My Lord Wicked (Historical Regency Romance) (2 page)

The baron drew an impatient breath but refrained from rebuking Roberts, having long ago realized it was his unfortunate lot to be saddled with a highly opinionated valet. When Roberts prefaced a statement with, "Has your lordship considered," he actually meant, "your lordship should."

Stacks contemplated his response while studying the gaunt valet who stooped to slide on his master's Hessians. A protruding chin was the most distinguishing feature on Roberts' gaunt face. Funny, Stacks thought, that Roberts' chin should stick out while his frail chest sank in. "I much prefer the outdoors, even if my boots do get sullied." After putting on boots that Roberts had spent the better part of the morning polishing, Stacks got to his feet.

 "Is your lordship contemplating a visit to London to patronize your tailor?"

Stacks' brows drew together, and he cast a scornful glance at his valet. "All I could wish for is here at Marshbanks Abbey." He would not admit his reluctance to face the London gossips, the mothers who quickly removed their daughters from his presence. "It is said Lord Stacks killed his lovely wife," they would say. And though similar remarks were undoubtedly uttered in his home county, his reclusiveness shielded him from them. During the past decade he had grown content with the quiet life here in the north.

And contentment was the most a man like him could ever hope to obtain.

Roberts, who only vaguely concealed his preference for London, straightened his back. His face — like his tone — was without expression. "Very good, my lord."

"By the way, is this not the day when young Mr. Lambeth arrives?"

"Indeed it is, my lord. Your ward arrives by the post chaise this afternoon."

Stacks nodded. "I have instructed Mrs. Greenwood to ready the red room for him."

"Has your lordship remembered to procure a birthday gift for the lad?"

Stacks hissed an oath. "I completely forgot. How old will he be?"

"He turned eighteen yesterday, my lord."

What would a fellow of eighteen value, Stacks wondered as he paced to the arched, gothic window, his face clinched in thought. As he looked out over the thicket, an answer came to him. "I shall present the boy with the musket I received on my eighteenth birthday. If he's anything like his father, he's an uncommonly good sportsman. I'm rather looking forward to having the young fellow around." Walking away, he spoke in a barely audible voice thick with emotion. "God knows I shall never have a son of my own."

 The letter from young Freddie made Stacks remember the lad’s father. They had met at Oxford, but their real closeness came after they left university, after their disastrous marriages. Stacks had never met the young woman for whom Frederick had cut short his studies to marry. Nor had Frederick met the beautiful Elizabeth, who became Lady Stacks a few years later. Yet it was these brides — or more precisely, their early deaths — that united in grief the two widowers. Through letters, they had laid bare their anguished souls. Frederick vowed never to marry again after losing his cherished Rosemary to childbed fever. Stacks, too, knew he would never marry after Elizabeth. Her needless, violent death still had the power to coil his hands into angry fists, still sent waves of nausea rushing over him, still tormented though ten years had since passed.

***

The third day into her journey north Freddie rested her weary head against the coach's grimy interior wall and finally admitted that she was wretchedly uncomfortable. She was especially angry at herself for purposely leaving behind her faded black shawl simply because she deemed it too shabby to wear in front of her guardian. That blasted pride of hers cost dearly as chilling March winds assaulted the coach.

Before she'd left Chilton Manor Freddie had repeatedly defended the traveling accommodations Aunt Dorothea smugly criticized. "Some peer of the realm his fancy lordship is," Aunt Dorothea had complained, "not even sending his own carriage for his ward, making her ride in a vulgar post chaise. And letting a young lady of quality travel without a maid! Why, it's the outside of propriety!"

It was all Freddie could do not to protest that she had no maid, had never had a maid, and was unlikely to ever have one.

Even while Sir Harold's family gathered to bid Freddie farewell as the Lambeth coach rattled up to take her to the nearest posting inn, Aunt Dorothea droned on. "I suppose it's just as well you will not be going in the grand Lord Stacks' undoubtedly luxurious coach, what with the way you look and dress."

At the parting there had been no hugs. No tears. No feigned affection.

To spite her aunt, Freddie had determined to enjoy the ride in the "vulgar" post chaise. Having never before been farther north than Tunbridge Wells, she pressed her face to the window and delighted in the varying scenery that flashed before her. Spring showers marred just one day, and the blossoming flowers along the way, especially the buttery yellow daffodils poking through new green grass, gave pleasure at every bend of the road. The new sights and sounds and smells kept Freddie's head spinning for days. She had marveled at sooty London with its hundreds of conveyances and thousands of people and splendid sailing vessels powering along the River Thames. North of the capital she eagerly watched as soft hills leveled out to rolling pastures.

But her delight over all the new experiences could not dispel the discomforts of her lengthy, tedious journey. Of being crushed against her fellow passengers — all of them male — as if they were kittens huddled together for warmth. Of her body begging to be stretched, walked, scratched, cleaned. Of spending nights in drafty posting inns that smelled of mildew, of sleeping on linens of dubious laundering.

As the journey wore on she had grown acutely aware of her gnawing loneliness. Each churn of the wheels seemed to say
alone, alone, alone
. The loneliness ingrained into her since birth had intensified since Papa’s death. With his death, she lost, too, the villagers whom her father had attended. Would the new surgeon provide as good of care? It was not likely he would have a daughter as skilled an assistant as Freddie had been. Who would tend her herbs and make the poultices and elixirs that sped her father's patients to recovery?

Underlying all her loneliness was grief over her father's death. She missed him like a toothache that no longer gave pain. For the two had never been affectionate. Never had he told her he loved her. He had neither complimented her appearance nor given her the means by which to improve it. And always he lamented that she was not beautiful as her mother had been. Then he would peer at her with hatred in his eyes, and she could read his thoughts as if they were her own.
Why couldn't it have been you and not Rosemary?

Though he had neglected Freddie's feminine education, she had learned from him. By watching him — for he rarely instructed her — she learned about medicine. She learned too, to ride as a man and to play chess cunningly. She committed to memory every book in his library and accompanied him wherever he went, largely because there was no nurse to care for her.

And he had at least thought fleetingly of her future when he asked Lord Stacks to be her guardian.

It wasn’t until she reached the blustery, gray North Country that she no longer felt like an observer behind the glass window of a passing carriage. For among the misty moors and loneliness of the bleak, rocky terrain of North Yorkshire she felt a deep connection, a feeling that she had been there before though she knew with certainty she had not.

She felt as if she had climbed the smoothly rounded barren hills that led to nowhere, had tossed stones into the rock streams that rushed between graphite crevices, had touched the fuzzy stems of silvery thistle that spiked along the bleached grasses. She could not understand the profound feelings that swamped her: the feeling that here in the rugged land which bore little stamp of man she had found her home.

The next stop would be Morton, the closest village to Lord Stacks' Marshbanks Abbey. That realization created the same thumping in her thoracic cavity as the waning heartbeat of one of Papa’s patients.

Would her guardian meet her himself? Or would he send one of his servants?

Lord Stacks had been all that was amiable in his reply to her letter that begged a visit to the abbey. She could stay at Marshbanks Abbey for as long as she wanted, he had said, and he had sent her more than enough money to meet her needs throughout the journey.

She hated being dependent on Lord Stacks, but she had no choice. Her pride’s only consolation was the determination that she would find some way to repay her guardian’s kindness.

Her fondest wish was that Lord Stacks bring her into fashion. Not the same kind of fashion well-born beauties like her cousin Roxanne. Never that. But with a modicum of effort, Freddie might be put forward, might be in a position to meet a man with whom she would be pleased to share her life. She would never expect her prospective husband to be rich or handsome, but she did want to enjoy being with him, to care for him and — God willing — the children, her children, who would so enrich her life.

How she wished for a babe of her own, a real person who loved her by the sheer virtue of its birth. What would it be like to be loved, she wondered wistfully. In all her life only one earthly being had ever truly loved her. Champs had lived for her touch, for her kindly murmurs of affection. Now, she had lost him, too. Aunt Dorothea had forced her to leave the dog behind in Chelseymeade.

Would that a man could care for her with Champs’ fidelity. She longed to care for someone — a real human being — so greatly that it gave pain.

Beneath gray skies, a profusion of gray stone buildings and gray stone streets marked the entrance to Morton. Her stomach gave an odd flip. She sat up straight, smoothing back the hair she always wore in an effortless bun. A pity nothing could be done about her dress that was now hopelessly wrinkled. The black serge pelisse she would wear over it was equally as unattractive. And both were shabby. Whatever would Lord Stacks think of her?

She was not to find out immediately. For when she disembarked from the coach, no one seemed to be waiting for her. There was one well-dressed gentleman who eyed the two passengers who got off at Morton, but he made no attempt to introduce himself to her or to the bearded man who had ridden in the cheap seats on top the coach.

Though the gentleman appeared to be Quality, he could not be Lord Stacks for he appeared younger than her father's eight and thirty years. He was tall like her father, but did not have the thickened waist and sagging chin her father and other men of his age possessed. Neither gray nor thinning were evident in his full head of black hair.

She turned away from the gentleman. She would have to hire a ride to Marshbanks Abbey. While deciding how to go about the daunting task of hiring a conveyance, she heard the gentleman query the coachman.

"Did you not give transport to a young gentleman of seventeen or eighteen? Name of Freddie Lambeth."

Chapter 2

A cool wind pierced through Freddie's threadbare pelisse, chilling the very blood in her veins as she stood incredulous in front of the inn at Morton, staring at the gentleman. Finally, she clamped shut her mouth and approached him. Her chest tightened, and she was not sure she could summon her voice. "Pardon, but would you be Lord Stacks?"

He spun around to face her, his eyes taking in the shabby clothes she wore. His face was burnished by the sun she had been told never shone here in the North Country. He was not classically handsome but most pleasant to look at. "I am."

"I, sir, am Freddie Lambeth," she said as she curtsied.

His mouth dropped open, then shut, all expression erased from his angular face. He glanced down at the tattered bag she carried. "May I carry your valise?"

She handed over the bag that held all she possessed.

"Please follow me to the chaise."

Four matched bays stood ceremonially in front of a glistening gilt-trimmed black carriage. His lordship handed her up into the most plush interior she had ever seen. She sank into royal blue velvet cushions, luxuriating in the softness after so many days on the hard cracked leather seats of the public coach.

Lord Stacks sat across from her, his face stern. "It appears I have been under the misapprehension that you were a---"

"A boy," she finished.

His black eyes flashed with emotion. Was it disgust? "Exactly."

He must not suspect how vulnerable she was. Above all, she would not allow herself to be the object of his pity. Her spine went straight as a poker. "I completely understand if your lordship wishes to retract your offer," she began.

"You have had a long journey, Miss Lambeth," he said, his voice inscrutable. "You will need to rest at Marshbanks Abbey. Once you are refreshed, we will discuss your stay."

As he gazed at the smoky-colored landscape out the coach window, Freddie took the opportunity to covertly study his appearance. He was as different from the fatherly guardian she had pictured as she was to the lad he had imagined her to be. That he did not at all look like the aging, pasty-skinned intellectual she had expected, unsettled her. He was neither collegiately young, nor did he look old enough to be her father. And nothing about him hinted at the scholar. His dark skin and lithe, athletic body were at odds with the picture her father had drawn of Lord Stacks. Lord Stacks the Recluse. Lord Stacks the Intellectual. In her mind’s eye she had foolishly conjured a bespectacled, gray-haired main lounging in a library, his gouty foot propped up on a stack of musty books.

The man sitting opposite her dressed in finely made soft leather Hessians, well-cut breeches with cut-away coat of rich camel color, and crisp ivory shirt and cravat, looked as if he belonged in the finest London drawing rooms, not in remote Northumbria. He displayed the agreeable looks and breeding of a man over whom young women like her beautiful cousin Roxanne would make a cake of themselves.

How foolish Freddie had been to secretly hope that Lord Stacks might be happy to have someone as plain and unaccomplished as she come to give him companionship in his lonely abbey!