Sheri Cobb South (7 page)

“Good morning, Ethan. I trust you had a pleasant evening?”

Mr. Brundy answered in a voice devoid of emotion. “Quite pleasant, thank you. And you?”

Sir Aubrey shook his head. “Deuced uncomfortable, I’m afraid. I say, Ethan, are you aware of any problem with mice? I was kept awake half the night by a squeaking sound within the wall.”

Lady Helen’s cup clattered against its saucer, spilling the hot liquid over the gilt rim.

“I don’t know as ‘ow we ‘ave any mice,” replied Mr. Brundy, darting a glance at his blushing bride, “although ‘elen is convinced there is one rather large rat.”

Perhaps fortunately for Lady Helen’s composure, Lady Tabor unexpectedly entered the lists. “Good heavens, Mr. Brundy! If you have rodents, send for the ratcatcher by all means, but pray do not discuss the creatures over the breakfast table! And the same goes for you, Aubrey.
You,
at least, have been bred to know what constitutes polite conversation!”

“I beg your pardon, me lady,” said Mr. Brundy. “I’ll say no more on the subject, except to assure you that I’ve no need of the ratcatcher. I’ve a feeling Aubrey won’t be troubled by mice again,” he added with a wistful look at his wife.

Lady Helen was profoundly grateful when the company’s attention was distracted by the entrance of Polly, dressed for the day in a morning gown of figured muslin.

“Ah, Miss Crump,” Sir Aubrey hailed the newcomer. “I trust your rest was undisturbed?”

Polly studied her inquisitor through blue eyes clouded with suspicion. If Sir Aubrey was no less handsome than he had appeared the previous day, neither was he any less dangerous.

“What, pray, would have disturbed it?” she asked warily.

Sir Aubrey gave a negligent shrug and applied himself to the task of spreading marmalade on a slice of toast. “Any number of things: mice—oh, I beg your pardon, Mama! We were not to discuss them, were we? Let me think, what else might disturb a lady’s slumber? Indigestion, perhaps, or a guilty conscience—”

“Of what are you accusing me, sir, that it should prevent my sleeping soundly?” inquired Polly in dulcet tones.

Sir Aubrey’s expression was all wounded innocence. “Why, nothing, nothing at all! I would no more cast aspersions on the state of your conscience than I would the contents of your stomach—although I must say that if you continue to slather butter all over your bread at that rate, you will find yourself fat as a flawn by middle age.”

As Polly stared down at the slice of toast in her hand (which she had unconsciously been covering with butter ever since Sir Aubrey had first begun his interrogation), Lady Tabor again took a hand.

“If this is what passes for gallantry these days, Aubrey, I am thankful to be too old for flirtations! First mice, and now this!”

“As always, Mama, you are quite right. Miss Crump, permit me to redeem myself in my mother’s eyes.   Your radiant appearance informs me that your repose could not have been other than blissful.”

As this declaration was delivered in accents too exaggerated to allow for their being taken at face value, Polly had no illusions as to the speaker’s sincerity.

“You are too kind, sir,” she responded in like manner. “But any radiance in my appearance must be credited to the beautiful gowns with which Lady Helen has been generous enough to provide me.”

“To be sure, Lady Helen has always had exceptional taste,” pronounced Lady Tabor.

“Why, thank you,” put in Mr. Brundy, bestowing a gratified smile upon the dowager. “And ‘ere I was, thinking you didn’t like me above ‘alf!”

“No doubt her taste in husbands would have been equally nice, had she been at liberty to exercise it,” muttered Lady Tabor, glaring at her host.

Silencing her grinning husband with a glance, Lady Helen applied herself to the task of soothing the affronted widow. “Now that Miss Crump has a suitable wardrobe for going about in Society, I have promised to take her to the theater tonight, my lady. Do say you and Sir Aubrey will give us the pleasure of your company!”

“Will
he
be there?” asked her ladyship, and Lady Helen had no trouble identifying her husband as the object of Lady Tabor’s inquiry.

“Mr. Brundy will, of course, escort us,” she admitted.

Whatever Lady Tabor’s retort might have been, it was cut short by her son. “I am sure I speak for my mother when I say we would be delighted to join you,” said Sir Aubrey. “But I should be even more delighted, Miss Crump, if you will first do me the honor of going for a drive with me in my phaeton.”

For some reason she could not name, Polly found Sir Aubrey’s gallantries even more disturbing than his veiled insinuations. Nevertheless, with no less than four people awaiting her answer, she could make only one response.

“Thank you, Sir Aubrey, I should be pleased to go driving with you,” she said, then rose to refill her coffee cup at the sideboard.

Sir Aubrey, in the meantime, had turned back to his hostess. “Tell me. Lady Helen, what other plans have you made for Miss Crump’s amusement?”

“Well, besides the theater, there are the assemblies, of course—dances, Miss Crump, which I am persuaded you will enjoy above all things!—and perhaps we might have a picnic on the beach one day, weather permitting.”

“And have you heard of any masquerades being planned?”

Since masked balls were known to promote licentiousness and a familiarity of manner which was not at all the thing, Lady Helen was more than a little taken aback by Sir Aubrey’s query. “Masquerades, Sir Aubrey? None that I am aware of. Why do you ask?”

His shrug was a study in well-bred indolence. “No particular reason. Only that I find masquerades fascinating, do not you, Miss Crump? No one is what they appear to be.”

From her position at the sideboard, Polly bent a sharp look upon Sir Aubrey, but met only a blank gray gaze. “Why, you are in need of more coffee, sir,” she exclaimed, seizing upon the excuse offered by his empty cup. “Pray allow me to let you have it.”

And so saying, she emptied the contents of the pot onto Sir Aubrey’s lap.

* * * *

By the time Sir Aubrey’s groom had fetched the high-perch phaeton, Polly had donned a dark blue spencer and tied the ribbons of a leghorn bonnet over her coppery curls. She had also had ample time to reflect upon her unconscionably rude behavior at the breakfast table. In retrospect, she feared she had perhaps overreacted to an unfortunate but wholly innocent remark. A guilty conscience, indeed!

Sir Aubrey, she noticed, had changed his coffee-soaked buckskin breeches for a pristine pair in a pale buff hue. Still, he made no reference to the circumstances which had made the change necessary, but handed her solicitously up into the phaeton and draped a lap robe across her knees before climbing up onto the seat beside her.

“The wind coming off the sea can be quite chilly, particularly on so cloudy a day as this,” he explained, setting the horses at a trot.

Indeed, the day was overcast, turning to gray the choppy waters of the Channel, and Polly, snug and warm beneath the blanket, felt doubly ashamed of having treated Sir Aubrey so shabbily.

“I must apologize again for this morning’s mishap, Sir Aubrey,” she said, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on his leader’s ears. “I cannot imagine how I came to be so clumsy.”

“Can you not, Miss Crump?” he asked, turning upon his fair passenger eyes the same color as the waters pounding the cliffs below. “I am sure you fail to do sufficient justice to your powers of invention.”

Having been afforded the dubious satisfaction of knowing that her initial reading of his conversation had been the accurate one, Polly had no more regrets for seeking recourse to the coffee pot. “Let us not beat about the bush, Sir Aubrey,” she said candidly. “Are you accusing me of telling untruths?”

“Having neglected to provide myself with a change of raiment, Miss Crump, I would not be so bold. Suffice it to say that I am moved beyond words by your touching reunion with your long-lost brother. One might suppose it to be something out of a fairy story, or a Minerva Press novel—except, of course, that the brother in question balks at welcoming the prodigal.”

“For one moved beyond words, you certainly seem to find a great many of them to hurl at me,” observed Polly with some asperity. “But one can hardly blame Mr.—my brother for being cautious. After all, he cannot be expected to harbor affection for me when he never knew of my existence.”

“But you knew of his?”

Underneath the lap robe, Polly crossed her gloved fingers. “My mother often spoke of him with affection—and regret.”

“Regret, Miss Crump?”

Sir Aubrey clearly awaited an answer, and Polly was thankful for having had the forethought to provide herself with a family history before being called upon to answer questions which were likely to prove awkward. To be sure, she would have preferred to make this speech to Mr. Brundy in the presence of his sympathetic wife. Still, she could not deny that there was something strangely exhilerating about matching wits with the obviously suspicious baronet.

“Regret for having given him up,” she explained. “You will no doubt think it unnatural for a woman to place her son in the workhouse, but I daresay she was not the first girl to be deceived by a gentleman’s promises of marriage.”

“Then it appears your mother must have been a very slow learner, Miss Crump. Even if she were very young at the time Ethan was conceived, there are more than half a dozen years separating the two of you. Surely your mother must have gleaned some wisdom in the interim.”

“I do not know all the details, for she rarely spoke of her mistake, save for warning me not to repeat it,” Polly replied primly.

“And yet, knowing of this supposed brother’s existence, you made no effort to find him until now, after he has amassed a fortune, wed a duke’s daughter, and established a foothold in Society. Your timing is truly impeccable. Miss Crump.”

“I am sure it must appear that way, but it was not until I came to London and, by a happy coincidence, hired a room over a linen-draper’s shop that I had word of my brother through his mill. Of course, the fact that he changed his name would have made a deliberate search fruitless, even had I made the attempt earlier.”

Sir Aubrey said nothing, but Polly had the distinct impression that he was still unconvinced. “I realize it must sound like a fantastic story, sir, but it is all I have. Alas, I have no solid proof of my claims.”

“Nor is there the slightest physical resemblance between you which might lend them weight,” Sir Aubrey said with brutal frankness. “Which puts me in mind of another question. How is it, Miss Crump, that you speak like a lady, while your supposed brother has never lost his, shall we say,
distinctive
accent?”

“I cannot account for his speech, since I know so little of his life, but my mother never let me forget that my father was Quality. She was convinced that I should sound like a lady, and to that end, she arranged for me to take elocution lessons from the vicar every Wednesday,” Polly explained, thankful to be able to answer truthfully.

As he could find no point on which to discredit her apocryphal tale, Sir Aubrey had to be content to accept it, at least for the nonce, at face value. With a twinge of regret, he tactfully turned the subject, restricting his conversation to the most innocuous of comments regarding the pleasures to be found in Brighton, or the virtues of a high-perch phaeton as opposed to those of a curricle.

Not, he determined with a covert glance at his fair companion, that he had any intention of letting Miss Polly Crump off so easily; if anything, he was more intrigued than ever. He did not for one moment believe her to be telling the truth, and yet he felt a certain grudging admiration for her audacity. She was an enigma, and not at all what he had come to Brighton expecting to find. He had been fully prepared to discover Mr. Brundy’s house taken over by a brass-faced high-flyer looking to advance herself in the world. To be sure, no one having seen Miss Crump wield a coffee pot could ever doubt her brass. But Sir Aubrey was forced to admit that he had mistaken the girl’s previous profession. Whatever her indiscretions, she was no light-skirt. There was an air of innocence about her that he could not but believe to be genuine.

Innocence. He allowed his mind to dwell momentarily on the word. What a curious adjective to apply to a young woman whom he knew to be lying through her pearly white teeth.

“Thank you for the outing, Sir Aubrey,” said Polly as he reined in his horses before Mr. Brundy’s hired house. “I regret that I cannot say I found it an unqualified pleasure, but I am sure you did your best to make it memorable.”

Far from taking offense, Sir Aubrey leaped down to assist her in the task of disembarking. “Since we understand each other so much better than we did before, we shall call it educational, rather than enjoyable,” he agreed, bowing over her hand with exaggerated gallantry.

He did not follow her into the house immediately, but lingered at the horses’ heads toying with their harnesses as an excuse to watch her retreating form. He found himself looking forward to the evening’s theater party with far more eagerness than the occasion warranted. It would be interesting to see what the
ton
would make of Miss Crump, and more interesting still to see how she would maintain her charade under close scrutiny.

“Best call the ratcatcher, Ethan,” he murmured under his breath. “I shall get rid of your sister for you, as promised, but I think—yes, I am afraid I must prolong your agony yet awhile.”

Chapter 6

Wisest men have erred, and by bad women been deceived.

JOHN MILTON,
Samson Agonistes

At eight o’clock that evening, Polly sat before the dressing table while Lady Helen’s dresser performed the final adjustments to her coiffure. At last satisfied with her handiwork, the little woman stepped aside, allowing Polly to admire the full effect of Urling’s net over a slip of ivory satin. A narrow ivory ribbon was threaded through her red-gold ringlets, and Lady Helen had insisted upon lending Polly her own pearl necklet and earrings for the occasion. By the time she descended the stairs, the former shopgirl felt very fine indeed.