This Wicked Gift (6 page)

“Vinny,” he said again, “have you taken
care of my note yet? Because I could—I mean, I
 
should
 
help.”

And how could she answer?
 
She
 
hadn’t taken care of his note. But
James wouldn’t have to worry about the matter ever again.
As
for William…

Lavinia pasted a false smile across her
lips. “You have nothing to worry about,” she said. “It’s all taken care of.
He’s all taken care of.”

Or he will be, soon.

I
T SEEMED INCONCEIVABLE
 
to William that
life should continue on as usual the morning after he’d damned himself. The
night passed nonetheless. The London streets a few blocks over awoke and
rumbled as a hundred sellers prepared for market. Not only did the clock
continue on schedule, but—as if fate itself were laughing up its sleeve at
him—they marched inexorably on to Monday morning.

Monday.
After he’d betrayed all
finer points of civilization, nothing so trivial as a Monday morning should have
been allowed to exist.
And yet Monday persisted.

When William stepped on the streets, he
shrank into the shoulders of his coat and pulled his hat over his eyes. But as
he walked down Peter Street, nobody
 
raised
the hue and cry. No cries of “Stop! Despoiler of women!” followed his steps.
Yesterday he’d snared an innocent woman in his bed by the foulest of means.
Today nobody even gave him a second glance.

Up until the moment when William arrived
at the gray Portland stone building where he worked, just opposite Chancery
Lane, the day seemed a Monday much like every other Monday that had come
before: gray, dreary and unfortunately necessary. But as soon as William opened
the door to the office, he knew that this was not going to be an ordinary
Monday.

It was going to be worse. Everyone, from
Mr. Dunning, the manager, to Jimmy, the courier boy, sat stiffly. There were no
jokes, no exchanged conversations. David Holder, one of William’s fellow
clerks, inclined his head ever so slightly to the left.

There stood his employer. The elderly
Marquess of Blakely was solid and ever so slightly stooped with age. If one
were boasting in a tavern, the man might have seemed the most respectable
master, the sort that any employee would feel proud to serve. When William had first
arrived, he’d spun a fantasy in which his keen mind and meticulous work made
him indispensable to the marquess. In his dreamworld, he’d been granted
promotions, advances in wages. He’d won the respect of everyone around him.

That dream had been exceedingly short in
duration. It had lasted a week from the day he was hired—until he’d met the
man.

The old marquess was a tyrant. In his
mind, he didn’t employ servants; he grudgingly shelled out money for minions.
The marquess didn’t merely demand the obeisance and courtesy due his station,
he required groveling. And, every so often, instead of raising a man up for
skill and dedication, he chose an employee and delved into his work until he
found an error—and no worker, however conscientious, was ever perfect—and then
let the man loose. William and his fellow servants went to work every day
swallowing fear for breakfast.

Fear did not sit well on a belly and heart
as empty as William’s was today. He stood frozen in the old marquess’s
gray-browed sights.

“Ah.” Old as he was, the marquess’s gaze
did not waver, not in the slightest. It was William who dropped his eyes, of
course, bobbing his head in hated obeisance. He fumbled hastily with his hat,
pulling it from his head. For a long while the elderly lord simply stared at
him. William wasn’t sure if he should offer the insult of turning his back so
he could hang up his hat, or if he must stand icebound in place, headgear
uncomfortably clutched in his hands.

The marquess turned his head, looking at
William side on. With that shock of graying hair, the pose reminded William of
some dirty-white bird of prey. The image wouldn’t have bothered him quite so
much if William hadn’t felt like so
much worm
to the
other man’s raptor.

His lordship glanced away, and William gulped
air in
 
relief. But instead of
moving his attention to another man, the marquess simply pulled a watch from
his pocket.

“Whoever you are,” he announced, “you’re a
minute late to your seat.”

I wouldn’t have been had you not glowered
at me.
 
But William held his tongue. He couldn’t
afford to lose his position. “I apologize, my lord. It won’t happen again.”

“No, it won’t.” The marquess gave the
words a rather more sinister complexion. “Blight, is it?”

“Actually, it’s White, my lord. William
White.”

He should not have offered correction.
Lord Blakely’s eyes narrowed.

“Ah, yes. Bill Blight.”

He spoke as if William had not worked for
him these three years. As if instead of names, his employees were possessed of
empty pages, and the marquess could fill those bleak tablets with any syllables
he found convenient.

“Come into the back office,” the marquess
said calmly. “And do bring the books you’ve worked on for the last two years.”

An invitation to the back office was as
good as a death sentence. It felt like an eternity that William stood, fixed in
space. But what good would it to do to scream or shout? If he went quietly, Mr.
Dunning might help him find another position when he was sacked.

How ironic, that he’d divested himself so
unthinkingly of those ten pounds, when he might find them of such immediate
use. No—not ironic. It was the opposite of ironic.

Perhaps it was appropriate that he’d been
singled out. He wasn’t fit for polite society, after all. Not after what he’d
done to Lavinia. How could he ever make it up to her? Maybe this, finally, was
the censure he’d been expecting all morning. He’d accept whatever came his way
as his just due.

Once inside the back office, the marquess
picked one of the books at random. He thumbed through it slowly, his fat
fingers pausing every so often, before moving onward. William stared past him.
The room’s furnishings could well have been as old as the marquess. The
wallpaper had long gone brown, and dry curls of paper at the edge of the
baseboard were working their way off the wall.

Finally the lord lifted his head. “You
seem to do good work,” the old Lord Blakely said. Said by anyone else, it would
be a compliment. But William’s employer twisted the sentence in his mouth,
giving a slight emphasis to the word
 
seem.
 
By
the ugly glint in his eye, William knew he was adding his own caveat:
 
I am not fooled
by your apparent competence.

“Tell me,” the marquess continued. “On
September 16, 1821, you entered three transactions related to the home-farm in
Kent. I’d like a few specifics.”

Fifteen months ago. The man focused on
transactions made fifteen bloody months ago? How could
 
William possibly recall the details of
a transaction more than a year in age? One did not keep books so that one could
browbeat the person who entered a transaction.

One didn’t unless one happened to be the
Marquess of Blakely.

“It is the first transaction, for two
pounds six, that I—”

The door opened quietly behind them,
interrupting his speech.

The old marquess looked up. His fists
clenched the account book, and his eyes widened. He drew himself up,
undoubtedly to castigate the fool who had the temerity to interrupt this ritual
sacrifice. William drew his breath in, thinking he’d won a reprieve. If he had,
the intruder would undoubtedly take on William’s punishment. Whoever it was
walked forward, steady, heavy footsteps crossing the room. A mixture of shame
and relief flooded William. Perhaps he might keep his position—but it was a
sorry man who hoped his carcass would be saved because a shark choked on
another fish first. It was an even sorrier man who hoped so, knowing that of
all the fellows in the
office,
he was most deserving
of punishment.

But instead of one of William’s fellow
clerks or the estate manager, the young man who came abreast of William’s chair
was the one person the old marquess could not sack.

It was his eldest grandson. William had
seen the man only once, and at a distance. But he’d been accounting for the
details of the man’s funds for three years.
Gareth Carhart.
Viscount Wyndleton, for now.
The man was a few years
younger than William. He had attended Harrow, then Cambridge. He had a
substantial fortune, received a comfortable allowance from his grandfather, and
he would inherit the marquessate. William almost felt as if he knew the fellow.
He was certain he held the young, privileged lord in dislike.

The young viscount might have had a
hundred servants available to do his bidding. But incongruously, the man was
carrying his own valise. He set this luggage on the ground and placed his hands
gently on his grandfather’s desk.

No thumping, no shouting, no untoward
drama of any sort. Had William not been a mere foot away, he would not even
have detected the rigid tension in the muscles on the backs of his hands.

“Thank you very much.” The viscount’s
words were quiet—not unemotional, William realized, but so suffused with
emotion that only that flat, invariant tone could contain his disdain. “I
appreciate your telling the carriage drivers not to take me to Hampshire. I
applaud your decision to bribe—how many was it? It must have been every owner
of a private conveyance in London, so that they would not take me, either. But
it took real genius on your part to outright purchase the Hampshire coach lines
in their entirety, five days before Christmas.”

“Well.” The old Lord Blakely preened and
examined
 
his nails. Of course,
the man did not find anything
so
uncouth as dirt near
his fingers, but he nonetheless brushed away an imagined speck.
“How lovely of you to admit my intelligence.
Now do you
believe that I was serious when I told you that if you did not give up your
foolish scientific pursuits, you would not see that woman?”

William might have drowned in the sea of
their exchanged sarcasm. Neither man seemed to care that he was in the room. He
was invisible—a servant, a hired man. He might have been etched on the curling
wallpaper, for all the attention that they paid him.

The young viscount lifted his chin. “That
woman,” he said carefully, “is my
 
mother.”

William felt a twinge of satisfaction. He
ought not to have reveled in the other man’s pain, but it was delicious to know
that even money could not buy freedom.

“I’m leaving,” Lord Wyndleton continued.

“No, you are not. What you are doing is
throwing a tantrum, like a child demanding a boiled sweet. It is long past time
that you gave up that natural philosophy nonsense and learned to manage an
estate like a lord.”

“I can read a damned account book.”

“Yes, but can you manage seventeen separate
properties? Can you keep a host of useless and unmotivated servitors bent to
their tasks?”

The young viscount’s gaze cut briefly
toward William. William felt himself analyzed, cataloged—and then, just as
swiftly, dismissed, an obstacle as irrelevant and underwhelming as a dead black
beetle lying in the middle of a thoroughfare.

“How difficult can it be?”

“Bill Blight, why don’t you explain to my
grandson what I had planned for you?”

“You were, I believe, going to look
through my work until you found an error.
My lord.”
 
And then you
were going to turn me off
.

“Blight, tell him what I really intended.”

William pressed his lips together. “You
were going to sack me to induce terror in your staff.”

That sort of sentence—bald and
unforgiving—ought to have gotten him tossed out on his ear.

Instead, the marquess smiled.
“Precisely so.
Wyndleton, how do you suppose I managed to
thwart your ill-fated flight this morning? I assure you, I did not need to
bribe every driver in London. I keep my staff in line—and that means they do as
I say, what I say, no matter the cost.”

The young viscount’s nostrils flared.

“You think you can be a marquess? Like
that?” The marquess snapped his fingers. “Get your valise. Spend these two days
with me—do as I say—and you’ll start to learn how it’s done. Someday you might
even get to thwart me. Or you would, if you had the money to do it.”

Still Lord Wyndleton did not move. He
stood next to William, his arms rigid, his fingers curving into the desk like
claws.

“Come along,” the marquess said. “I
shouldn’t have to spoon-feed you these lessons. If you’ll listen to me, I’ll
have the carriage take you over late Christmas Eve.” The old man stood up and
walked to the door. He didn’t look back.