Not Quite a Lady (8 page)

The large and comfortably arranged room was obviously in frequent use. Books, covering every subject under the sun, filled the oak shelves lining the walls. In the room’s center stood an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system. Elsewhere Darius saw a pair of globes and a telescope, several more tables of various kinds, and a ladder. All the usual accoutrements, in other words, of the well equipped library.

The rector sat snoring, his head resting upon the back of a sofa near the fireplace. A book lay open on the table in front of him.

“It seems I’m not the only one eager to get away from Mrs. Badger-Me,” Darius whispered.

He received one sidelong glance from the cool blue eyes, too quick for him to read.

“Papa has always encouraged his guests to wander the public rooms as they please,” she said. “He wants them to feel at home.”

She continued across the room to a large table near the south-facing windows. Beyond the windows, the long summer day had ended early under a thickening blanket of clouds. Darius heard rain pattering on the terrace outside.

Inside, pier glasses hung between the darkened windows. In their mirrors danced the flames of the recently lit candelabra standing on the matching pier tables. In the nearest glass he saw, too, the open doorway behind them and servants passing in the hall outside.

Lady Charlotte opened the large portfolio that lay on the table.

Darius did not immediately join her at the table. He bent and looked under it. He walked around and looked behind it. He looked up at the ceiling, then at the windows.

“The plans are here, Mr. Carsington,” she said, tapping a slim finger on the portfolio.

“I’m looking for the trap,” he said, keeping his voice low. “First Mrs. S, then Mrs. B, then Lady L. What next, I wonder? A hinged door that opens up beneath my feet and drops me into a vipers’ pit?”

“I’ve never seen a viper at Lithby Hall,” she said.

“
Vipera talka-lot-icus, Vipera henpeck-us-to-death-icus, Vipera-bankrupt-me-remodeling-my-house-icus.”

Her lips quivered. To his disappointment, though, the placid cow expression swiftly settled back into place.

“Here is a drawing of Lithby Hall at the end of the seventeenth century,” she said in the dispassionate tone of a lecturer. “Here it is a century and a half later. This is more or less how my stepmother found it when she first came.”

Darius drew nearer. “Is that a moat?” he said, sliding one of the larger drawings toward him.

She nodded. “It’s less obvious now. Grandfather turned a section into an ornamental lake. An orangery once stood where the kitchens and servants’ hall are. In this one you can see how they closed in the kitchen court. Stepmama added the vestibule, there.” She pointed. “But the greatest changes were inside. This house used to be gloomy and oppressive and cold—or so it seemed to me, as a child. She brought light and warmth.”

He gazed at her, surprised, as he had been earlier, at the way her voice softened when she spoke of how her stepmother had transformed Lithby Hall.

“You are fond of your stepmother,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I know it is abnormal. I am supposed to hate her.”

“It’s certainly unusual,” he said. “Females can be more viciously territorial than males.”

“Can we, indeed?” She looked at him, and he had the distinct sensation of being assessed or tested in some way. “Have you made a study of women, then, too, Mr. Carsington? I’m surprised I haven’t heard of it. Papa quotes you all the time. I envisioned you as a sage.” She looked away, her brow knit. “I saw you with sparse, white hair and a stoop. And spectacles. People must be shocked the first time they come to hear you lecture.”

Oh, she was good. She’d turned the conversation smoothly from herself to him.

She ought to know how to do it, at her great age!

And he ought to know how to press on, at his age. “I have not yet lectured on familial relationships,” he said. “I have studied them, however.”
In self-defense,
he could have added. “Your case is most intriguing. You had already emerged from childhood when your father remarried. You had to give way to a woman merely nine years older than yourself. This same woman has borne your father four sons so far, the eldest of whom will inherit the title and property. Yet you seem neither jealous nor resentful.”

“It is like having an older sister,” Lady Charlotte said.

“One might resent or be jealous of a sibling,” he said.

“One might,” she said. “You speak from experience, I daresay, having four older brothers.”

Damnation. She was too good.

“I don’t have to live with them,” he said. “Boys are usually sent away to school. We don’t have to live under the same roof for years on end. Women do. They are usually eager to have homes of their own.”

“This is my home,” she said.

She took some sketches out of a portfolio, clearly wishing to put an end to the subject.

Perhaps he had become too personal. He was not used to conversing with Society maidens—but it was maddening not to know why she
was
a maiden still.

Though Mrs. Steepleton had talked endlessly, she’d added only one more rumor to those surrounding Lady Charlotte.

This one concerned a mysterious illness in her youth: For a time it was believed that Lady Charlotte would soon follow her mother to the grave. However, after her stepmother took her for an extended stay in the north, then another in the Swiss Alps, she’d recovered from the ailment and made her debut belatedly, at the age of twenty.

The illness, Mrs. Steepleton whispered, was the reason Lord Lithby allowed her more freedom than some people thought proper.

Not much of an explanation. A debut at age twenty still left Lady Charlotte eight Seasons to get a husband.

Darius would find out the answer, eventually. He always found out the answer.

“Not all of the changes Stepmama made are merely aesthetic,” she said. “It was more than decorating. She made important repairs and improvements.”

He drew closer to her and tried to fix his full attention on the sketches.

“New floorboards for certain rooms,” she said. “New airholes cut for ventilation…”

She went on about chimney pots, windows, and tiled floors, about water closets and washstands and calling bells, about painting and plastering and carpentry.

He was soon left in no doubt that bringing Beechwood House into order would cost a king’s ransom. Simply maintaining it at a minimum level would be costly. He couldn’t afford it.

He didn’t want to think about money.

He didn’t want to think about pipes and drawer pulls and stove bottoms.

He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. He’d come too close, and he’d caught her scent. She spoke of ventilation, and he was aware mainly of the light scent of flowers or herbs wafting about her—the soap she used or the herbs stored with her clothes. He bent his head and drank it in.

The soft skin of her neck was inches away from his mouth.

You are three and a half inches from serious trouble,
said Logic.

Darius made himself straighten.

What he couldn’t do was keep his mind on house maintenance.

When she talked of stoved feathers—cooked first, she explained, to kill vermin—to fill mattresses, he saw himself lifting her off her feet and tossing her onto a bed.

He saw her grinning wickedly up at him, the same wicked grin she’d worn when she delivered him to Mrs. Steepleton.

She’s playing with you,
said Logic.
Maiden she may be. Naïve she isn’t.

He firmly banished the pictures from his mind. “It seems a great deal of work,” he said. “I wonder at Lady Lithby’s undertaking it. Though others will do the actual labor at Beechwood, she must supervise and keep track of everything.”

“Not if you hire a competent house steward.” Lady Charlotte tipped her head to one side and studied the sketches with a critical eye. The movement set her eardrops swaying. One lightly touched her cheek. “Your land agent Quested will find the right man for you.”

“He’s finding me a land steward,” said Darius.
At two hundred pounds per annum.
“I understood that the steward would manage the household as well as the land.”

“That is how Lady Margaret arranged matters,” she said. “And that is how my grandfather did it. But it is an old-fashioned system. Not at all efficient. Ask Papa.”

“Beechwood is not like Lithby Hall,” Darius said. “It is a more modest dwelling, and my needs are far more modest than those of a convivial peer with a large family and an extensive acquaintance.”

She turned her head toward him. Captivated by the teasing eardrop, he’d drawn closer, so very close that he could feel the warmth radiating from her body. Her clean scent was everywhere, it seemed. His mouth was mere inches from hers.

Her gaze lowered to his mouth.

Her breath came a little faster.

He leaned in a little closer.

She turned away. “Colonel Morrell,” she said. “What is your opinion regarding house stewards?”

Darius swore silently, casually eased away from her, and looked in the same direction.

The colonel crossed the threshold and quickly covered the length of the room.

She must have spotted him in the pier glass. But how long had she known he was there?

How long, before she noticed, had Morrell stood in the doorway, watching and listening?

“I should think a butler sufficient for a smaller property, particularly a bachelor’s abode,” he said. “But we soldiers are accustomed to spartan living. I should consider a housekeeper and valet and perhaps a few day servants more than sufficient. However, I am told that this is a disgracefully nipfarthing, cheeseparing way of getting on, not at all in keeping with my consequence.”

He did not say who had told him this, probably because the critic’s husband snored nearby.

Morrell joined them at the table, taking a position on the other side of Lady Charlotte.

“I was ordered to come and look at the pictures and discover ways to make my house grander,” he said. “Is this your work, Lady Charlotte? Your draftsmanship is very good.”

In the process of taking up the picture, he contrived, without being obvious about it, to draw nearer to her.

She edged away from him, which brought her closer to Darius. He ought to move away, too, to give her space. But he knew that Morrell hadn’t closed in merely to be near her. He knew she would back away, and he thought Darius would retreat to give her room. This would push Darius to the very edge of the table. One more such maneuver would force Darius to the other side of the table, where he must view the material sideways.

A territorial move, in short.

One could be amused, and let the fellow have the lady to himself. After all, Darius had no use for her.

However, he had grown up as the youngest of five aggressive males. He never gave up ground without a fight.

He moved not an inch.

Morrell reached out to pick up another sketch, moving nearer still to Lady Charlotte as he did so.

She backed away, and since Darius stood with his hip against the table, this brought her rump against his breeding organs. They instantly took notice of her.

As did she of them, with a sharp intake of breath.

Though his own breathing wasn’t steady, Darius casually reached for another picture. “Ah, the dairy,” he said. “One thing—one of many—I miss in London is fresh country cream and butter. City cream doesn’t taste the same at all.”

“You will need cows, then,” said Lady Charlotte. She set her heel down on his toe.

She put some weight on it, and though he was wearing thin evening shoes rather than boots, it was not enough to make him yield. “I’m a countryman,” he said. “I know where milk and cream come from.”

She shifted her weight onto the one foot. Hers was no great weight, but his toes, unlike his upper body, were not constructed to bear it. He swallowed a gasp…and withdrew.

“I thought you were a London man,” Colonel Morrell said as he perused a plan. “You lecture there often, I believe.”

Careful to keep his toes out of danger, Darius picked up another document. A crayon sketch, which must have been stuck to the bottom of it, fell to the table.

Lady Charlotte reached for the sketch, but Darius got it first.

“I lecture in London,” Darius said. “I learn in the country. In Derbyshire—not very far from here, in fact. My brother Alistair lives in the Peak, near Mat-lock Bath. Who is this sweet creature, Lady Charlotte? I cannot read the inscription.”

In the picture, a woman sat on the doorstep of a cottage, dandling her infant.

Lady Charlotte snatched the picture from him. “It must have fallen on the floor,” she said. “One of the maids must have picked it up when she was cleaning and put it with the others. It doesn’t belong to this lot. It’s one of the villagers with her child. Merely the sort of rustic scene ladies are expected to draw. Well, I will leave you gentlemen to debate the finer points of dairy farming.”

She hurried out of the library.

That was odd,
Darius thought.

Morrell must have thought so, too, because his brow knit as he turned and watched Lady Charlotte go. But neither man remarked on it. With stiff courtesy they exchanged opinions about dairies, brew-houses, and bakehouses. They agreed that Lithby Hall’s kitchen court was conveniently situated and arranged. Then Mrs. Badgely came in and woke her husband, after which they all returned to the drawing room.

Darius kept away from Lady Charlotte. He could not believe he’d taken such risks in the library. He was not a boy of fifteen. He knew better. Now of all times he needed to keep a clear head. He was going to prove his father wrong. He was going to revive Beechwood. He was not going to get into trouble with a nobleman’s unwed daughter.

He was already in trouble, and he’d no one to blame but himself. How in blazes was he to finance Lady Lithby’s refurbishing of his house?

He wasn’t. He couldn’t. He had to get out of it somehow.

He was still trying to determine the “somehow” as the party began breaking up. Then, as he was taking his leave of his hosts—and looking forward to a long night of kicking himself—rescue came, all unexpected.