The Wicked Wedding of Miss Ellie Vyne (14 page)

“Don’t crush my gown,” she warned the elderly gentleman. “It is best branched velvet, so mind you don’t sit on it. You’re so fat you’d likely crush the pile right out of it.” She looked around the interior, her small nose in the air. “This is a very small carriage.”

“It doesn’t generally have so many people in it,” Lord Shale replied, shooting James another wary glance.

“And it smells like sawdust and tobacco,” the girl added. “How unfortunate that my lavender sachet is in my other trunk.” She glowered at Trenton from beneath heavy copper ringlets that remained unflattened by a solid night’s sleep. “Someone has stepped in something. If I did not have a strong constitution, I should be sick.”

Being so close to James, his thigh pressed to hers, his hand almost touching her leg, Ellie had allowed her mind to wander. Now she drew it back again, although it was a tortuous effort. “We are going only so far as my aunt in Sydney Dovedale, Lord Shale. We shall not trouble you for long.”

“My dear young lady, it is no trouble. It was most fortuitous that we should be passing and see you. It was Trenton whose sharp eyes recognized you, my dear, and he insisted we stop at once. Did you not, Trenton?”

His son sighed out a disinterested, “Yes, Father.”

Trenton Shale hadn’t changed much, she noted. He was just taller and thinner, as if someone had stretched him out on a rack.
If
only,
she mused dryly, her mind gleefully composing the image of her own hands turning the wheel.

“Doesn’t Miss Vyne’s beauty quite brighten the dismal weather, Trenton?” his father prompted, tapping his cane on the floor of the carriage. “I daresay you’ve seldom seen such prettiness. In winter it is a blessed sight. Like spring bloom at last. A snowdrop peeking through the slurry.”

“Yes. Quite,” came the begrudging reply.

Ellie somehow kept a disciplined countenance at the idea of herself as a delicate snowdrop, but maintaining a straight face was made even more trying in the next moment.

“I don’t consider her pretty at all,” Lady Mercy grumbled, swinging her feet. “Faces like hers are two a penny on any high street. In fact, I think she is quite plain. Her lips are uneven, and there is nothing distinctive about her nose whatsoever. She is all legs and bosom.”

A brutal assessment, but an honest one. Ellie could hardly disagree with a word of it. Her nose had indeed been a dreadful letdown ever since she first realized the importance of owning a good one. She felt James shaking with stifled laughter beside her. Mr. Grieves was right, she thought with a huff; his manservant needed a good thrashing to improve his behavior.

“Smallwick,” she whispered, “I do hope you’re not perspiring on my gown.”

“I shall cease all sweating at once, madam.”

Ignoring the interruption, Lord Shale continued, “But what could have prompted you to travel in winter weather, Miss Vyne? No emergency, I hope?”

“Not at all, sir. I simply decided to visit my aunt in the country for the Christmas season. London has grown very dull.”

“Without you gracing the streets of the town, Miss Vyne, I daresay it is even less lively. Now we know you shall not be there, Trenton will certainly be in no hurry to return. He will very probably urge me to stay in the country as long as possible in the hopes of your pretty face cheering his day again.”

She raised her brows at this awkwardly excessive flattery. Lord Shale kept looking at his son expectantly, but Trenton did not play along. Arms folded, he glowered through the window. On her other side, James fidgeted, trying to stretch out his legs in the cramped space.

“How very odd, Miss Vyne,” said Lord Shale, “that you should have a manservant. Most unwed young ladies—”

“It was quite by accident that he came into my hands, and now I should be quite lost without him.”

James stilled, his fingers spread over one muddied knee, their tips touching her damp coat.

“I heartily recommend a male servant to all my lady friends,” she added.

After a moment’s pause, Lord Shale forced a vexed laugh and shook his finger at her. “You always were a joker, Miss Vyne. Now I see you look to shock me, young lady. Tsk, tsk! Someone, Miss Vyne, ought to look out for you. Indeed they should.” He must have hit his son’s foot with the end of his cane, for Trenton shifted sideways and became very red. Young Master Shale was pretty rather than handsome, but his unpleasant attitude made him appear sallow faced and pinch lipped most of the time.

On her other side, Smallwick growled low, “
I
look after Miss Vyne.”

He was pressed so close to her that she felt the words rumble through his body and into hers. It started the heavy, wanton heat again, stirring it up inside her.

Lord Shale glowered at James, clearly annoyed and perturbed that a servant should speak without being spoken to.

She felt James’s thigh shift, and the hard muscle reminded her of what happened last night—before the accident. Afraid of blushing, she quickly shook off the pleasant memory. “In truth, I have always looked after myself,” she said, directing her words at Lord Shale as if the man beside her had never spoken.

“Yes.” The elderly gentleman shook his head sorrowfully. “And see how that has turned out.”

Tension in the carriage was palpable, thick enough to bite, and with her handsome manservant beside her, it was increasingly difficult to say or do anything very sensible that might lessen the strain. Continued breathing was challenge enough.

“Never mind that now,” Lord Shale added eventually, brightening up, resting both hands on the silver head of his cane. “We shall put you to rights. Shall we not, Trenton?”

His son looked terrified at the prospect.

She wondered vaguely why all these men thought she needed putting to rights. But she liked James Hartley’s method of tackling the job far better than any other. Hopefully he would resume, once he got his memory back. It was not right at all, taking advantage of a servant. Even if he was being deliciously noble and delightfully saucy. And holding his breath each time she moved her leg against his.

Ellie
Vyne,
she admonished herself severely,
you
are
an
irredeemable
hussy.

She’d known this sad fact for a long time, but never had it been so evident as it was in the presence of the very confused, terribly naughty, insubordinate manservant. If only she had a Smallwick completely at her disposal on a permanent basis. She wondered idly how much it might cost to keep one.

The Shales’ carriage rolled around the village common and drew to a smooth halt beside her aunt’s garden gate. Ellie looked out with intense relief. Throughout their journey she’d feared Lady Mercy Danforthe might give James’s identity away. A parade of coy glances had warned Ellie that the child expected something in return for her silence.

Now, at last, their painful journey was over.

Ellie leapt out of the carriage, not waiting for assistance to lower the step. “Thank you for the ride, and please, do not get out, your lordship. It is wretched cold.”

Lady Mercy skipped down after her, looking around with superior interest, while James once again struggled with their trunks.

“We ride on to the Red Lion Inn in Morecroft, Miss Vyne,” Lord Shale told her through the window. “I shall hope to see you again while we are in the county.”

She agreed, falsely, that she hoped the same.

James tugged her broken trunk from the back of the carriage and let it fall loudly to the path, apparently having had enough of that bulky, unpredictable weight.

As the carriage wheels crunched slowly away, she turned to find the door opening a crack, her aunt peering out cautiously through small, round spectacles.

“Ellie! Can it be? My dear girl—to travel in this weather!”

“I came to look after you, Aunt Lizzie!” She beamed and embraced the lady with such enthusiasm that she almost knocked the lace cap off her head. Delighted to find her aunt looking quite rosy cheeked and not at all as ill as she’d expected, Ellie gave her a warm hug and lifted her off her small feet in the process.

“But this is most…unexpected.” Back on her own feet, her aunt looked at the tattered traveling trunk on the path behind Ellie. “You should have warned…I mean to say, you should have
told
me you were coming. I had not…” Moving upward, her poor eyesight must finally have discovered the tall, crumpled, wet fellow with muddied knees. Her jaw fell slack. She pointed one shaky finger. “Is that—?”

“Aunt Lizzie, this is Smallwick. A manservant.”

James bowed politely from the waist, hands hanging at his sides.

Still her aunt stared, and her pale lips worked loosely.
“Smallwick?”

His breeches were very tight, leaving little to a lady’s imagination. It seemed Ellie’s proximity in Lord Shale’s carriage had caused James a most unfortunate reaction, which, had his breeches been slightly looser fitting, would not have been so apparent. Smallwick by name, she mused, not by nature.

“He is on loan to me,” she explained quickly, “for my safety. We were all traveling in the same carriage, you see, and there was an accident. His master, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Grieves, thought I should have an escort for the rest of my journey, and he will come later to retrieve Smallwick.”

“Saints preserve us,” her aunt gasped, “it is most strange that he should look so much like—”

“Aunt Lizzie, your front door is wide open and letting in all the cold air!”

At once her aunt was all apologies for keeping them out on the path. “You had better come in and get warm. What am I thinking to keep you all standing out here?”

Smallwick grabbed the broken handle of her trunk and dragged it over the doorstep, while her aunt held the door open, fretting now about the terrible weather and Ellie’s idea to travel in it. Finally Lady Mercy was noticed. She stood on the path, hands in her muff and shoulders huddled against the cold, looking rather woebegone. Like lost luggage.

“This is Lady Mercy,” Ellie explained. “She is also being collected in a day or so. I’m sorry to burden you, Aunt Lizzie, but I couldn’t very well leave her behind at the scene of the accident.”

“What sort of place is this?” the young lady demanded. “Don’t you have a footman to open the door?”

“Goodness no, my lady,” Aunt Lizzie replied. “Only me. I’m afraid I must suffice.”

Surrounded at once by the familiar and the beloved, Ellie looked around the narrow hall. Nothing ever seemed to change about her aunt’s house. “I thought to surprise you!” she exclaimed, flinging her arms around the lady for yet another joyous embrace. She knew she should have written, but as was often the case with Ellie, there was barely time from decision to application of the deed, and in all likelihood she would have arrived before her letter. “Is it not wonderful that I can stay for Christmas this year?”

“My dear girl…of course…quite wonderful, as you say. Goodness, yes indeed. What a shock you have given me. I mean to say—
surprise
! Surprise—yes—that is the proper word, so it is. Coming all this way by yourself…and not a word…but I daresay I shall recover.”

Ellie removed her coat and bonnet and hooked them up by the door. She pushed by James and hurried into the parlor to greet her aunt’s parakeet, making sure everything there was exactly as it should be, unchanged for the last twenty-seven years. Lady Mercy followed her, perusing the cottage as if it was an exhibit at a museum and inquiring if there was anything to eat.

“The stink in that old man’s carriage was positively wretched. I shall be surprised if I can eat very much, because it has rendered me nauseated. But I should try to eat, or else I might faint. My head is feverish sore.”

Aunt Lizzie assured her that food would be prepared immediately.

“Where is the rest of your house?” Lady Mercy asked in the same brusque tone. “Did it burn down? Is there more beyond?”

“I’m afraid this is all there is, my lady.”

“But it’s all so small and confined. Why, I could walk from one end to the other in less than a minute. There is nowhere to hide.”

“It’s quite enough for me to keep up. ’Tis all a widow like me can need.”

“Of course it’s enough,” Ellie agreed warmly.

“And there’s not much call for me to hide. Not at my age, my lady.”

On the outside, her aunt’s cottage was somewhat shabby: the roof dipped in the middle, and the old casement windows were in need of fresh paint on the trim. The interior leaned toward practical rather than elegant, but it was as comfortable and as beloved to Ellie as a dear old friend. She took a glad breath of the familiar smoky odor, for her aunt’s chimney was stubbornly reluctant to let smoke outside, preferring to blow it back into the house. Underfoot was the same crooked flagstone floor, and above her head the upper storey of the house still tilted west at a steep angle, requiring the inhabitants to find their bed with a somewhat drunken lurch every evening.

Everything was as it should be. Few things in her life were this reliable.

She hugged her arms and crouched by the parlor fire to let the heat tickle her face, and listened to the muffled thumps of James dragging her trunk up the stairs to the guest room. He must be taming his curses on her aunt’s behalf. Now what was she going to do with him until Grieves arrived with Dr. Salt?

“I had better make some tea.” Her aunt was tidying the parlor with quick, fidgety hands, folding sewing away, closing a newspaper, and reorganizing pillows on the sofa.

“I’m very disagreeable if I’m not fed on time,” Lady Mercy exclaimed before catching sight of the parakeet and dashing over to study it. “Does he speak?”

“Quite frequently,” Aunt Lizzie replied. “And always when I don’t want him to do so. The things he picks up…oh dear!”

“He is beautiful,” the young lady exclaimed. “I should like to buy him. How much, my good woman, will it cost me?”

“Cost…oh dear…he is not for sale, my lady. I could not part with him. He belonged to my deceased husband, Captain—”

“Of course he is for sale. Everything is. For the right price.”

“
Lady
Mercy
,” Ellie admonished her, “indeed, everything is not for sale! Mind your manners. And your coin.”

The girl pouted ferociously, her lion’s mane of copper curls seeming to stand out from her head, bristling with anger.

Ellie ignored her and silently greeted the familiar objects along her aunt’s mantel. The old clock and its steady, galloping click-clack reminded her of quiet afternoons by this fire with her sisters, whenever the summer rain kept them indoors. Her sisters played with their dolls and quarreled with each other, while she played solitaire or wrote in her diary—elaborate, adventurous stories, seldom with a shred of truth. She looked farther along the mantel, at the little china ornaments, and then the framed pictures above the spinet in the corner.

“I won’t be any trouble this time, Aunt Lizzie. I promise.” It was something she’d uttered many times, standing in this room. Now it came mechanically from her lips.

The scuffing, groaning cacophony of James as he labored with her trunk across the floor above made all three women roll their eyes to the ceiling to follow his bumpy progress. First to glance downward again, Ellie saw the anxious frown pleating her aunt’s brow.

“I assure you, Aunt Lizzie, I am quite beyond all mischief now and content to be good. At my age, what else can I be?”

The ancient parakeet let out a slow, tremulous squawk that sounded very much like an “uh, oh” from his large cage by the window.

She threw the bird a quick frown, and her aunt scurried off to make tea.

As she perused the mantel again and rubbed her arms, Ellie’s gaze came to rest on a clay pipe beside the clock. Her eyes had only skimmed it before, taking it for one of her uncle’s possessions kept by her aunt out of fondness. She picked it up and sniffed the bowl. There was a strong odor of fresh tobacco smoke, and if her fingertips did not deceive her, the pipe was still warm, as if it had not long been put out.

Carefully she set it back where she found it. She assumed her aunt must have taken up the pipe in tribute to the dead captain.

She realized suddenly that the lady went to make the tea herself, when she would usually call for her housemaid, so Ellie hurried down the passage and into the kitchen. She entered just as the back door closed. Her aunt turned, almost dropping the teacups she was setting on the tray.

“My dear girl, stay by the fire in the parlor and get warm. You must not catch cold.”

“Was that Mary Wills just gone out?”

It seemed her aunt’s hearing had also deteriorated, for she didn’t answer, causing Ellie to repeat her question in a louder voice.

“Goodness, no,” came the rattled reply eventually. “I have not had Mary here these last two winters. She went to look after her sister in Thrapstead, you know, and it was well she did, for I could scarce afford her any longer. I have little Molly Robbins only a few times a week now to help around the house. She’s hoping to secure a post as a housemaid in a year or two, in Morecroft, and the experience is good for her.”

“Perhaps Smallwick can give her some advice.” Smiling, Ellie stole a shortbread biscuit from the tea tray.

Her aunt set the teapot down with a bang. “That is James Hartley, is it not? My eyesight is poor, but not that bad, Ellie! What can you be up to now?”

“Aunt Lizzie, it is nothing to—”

An ominous crash stole the sentence from her. The two women hurried out into the hall just as James tumbled down the narrow stairs and landed at their feet.

He lay there in an ungainly sprawl, blinking up at them. “I banged my head on the ceiling and tripped. Who built this damned cottage? An elf?”

Poor James. He wasn’t used to small houses with narrow stairs and treacherous, threadbare carpets. As Aunt Lizzie helped him upright, that entitled, peevish expression vanished from his face again, replaced by a blank look. One more befitting the “injured” subservient valet.

But for those few seconds in which he let down his mask, startled by the abrupt fall, the old arrogant James was there again.

Ellie saw, and now she knew for certain what she had previously begun to suspect.

The
lying
hound!

She was unable to restrain her laughter. It burst out of her in a gale and swept her double.

***

“Well, really, Ellie!” her aunt cried. “This is no time for hilarity.”

James, rubbing his doubly abused head and clambering unsteadily to his feet, quite agreed. How typical of the woman to find humor in his pain. She was laughing so hard she almost choked. If his head fell off, she might expire with amusement.

Lady Mercy immediately wandered out into the passage to see what all the fuss was about, and with her talent for observing fault, pointed out that he’d split his breeches.

Eliza Cawley took charge. She shooed him down the passage into the kitchen, trying to cover his behind with her apron. James ducked his head to pass into the small, warm kitchen.

“Now you take those off, Mr. Hartley, and I’ll have them sewn up for you in no time.”

He glowered down at the little woman. “The name, madam, is Smallwick. You confuse me with someone else.”

She squinted through her round spectacles, lips drawn together in a small “o.”

“I assure you, madam,” he added firmly, “the name is Smallwick.”

The little woman knew otherwise, and he feared she might turn him out of her house, but instead, her misty-eyed gaze perused the bump on his brow and the black eye. Her expression softened. “I can see you’ve been in the wars, young man. Trailing after my niece has brought you little good fortune, no doubt.”

Her kindly tone surprised him. She must have been put out to suddenly receive three guests all at once in her tiny house—especially with one of them being a Hartley—yet she took time now to fuss over him, and he was grateful for it. His back ached from hauling that woman’s trunk around all day. His clothes were uncomfortably damp, and he was quite certain he had a broken ankle.

“Take off your breeches,” she repeated, “and I’ll have Molly Robbins mend them. She’s a bony wisp of a girl, whom a good gust of wind could blow clear across the common, and she’s in possession of a frightfully melancholic disposition, but she has a very neat stitch. Worry not a bit, young man, I’ve seen it all before. Drop your breeches. At my age, precious little is a shock anymore.”

He’d never been treated like this in his life. Servants were helpful but detached, and they did not chatter or pat his cheek as if he was a little boy up to no good. But it was quite pleasant.