Eternally Yours: Roxton Letters Volume 1 (17 page)

“Not the divine Lady Mary, Grasby, you piece of burnt toast! Dair.
Dair
was a hairy oaf at Harrow. Still is.”

“Well, you’ve grown into your hairs. I’ve not changed,” Grasby admitted sulkily. “And you at least have width and muscle, Cedric. Just like Dair. Females admire width and muscle. I still look the undernourished ferret—That’s right! Keep the laughter coming! Kick a man when he’s drunk! It’s bloody true, I tell you!”

“You’ll feel less the ferret and more the warrior once the war paint is applied,” Dair assured him. “Every man can hide behind war paint. Now, do get a move on, Grasby, before the ladybirds flit away into the night.”

Lord Grasby liked the idea of hiding behind war paint. He whipped off his drawers, snatched the belt with breechcloths attached from the ever-patient Farrier, who had been standing at his side for some little while, and threw it around his waist. Being acutely self-conscious, he secured the belt ends in a rush, and breathed a sigh of relief to have completed the task in record time. Unbeknownst to him, the two breechcloths were not front and back as he thought, but left and right, against his bare flanks.

Cedric Pleasant could not contain himself. The laughter burst from him; the look of relief on Grasby’s face the final straw. Dair turned away to hide his grin, and the two friends staggered about, hunched over with uncontrolled mirth. Hands on hips, Grasby glared at them, wondering what was amiss. Finally, Cedric turned and, unable to speak because he was laughing so hard, waggled a finger in the direction of Grasby’s groin. His lordship glanced down, gave a start when he saw the source of his friends’ mirth, and was swift to try and set matters to rights, face ablaze.

“Blast it! It’s all caught up now!”

“May I be of assistance, my lord?” Farrier asked at his most bland, as his master and Mr. Pleasant continued to fall about, unable or unwilling to control their laughter.

“Yes. Yes. All right! And be quick about it!”

Grasby suffered the ministrations of the batman to adjust the sit of the breechcloths with chin in the air, and with all the dignity of a man in his dressing room and not naked in a laneway.

“If you would just check to see that the knot you tied is still secure, m’lord, then all will be well.”

“Can’t you do that for me, too, damn you?” Lord Grasby demanded through clenched teeth.

When the batman remained silent and held up his left arm, Grasby finally looked at him. Where the man’s hand should be, there was only air. Curiosity got the better of him, and he peered into the void of Farrier’s coat sleeve. In response, Farrier thrust his arm up through his sleeve and out popped a stump where his hand should be. It was capped with a small polished silver hook, the fitted silver cap secured by a leather strap buckled about his forearm.

Grasby leapt into the air.

Dair and Cedric Pleasant, who had just mastered control of their features, spluttered once more into uncontrolled laughter, and this time so hard they fell back, shaking shoulders against the high stone wall surrounding the garden of George Romney’s townhouse, as if needing its support to remain upright.

“For king and country, m’lord,” was Farrier’s bland response to Lord Grasby’s reaction to his amputated hand.

“You scared me half to death! Damn you!”

The batman bowed, and with a flourish wriggled his arm so that the stump was again hidden, with only the tip of his hook visible within his coat sleeve.

“Thank you, Mr. Farrier,” Dair said, taking his bare shoulders off the stone wall. “You’ve had your amusement for the evening; ours is yet to begin. Time to fetch paint pot and ash.”

The batman bowed and retreated, leaving behind him a heavy silence.

“Nine years in the army and you come out of it with a few knocks and dents, but poor Farrier has the rotten luck to lose a hand,” Cedric Pleasant said into that silence. “Still, you both managed to keep a head on your shoulders, and that’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

“You could have damn well told me!” Grasby threw at Dair. “I’ll have nightmares for weeks.” He gave a shudder of revulsion. “Damned unpleasant…”

Dair’s face tightened. He was on the verge of reminding his friend that there were thousands of Farriers out there who had lost limbs, not to mention those who had made the ultimate sacrifice, all in the service of their king and country. And all so gentlemen such as Grasby were at liberty to go about their daily lives undisturbed and unfettered. Instead, he pushed the unspoken diatribe back down his throat and turned away to take the paint pot from his batman.

“Watch and learn, Grasby,” he said, beckoning his best friend closer.

Dipping his index finger into the small ceramic pot of white paint, then peering into a hand mirror his batman held up in the soft orange glow of the linkboy’s lantern, Dair painted a continuous stripe from cheekbone to cheekbone across the beak of his nose. Two stripes were added to each cheek and a single stripe from bottom lip down the center of his square heavy chin. Satisfied with his war paint, he exchanged the paint pot for a cloth dusted in charcoal. This he rubbed into his closed eyelids, then blackened under his eyes, extending the blackness out across his temples into his hairline. He then applied soot to the beefy rounded tops of his shoulders. Peering back into the mirror, he grinned. The whites of his eyes were now stark and menacing, and the paint and soot somehow also made his large white teeth brighter and sharper.

Dair turned this macabre grin on his friends, who opened wide their eyes and smiled their appreciation of his transformation. And when he threw back his head of black hair and howled at the moon Grasby joined in, infected with his friend’s enthusiasm.

With both gentlemen sufficiently decorated in war paint, soot not only applied to Lord Grasby’s face but dusted through his hair to turn it gray to disguise its blondness, Cedric Pleasant took one last look at his friends and declared they were ready to carry out their mission. Lord Grasby, however, halted proceedings with one last reservation, saying diffidently,

“You don’t think my breechcloth rather smaller than Dair’s?”

Dair and Cedric gave a practiced start and looked at each other before solemnly shaking their heads. Both suppressed smiles, but there was a light in their eyes of mischief and anticipation, seen often in schoolboys playing a prank on an unsuspecting chum. Dair had instructed Farrier to trim the length and width of his friend’s breechcloth, so that when Lord Grasby ran about, he could not help but expose himself.

“Certainly not!” Cedric Pleasant lied. “It’s all in the perspective… You and Dair have the same size tackle, I’m sure of it. Hasn’t he, Dair?”

“Don’t ask me!”

“Not that, Cedric! I don’t require your reassurance about the size of my sugar stick! The
cloth
. It’s the cloth I’m worried about. Its coverage is—”

“I’d be more concerned about that birthmark,” Dair interrupted with a slow shake of his head. He sucked air through his teeth, and as he let out a slow breath, let his shoulders drop. “If anyone should recognize it, they’ll recognize you, and you don’t want that.”

“Yes we do!” Cedric Pleasant hissed in his ear.

Lord Grasby clapped a hand to the left side of his exposed groin to cover a caramel-colored stain the size of a snuffbox. He put his nose in the air. “No one will recognize it except for my dear lady wife.”

Dair put up his black brows. “Are you certain?”

“What are you suggesting? That I’m an unfaithful husband?”

“Is that what I’m suggesting?”

“I take the sanctity of marriage
very
seriously.”

“Good for you!” Dair slapped his friend’s bare back a little too hard. “I admire a man prepared to sacrifice himself for a cause, however lost. Farrier! It’s time, if you please!”

“Now look here, Dair! I don’t appreciate—”

But Dair had turned away from Grasby to hide a smile. A wink at Cedric Pleasant, and his friend realized Dair had successfully diverted Grasby from his concern over the size of his breechcloth, and shook his head in admiration of his gift for subtle subterfuge.

While Farrier and the linkboy gathered up the gentlemen’s belongings, Dair went over the mission plan to raid the painter’s studio one last time, particularly the timing of Cedric Pleasant’s dramatic entrance with sword drawn. When his friends nodded their understanding of how events would unfold, he added,

“When Cedric threatens to stick me with his sword, that’s our signal to get the hell out of there—”

“—looking suitably terrified,” Cedric Pleasant added.

“We’ll be scared stiff, dear chap,” Grasby confirmed.

“You threaten to stick me and we make our dash for the front door. Understood, Grasby?”

“Perfectly. Cedric tries to stick you. We look petrified. I stop chasing dancing girls and dash out of the house after you. We make for the carriage across the square.”

Dair smiled. “Cedric saves the day, and the divine Consulata Baccelli has eyes only for her newfound champion. Couldn’t be easier.” He stuck out his hand. “Gentlemen, let the adventure begin!”

All three men shook hands, a gleam of mischief in their eyes, and wished each other luck before going their separate ways. Mr. Cedric Pleasant proceeded back down the laneway, a gloved hand to the hilt of his sword and a spring in his step. Major Lord Fitzstuart and Lord Grasby entered the garden of George Romney’s townhouse by stealth and the back gate.

At the very same moment, Lady Grasby, Mr. William Watkins, and Lord Grasby’s sister Miss Talbot, were being welcomed inside the townhouse by Mr. Romney’s butler.

Dair Devil
at Kobo

A
BOUT
L
UCINDA
B
RANT

W
HEN
NOT
BUMPING
about 18
^th
century London in my sedan chair or exchanging gossip with perfumed and patched courtiers in the gilded drawing rooms of Versailles, I write award-winning Georgian historical romances and mysteries (with lashings of romance). My books are set in 1700s Georgian England, with occasional crossings to continental Europe. I pull up the reins at the French Revolution where I lost a previous life at the guillotine for my unpardonably hedonistic lifestyle as a layabout aristo!

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