The Last Hellion (5 page)

Even then he couldn't bring his full attention to the men about him because his mind was churning with salacious scenarios that landed her on her back instead of him.

Still, he knew the trio about him—Augustus Tolliver, George Carruthers, and Adolphus Crenshaw—and they knew him, or thought they did. And so his expression remained the drunkenly amused one they'd expect.

"Let it be a lesson to her, eh?" Tolliver said, chuckling. "What lesson was that, I wonder? How to deliver a jawbreaker?"

"Jawbreaker?" Carruthers echoed indignantly. "And how could he be talking if it was? I vow, you must be half blind. It wasn't the uppercut that dropped him. It was that curious acrobatic trick of hers."

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

"I've heard of such things," said Crenshaw. "Some-thing to do with balance, I collect. All the rage in China or Arabia or some such—and about what you'd expect from those heathen inscrutables."

"About what you'd expect from Lady Grendel, then," said Carruthers. "I heard she was born in a Borneo swamp and reared by crocodiles."

"More like Seven Dials," Tolliver said. "You heard this lot, cheering her on.

They know her. She's one of their own, spawned in the back-slums of the Holy Land, I don't doubt."

"Where'd she learn heathenish fighting tricks, then?" Crenshaw demanded. "And how is it no one ever heard of her before a few months ago? Where's she been keeping all this time that no one remarked a Long Meg like her? It isn't as though she's hard to see, is it?"

He turned back to Vere, who was swatting mud from his trousers. "You'd a close enough look and listen, Ainswood. Any hint of the Holy Land in her speech?

London bred, would you say, or not?"

Seven Dials was the black heart of one of London's seamiest neighborhoods, St.

Giles's parish, which was also known ironically as the Holy Land.

Vere doubted that the Grenville gorgon would have needed to travel beyond its boundaries to learn the kinds of dirty fighting tricks she employed. That he'd discerned no Cockney accent meant nothing. Jaynes had grown up in the back-slums, yet he'd lost all traces of the accent.

Perhaps she had sounded more like
a
lady than Jaynes did a gentleman. What did it signify? Plenty of lowborn wenches tried to ape their betters. And if Vere could not at the moment recall a single one who'd made it seem so natural, he could not, either, discern a single reason to stand here blithering about it.

Covered with mud outwardly and simmering inwardly, he was in no mood to Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

encourage this lot of morons to exercise their limited intellects upon this or any other point.

Leaving them, he made for Brydges Street in a storm of outrage, the likes of which he hadn't experienced in years.

He had hurried to the curst female's rescue and found her all but begging for a riot. His timely intervention had beyond question spared her a knife in the back.

In reward, he'd received an earful of brimstone and taunting defiance.

Miss Insolence had actually threatened to black both his eyes. She'd threatened
him
—Vere Aylwin Mallory—whom even that great big-beaked brute Lord Beelzebub couldn't pound into submission.

Was it any wonder that a man so goaded should adopt the tried and true method of silencing a scold?

And if she didn't like it, why didn't she slap his face, as a normal woman would?

Did she think he'd hit her—any woman—back? Did she think he meant to ravish her in Vinegar Yard before a mob of drunks, pimps, and whores?

As if he'd
ever
stoop so low, he fumed. As if he needed to take a woman by force. As if he didn't have to fight off their advances with cudgels, practically.

He was halfway to Brydges Street when a loud voice penetrated his indignation.

"I say—Ainswood, ain't it?"

Vere paused and turned. The man calling to him was the one he'd pulled out of the cabriolet's rampaging way.

"Couldn't place the name at first," the fellow said as he reached him. "But then they said something 'bout Dain and m' curst sister and then I recalled who you was. Which I should've done in the first place, him mentioning you more than once, but I'll tell you the truth: I been hurried and harried from pillar to post till I feel like what's-his-name the Greek fellow with them plaguey Fury things after Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

him, and it's a wonder my brainworks ain't closed up shop permanent. So it's like as not if the tall gal did run me down I wouldn't know the difference, except maybe it'd be the first rest I had in weeks. All the same, I'm much obliged, since I'm sure it's a deuced awkward way to go, havin' your bones crushed under a wheel, and I'd be honored if you'd share a bottle with me."

He stuck out his hand. "Mean to say, it's Bertie Trent—me, that is—and pleased to make your acquaintance."

Lydia shoved the Duke of Ainswood to the darkest corner of her mind and focused on the girl. This was not the first damsel in distress she'd rescued. She usually took them to one of London's more trustworthy charitable organizations.

Early in the summer, though, Lydia had rescued a pair of seventeen-year-olds, Bess and Millie, who had run away from harsh employers. She'd hired them as maids of all work—or slaveys, as such servants were often called—because her intuition told her they'd suit her. Experience had proven her intuition correct.

The same forceful inner voice told her this waif would also do better with her.

By the time Lydia had squeezed her and Susan into the cabriolet, she was certain the girl was not of the laboring classes. Though she spoke with a slight Cornish accent, it was an educated one, and practically the first words that came out of her mouth were, "I can't believe it's you, Miss Grenville of the
Argus
."

Maidservants and simple country girls were unlikely to be familiar with the
Argus
.

The girl's name—definitely Cornish—was Tamsin Prideaux, and she was nineteen years old. Lydia had guessed fifteen at first, but on closer inspection the maturity was more evident.

Tamsin was a smallish girl, that was all, except for her eyes, which were Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

enormous and velvet brown. They were also extremely shortsighted, it turned out. Apart from what she wore, her spectacles were the only belongings she had left. They were sadly mangled, with one lens cracked.

She had taken them off shortly after alighting from the coach, Miss Prideaux explained, in order to clean them, because by then they were thickly coated with road dust. There had been a great crush at the coaching inn, and someone had pushed her. The next she knew, someone tore her reticule and carpetbag from her hands so violently that she unbalanced and fell. When she got up from the ground, her box was gone, too. At this point, the bawd had come, feigning sympathy and offering to take her to the Bow Street magistrate's office to report the crime.

It was an old trick, but even hardened Londoners were assaulted and robbed daily, Lydia assured her.

"You mustn't blame yourself," she told the girl as they reached the house. "It could happen to anyone."

"Except you," Miss Prideaux said. "You're up to every rig."

"Don't be silly," Lydia said briskly while hustling her indoors. "I've made my share of mistakes."

She noticed that Susan showed no signs of jealousy, which looked promising.

She had also resisted the temptation to play with the new human toy. This was considerate of the mastiff, since the girl had been terrified out of her wits already, and—misinterpreting affectionate canine overtures—might start screaming, which would upset Susan very much. Nonetheless, as they entered the hall, Lydia took precautions.

"This is a friend," she told the dog while lightly patting Tamsin's shoulder. "Be gentle, Susan. Do you hear?
Gentle
."

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

Susan licked the girl's hand, very delicately.

Gingerly, Tamsin petted her.

"Susan is highly intelligent," Lydia explained, "but you must communicate with her in simple terms."

"They used mastiffs to hunt wild boar in olden times, didn't they?" the girl asked.

"Does she bite?"

"Devour is more like it," Lydia said. "Still, you've nothing to fear from her. If she grows too playful, tell her firmly, '
Gentle
,'—unless you'd rather be knocked down and drowned in doggy drool."

Tamsin chuckled softly, which was an encouraging sign. Bess appeared then, and in a little while the guest was borne off for tea, a hot bath, and a nap.

After a quick washing up, Lydia adjourned to her study. '. Only there, with the door closed, did she let her mask of unshakable confidence slip.

Though she'd seen a great deal of the world—more of it than the majority of London's most polished sophisticates, male and female—she was not altogether as worldly as the world believed.

No man had ever kissed Lydia Grenville before.

Even Great-Uncle Ste, kindly if misguided, had never done more than pat her on the head—or, when she started sprouting into a giantess, upon the hand.

What the Duke of Ainswood had done was very far from avuncular. And Lydia found she was very far from immune.

She sank into the chair at the desk and pressed her bowed head against the heels of her hands and waited for the hot inner tumult to subside and her neatly ordered, well-controlled world to settle back into place.

It wouldn't. Instead, the chaotically uncontrollable world of her childhood Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

flooded her mind. The tide of images ebbed and flowed, to settle at last upon the scene most deeply etched in her memory: the time when her world and sense of who she was had changed irrevocably.

She saw herself as she had been then, a little girl sitting upon a battered stool, reading her mother's diary.

Though Lydia never would, she could have written the tale much in the same style she used for
The Rose of Thebes
.

London, 1810

It was early evening, several hours after Anne Grenville had been laid to rest in
the parish burial ground, when her eldest daughter, ten-year-old Lydia, found
the journal. It lay hidden under a shabby collection of fabric scraps intended for
patches, at the bottom of her mother's sewing basket.

Lydia's younger sister, Sarah, had long since cried herself to sleep, and their
father, John Grenville, had gone out to seek solace in the arms of one of his
trollops or in a bottle
—
or both, most likely
.

Unlike her sister, Lydia was awake and her blue eyes were dry. She had not been
able to cry all day. She was too angry with God, who had taken the wrong
parent.

But then, what would God want with Papa?
Lydia asked herself as she pushed
away a stray lock of golden hair and searched for a patch for Sarah's pinafore.

That was when she found the little book, its pages filled with her mother's tiny,
precise penmanship
.

The mending forgotten, she sat huddled by the smoky hearth and read on
through the night the vastly puzzling story. The diary was small, and her mama
had not made entries faithfully. Consequently, Lydia reached the end before her
Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

father staggered home sometime after dawn.

She waited until midafternoon, however, when he was sober and the worst of his
ill temper was abating, and Sarah was in the alley playing with a neighbor's
child.

"I found something Mama wrote," Lydia told him. "Is it true she was a lady once
upon a time? And you acted upon the stage once? Or was Mama only making
believe?"

He had started hunting in the clothespress for something, but paused and gave
her a faintly amused look. "What does it matter what she was?" he returned. "It
never did us any good, did it? Do you think we should be living in this hovel if
she'd come with a dowry? What does it matter to you, Miss High and Mighty?

Fancy yourself a great lady, do you?"

"Is it true that I take after Mama's ancestors?" Lydia asked, ignoring her father's
sarcasm. She had learned not to let it upset her.

"Ancestors?" He opened a cupboard, shrugged at the meager contents, then
slammed it shut. "That's a grand way of putting it. Is that how your mama
explained it?
"

"
She wrote it in a book
—
a diary, it seems to be, Lydia persisted, "that she was a
lady from an old, noble family. And one of her cousins was a lord
—
the
Marquess of Dain. She wrote that she ran away with you to Scotland," Lydia
continued. "And her family was very angry and cut her off as though she was 'a
diseased branch of the Ballister tree.' I only want to know whether it's true.

Mama was… fanciful.

"So she was. Papa got a crafty look in his eyes, much worse than the mockery
and even the dislike he sometimes forgot to conceal.
"

Then, too late, Lydia realized that she shouldn't have mentioned the diary.
"

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

Then all she could do was want to kick herself. But she hid her feelings
—
as usual

—
when he said, "Bring me the book, Lydia.
"

She brought it and never saw it again, as she'd expected would happen. It
vanished as so many of their belongings had vanished before and continued to
do in the following months. Lydia had no trouble figuring out that he'd pawned
her mother's journal and would never reclaim it, or had sold it outright. That
was how he got money. Sometime he lost it gambling, and sometimes he won, but
Lydia and Sarah seldom saw much of it.

Neither did the people John Grenville owed.

Two years later, despite numerous changes of name and residence, his creditors
caught up with him. He was arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea
Prison in Southwark. After he'd lived there for a year with his daughters, he was
declared an insolvent debtor and released.