Sheri Cobb South (3 page)

Polly thanked him curtly and set off down the street in the direction he had indicated. When she reached her destination, however, the stately pilastered facade gave her pause. This was not the sort of building one might expect to house a weaver. Mr. Brundy must be very, very wealthy indeed. Why, the Prince Regent himself would feel at home in such a house!

Squaring her shoulders, she marched gamely up the steps, lifted the brass knocker, and let it fall. A moment later the door opened to reveal a daunting figure in black coat and knee breeches. He was older than she had imagined, but in all other aspects, his appearance was every bit as forbidding as she had been led to believe.

“Mr. Brundy?” she asked uncertainly.

“My name is Evers,” the man informed her with great dignity. “I am the butler.”

“Oh,” said Polly, quite cowed. In retrospect, she should have known that the wealthy Mr. Brundy would not answer his own door, but then she knew little of
ton
ways beyond what she had seen in Mr. Minchin’s shop and read between the pages of the books on his shelves. “I—I should like to see Mr. Brundy, if you please.”

Evers’s seasoned eye assessed the visitor at a glance. She did not look like a lady of Quality, if her dark stuff gown and frumpy bonnet were anything to judge by, and yet four months in Mr. Brundy’s employ had taught him not to set too much store by appearances. Opening the door wider, he bade the visitor enter.

* * * *

Had she paused in her negotiations with the crossing sweeper long enough to cast a glance back up the Square, Polly might have witnessed Mr. Ethan Brundy, mill owner and canny investor on ‘Change, entering his Grosvenor Street domicile. Once inside, he surrendered his hat and gloves to the butler and inquired after his wife. Upon being informed that he might find her ladyship in the dining room, he betook himself up the stairs in this direction.

It had been five years since he had inherited the mill that had made him, at the tender age of three-and-twenty, one of England’s wealthiest men, but when he took the time to reflect upon the turns his life had taken, he still marveled. He had been only nine years old when Mr. Brundy, requiring cheap labor for his mill, had plucked him from the workhouse, and so his memories of that bleak existence were perhaps mercifully vague. Nevertheless, he had clear recollections of being always hungry, always cold, and, although surrounded by persons of all ages as miserable as himself, always alone. Now he had as much as he wanted to eat, whenever he wanted to eat it (small wonder that his tailor bemoaned the fact that Mr. Brundy’s waist was not so narrow as fashion dictated!), he kept fires burning in every room which he might conceivably wish to enter, and he slept—more often than not—with the former Lady Helen Radney in his arms. The thought made him impatient for nightfall, and he quickened his pace as he climbed the stairs.

Although it was too early for dinner, he did indeed find his wife in the dining room, arranging flowers in a bowl for the center of the table. As her back was to the door, she was unaware of his presence, and he, seizing upon the advantage of surprise, slipped up behind her and wrapped his arms about her waist.

“I’m ‘ome, ‘elen,” he said, nuzzling her neck.

Lady Helen, displaying the stoicism for which she had been praised that very morning, submitted to this assault on her person with a compliance which even the sympathetic Lady Farriday would have deemed excessive.

“Ethan, the servants will see us,” she protested half-heartedly, leaning back against her husband and cradling the arms that imprisoned her.

“Let ‘em see,” was his reply. “If they ‘aven’t figured out by now that I’m ‘ead over ears in love with me wife, they’re too stupid to be working for me, anyway.”

They were already two months wed, but had lived as man and wife for only half that long, and he still found her maidenly modesty enchanting, secure in the knowledge that he could coax her out of it later, in the privacy of the bedchamber.

At length, however, her heightened senses detected something not quite right about the sleeve of his coat beneath her fingers. Freeing herself abruptly, she turned to cast a disapproving eye over his baggy coat, whereupon he pulled her against him in a face-to-face embrace.

“Ethan!” she scolded, putting up only a token resistance to this high-handed treatment. “While I have no objection to you dressing for comfort in the privacy of your own home, you promised to wear coats that fit properly when you are out and about in public!”

“I’d ‘ardly consider a visit to me ware’ouse a social call,” he protested.

“For that matter, I would hardly call it a
visit,”
retorted Lady Helen. “You’ve been gone all day.”

“Aye, that I ‘ave,” agreed her much-maligned spouse. “I’d a few things to take care of before we leave for Brighton in the morning. I want no interruptions on me ‘oneymoon,” he added, covering her mouth with his own before she could voice further grievances.

Lady Helen, however, could find nothing in these sentiments with which to take issue, and so returned his kiss with every appearance of enthusiasm.

And so it was that Evers, after admitting the visitor to the hall and taking her bonnet and shawl, climbed the stairs to the dining room and discovered master and mistress locked in a passionate embrace. This had become a common occurrence over the last month, and in that time Evers had perfected the art of becoming blind and deaf. Stepping back into the corridor, he cleared his throat quite audibly to notify them of his presence before re-entering the room. The tableau which met his eyes this time was quite different.   Lady Helen’s floral arrangement evidently possessed her undivided attention, although her heightened color and the gleam in her husband’s eye betrayed their interrupted embrace.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” Evers addressed Mr. Brundy, “but there is a young, er, person below who is wishful of seeing you.”

“A ‘person,’ Evers? Don’t be so vague! ‘oo is ‘e?”

Evers felt obliged to correct his employer’s erroneous assumption.
“She,
sir. Owing to the unexpected nature of the young woman’s arrival, I fear I neglected to inquire as to her name. Shall I do so now?”

“No, just show ‘er into the drawing room. I’ll be there directly.”

Bowing his acquiescence, Evers betook himself from the room, only to climb the stairs again a moment later with Polly in tow. That intrepid young lady trudged upward in the butler’s wake, trying valiantly not to gawk at the opulence of her surroundings, from the elaborate plasterwork ceilings over her head to the thick Aubusson carpet beneath her feet. Only now, when it was too late to turn back, did the enormity of her undertaking begin to dawn. Surely it was unlikely that any man living in such a house could feel any degree of sympathy for an unknown and penniless girl! Dear, good Reverend Jennings, on the other hand, might not have lived in grandeur, but he would have given his last crust of bread to any soul in need. Polly grieved anew for the one person who might have acted in the place of a male relation and shielded her from men like Mr. Minchin.

At the top of the stairs Evers opened the door of the drawing room, and Polly entered a tastefully appointed chamber whose understated elegance made her feel hopelessly dowdy. An oil portrait whose subject she recognized as Lady Helen hung over the mantel and the painted image, dressed all in white and wearing a dazzling necklace of diamonds, seemed to sneer disapprovingly at the uninvited guest. Spying a gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall, she took stock of her appearance, and found her worst suspicions confirmed. She smoothed her rumpled dark skirts, which had been hopelessly crushed from her hackney ride, and was in the process of slicking back her disheveled curls when the door opened to reveal the honey-haired beauty from the bookstore.

However, it was not Lady Helen but the man beside her who commanded Polly’s full attention.   Although not above the average height, he was more solidly built than most of the fashionable gentlemen who patronized Mr. Minchin’s shop, and his mulberry colored coat, while obviously cut from the finest cloth, was so baggy it might have been made for a much stouter man.  His dark curly hair, though fashionably cropped, was somewhat disheveled. He was not handsome at all, at least not in the sense that the gentleman in the bookstore had been handsome. It would have been hard to imagine a less likely husband for the elegantly beautiful Lady Helen. If this were indeed Mr. Brundy, she could see why Lady Farriday had been so appalled. And yet there was something inviting about his welcoming smile and warm brown eyes, something that belied Lady Farriday’s gothic whisperings of coercion and brutality. To Polly, he looked more brotherly than brutal. Brotherly. . . And she was in desperate need of a male relation. . . .

“Mr. Brundy?” Her voice shook on the words.

“Aye, that I am,” he answered.

“Ethan!” she exclaimed, smiling uncertainly at him. “Don’t you know me? But of course you could not! I’m your sister!”

Chapter 3

Marriage is a desperate thing.

JOHN SELDEN,
Table Talk

“Sister?” echoed Mr. Brundy. Gone was any trace of the welcoming warmth she thought she had seen in his eyes, and the frigid contempt which replaced it was sufficient to convince Polly that, if anything, Lady Farriday had been too generous in her assessment of his character.

“Ethan!” cried Lady Helen, clasping Polly’s hands warmly. “You never told me you had a sister!”

“Life is just full of surprises,” he muttered in skeptical tones.

“Do come and sit down,” she urged, steering Polly toward a striped, satin sofa. “Only fancy, Ethan, if your sister had come a day later, she would have found us gone.”

“What a shame
that
would’ve been,” was his less than enthusiastic reply.

Lady Helen, fully occupied in seeing her new-found relation comfortably disposed on the sofa, made no reply to her husband, but instead inquired as to her guest’s name.

“Polly,” replied the visitor, watching from under demurely lowered eyelashes to observe the effect of this pronouncement on Mr. Brundy. “Polly Crump.”

His reaction was swift and profound. Indeed, as Evers later confided to an enthralled Cook, the master might have been turned to stone before his very eyes.

“Polly
Crump,
did you say?”

“Ethan, what is the matter?” asked Lady Helen, observing her husband’s distress.

He stared with unseeing eyes at his wife’s anxious face. “Crump was me mum’s name—and mine, before I took the name of Brundy.”

“Then it is hardly surprising for your sister to share it,” Lady Helen pointed out reasonably. Then, spying a curious Evers still hovering in the doorway, she sent him about his business. “Evers, have Miss Crump’s things brought up to the blue bedchamber, and tell Cook that we will be increasing our covers for dinner.”

As Evers quit the room, Mr. Brundy seized his wife’s hand and quickly followed suit.

“A word with you, ‘elen, me dear,” he growled, half-dragging her into the corridor and firmly shutting the door behind her. “What, pray, do you think you’re doing?”

“Why, trying to make your sister feel at home,” she said, baffled by his odd behavior.

“I ‘aven’t got a sister,” he informed her.

“I don’t understand you, Ethan. I should have thought you would
want
a family of your own.”

“I’ve all the family I need in you, ‘elen,” he said, more gently this time.

“But your sister—”

“‘elen, five years ago, I in’erited a cotton mill. Overnight I was a wealthy man, and suddenly I’d more relatives than I could count—each with an ‘ard-luck story and an ‘and ‘eld out.”

Lady Helen’s green eyes grew round. “You think Miss Crump is lying?”

“I don’t just think it, love. I know she is.”

“But she knew your birth name—something your own wife didn’t know, for that matter,” she reminded him.

“Oh, she’s thorough, I’ll grant ‘er that. I’d give a monkey to know where she got ‘er information.”

“But Ethan, we can hardly toss her out into the street!”

“Watch me,” said Mr. Brundy, reaching for the doorknob.

“Wait!” Moving quickly to block his path, Lady Helen grasped the lapels of his baggy coat. “Darling, I haven’t forgotten how perfectly dreadful I was to you when you first came to Town. I don’t want to make the same mistake with your sister.”

“That girl is no more me sister than
you
are!” he insisted. “Tell me, ‘ow old would you say
me ‘sister’ is?”

Lady Helen considered the question. “Very nearly my own age, I should say. Perhaps a little younger—nineteen or twenty.”

“Which would mean she must be at least eight years younger than I am,” he concluded. “But me mum died when I was six. Unless she found a way to bear a child two years after ‘er death—”

“But what if your mother didn’t die, Ethan?” asked Lady Helen as a new thought struck her. “What if she discovered she was to have another child, and hoped to prevail upon the father to marry her, so—”                                  

Mr. Brundy stared at his wife as if she had just struck him. “You’re saying me mum put me in the work’ouse because I was in the way!”

Seeing his stricken look, she quickly backed away from a suggestion that could only bring her husband pain. Although she still did not consider such a scenario beyond the realm of possibility, she would not hurt him for the world. “Or perhaps she was not dead,” she added hastily. “Perhaps she was very ill, or—or injured, and only recovered after you had already been taken from   her—”

“Or per’aps I’m being taken advantage of by a scheming little adventuress ‘oo wants to get ‘er ‘ands on me money,” he finished for her.

“But what could she possibly hope to gain by such a deception?”

“Think of it, love: I’m a rich man, probably the only such in England with no way of disproving her claims, and me wife is the daughter of a dook. Depend on it, she thinks she’s found a way to foist ‘erself onto Society.”

“Like
you
did, in other words,” was Lady Helen’s observation.