sighed, but not unhappily. “It’s not fair, it never is. You gain a wife, and I must lose both capital and my boon companion?”

“You should choose better friends.”

* * * *

Nash spied Miss Wetherby on the far side of the artificial pond, the castle between her and the Wetherby lands. Through the quarter-hour it took to round the water and reach her, she sat against a downed tree trunk, her bonnet in her hands, watching him.

Taking bad-tempered Roanoke out on this mission might have been a mistake. He’d chosen the beast to beat out some of his own pent-up energy through its pounding stride, but that wasn’t quite the thing for a tender young lady in fragile spirits.

With the light dappling her tousled hair and fancy-tucked dress, she looked far better suited to Regent’s Park than this northern land. She had nothing hard-edged about her, nothing forged or seared strong. How would she survive this new world? His heart ached to help her. His head asked, how far would you go?

He should concentrate on his own troubles, Nash told himself for the dozenth time this afternoon. He was doing his best to keep his men employed, but the market for their cloth and goods was running dry. And with the government stoking its tinder, a mere spark might set the whole town off. Adding a wife to his roster seemed less than seaworthy.

She rose as he drew near, and came to the head of the horse as Nash dismounted.

“Coming to my rescue again?” Her voice was ragged. Trails of tears traced the planes of her face. Since when had women’s tears had such an effect on him?

“Nothing of the sort,” he said, and immediately regretted it. The flimsy mask of sociability she wore crumbled. She dropped her head to study the dead leaves and new grass at their feet and struggled to catch her breath.

“No one wants me.” She said it not with anger, or despair, only bone-deep grief. It cut him to the quick. His mind skittered away from the pain.

“That’s doing it too brown,” he said teasing, as if she were a moped-up ensign. He took her elbow, but she didn’t shift her gaze. He slid his hand down to her palm, and tickled it. The shock of contact startled them both. She blinked, and tumbled to the ground.

He’d hurt her.

“I’m sorry. I turned my ankle a little, before.” She pushed to her hands and knees, and gingerly rolled up to a stand, clapping the dirt off her hands. The dress already had more than one stain; she must have done this before. He was a blind fool not to notice it earlier. “You see, I was, rather, hoping for a rescue. At least from these woods.”

“I’m your man. Can you sit the horse?”

She eyed the stallion, whose shoulder reached past her head. “Sit, but not control.”

“We’ll band forces. He’s plenty long enough, and strong.” He made a step of his twined hands, and lofted her up to sit sidewise ahead of the saddle. He vaulted into place behind her.

Roanoke was on his best behavior, and after only a few hundred yards of stiff riding, Miss Wetherby relaxed her chilled shoulders into his chest. A strange weight, but not uncomfortable, and she quickly recovered her warmth. He’d guessed right—she would be a perfect fit for him. She’d need new soap though; he hated lavender. As they passed from the loamy chill of the wood to the breezy sun of the meadow, only a mile from home, she let out a great sigh.

He scrambled for a topic that would divert her from thoughts of Wetherby or Deacon or Shaftsbury or what all. “Have you read of the reform meetings? It’s all the talk.”

She took the bait. “Can the magistrates keep the peace?”

“Depends what peace means. Most on the committee take the part of the manufactories. The yeomanry—shopkeepers, thieves, and other brigands volunteering to spy on their neighbors—are a wild card. Wildest card of all, though, are the craftsmen. Do they seek to form unions of trade to improve their lot or destroy ours?”

“If there were a union, what could it do?”

“Organize an attack on the new machines stealing their livelihood, I suppose. But that would only delay the inevitable, not to mention send the breakers to Australia or the gallows.”

Nash wasn’t sure if the magistrates had the right of it. What was the difference between profit and livelihood?

At Shaftsbury, Deacon was responsible for the well-being of his tenants. In town, who was responsible for the well-being of the manufactory workers? The owners didn’t claim it. Would the government step in, or the church, with its almshouses and orphanages? Would Parliament build laws to protect people or to protect commerce? If it were a choice between the paltry taxes the workers paid and the chunks of blunt the manufacturers paid, Nash knew who would prevail.

She shivered in his arms, and he cursed himself for not thinking to bring a blanket. Even in May, the woods weren’t warm. He pulled her closer. She wasn’t wearing a corset today. He shifted slightly in his seat. She should try honeysuckle. What were they talking about?

“But aren’t you a magistrate?”

“I’m on the special committee, yes. Lucky to be chosen. I run a warehouse and sales concern, so I understand the claims of the manufacturers. But I also trade with their workers, and have tradesmen working for me. Silk weavers.”

“I must arrange for new clothes.” She picked at the fine dyed silk. He wondered where she had found straw in the woods.

“Might not. I’m trying to convince Deacon to take Mama and you to London. Would you like that?”

“I can make the best of it.”

“You don’t like the city?”

“It’s kind of Lord Shaftsbury to consider it. I owe your family a great deal.”

Nash wasn’t sure what came over him then. Was it passion, the shock of holding a lovely young thing in his arms for a half-hour? Or simply that her flat statement of debt called to his love of negotiation? She held the weak position; he could get the best deal.