The Savage Miss Saxon (2 page)

I
t was a chilly night, even for November, and there was precious little moon to ease the darkness. All the honest folk in the neighborhood had been long abed, aware that nights like these were best suited to keen-eyed owls or, as had been the case these months past, highwaymen on the lookout for any person for whom they could ease the burden of traveling the highways while hampered by quantities of cumbersome jewelry and purses heavy with gold.

Yet there were others abroad this night besides creatures of prey and their hapless victims, for in the distance could be heard the sound of male voices raised in raucous song. These voices belonged to a trio of young gentlemen who had lately quit the Bull and Feathers tavern as well as the village of Linton itself (having already been politely but purposefully ejected from two neighboring taverns) and who were now jogging arm-in-arm along the dark roadway leading away from the village.

Their song faltered and then died away completely as none of the merry trio could recollect the words to the fifteenth verse of the ditty they had been composing all that evening long (a bawdy tune whose loss to the pages of musical history could only be termed a blessing).

In silence they marched on, crisscrossing the roadway several times in the meandering gait of the happily inebriated, until they at last reached the crossroads. Once at this juncture their wine-bemused mental faculties combined with a sudden deterioration of their physical coordination, and they fortuitously sat themselves down beside the signpost before they either set off on a wrong turning or tumbled into a puddle and drowned themselves.

“Anyone know where we’re at?” one of the young men asked of his companions.

“Signpost here,” pointed out the second youth. “Jeremy,” this one ordered the third, “your neck of the woods—tell us—are we lost?”

The one called Jeremy hauled himself upright by means of a hand over hand climbing bf the signpost until he stood, rocking slightly on his heels, staring owlishly at the five fingerposts nailed to the main signpost.

After a few moments spent in fierce concentration he announced happily, “We’re in England!” before collapsing to the ground in a paroxysm of giggles.

“Cup shot,” the first young man observed sagely. “Well and truly corned.”

“Thass no’ so,” Jeremy protested. “No more than a drop in the eye, Billy, thass all, no more.”

The one called Billy shook his head in the negative. “Drunk as an emperor,” he persisted.

“An emperor?” Jeremy questioned vaguely.

Their companion, Cuthbert Simpson, and the acknowledged leader of the trio, translated. “He means you’re ten times as drunk as a lord. And, worse luck, he’s right.”

“Wanna go home,” Jeremy retorted feebly. “Feeling dashed queer.”

“Is it any wonder, my dear friend?” Cuffy, as Cuthbert was known to his friends, countered. “I
did
try to talk you out of jumping off that hen house with a chicken tucked under each arm. Any fool could have told you it wouldn’t work.”

Jeremy hung his head. “It should have worked. There were wings and feathers enough.”

“That’s true, you jingle brain,” Cuffy countered, “except that even Billy here knows
chickens don’t fly
. But did you listen? Oh no, not the so-smart Lord Jeremy Mannering. You were going to let those chickens fly you twice around the barn and into the second-story bedroom of the good farmer Bates’s granddaughter.”

Jeremy looked down at the front of his fine waistcoat and breeches, covered now with dry, caked mud acquired when his body made rude contact with the soggy farmyard, and decided to change the subject. “What say we head back to Linton Hall? But first,” his eyes lit with another sterling idea, “what say we, um,
rearrange
these little fingerposts?”

As this practice had long been looked upon as an almost mandatory prank, committed by youths out on a lark for untold generations, this idea met with near instant agreement.

Within minutes the deed was done, and the trio was about to set off again when suddenly they heard the thundering approach of horses moving fast.

“Bing avast, you coves; play least in sight behind the crackmans! It’s land pirates—prod your dew beaters!”

Jeremy thumped his fists against his hips. “There he goes again, Cuffy, spouting thieves’ cant gibberish from that damned book. Good God. The fella reads one book in eighteen years and it has to be a damned dictionary of sporting language. What’s he saying?”

“He says we’re to go through the hedges because highwaymen are approaching. We’re supposed to run away on foot—move our dew beaters,” Cuffy responded rapidly, moving toward the hedges. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that Jeremy was still standing in the middle of the road, laughing at the thought of calling feet ‘dew beaters.’ “Jeremy!” Cuffy commanded tersely. “Bing avast your arse!”

Belatedly, Jeremy moved, diving headfirst into the hedges alongside the road just before a large post chaise and four plunged to a halt at the crossroads. “A rattle and prad,” announced Billy anticlimactically.

“Brilliant deduction, friend,” responded Cuffy, still spitting leaves from his mouth thanks to his mad dash through the hedge, “if only a trifle tardy. Look—the postilion is reading the fingerposts. Now he’s telling the driver, yes Billy, I mean the rattling cove, which way to go.”

The post chaise lumbered off down the road, in quite the opposite direction of its intended destination, and Cuffy saw a dark female shape outlined through the side window.

“Well, well, my lady,” he murmured thoughtfully as he threw an irreverent kiss at the departing vehicle, “and whose uninvited guest shall you be this night?”

Chapter One

“W
ould you mind repeating that, Poole?” the man asked with remarkable
sang-froid
.

Poole watched nervously as his master, Nicholas Mannering, Earl of Linton, settled his long, lean torso into a chair set behind the massive desk in the Linton Hall library. His lordship then picked up a silver letter opener and began fingering its sharp tip negligently as he impaled his longtime butler with one sparkling golden eye.

It was bad enough before, thought Poole quakingly, enduring Master Nicholas’s unsettlingly direct gaze, but it was doubly frightening now—almost as if the black velvet patch covering that blind left eye were capable of looking right through a person and into his soul.

“Well, um—er—yes, sir, I mean—er—
harrumph
. That is to say, sir...” Poole’s words trailed off.

“Allow me to assist you, old friend,” his lordship intervened before his flustered butler collapsed altogether. “We shall begin at the beginning, if you please. Last night I retired early with another of these cursed headaches that have plagued me since Waterloo. Am I right so far, Poole?”

Poole used one shaking finger to ease his tight collar. “That you are, sir. Powerful weary you were too, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so. But before you retired I reminded you that young Master Jeremy and his friends were not as yet at home and asked if I was to let you know when they returned. Upon which, sir, you said—”

“Upon which, Poole, I said ‘the man who wakes me once I finally find sleep tonight will rue the day he was born,’ ” Lord Linton supplied feelingly.

“
Exactly so
, my lord,” breathed Poole, relaxing a bit. “And that’s why I didn’t wake you when the—er—young woman began banging on our door after midnight. Knocked so long and loud, sir, I thought King George himself was calling, I did, and that’s no lie. Well, sir, when I saw it weren’t Farmer George but only some dowdy dressed female—and not even an English female, if you take my meaning, sir—I told her straight that she had to leave.”

Seeking to save himself from a recital of all Poole had said to the woman, Nicholas interrupted his butler again. “But she had already dismissed the post chaise that had brought her?”

Poole gave a deep sigh. “That she had, my lord. Even then I saw no great problem, as I could have had one of the stableboys run her to the Bull and Feathers, but she was having none of that, she told me. Said she
belonged
here, sir, and then—and I repeat, sir, I was not in my cups—this great hulking man-monster tramps into the hall carrying his weight in baggage and trunks. Oh sir, it was a sight fit to turn your hair white—this man-beast was near as wide as the doorway and twice as high. But the worst of it was his face. Coal black it was, sir—not like Molineaux, that fighter you call The Black, you know—but
painted
black and all shiny and streaked like.”

Lord Linton allowed himself a small smile at the sight of the squat, chubby, middle-aged Poole trying to recreate a visual picture of the creature.

Poole saw his master’s amusement and pushed on to his conclusion while, it seemed, the gods were still smiling on him. “Well sir, while the beast grumbled in some foreign tongue the woman tells me, oh so superior like, as if she was somebody, ‘So your master’s abed, is he? Well, I should hope so, man; after all, he is an ancient piece, isn’t he? As a matter of fact, until Chas told me different I thought the old boy had turned up his toes long since.’
Then
, my lord, she hikes up her skirts and brushes right past me to the stairs, the beast following after her, and says she’ll find her own bedroom!”

“At which point you positioned yourself at the base of the stairs, arms outflung, and told them they would have to get past you first?” ended Lord Linton, his one good eye twinkling at the mental image such a scene evoked.

Poole hung his balding head in shame. “I am sorry to say I did no such thing, sir. I did try to stop them, I swear on my mother’s eyes—er, sorry, sir, I mean, I swear on my mother’s saintly grey head—I
did
try, but the beast turned and growled at me and, well, sir, I’m not a young man anymore, you know.”

Nicholas Mannering unbent himself from his chair and rose to his full height, the early morning sun striking his black locks and highlighting them with gold. His wide mouth splitting into an amused grin, showing his even, white teeth to advantage against his deeply tanned skin, he assured his butler that he was certain he had done his best and that, indeed, no man could have done more. Then, clasping his hands together behind his back, he began pacing up and down in front of the desk. “But what about Master Jeremy and his two ramshackle school chums? Surely they could have assisted you in rousting our bizarre housebreakers?”

“Begging your pardon yet again, sir,” Poole dared to say, “but the young master and his companions were in no fit state to be of any help, more’s the pity.”

Lord Linton allowed himself a small smile. “Am I to take it then that m’brother and his guests were, perchance, inebriated?”

Poole’s brow furrowed in confusion. “If in-ineb—er—if that word you said means were they falling down drunk, then I must sadly say, yes, my lord, they were.”

“And would you also say that to rout this same hapless trio out of their snug little beds at the ungodly hour of eight in the morning could only be deemed cruel and inhuman treatment, when anybody of any sense knows being forced to confront the inevitably painful results of an evening of deep drinking even a moment before noon, at the very earliest, could easily convince those same afflicted persons that death was not only imminent but to be eagerly anticipated?” his lordship prodded.

Poole grinned his widest grin. “Powerful cruel, sir,” he concurred happily.

Lord Linton shrugged his shoulders in patently mock sorrow. “Yet I fear I must ask you to send servants to do just that, Poole. If we are to deal with this uninvited guest and her great beastie, I would prefer to do it with my brother at my side—and his erstwhile friends as well, as long as they are in residence anyway. See that they join me within the next half hour, please.” As Poole turned to relay his lordship’s order to the footman in the hall, barely hiding his glee over this golden opportunity for revenge on the youths who were so patently useless last night when the man had been sorely in need of advice and assistance, Lord Linton added, “And have a pot of coffee sent in here—a large pot, as strong as Cook can brew it.”

Drat you, Jeremy, Nicholas thought to himself after the butler had departed. How much longer are you going to indulge in these hey-go-mad starts of yours? If it’s my attention you desire, brother, you certainly have it!

While waiting for his brother and his friends to put in their appearance, the Earl, his unknown house guests temporarily dismissed from his mind, reflected yet again on Jeremy’s recent behavior.

His brother, now eighteen, seemed to be attempting to throw over the traces in a bid for independence—that, and displaying a strong desire to be at home at Linton Hall where he could “take care of you, Nick, I owe it to you.”

A series of minor infractions had given rise to an almost constant correspondence between Nicholas and Jeremy’s headmaster, but even the Earl’s most eloquent entreaties could not keep Jeremy from being sent down for the rest of the term when the lad, in a fit of pique, tossed his dinner at an annoying fly. The fly providentially escaped the missile that finally landed, very improvidentially, square in the face of the hall proctor.