Carla Kelly (20 page)

“Oh, I do not think it will come to that, Emma,” he said as the carriage pulled up in front of the house. He sighed, considering the evening ahead. “Now I must gird my loins for an evening of fine dining and dancing.” He helped her from the carriage, careful not to hold her elbow a moment longer than she needed. “I would almost rather stay in the book room with you and consider ledgers and double entries.”

“And we all know what a fiction that is,” Emma murmured as they walked up the front steps.

He smiled. “It's less of a stretch than you would suppose,” he said as he nodded to Lasker, who must have been watching for them out of the peephole in the door. “Emma, it is somewhat daunting to converse with lovely young things on the right and on the left, and across the table, and try not to be too obvious staring at whatever charms they possess. Thank you, Lasker,” he said as he relinquished his overcoat. “And then, in turn, I must suffer their sidelong glances as they try to discover if there is any substance beneath my shallow facade.”

Emma laughed, and it was the glorious, heartfelt sound he realized he had been craving all day. “Are you saying, my lord, that there is rather less to you than meets the eye?”

He wanted to laugh out loud at the strangling sounds coming from his unflappable butler, who had turned away and with a shaking hand was rearranging a bouquet of flowers. “Well, as to that, I wonder, Emma. I think you are improving me already,” he said as they continued down the hall toward the book room. “I have not been near my club, the wine cellar is locked, and Mama is looking on me with less chagrin than normal.” He chuckled. “Now if only the young ladies will follow her lead …”

“They will, my lord,” Emma assured him as she removed her cloak and sat down at the desk. “You need merely to decide what it is you are looking for in a wife, and follow through.”

Follow through, is it?
he thought as he watched her rummage for pencil and paper.
You are asking that of the man who could not save his own father from a rabble crowd? I wonder if I know how to see anything through to its completion. I was well on the way to my own ruin, but it seems I cannot accomplish even that.

“My lord?” Emma was asking. “You wanted to dictate a letter to your bailiff in Norfolk?”

“Oh! Yes, yes, I did,” he said as he clasped his hands behind his back and strolled to the window. “And you'll have the other one for Sir Augustus ready by the time I return this evening?”

“Of course, my lord.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her to call him John, but reason prevailed, and he did not. The letter was too soon dictated, and then he had no more excuse to linger in the book room, but must face, instead, the prospect of shaving again, and dressing, and staring in the mirror and wondering what on earth he was doing.
It is not that I dislike women,
he considered as he suffered Hanley to arrange his neck cloth.
Quite the contrary. It's just that I begrudge the exertion I must expend to find a wife. Too bad they do not grow on trees, there for the plucking. Or something like that,
he concluded, grinning to himself.

Sally Claridge looked especially fetching in a pale blue muslin, her blonde hair swept up on her head in a style that earned a second look. He watched her descend the stairs, admired, from his viewpoint, her trim ankles, and idly considered the prospect of an alliance with his Virginia cousin. The quick glance of terror she turned his way before her more well-bred demeanor masked it convinced him that she would not be much fun to sport with. And even if she were, he thought as he helped his mother with her evening cape, sooner or later she would open her mouth and bore him into drunkenness or opium use, whichever came first.

His mother also watched with approval as Sally completed her descent of the stairs. “My dear, how lovely you look tonight!” she exclaimed, kissing her niece on the cheek. “John, only consider how well your guineas look upon Sally's back.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Only think how well
we
are spending my money.” That ill-advised remark earned him another look of terror from Sally and a cluck of his mother's tongue. “Glad to do it for relatives, glad to do it,” he amended, hoping that his evening was not ruined before it started.

Mama was eager to be pleased (perhaps considering her own incursions into his fortune). “Quite right, John. Sally, do you have on your dancing shoes? I hear Lord Renwick has engaged a particularly fine orchestra for tonight.”

Shoes. Shoes. That was it. “Excuse me, Mama, Sally. I forgot something in the book room,” he said as he hurried down the hall.

Emma Costello looked up in surprise when he opened the bookroom door without knocking. “Now, my lord, you are not getting cold feet …” she began, putting down the quill pen.

“No, but you are, Emma,” he said. “I need two pieces of paper and a pencil.” He snapped his fingers and held out his hand for the items, which Emma brought to him. He put the papers on the floor in front of her. “Take off your shoes, Emma.”

She hesitated. “Hurry up, now,” he admonished, taking the pencil from her. “I don't want to miss a minute of what promises to be an evening of astonishing boredom.”

“You are too negative, my lord,” she grumbled as she removed her shoes—poor, cast-off things that should have been in an ash can years ago.

“Raise your skirt,” he ordered as he knelt on the floor beside her and grasped her ankle.

She gave a noticeable start when he touched her stockinged ankle, then rested her hand lightly on his shoulder to steady herself while he outlined her foot with the pencil.

“Other foot.”

She leaned the other way as he held that ankle.
Such a shapely foot
, he thought as he carefully traced it. Not small, he considered, half-enjoying the weight of her against his shoulder. He looked at the papers. “Well, what color do you want?”

“Black or brown; something sensible. And if you please, stockings to match, my lord,” she said. She sounded embarrassed at the intimacy of their association, so he did not look at her while she stepped into her shoes again.

“I'm surprised your Virginia indenture holders didn't see that you were better shod,” he said as he took the papers and stood up. He looked at her then, and her cheeks were still pink.

“My lord, I think you will understand the matter more completely when you consider that Robert Claridge's bills generally outran the family's entire quarterly allowance,” was her quiet reply as she took her seat at the desk again.

He strolled over to sit on the desk, ignoring his mother's voice calling to him from the front entrance. “So you were the afterthought.”

“I and the other servants, sir,” she said, dipping the quill tip into the ink bottle again. She looked at him in that calculated way of hers, as though gauging his response. “And I have to tell you that I like going barefoot in the summer, so please don't feel sorry for me, Lord Ragsdale.”

She turned again to the letter in front of her, effectively dismissing him from his own book room. He grinned at her impertinence and left the room.

Lasker hovered outside the door, obviously sent by Lady Ragsdale to tell him to hurry up but also obviously reluctant to tell him anything. “It's all right, Lasker, I'll go peacefully,” he said, pleased with himself to earn one of the butler's rare smiles. “And you take these to wherever it is Lady Ragsdale gets her shoes made. I want one pair of sturdy brown shoes.” He started down the hall, then turned back, grinning broadly. “And another pair of red Morocco dancing slippers. Good night, Lasker. You needn't wait up,” he added, knowing that the butler would be sitting ramrod straight in one of the entryway chairs until the last titled member of the household was indoors and abed. It was their little fiction.

Truly enough, there was Lasker waiting for them when they returned in that late hour just before the dark yielded to the blandishments of another day, careering in from the east. He handed his mother and cousin their candles, wished them both good night, and went to the book room, hoping that Emma might still be up. He wanted to tell her about the diamond of the first water—a daughter of Sir Edmund Partridge's—who had flirted with him mildly, and who appeared, when he worked up the nerve to converse with her, to have at least some wit. He wanted to tell Emma that he and Clarissa Partridge were destined to witness a balloon ascension—he whipped out his pocket watch—in eight hours.

But the book room was dark. He held his own candle over the desk, where Emma had arranged the letter she had composed for him to Sir Augustus Barney, and the other to his bailiff. He picked up the letter to his bailiff and read it, noting that she had changed some of his dictated wording and added other passages. He read it again and had to admit that her changes were salutary. “Really, Emma,” he said out loud as he left the room, “you were supposed to be here so I could tell you about Clarissa Partridge. Do I have to do
everything
in this courting venture?”

Well, it would keep for the morning, he decided as he mounted the stairs. He stopped halfway up. Emma was taking her day off tomorrow, and he would not see her until the evening.
Perhaps I was a little hasty with this day off,
he thought. He continued up the stairs, putting Emma from his mind and wondering what one wore to a balloon ascension.

While the day could not have been deemed an unqualified success, at least Emma Costello ought to have the decency to hurry back from her day off so he could tell her about it, Lord Ragsdale decided the following evening as he paced back and forth in front of the sitting-room window.

He had decided that he would begin by painting a word picture of Miss Partridge for Emma, describing her delicate features, her big brown eyes that reminded him of a favorite spaniel, long dead but still remembered, and her little trill of a laugh. Of course, by the time the balloonists had taken themselves up into the atmosphere, he did have the smallest headache, but he couldn't attribute that to Clarissa's endless stream of questions. He just wasn't accustomed to having someone so small and lovely who smelled of rose water hanging on his every word and looking at him with those spaniel eyes.

“Emma, you are certainly taking your time with this day off,” he muttered under his breath. He was beginning to feel that when Emma finally opened the door, a scold was in order. He would remind her that London was far from safe after dark and that nasty customers liked to prey on unescorted women, especially if they were pretty.

There wasn't anything else he could scold her about. When he had wakened in the morning, his correspondence was ready for his attention on the smaller table in his bedroom. He had signed the letters, initialed the morning's bills, and noted with approval a newspaper article about Norfolk that she had circled to catch his attention. A man never had a better secretary than Emma Costello.

But where the deuce was she now? He clapped his hands together in frustration, imagining her conked on the head and being delivered unconscious to a white slaving ship anchored at Deptford Hard, even as he wore a path from window to window. One would think she would have more consideration for his feelings. That was the trouble with the Irish.

And then he saw her coming up the street, moving slowly, as though she dreaded the house and its occupants. As he watched, she stopped several times, as though steeling herself for the ordeal of entering into one of London's finest establishments.

“The nerve of you,” he grumbled from his view by the partially screening curtain. “When I think of the legions of servants who would love to have half so fine a household as this one …”

Perhaps I am being unfair,
he thought as he kept his eyes on her slow progress. She trudged as though filled with a great exhaustion, discouragement evident in the way she held herself. He thought she dabbed at her eyes several times, but he could not be sure. He waited for her knock, which did not come.
You idiot,
he realized finally,
she has gone around to the alley and come in from the belowstairs entrance.
He rang for Lasker.

“Tell Emma Costello that I would like a word with her,” he told the butler.

“I was not aware that a day off meant a night off too,” he found himself telling Emma several minutes later when she knocked on the sitting-room door and he opened it.

She mumbled something about being sorry, and it was a longer walk from the city than she realized.

She looked so discouraged from her day off that he felt like a heel for chiding her. Her eyes were filled with pain that shocked him. He wondered briefly if her feet in those dreadful shoes were hurting her, and then he understood that the look in her eyes was another matter. He stood in front of her, hand behind his back, rocking back and forth on his heels, feeling like a gouty old boyar chastising his serfs.

“I trust this won't happen on your next day off,” he ventured, wishing suddenly with all his heart that she would tell him what was the matter.

If he was expecting a soft agreement from her, he was doomed to disappointment. At his sniping words, Emma seemed to visibly gather herself together, digging deep into some well of resource and strength that he knew he did not possess.