The Gypsy Duchess (5 page)

“You’ve had a bad fall,” she said gently, dipping a cloth into the basin of cool water the maid had set beside her, then wringing it out and placing it on the boy’s forehead. “But you’ll not be dangling down any more chimneys, for we’ve work for you right here in our kitchen.”

The boy made no response, merely blinked and wiped the back of one grimy hand across his eyes.

“Cook already has a fire-lighter, your grace”—Mrs. Chawleigh surveyed the small, soot-covered boy with obvious disgust—”and I doubt she’ll want to replace him since he’s her orphaned nephew.”

“Then make him a pot boy,” Moira said.

Mrs. Chawleigh looked as sour as if she’d just sucked a lemon. “My sister’s youngest is our pot boy,” she declared, as if that ended the distasteful matter.

“If nobody else wants the soot boy, may I have him, Mama?” Charles stepped forward to place his hand on Moira’s shoulder. “He can be my com…my com…” He looked first to Elizabeth, then to Moira for help.

“Companion,” Moira supplied. “But I’m not certain that is such a good idea, sweetheart.” She cast a dubious glance at the wide-eyed bundle of rags and soot who had struggled into a sitting position while the strangers around him haggled over his fate.

“But I want him.” Charles’s voice held an unusually stubborn note. “You have Miss Elizabeth, but I don’t have anyone. The earl said he would be my special friend, but I think he forgot.”

Moira heard the loneliness in the boy’s voice and cursed his insensitive guardian anew. Charles had been much too quiet and withdrawn since he’d lost his father, and the earl’s rejection had only made things worse. More than once in the past week she had contemplated finding him a playmate. But a ragged waif from the slums of London? What could the young Duke of Sheffield have in common with such a creature?

“He just smells bad ‘cause he’s dirty,” Charles said, as if reading her mind. “John Footman can bring a tub of hot water to my chamber and we can bathe him like we did my puppy in Cornwall. Then he’ll smell just fine.”

A look of horror came over the urchin’s face. “I ain’t gettin’ in no tub of hot water. Me pants’d shrink up till they scarce covered my knees, they would and they’s the onliest ones I got.”

“What a silly boy you are.” Charles grinned from ear to ear. “Of course you can’t take a bath with your clothes on. How could John Footman scrub the soot off you?”

“Well you ain’t gettin’ Alfie Duggan in no water in his altogethers neither. I can tell you that. It ain’t decent—and like as not I’d be down with lung fever afore the cock give another crow.”

“Oh pooh, I take baths all the time and I never get lung fever because John Footman always builds up the fire before I take my clothes off,” Charles scoffed.

The urchin’s eyes widened to two round, blue marbles in his sooty face. “I heered the toffs was strange ones, but if that don’t curl the cat’s whiskers, nothin’ ever will.”

Charles laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. “Oh, Alfie Duggan, I do believe you are the funniest boy in all of England.”

It was the first time Moira had heard Charles laugh—really laugh—since his father died. The sound made her heart sing, and she decided then and there that Alfie Duggan was just exactly what he needed to turn him back into the happy little boy he had once been. A gift from the gods—that was what the scruffy little street urchin was, and who was she to look askance at a gift the gods chose to drop down her chimney.

She smiled at her young stepson. “Very well, you may have Alfie as your companion—providing he agrees, of course, and providing he will allow John Footman to bathe him, for I’ll not spend good money for new clothes and new boots unless he’s clean as the day he was born.”

“New clothes and new boots?” Alfie Duggan searched Moira’s face as if to determine whether she could possibly be serious. He swallowed hard. “I maybe could get in the water onct, seein’ as how it didn’t do the nipper no harm.”

His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “But wot I wants to know afore I agrees to changin’ me occupation is wot’s this ‘ere companion got to do to earn ‘is keep? There’s things I’ll do and things I won’t do, if you takes my meanin’.”

“I shall expect you to provide companionship for the young duke and help the rest of us see that he never comes to harm,” Moira said, her approval of Alfie Duggan growing by the minute. In many ways he reminded her of herself at that age. He might be a product of poverty, but he had his own set of standards, which not even the most drastic of circumstances could alter.

“Gor’blimey. Is me ears goin’ bad or did I ‘ear you say the nipper’s a bloomin’ duke?”

Moira struggled to keep a straight face. “The Duke of Sheffield,” she said gravely.

“Well if that don’t beat all. Lord luv us, I wish me ma could see me this day—and her wot said I’d never come to nothin’ with a face wot could curdle milk.”

“I take it that means you accept the job,” Moira said. “Very well, the salary is two shillings per week plus your food and clothing.”

“Done,” Alfie said, holding out his grimy paw. “And I promises you this. You’ll never be sorry you struck this bargain, ‘cause the little nipper’ll be safe as the bloody Regent in ‘is palace with Alfie Duggan lookin’ after ‘im.”

Devon was awake—or else asleep and in the midst of a nightmare in which he suffered such excruciating pain, it was all he could do to keep from weeping like a helpless child. He could hear someone moaning, and he was very much afraid the piteous sound was emanating from his own mouth.

He moved warily and instantly broke out in a cold sweat as the pain accelerated tenfold. But the abortive bit of movement told him one thing. He was in bed. For he could feel the softness of a mattress beneath his agonized body and the warmth of a feather quilt over it. He just couldn’t find the strength to open his eyes and discover where the bed might be or who the voices he had heard earlier might belong to.

He vaguely recalled lying on a rock-hard cot in a whitewashed cubicle and Stamden telling him he was in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. But St. Bartholomew’s had never seen the likes of the luxurious bed in which he lay now. Still, there was something vaguely familiar about it. He wracked his brain. The smell. That was it. The same pungent, soapy smell that had permeated the tiny cubicle assaulted his nostrils here.

It was all coming back to him, including the memory of some blasted sadist with a Scottish brogue as thick as the walls of a Highlands castle poking and prodding the open wound on his game right leg. If he remembered correctly, he had threatened to rise up off the bed and wring the fellow’s neck. Then he must have lost consciousness, because that was the last thing he remembered until this minute.

“I think he’s coming round.” That was Stamden speaking. He’d know that voice anywhere.

“And thank the Lord for that!” Devon recognized the second voice as that of his faithful Cornish batman-cum-valet, Ned Bridges.

He concentrated all his energy on his eyelids and managed to crack them wide enough to fix his foggy gaze on the stocky, black-haired man standing beside the bed. “Devil take it, Ned, is that you?”

“And who else would be taking care of you, Captain—I mean your lordship?”

“Captain will do fine, Ned.” Devon frowned. “But where am I and how did I get here?”

“You’re in one of the bedchambers in my town house,” Stamden said. “And as to how you got here—it was Dr. Hamish MacDonald’s idea.”

“MacDonald? What happened to Grisham? He’s always taken care of me before.”

“Grisham’s in Vienna studying some new surgical procedure. The Madman from Glasgow, as MacDonald’s colleagues call him, is new to London and I gather he’s already caused an uproar at St. Bartholomew’s by declaring the lack of cleanliness in the wards is killing more patients than their diseases.”

Stamden grinned. “Strange as it seems, the fellow is dead serious. He took me aside when he’d finished your surgery and told me he wouldn’t leave a dog in the care of hospital attendants who neglected to wash their hands before changing their patients’ bandages. He has this notion that infection is somehow connected with dirt, you see. It sounds a bit strange, but Ned and I didn’t feel we were in a position to argue with him. We just bundled you into my carriage and brought you here.”

“Strange isn’t the word for it—or for Hamish MacDonald,” Ned declared, shaking his shaggy head. “The man’s an honest-to-God Bedlamite if you ask me. I’ve washed my hands with that lye soap of his so many times, my fingernails is about to fall off and he’s still not satisfied. What’s more, whoever heard of packing an open wound with bread so green with mold no self-respecting seagull would peck at it if I was to throw it out on a Cornwall beach? If it wasn’t for the fact that you’re coming along so fine, I’d bar the door to that crazy Scotsman.”

Devon moved a fraction to ease his aching body and sharp, hot pain seared his right thigh. “Fine!” he exclaimed when he could catch his breath. “If this is fine, heaven help me if things go badly.”

He rubbed his chin and felt a surprising growth of beard. “My God, how long have I been here?”

“This is the sixth day, Captain,” Ned Bridges replied. “Not that you’d be knowing, for we fed you so much laudanum, you slept through the lot of it. And a good thing too, for the Scotsman had to cut you up pretty bad to get at the pieces of metal you’ve been carrying around inside you these past two years.”

“Ned’s right,” Stamden corroborated. “Apparently the surgeon who attended you in Spain missed a couple of metal fragments that were embedded in the muscle of your right thigh and your scuffle with those two cutthroats knocked them loose.”

“You lost consciousness shortly after you signed the duke’s guardianship papers, and when we realized you were bleeding like a stuck pig, Ned and I rushed you to St. Bartholomew’s. Luckily Dr. MacDonald was available, for I’m convinced that despite his idiosyncrasies, the man is an expert with a knife.”

He chuckled. “Which, as I see it, makes the second expert with a knife to save your life on the same day.”

“The duchess!” Devon pressed his fingers to his aching temples in an effort to clear his befuddled brain. “My God! Have you seen her? Is she…that is, is my ward all right? I can’t believe Quentin would let one failed attempt stop him from trying to get his hands on the boy.”

Stamden nodded in agreement. “My thought exactly, which is why I’ve had the lads from Bow Street watching the duchess’s town house round the clock.”

He frowned. “But no, I haven’t seen her, and Ned and I have been so busy trying to save your ornery hide, I didn’t think to check with your staff for messages until this morning. When I sent a footman to inquire of your butler, he brought this back.” He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and withdrew a folded note.

Devon knew instantly it was from the duchess; the exotic fragrance he had come to associate with her lingered on the fine French bond. He unfolded it with shaky fingers but his eyes were still too out of focus to read the bold, black script. “You read it,” he said, handing it to Stamden.

Stamden quickly perused the note. “Nothing urgent,” he said. “She’s merely asking your permission to take the young duke back to Cornwall.”

Devon breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. Drop her a note, if you will. Don’t mention my surgery. Just tell her I’ll consider her request and give her an answer in a few days. I think removing the lad from London is an excellent idea, but not until I am ready to leave myself. In the meantime, the duchess will have to exercise a little patience. With a blackguard like Quentin hovering about, it would be foolish in the extreme for two women and a small boy to travel between here and Cornwall without proper escort.”

A
lfie Duggan snuggled beneath the warm quilt on the truckle bed John Footman had placed in the fireplace alcove of the young duke’s bed chamber and stared contentedly out the window at a cold February moon. He’d been in this fine house all of five days and not a soul had cuffed him or kicked him or even cursed him out. What more could a fellow expect from life than that?

Not that the toffs and their strange ways didn’t take a bit of getting used to.

Take the bathing, for instance. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear they was part fish the way they took to water. No sooner had he put a foot out of bed each morning than it was, “Wash your face and hands, Alfie,” like he’d spent the night sleeping in the gutter instead of between sheets smelling sweet as any flower in a Haymarket stall.

Then come Saturday and like it or not, there was John Footman with his everlasting tub of hot water, and it was, “In you go, Alfie,” and next thing he knew, they was back to scrubbing the hide off him again.

There was drawbacks to his fine new clothes as well. For before he could put on his britches of a morning, he must remember to pull on a pair of underdrawers—useless things and a waste of good money, if you asked him, for not a soul could see them. But the one time he’d forgotten, you’d have thought he’d snabbled the bloody silverware, from the fuss Miss Elizabeth made when one of the maids found the blasted things shoved beneath his pillow.

Then, he’d no sooner got all the bits and pieces on each day than it was time for bed and off they all had to come again, and he was expected to put on something the nipper called a night robe—and a cap to boot, as if it ever got cold enough in the duchess’s house for his ears to take a chill.

And wasn’t he glad none of his East End cronies could see him in that silly getup.

Still, the good outweighed the bad. For hadn’t he sunk his teeth into more fine mutton in five days than he’d hoped to see in his lifetime? And wasn’t sleeping alone in a truckle bed as close to heaven as a bloke could get after sharing a straw pallet in an attic with four other soot boys?

Alfie stretched his legs and wriggled his bare toes against the clean, soft sheets—a luxury he’d never before been able to enjoy, since he’d never before dared take his boots off except to stuff a bit more paper over the hole in the bottom. Sure as scratch if he took ‘em off when sleeping in the sweep’s attic, he’d wake up next morning and find ‘em walking around on another soot boy’s feet.

He stretched again. Yessir, things was looking up for Alfie Duggan. And the best thing of all was the learning. For right off that first day, the duchess had said in her low, kinda gravelly voice that made a fellow think of pigeons cooing, “Miss Elizabeth should teach Alfie lessons same as the duke.”

Just as if he’d been born in Grosvenor Square instead of the back room of a Bleeker Street bawdy house.

He’d taken to lessons like a cat to cream, for his head had always been like a sponge, ready to soak up new things. He’d memorized the alphabet quicker than Miss Elizabeth could blink her eyes, and he’d figured out right off which letter the toffs was more partial to. “H” was it, for nothing put Miss Elizabeth off like listening to him say things like ‘ouse and ‘appy and ‘airy ‘ound. But from now on it would be house and happy and hairy hound if he had to tie his tongue in a knot to do it.

For it didn’t take much of a brain box to see that if a fellow wanted to get ahead in the world, he had to give up talking like the raff and scraff and start sounding like the gentry. Old Chawleigh could gabble it off with the best o ‘em, and look wot a fine life he and missus had.

Well, don’t count Alfie Duggan out, for he could do anything he had to once he set his mind to it. For hadn’t it come to him, once he’d started learning to read and write, that it wasn’t near as hard as the dummies wot had never tried it made it out?

Mayhap one of these days, he’d pay a visit to the East End—and wouldn’t his old chums turn green as bullfrogs when he read them at bit of news from the
Times
or told them of the fine place he lived? For not a one of them could read a word except maybe the old Bear Alley moneylender who’d sometimes paid him a bob or two for running his errands—and even old Finster had never laid his head down of a night beyond the sound of Bow Bells.

But of all the lessons he’d learned, the one he was least likely to forget was that he must
never keep the duchess waiting
. All he’d had to do was watch her pretty, slanty eyes flash blue fire and her cheeks get red as a painted doxy’s when she opened that note from the fellow she called “the earl,” and he’d seen right off the woman purely hated to wait for anything.

“Who does he think he is?” she’d asked Miss Elizabeth, with a look on her face like she’d just got a whiff of a fish gone rotten. “First the arrogant devil keeps me waiting six days for a simple answer; then he tells me to wait even longer while he makes up his mind.”

Alfie smiled to himself. He didn’t envy that “earl” fellow when he finally got around to showing up. For unless he missed his guess, the bloke was in for a proper tongue-lashing.

But that was neither here nor there to Alfie Duggan, for the duchess, God save her, had been nothing but kind to him. He already had two bob in his pocket, like she’d promised, and the week not proper over. And the last two nights when she’d come to tuck the nipper in bed, she’d crossed to the truckle bed and whispered, “Good night, Alfie” as well.

Then tonight—well tonight was nothing he’d ever dared dream of. For she’d not only said good night, she’d leaned down and kissed him right in the middle of his forehead. He could still remember how good she’d smelled and how soft her lips had felt against his skin and how his eyes had gone all misty because no one, not even his ma, had ever kissed him good night before. Hell’s bells,
she
hadn’t even kissed him goodbye the day she
sold him to the sweep and run off with that knackerman from Yorkshire.

He could feel his eyes getting misty all over again just thinking about that goodnight kiss and about how the nipper had hugged him and told him he was glad he’d fallen down his chimney.

He pulled the quilt tighter around his chin and closed his eyes, for if those weren’t the kinds of things a fellow could dream on, nothing ever would be.

He had just started to doze off when he heard the noise. He knew right away what it was—the faint click of the lock as someone turned the door handle—then the quiet, squishy sound of feet tiptoeing into the room.

Alfie turned his head on the pillow and took a peek. With so much of his life spent down in a chimney or up in an attic, he had eyes like a cat. He could see the intruder was dressed in the same green-and-gold livery as John Footman. But John Footman was tall and thin with a thatch of hair the color of a ripe carrot; this bloke was near as broad as he was tall and had nary a hair on his head. And he was carrying a sack which, from the smell of it, had once been full of—Alfie wrinkled his nose—horse manure. Now why would anyone bring such a thing as
that
into the duke’s bedchamber?

As Alfie watched, the intruder tiptoed right up to the duke’s bed, looking over his shoulder all the way, like he was afraid of being caught—and all at once Alfie knew what the filthy bugger was up to. Lord luv us, he was looking to kidnap the nipper!

Without another thought, Alfie slipped out of bed, reached for the fireplace poker, and stalked his prey as silently as he’d watched the attic cat stalk an unsuspecting rat.

He was scarcely an arm’s length behind the villain when the fellow whipped a cloth from his pocket and tied a gag around the young duke’s mouth. Instantly, the poor little fellow was wide-awake—arms and legs flailing the air like a beetle turned on its back.

“Stop your bloody squirmin’, you stupid brat,” the villain snarled, and with a curse as would make a thatchgallows blush, cuffed the nipper aside the head.

The little duke sank back onto his pillow and lay still as a corpse—and Alfie saw red! He’d promised the duchess he’d take care of the nipper and this misbegotten gob of pond scum was trying to make a liar out of him. Well, the fellow had crossed the wrong doorstep this time. For if there was anything Alfie Duggan had learned on the streets of the stews, it was how to bring down bullies three times his size.

Grasping the handle of the poker with both hands, he swung it with all his might against the soft, fleshy backside of the villain’s knees.

“Yeow!” The villain dropped his sack and fell to his knees.

Alfie immediately landed a well-placed kick to his groin.

“Ugh!” The villain doubled over, gasped for breath, and clutched his privates.

“Take that, you slimy muckworm,” Alfie shouted and brought the poker down across the fellow’s bald pate with a resounding whack. “And that! And that! And that!”

Without another sound, the villain slumped forward and sprawled facedown beside the young duke’s bed.

His nose was still buried deep in the folds of the manure sack when the duchess, Miss Elizabeth, and old Chawleigh burst through the door.

Devon healed so quickly from his surgery that even such skeptics as the Marquess of Stamden and Ned Bridges started singing the praises of Dr. MacDonald’s unorthodox methods. In fact, when the Duke of Wellington called on his former aide to wish him a speedy recovery, Devon, with Stamden’s backing, urged the Iron Duke to demand the “Madman from Glasgow” be put in charge of the surgery wards of both the Duke of York Military Hospital and the Chelsea Royal Hospital for indigent army veterans.

Scarcely a fortnight from the day Stamden had transported him to his town house, Devon was on his feet and walking with crutches, with not a sign of the deadly infection that had caused so many soldiers, including the marquess, to lose limbs.

“It’s time I moved back into my own establishment,” Devon announced over a hearty breakfast in the marquess’s sunny morning room. “And time I called on my ward and his stepmother to set a date for their return to Cornwall.”

He signaled a nearby footman to pour him a second cup of tea. “The duchess does not strike me as a patient woman. I imagine she is cursing me to high heaven for delaying my permission this long.”

Stamden’s smile looked even more devilish than usual. “I imagine she is, since you forbade me to mention your surgery in the note I sent in your name. Considering you’re less than cordial treatment of her when last you met, she probably thinks you are keeping her hanging on tenterhooks just to bedevil her.” He raised an expressive eyebrow. “Was keeping her ignorant of your condition entirely wise, old fellow? You may have driven her to take drastic measures on her own.”

“She wouldn’t dare,” Devon scoffed. “She knows the terms of the guardianship agreement. She can’t make a move without my permission.” He smiled to himself. For some inexplicable reason, the thought of the feisty duchess being under his thumb gave him a perverse kind of satisfaction. It still galled him to think that she had had to come to his rescue—and in a most unorthodox way—when theoretically both the duke and she were supposed to be under his protection. He raised his cup of steaming tea to his lips and without thinking, took a healthy swallow. “Damn!” he sputtered, clanking the delicate Sèvres cup onto its saucer with a force that made Stamden wince.

Devon touched the tip of his finger to his scalded tongue and grimaced. “Surely you’re not implying she would consider moving her household to Cornwall without my knowledge,” he said, his temper flaring at the very thought.

Stamden shrugged. “I think that more than any other woman I have ever met, the duchess is a law unto herself. There is an indefinable, almost fey, quality to the lady which defies us ordinary folk to try to make her adhere to our ordinary rules.”

“If you are saying I am dealing with a woman who is less than civilized, I am already aware of that,” Devon said, remembering the duchess’s amazing prowess with her lethal stiletto.

“I’m not exactly certain what I’m saying. Does an uncanny sense of precognition, plus the ability to throw a knife like a Spanish camp follower, make her more or less civilized than the rest of us? I rather suspect that to answer that question, one would have to know the lady’s background. I assume your brother was privy to that information since he had made up his mind to marry her. No sensible man would leg-shackle himself to a woman without knowing a great deal about her—especially a woman with the duchess’s unusual talents.”

“Don’t underestimate the woman’s power to turn men into mindless idiots,” Devon said dryly. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t the slightest idea what, if anything, Blaine knew about her family background.

He drummed his fingers absentmindedly on the table, absorbed in the disturbing thoughts running through his mind. “My mother despises her, of course. Has gone so far as to call her a witch, but my father forbade her to ever speak so in public. The men and women of Cornwall are notoriously superstitious; it would be a dangerous thing to plant such a thought in their minds, even about a heartless vamp like the duchess. A witch hunt is not a pretty thing.”

Devon reached for his crutch and pushed himself to his feet. “Which does not, however, preclude my looking into her past—since I must deal with her in the future.” He smiled at this own choice of words. “And I can think of no better time than the present to begin my investigation.”