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The manservant gave a Gallic shrug, shaking his head. “Il vous rit au nez.”
“Father doesn’t laugh in my nose, Duvall; he laughs in my face, and no, I don’t think so. Not this time,” Pierre corrected, smiling at the French interpretation of the old saying. “This time I think he is deadly serious, more’s the pity. My dearest, most loving father thinks I need to—”
“Tomber à plat ventre,” Duvall intoned gravely, folding his scrawny arms across his thin chest.
“Not really. You French may fall flat on your stomachs, Duvall. We English much prefer to land on our faces, if indeed we must take the fall at all. And how will you ever develop a workable knowledge of English if you insist upon lapsing into French the moment we are alone? Consider yourself forbidden the language from this moment, if you please.”
“Your father, he wishes for you to fall flat on your face,” Duvall recited obediently, then sighed deeply, so that his employer should be aware that he had injured him most gravely.
“Bless you, Duvall. Now, to get back to the point. I have been acting the fool these past years, a fact I will acknowledge only to you, and only this one time. There’s nothing else for it—I must seek out a good deed and perform it with humble dedication and no thought for my own interests. Do you suppose the opportunity for good deeds lies thick on the ground in Mayfair? No, I imagine not. Ah, well, one can only strive to do one’s best.”
“Humph!” was the manservant’s only reply before he turned his head to one side and ordered himself to go to sleep in the hope that the soft, well-sprung swaying of the traveling coach would not then turn his delicate Gallic stomach topsy-turvy.
Standish marveled silently yet again at the endless effrontery of his employee. The man, unlike the remainder of Pierre’s acquaintances, had no fear of him—and precious little awe. It was refreshing, this lack of deference, which was why Pierre treasured the spritely little Frenchman, who had been displaced to Piccadilly during Napoleon’s rush to conquer all the known world. Reaching across to lay a light blanket over the man’s shoulders, for it was September and the morning was cool, Pierre sat back once more, determined to enjoy the passing scenery.
It was shortly after regaining the main roadway, following a leisurely lunch at the busy Rose and Cross Inn—Pierre being particularly fond of country-cured ham—that it happened. One of the two burly outriders accompanying the coach called out to the driver to stop at once, for there was something moving in the small mountain of baggage strapped in the boot of the coach.
“How wonderfully intriguing. Do you suppose it is an animal of some sort?” Pierre asked the two outriders, the coachman, and a slightly green-looking Duvall a minute later as the small group assembled behind the halted coach. He lightly prodded the canvas wrapping with the tip of his cane, just at the spot the outrider had indicated. “I do pray it is not a fox, for I will confess that I am not a devotee of blood sports. Oh, dear. It moved again just then, didn’t it? My curiosity knows no bounds, I must tell you.”
“It’s a blinkin’ stowaway, that’s wot it tis,” decided the second outrider, just home from an extended absence at sea, a trip prompted not by his desire to explore the world, but rather at the expressed insistence of a press gang that had tapped him on the noggin with a heavy club and tossed him aboard a merchantman bound for India. “Let’s yank ’im out an’ keelhaul ’im!”
Pierre turned to look at the man, a large, beefy fellow whose hamlike hands were already closed into tight fists. “So violent, my friend? Why don’t we just boil the poor soul in oil and have done with it?”
Raising his voice slightly, Pierre went on, “You there—in the boot—I suggest you join us out here on the road, if you please. You can’t be too comfortable in there, knowing the amount of baggage I deem necessary for travel through the wilds of Sussex. When did you decide to join us? Perhaps when my baggage was undone to unearth my personal linens and utensils back at the so lovely Rose and Whatever Inn? Come out now, we shan’t hurt you.”
“Oi can’t,” a high, whiny voice complained from beneath the canvas. “Yer gots me trussed up like a blinkin’ goose in ’ere!”
Pierre tipped his head to one side, inspecting the canvas-covered boot. “Our unexpected passenger has a point there, gentlemen. It really was too bad of you, wasn’t it, even as I applaud your obvious high regard for the welfare of my personal possessions. Perhaps one of you will be so good as to lend some assistance to our beleaguered stowaway before he causes himself an injury?”
Less than a minute later the canvas had been drawn away to reveal a very small, very dirty face. “Hello. What have we here?” Pierre asked, peering into the semidarkness of the boot.
“Yer gots Jeremy ’Olloway, that wot yer gots!” the young boy shot back defiantly, pushing out his lower lip to blow a long strand of greasy blond hair from his eyes. “Now, stands back whilst Oi boosts m’self outta this blinkin’ ’ellhole!”
“How lovely,” Pierre drawled. “Such elegant speech. And a good day to you too, Master Holloway. Obviously, my friends, we have discovered a runaway young peer, bent on a lark in the country. Gentlemen, let us make our bows to Master Holloway.”
“That’s no gentry mort,” the burly outrider corrected, narrowly eyeing the young boy as he climbed down from his hiding place and quickly clamping a heavy hand on Jeremy’s thin shoulder as the lad looked ready to bolt for the concealment of the trees on the side of the road. “This ’ere ain’t nothin’ but a bleedin’ sweep!”
“Oi’m not!” Jeremy shot back, sticking out his chin, as if his denial could erase the damning evidence of his torn, sooty shirt and the scraped, burned-covered arms and legs that stuck out awkwardly from beneath his equally ragged, too-small suit of clothes.
“Of course you’re not a sweep,” Pierre agreed silkily, suppressing the need to touch his scented lace handkerchief to his nostrils as he looked at Jeremy and saw a quick solution to his need to do a good deed. “But if you were a sweep, and running away from an evil master who abused you most abominably, I should think I could find it in my heart to take you up with us for a space, until, say, we reach London? Listening to your speech, and detecting a rightful disdain for those so troublesome ‘aitches’, I believe you might feel at home in Piccadilly?”
Jeremy, who had begun eyeing Pierre assessingly, positively blossomed at the mention of Piccadilly. Quickly suppressing his excitement, he scuffed one bare big toe in the dirt and remarked coolly: “If Oi wuz a sweep—which Oi’m not, o’course—Oi might wants ter take yer up on that, guv’nor. The Piccadilly thing, yer knows.”
Duvall immediately burst into a rapid stream of emotional French, wringing his hands as he alternately cursed and pleaded with his master to reconsider this folly. Better they should all bed down with une mouffette, a skunk! Oh, woe, oh, woe! Poor master, to have a cracked bell in his head. Poor Duvall, to be so overset that he could not even think which saint to pray to!
Jeremy stood stoically by, grimy paws jammed down hard on even grimier hips, waiting for the barrage of French to run itself down, then said, “Aw, dub yer mummer, froggie. Oi ain’t ’eared such a ruckus since ol’ ’awkins burnt ’isself wit ’is own poker!”
Duvall stopped in mid-exclamation to glare down at the boy, his lips pursed, his eyes bulging. “Mon Dieu!” he declared. “This insect, this crawling bug, he has called me a frog. I will not stand for such an insult!”
“Stand still,” Pierre corrected smoothly, at last succumbing to the need to filter his breathing air through the handkerchief. “Now, if the histrionics are behind us—and I most sincerely pray that they are—I suggest that Jeremy crawl back into the boot, sans the cover, and the rest of us also return to our proper places. I wish to make London before Father Christmas.”
Satisfied that he was doing his good deed just as his father had recommended—and rescuing Jeremy from an evil master certainly seemed to qualify—Pierre once more settled himself against the midnight-blue velvet squabs and began mentally preparing a missive to his father detailing his charitable wonderfulness. “And that will be the end of that,” he said aloud, eyeing Duvall levelly and daring the manservant to contradict him.
The coach had gone no more than a mile when it stopped once more, the coachman hauling on the reins so furiously that Pierre found himself clutching the handstrap for fear of tumbling onto the narrow width of flooring between the seats.
“I am a reasonably good man, a loving son,” he assured himself calmly as he reached to open the small door that would allow him to converse with the driver. “I have my faults, I suppose, but I have never been a purposely mean person. Why then, Duvall, do you suppose I feel this overwhelming desire to draw and quarter my coachman?”
“If there truly is a God, the dirty little person will have been flung to the road on his dripping nose,” Duvall grumbled by way of an answer, adjusting his jacket after picking himself up from the floor of the coach where, as his reflexes were not so swift as his employer’s, the driver’s abrupt stop had landed him.
“Driver?” Pierre inquired urbanely, holding open the small door. “May I assume you have an explanation, or have you merely decided it is time you took yourself into the bushes to answer nature’s call?”
“Sorry, sir,” the coachman mumbled apologetically, leaning down to peer into the darkened interior of the coach. “But you see, sir, there’s a lady in the road. At least, I think it’s a lady.”
Pierre’s left brow lifted fractionally. “A lady,” he repeated consideringly. “How prudent of you not to run her down. My compliments on both your driving and your charity, although I cannot but wonder at your difficulty in deciding the gender of our roadblock. Perhaps now you might take it upon yourself to ask this lady to move?”
“I can’t, sir,” the coachman responded, the slight quiver in his voice reflecting both his lingering shock at avoiding a calamity and his fearful respect of his employer. “Like I told yer—she’s in the road. It’s a lady for sure, ’cause I can see her feet. I think mayhap she’s dead, and can’t move.”
Pierre’s lips twitched as he remarked quietly, “Her feet? An odd way to determine gender, Duvall, wouldn’t you say?” His next communication to the coachman followed, both his words and his offhand tone announcing that he was decidedly unimpressed. “Dead, you say, coachman? That would be an impediment to movement, wouldn’t it?”
Duvall quickly blessed himself, muttering something in French that may have been “Blessed Mary protect us, and why couldn’t it have been the sweep?”
“A dead lady in the middle of the road,” Pierre mused again out loud, already moving toward the coach door. “I imagine I should see this deceased lady for myself.” With one foot in the road, he paused to order quietly: “Arm yourself, coachman, and instruct the outriders to scan the trees for horsemen. This may be a trap. There are still robbers along this roadway.
“Although I would have thought it would be easier to throw a dead tree into the road, rather than a dead lady,” he added under his breath as he disengaged Duvall’s convulsive grip on his coattail. “Please, my good friend,” he admonished with a smile. “Consider the fabric, if not your long hours with the iron.”
Pierre stepped completely onto the roadway, nodding almost imperceptibly to the two outriders while noting with mingled comfort and amusement that the coachman was now brandishing a very mean-looking blunderbuss at the ready. A quick look to the rear of the coach assured him that his Good Deed was still firmly anchored in the boot, as the streetwise Jeremy Holloway’s dirt-streaked face was peeping around the edge of the coach, his eyes wide as saucers. “Oi’ve got yer back, guv’nor,” the boy whispered hoarsely. “Don’t yer go worryin’ ’bout dat.”
“Such loyalty deserves a reward,” Pierre whispered back at the boy. “If we get out of this with our skin intact, Master Holloway, I shall allow you to sit up top with the coachman.” As the coachman gave out with an audible groan, Pierre began strolling toward the standing horses, his demeanor decidedly casual, as if he were merely taking the air in the park.
Once he had come up beside the off-leader, he could see the woman, who was, just as the coachman had reported, lying facedown in the roadway and looking, for all intents and purposes, extremely dead. She was dressed in a man’s drab grey cloak, its hood having fallen forward to hide her face as well as whatever gown she wore beneath its voluminous expanse. Her stockinged, shoeless feet—small feet attached to rather shapely slim ankles, he noted automatically, for he was a man who appreciated female beauty—extended from beneath the hem of the cloak, but her hands were pinned beneath her, out of sight.
He walked to within two paces of her, then used the tip of his cane to lightly nudge her in the rib cage. There was no response, either from the woman or from the heavily wooded perimeters of the road. If the woman was only feigning injury and in league with highwaymen, her compatriots were taking their sweet time in making their presence known.
Gingerly lowering himself onto his haunches, and being most careful not to muddy the knees of his skintight fawn buckskin breeches, Pierre took hold of the woman in the area of her shoulder and gently turned her onto her back.
“Ohh.” The sound was soft, barely more than a faint expulsion of air, but it had come from the woman. Obviously she had not yet expired, not that her life expectancy could be numbered in more than a few minutes or hours if she were to continue to lie in the middle of the roadway.
“She toes-cocked, guv’nor, or wot?”
Jeremy’s voice, coming from somewhere behind Pierre’s left shoulder, made him realize that he had been paying attention to the woman when he should have been listening for highwaymen. “She’s not dead, if that’s what that colorful expression is meant to imply,” he supplied tonelessly, pushing the hood from the woman’s face so that he could get a better look at her.
What he saw made him inhale involuntarily, his left brow raising a fraction in surprise. The woman was little more than a girl, and she was exceedingly beautiful, in an ethereal way. Masses of softly waving hair the color of midnight tangled across her ashen, dirt-smeared face, trailing strands that lovingly clung to the small, finely sculpted features that carried the unmistakable stamp of good bloodlines.
Quickly seeking out her limp arm to feel for her pulse, Pierre mentally noted the fragile slimness of her wrist and the slender perfection of her hand and fingers. Her cold hand and frigid fingers.
“Master Holloway, be a good boy and go tell Duvall to bring me a blanket,” Pierre ordered without looking away from the young woman’s face, wrapping her once more in the worn grey cloak. “And have him bring my flask as well. This poor child is chilled through to the bone.”
Once Duvall had brought the blanket, Pierre draped it over the young woman and hefted her upper body onto his knees, intent on forcing her to drink some of the warming brandy. It was no use. The brandy ran into her mouth, only to dribble back onto her chin. Handing the flask back to his manservant—who immediately took a restorative dose of the fiery liquid for himself—Pierre lifted the young woman completely into his arms and returned to the coach.
“Yer takin’ ’er with us?” the seafaring outrider questioned worriedly. “Wimmen is bad luck aboard, that’s wot they are. Always wuz, always will be. Better yer toss ’er back. She’s a small one anyways.”
Pierre silenced the man with a look. “Turn this equipage about at once, if you please. I have a sudden desire to return to Standish Court. And don’t spare the horses,” he ordered the driver as he swept into the coach, the young woman lolling bonelessly in his arms.
Beneath his breath he added, “I do begin to believe my loving parent has put a fatherly curse on me. I am suddenly overrun with unlooked-for Good Deeds. But, being a loving son, and not a greedy man, I also believe that at least one of these humanizing projects rightfully belongs to him. Duvall,” he called out, “tell the coachman that Jeremy is to ride atop with him.”
CHAPTER THREE
“COO, GUV’NOR, would yer jist look at dat! Dat gentry mort looks jist like yer—wit a coffin o’ snow plopped on ’is ’ead!”
André Standish leveled a cool, assessing look at the untidy urchin perched on top of the traveling coach, then descended the few remaining steps to the gravel drive and addressed his son through the lowered coach window. “An acquaintance of yours, Pierre? He has an interesting way with description. Have you lost your way and must retrace your steps, or have you somehow learned that cook is preparing your favorite meal for tonight—a lovely brown ragôut of lamb with peas—and it is your stomach that brings you back to me?”
“My current favorite meal is rare roasted beef with horseradish sauce,” Pierre corrected, “although I know it is rude of me to point out this single lapse in your seemingly faultless store of information about me. And no,” he said, shifting the human weight in his arms in preparation for leaving the coach, “much as I love you, I have not lost my way. May I infringe upon your affection by prevailing upon you to open this door?”
André complied with a courtly bow, flinging open the door and personally letting down the steps. A moment later, Pierre was standing beside him in the drive, the young woman still lying limply in his arms.
The older Standish gently pushed back the hood of the grey cloak, revealing the young woman’s face. “I detect the smell of brandy. I foolishly thought I had raised you better than this. Surely you haven’t taken to drugging your females, Pierre?”
“Not lately, Father. My coachman nearly ran over her as she lay in the road.”
“Unconscious? A head injury?” André asked, not wasting time in useless questions as to how the female had come to be in the road in the first place.
“Most definitely unconscious.”
“Have you learned her name?” André asked as the two men hurriedly mounted the steps to the house, Jeremy Holloway at their heels until Duvall stuck out one foot and tripped him so that he landed facedown in the drive.
“I like to think of her as Miss Penance,” Pierre replied immediately. “Whether she is mine or yours remains to be seen. Duvall,” he called over his shoulder, “I saw that. For shame. I would not have believed it of you. Now wash it and feed it and put it to bed.”
Duvall, having no trouble in understanding who “it” was, tottered over to lean against the side of the traveling coach and buried his head in his hands.
“SHE’S STILL SLEEPING?” André asked the question three hours later as Pierre entered the drawing room, having excused himself after dinner to check on their patient.
“Hartley assures me that she’ll sleep through to the morning,” he told his father. “It may only be a butler’s opinion, but as the doctor said much the same thing before he left, I believe we can safely assume it’s true. She’s got a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg on the side of her head.”
“Poor Miss Penance,” André commented, accepting the snifter of brandy his son offered him. “She’ll have a bruiser of a headache when she wakes, I fear. Now, do you think it’s possible for you to tell me about the urchin? We somehow neglected to speak of him over dinner, perhaps hoping to preserve our appetites, for he was most unappealing when last I saw him. Duvall appears to dislike him, a lack of affection that seems to be mutual. I happened to pass by the bedroom as your man was giving the boy a bath, you see. The language spewing forth from the pair of them was enough to put me to the blush.”
Pierre took a sip of brandy. “Duvall likes everyone very little, save me, of course, for whom he would gladly die if asked. A man could become quite full of himself, knowing that. But to answer your question, young Master Jeremy Holloway is a runaway—having escaped the life of a chimney sweep, if my powers of deduction are correct. He chose my coach as his route to freedom when we stopped for luncheon.”
“An enterprising young lad,” André remarked, watching the burnished liquid swirl and gleam as he rubbed the brandy snifter lightly back and forth between his palms. “Oh, by the by—young Master Holloway would like to have a hot poker inserted in an area of Duvall’s anatomy that is not usually spoken of in more polite circles. Duvall, in his turn, would like the boy deposited in a dirty sack posthaste and drowned in the goldfish pond—as I am convinced my understanding of gutter French is still reasonably accurate. My goodness, I begin to feel like a spy reporting to his superior.”
“Duvall likes to think of himself as bloodthirsty,” Pierre remarked calmly. “Even taking Duvall’s sensibilities into account, however,” he went on silkily, “I do believe I shall take Jeremy as my Good Deed, and leave the disposition of Miss Penance to you.”
André blinked once. “Indeed,” he drawled, setting the snifter down very carefully. “And might I ask why I’m to be gifted with an unknown female with a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg on her pate?”
“Of course.” Pierre lifted his own snifter and tipped it slightly in André’s direction. “I won’t even remind you of how you maneuvered me so meanly once you learned about Quinton. Shall we drink to poetic justice, Father?”
THE MORNING ARRIVED very early, very abruptly and in full voice.
“How dare you! Get your hands off me! At once! Do you hear me?”
Obviously the injured young lady had come to her senses with a vengeance. Mere seconds after her screams had stopped, Pierre—who had been sleeping most peacefully in the adjoining chamber—skidded to a halt just inside the bedroom that had been assigned to Miss Penance, still tying the sash of his maroon banyan around his trim waist.
“I imagine you can be heard in Bond Street, brat,” he commented, running his fingers through his sleep-mussed hair and ruefully looking down at his bare legs and feet. Raising his head, he addressed the butler, whom he espied backing toward the door to the hall, a china cup and saucer nervously chattering against the silver tray he was clutching with two hands, his face white with shock. “Ah, Hartley, dear fellow, what seems to be the matter?”
Hartley’s lips moved, quivered actually, but no words came forth.
“What seems to be the problem?” the woman asked. “What seems to be the problem! I awoke to see this man leaning over my bed! That’s the problem! And why are you asking him? And who are you? You’re not even dressed, for pity’s sake. What has the world come to when a lady can’t get some sleep without all the world creeping into her bedchamber, with only the good Lord knows what on their minds, that’s what I want to know. Well, don’t just stand there with your mouths at half cock. You both have some explaining to do!”
“Hartley, you may retire now,” Pierre offered kindly as the elderly butler looked about to expire from mingled shock and indignation. “And please accept my congratulations. I didn’t know you were still considered to be such a danger to the ladies.”
Leaning his shoulder against the doorjamb, his arms folded against his chest, one bare leg crossed negligently over the other at the ankles, Pierre then allowed his gaze to take a slow, leisurely assessment of the young woman occupying the bed.
She was still as beautiful as his initial impression of her had indicated, with her small features lovingly framed by a heavy mass of coal-black hair, her pale skin made creamy where her slim throat rose above the fine white lawn of Eleanore Standish’s nightgown. His first sight of her long-lashed, blue-violet eyes only reconfirmed his opinion. However, she might not be quite as young as he had first thought, for the light of intelligence burned brightly in her eyes. “Unless it’s fever,” he hedged aloud, knowing his wits weren’t usually at their sharpest this early in the day. His early morning wits or the lack of them to one side for the moment, Miss Penance was still a most remarkably beautiful young woman.
“Well?” she asked, pushing her hands straight out in front of her, palms upward and gesturing toward him. “Have you somehow been turned to marble, sir? Perhaps I should remind you of your current situation? You’re in a lady’s bedchamber without invitation. I suggest you retire before I’m forced to do you an injury.”
Pierre smiled. “Oh, Father’s going to adore you,” he said silkily. “What’s your name, little Amazon? We can’t go on calling you Miss Penance, although my spur of the moment christening now seems to border on the inspired. Please, madam, give me a name.”
“My name?” she croaked, wincing.
“Your name,” Pierre repeated. “As you’re sleeping in my father’s house, I don’t believe it is an out-of-the-way demand.”
Miss Penance slumped against the pillows, suddenly appearing to be even smaller than she had before, her chin on her chest. “So you don’t know who I am, either,” she said in a small voice, all her bravado deserting her. “I had hoped—”
She sniffed, a portion of her spunk reasserting itself. “I should have known I’d be looking for mare’s nests, asking for some spark of intelligence from a man who has that much hair on his legs and is vain enough to consider showing it off to strangers.”
“Eight to five you’re a parson’s eldest,” Pierre was stung into replying. “And a Methodist parson to boot. Only the worse sort of strumpet or a holier-than-thou old maid would even dare utter the word ‘leg’ in front of a gentleman. Somehow, I can’t quite picture you in the role of strumpet. You dislike men entirely too much. Which leaves us with only the other alternative. Now, are you really trying to tell me that you have no recollection of your own name?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Of course I know my own name! Everyone knows his own name,” she shot back at him. “I just—” Her voice began to lose some of its confidence. “I just seem to have, um, momentarily misplaced the memory. It’ll come to me any time now. I’m sure of it.”
“How reassuring,” Pierre soothed, slowly advancing into the room. “And, of course, once you succeed in locating this truant name, you’ll doubtless inform me as to why you were lying unconscious in the middle of the roadway just north of here, obstructing traffic and upsetting my coachman no end. It’s the merest bagatelle—no more than a trifling inconvenience—this temporary lapse.”
The violet eyes shot blue-purple flame. “Oh, do be quiet, Mr.—”
“Standish,” Pierre supplied immediately, lowering himself into a seated position on the bottom of the bed. “Pierre Standish. See how easy that was. Now you try it. How utterly charmed I am to meet you, Miss—”
She nodded her head three times, as if the movement would jog her memory. “Miss…Miss…oh, drat! I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“Quietly, my dear Miss Forgetful, quietly,” Pierre scolded absently. “We shall abandon this exercise momentarily, as it seems only to annoy you, and speak of other things. How is your head? You sustained a rather nasty bump on it, one way or another.”
She reached up to gingerly inspect the lump she had discovered earlier upon awakening. “It’s still there, if that’s any answer,” she told him. “Your guess is as good as mine as to how I came to have it. And, even though I am sure it matters little to you, it hurts like the very devil.”
Pierre frowned at her use of the word “devil.” Tipping his head to one side, he commented, “I believe we can dispense with the notion that you are a parson’s daughter. Your language is too broad.”
“Then I am to be the worst sort of strumpet?” she asked, narrowing her eyes belligerently. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Pierre shook his head, “No, not a strumpet, either. You’re much too insulting. You’d have starved by now.”
“Perhaps I am a thief,” she suggested, pulling the blankets more firmly under her chin. “Perhaps you should be locking up your family silver at this very moment, for fear I shall lope off with it the instant I find my clothes. I may assume that I have some clothing somewhere? Not that I’m likely to recognize it any more than I recognize this nightgown I have on now.”
