Judith Ivory (6 page)

“That’s not it. The date and details.”

“Oh.” She turned a page of scribbles and tried to remember. “On the seventh of April will hereby—”

“It was the tenth.”

Emma let her dismay show, exaggerating it in fact. “Did I get it wrong?” she asked meekly. She scratched out a line, then jotted furiously. “I have it then. Go on. I have it now.”

The viscount looked at her a long minute as he unbuttoned his frock coat—it was warm in the room—and leaned back against the rich greatcoat behind him draped over his chair. He said, “My secretaries have always used Pitman.”

“I don’t,” she said quickly. The vest beneath his dark frock coat was surprising: bright blue silk. She stared at it.

He said, “I presently have two, who both had to leave un
expectedly.” The information held no judgment, no accusation, yet Emma felt a little tingle of heat.

She forced a smile. “Good thing, then, I could be here.”

He continued to stare, unnerving her with his silent gaze. Then he nodded once, looked back at the stack of papers accumulating before him, and let out a sigh strong enough to flutter the next page passed to him as it settled on top of the others.

The stack grew. The Viscount Mount Villiars, soon to be one of the richest men in England, was bridging the gap between the present and when the bulk of his personal investments, mostly in French francs and in properties being sold abroad, could be converted to English currency and his use. And ultimately, of course, till the viscountcy would be his alone, unhindered by questionable debt. He needed two accounts to do it, a personal one with the signature of Stuart Winston Aysgarth and one for his entailment with the signature of Mount Villiars.

Emma’s eyes boggled at the numbers as she mentally tallied the flow of both across her portion of the table. The fifteen thousand pounds was the tip of it, a pittance compared to the whole. He was borrowing almost nine hundred thousand pounds, some of it just on his name, the rest backed by various properties, stocks, and assets.

Good, she thought. He wouldn’t even notice fifty pounds gone missing in all these transactions. My goodness, were his finances complicated!

Better still, when he sat forward to sign the first of the documents, she watched very stylized writing flow from his hand, lots of loops, florid. Ha, she might have known! It would be easy to imitate; the fanciest always were. If this was it, she couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about.

After signing, however, he brought forth from the inside pocket of his frock coat a flat gold case, opened it, and took out a seal and stick of red wax. Well, of course, she thought. Two men jumped up to offer a flame for melting the wax onto
the document. The bank governor won, offering an official-looking lighter of some sort, a bird with a flame out its bill. The viscount’s gloved hand held the wax stick in the flame, his eyelids lowered as he stared down at it. The small light made a faint, rather satanic waver up over his severe face, offsetting the shadows of a deep brow and a hat brim.

For a moment, light played up into his face with its wide, clean-shaven jaw and high cheekbones. And Emma thought, oh dear, there was a certain type of woman, more the pity for her, who would not stand a chance against such a man.

Mount Villiars was romantically handsome, his face severe in its Anglo-Saxon proportion, if dark from coloring of peoples farther south. A sharply angled face, underlined by hollow and bone and coloring. Not to mention a bearing, an air about his tall, slender body. It made one wonder at the logic of nature that a man who already had so much should have this too—a stunning physical presence.

His dark eyes—even in good light as dark as Turkish coffee—blinked when wax splashed down: two small red splotches onto the white page. More drips quickly pooled into a bright bloodred puddle of wax. He covered this with his seal and pressed, rocking the instrument once.

Emma caught herself: Turkish coffee. When was the last time she’d drunk that? Ah, never mind; in London. But didn’t old Stuart here embody every last rare thing, come to think of it, that was available in the wicked, old cosmopolitan place?

Done, she thought with satisfaction, as she stared at red wax hardening into an embossed salamander, the emblem of French kings, if she remembered correctly. (
Ah, Zach, where are you when I need you?
It was the sort of useless information he could have confirmed in his sleep—in a stupor, dead drunk.) In any case, she could easily do a reverse impression of the seal, and the viscount’s neat, ornate handwriting was going to be a breeze to duplicate. She could already feel the triumph: the flow of his signature in her mind, its curve and stoke within her fingers. Aah, the old, talented fingers—

That was when he produced another thin box, this time silver. It was smaller, looking like an antique patch box, the sort carried two hundred years ago by the aristocracy when “beauty marks” were all the vogue as a way to cover facial flaws. He opened it,
click
, and there was what looked like…an ink pad. She frowned as he set this down and took the finger of one glove in his teeth, pulling. He removed the glove, revealing long, slender fingers on a large palm, fingers that turned up slightly at the tips, smooth, round, trimmed nails. He folded his graceful hand into a loose fist, extending his thumb, and pressed it onto the ink pad, then onto the document.

His thumb print in blue ink. Emma stared down at the first loan paper, blinking at how colorful it looked despite all the black writing, the colors of the Union Jack: white paper, red seal, blue thumbprint.

When she discovered herself to be glaring over it at the viscount himself, she made her eyes return to her lap. She jotted a few lines of nonsense, wanting to write,
Idiot, jackanapes, scoundrel, purely difficult, overcareful ridiculous man!
She stared at the tablet, while she tried to compose her own features. She kept glancing up though, more and more irritated.

He did the same thing, a thumbprint, on each page as it came before him, on both accounts, she herself having to pass most of the papers over to him from the string of solicitors and accountants who judged them as they came by: He signed, then sealed, then pressed a dark blue, impossible-to-counterfeit mark just below each signature. As he put his last thumb’s impression on the last page, the sight of it made her so angry her vision blurred.

Could he
be
more troublesome? Could he make this any harder? She sat there fuming. How many obstacles had she come over? How many ways had she tried to get him to pay his debt? And now this. A thumbprint, which she couldn’t possibly fabricate.

Think, think, she told herself again. How might she be able to? Whom might she know who could help her? First, though, she’d have to have an impression, the thumbprint. She could lay her white cuff over it, hope to take a likeness in wet ink. No, what a mess that would be, and it would bleed and lose detail. She could hand him something while his glove was off—

Right-o! Her cousin worked in Scotland Yard now. They did all sorts of things with fingerprints. She dropped her pen, then watched it roll as she realized, No, it was too round; she wasn’t sure a fingerprint would lift easily from it.

Think, think, think!

She crossed her legs and shoved her tablet off her lap with her knee. But, no, that would be too soft. When she bent to get her dropped tablet, she found her cloth purse. Beneath everyone’s line of view, ostensibly as she felt around for her tablet, she opened the drawstring, then rose up, noisily clattering out all the contents, dumping them. There must be something in there. “Oh, dear,” she said and dived under the table to look.

Upside down over her skirts in the dimness under the table, she watched her own mirrored compact skid. Yes, that would do it! Hard and smooth.

The compact came to a stop in front of the far leg of the viscount’s chair, a bit difficult to reach.

“I have it,” he said above her.

Or she thought he was above her. They were suddenly both under the table. Together. He’d removed his hat. He hair was dark, much longer than was stylish, and curled slightly. Her heart leaped into happy rhythm. Oh, yes, your lordship, you get it for me, she told herself. But the dark under the table became interesting in ways beyond obtaining his thumbprint. It had something to do with the way his round, shadowed eyes fixed on her, looking at her till she felt the blood rise in her face.

She pulled back, sitting up in her chair abruptly, feeling
fidgety as she stared down at his wide back where it curved toward his shoulders. He was down on one knee—he had a true gallant streak, if nothing else. Or else a marked inclination to earn indebtedness from the hired help. Did he sleep with his housemaids? His laundresses? He was interested in her sexually, she would have bet money on it now. While she was only a secretary, for goodness sake. What was he doing, with all these long, heated looks?

Then she smiled to herself.
He was interested in her sexually
. When was the last time
that
had happened? Or, no, when was the last time it had happened, and she’d felt anything at all in return? There was the difference. Years! Though he was hardly her usual type. She usually went for the bad boys, the misfits and make-dos, the rebelliously wicked ones. Goodness, perhaps she’d grown up.

Then, no. As he rose back up into his chair, she remembered his mean letters, his refusal to obey the court decision, his dark, unsmiling glances—and she sighed inwardly at herself. No, thank you.

He offered her compact that contained sifted face powder out to her. In his gloved hand, his right hand. Along with it, he also deposited on the table in front of her: her pen, her tablet, a comb with a missing tooth, and yesterday’s to-do list, which read neatly and boldly:

—feed Giovanni leftover lamb liver

—take old bread to church

—make ripped towel into monthlies rags

She blushed again, all the more annoyed because she could not remember blushing this much in her lifetime, let alone in a single afternoon.

Mount Villiars said, “I hope I didn’t get ink on anything.” He held his bare hand with the inked thumb up, out of the way.

Emma’s tongue felt thick, her face hotter by the minute.
She muttered, “I’m so clumsy today.” Ugh. Oh. She certainly was. She had botched this. All her trouble, all her risk, for naught. She couldn’t make anything work. She hadn’t been able to for four months now, and she was so frustrated by it—by
him
, this
man
—she wanted to wail, to stand up and overturn their blasted table, screaming.
Do you know what this miserable no-account has done? This wicked man, whom I am not the least bit interested in because I am done with wicked men and even reformed wicked men? Do you have any idea what a powerful one can get away with? And, the scoundrel, he doesn’t even care! That’s the point. They never do. Someone truly ought to teach Lord La-di-da here a lesson
….

Oh, what a rant she had inside herself.

The stupid meeting went quickly from there. No wonder lawyers were willing to do him the odd favor. His financial life was producing enough work to retire the entire population of the Inns of Court. The last of the papers circulated, being verified and reverified; one of them was re-signed, resealed, and reimprinted. She crossed her legs irritably and actually kicked old Stuart once.

“Sorry,” she said.

He looked at her again.

Which forced her to smile and say much more sweetly, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to kick you, your lordship.” No, she’d prefer to throw up on him.

The next moment, he was standing, pulling on his glove. As he looked over at the bank’s governor, he said, “I would like the matter tidied up by tomorrow?” His smooth voice rattled the words out perfectly, no hesitation. And though intoned as a polite question, neither his syntax nor his manner left it one.

“Tomorrow?” The governor, half-risen, all but choked. “We can’t possibly—”

The viscount paused in pushing his glove down between two fingers, so as to focus all his desire to make a quick
business of this into one furrowed look of deep, imperious displeasure.

At this unlikely moment, the word
vicuna
came to Emma. It was the name of the wool of his coat. While the fur inside it, which invisibly composed most of the garment, was
chinchilla
. Old words. Words she hadn’t thought in a long time. Which meant, dear God, his coat cost more than the average piece of English real estate. And was so thick and double-bunny-smooth, where it brushed against her hand—Mount Villiars swung it up off the chair and down onto his arms in a single movement—she wouldn’t have minded building a wee cottage on it, moving in, living there. If only she could have gotten him out of it first.

She must have murmured the word. “Vicuna.” Because they all looked at her.

Then—as if a brilliant idea—the bank’s governor said, “Your excellent references, Miss Muffin—”

“Miss Muffin?” the viscount repeated, looking at her.

“Molly Muffin,” she said. Her idea of humor. She always used absurd names when she didn’t use her own real, not entirely dignified one.

The bank’s governor cleared his throat and began again. “Your excellent references said you also know how to do double entry bookkeeping.”

Indeed. She had sterling references—some of them even real.

Years ago, Molly Muffin had done the bookkeeping for the bishop. And made him tea and hopped across the street for hot cross buns to go with it. She was actually better at bookkeeping than typing or taking shorthand, though that wasn’t saying much. Her strong suit had been fetching the hot cross buns.

She sighed. She didn’t want to stay up all night doing their bookkeeping for them. Let them get their bookkeeper to do it.

“You see, our bookkeeper is out ill till tomorrow. We
thought,
um
—” Mr. Hemple paused, then smiled. “If you could help us, Miss Muffin, we’d make it worth your time.”