Wicked Angel (Blackthorne Trilogy) (8 page)

      
Monty inspected the gangly ape leader who was Suth- ington's niece. Small wonder the old boy never arranged a come-out for her, not that he could do so with that addle-pated nonconformist preacher dragging her about on his crusades. Lud, she looked even worse than she had earlier, if such were possible. Those thick eyeglasses, slightly askew, reflected the candlelight eerily and the faded yellow dress hanging on her was a shapeless horror.
 

      
He had an uneasy suspicion he would not like what she had to say about Alex. "Good evening, Miss Woodbridge."

      
"I know it is presumptuous of me to call unannounced this way, milord, but the matter is most pressing." When he raised his eyebrow sardonically she could see the family resemblance to Alex.

      
"I fear you've come with ill tidings about my scapegrace nephew. Pray, out with it, Miss Woodbridge. I don't doubt but he's in the suds once more. Tell me, has he sent you for a loan to carry him over at the gaming tables?"

      
Joss knew Alex did not want his family to know about his injury or that he lay in a charity hospital. She had equally selfish reasons for keeping his guilty secret. She wanted him to remain under her care. "No, milord, Alex has not had an unsuccessful time at the tables. Indeed he's been winning quite steadily. That's why he sent me. He brought with him from America some of his Grandmother Blackthorne's Indian remedies and I have need of them at the charity hospital where I work."

      
"Indian remedies? Well, if they can cure dogs, then perhaps they can cure the indigent. Lud knows nothing else can."

      
"Education and a fair wage would do wonders for those of them who are in good health," Joss replied before thinking.

      
Monty was amused at her impertinent response. "You are Elijah's get, no doubt about it. Never saw two brothers less alike than your father and the earl."

      
She raised her head. "I take that as a compliment, milord."

      
He chuckled. "You would."

      
"If I might have the herbals, milord, I shall trouble you no further."

      
"Why is it, my dear, that I feel you shall trouble this family a very great deal before we're quits, hmm? Very well," he replied, ringing for a footman to fetch from Alex's room the pouch she described.

* * * *

      
Alex was able to give her mumbled vague directives about how to make the cherry-bark infusion that she sat spooning down his throat all through the night. She sponged his brow and changed the dressing on his wound, using his grandmother's healing ointment that they had employed so successfully on Poc. As she worked, she was able to study him without those devilish dark eyes to fluster her. He looked so young and vulnerable, almost boyish as he slept.

      
Thick golden lashes rested against his cheeks and the slashing, expressive eyebrows above them for once were not raised in sardonic amusement. His mouth, so wide and dazzling when he smiled, lay barely closed. She could not resist tracing over his eyebrows, then down his high cheekbones to where the thick gold stubble of his beard abraded the sensitive pads of her fingertips. His lips moved soundlessly, drawing her irresistibly to touch them and wonder how such a mobile, expressive mouth would feel pressed against her skin.

      
Joss jerked her hand away, scalded by the very thought, a thought that had never entered her mind about any other man she had ever met.
I'm a silly old tabby
, she scolded herself as she stood up and paced across the room. It was time to check the patients in the ward. The work would keep her foolish hands busy and give her time to get her mind in sensible order once more.

      
Alex awakened as the first pale rays of sunrise inched over the sill of the narrow window, bathing his face in light. He looked around the bare, unfamiliar room, thoroughly disoriented for a second. Other than one crude wooden chair and a small splintery table, there was no furniture. He lay on a narrow lumpy mattress. When he squirmed, trying to find a more comfortable position, a sharp pain lanced from his upper back straight down his spine. Then he saw Grandma Charity's medicines sitting out on the table and remembered where he was.

      
Joss stepped into the room at that moment, carrying a tray with fresh water and clean bandages on it. A merry smile, uniquely her own, split her face. "So you're awake. Fever's broken."

      
"How can you tell from across the room?"

      
She came in and set the tray down on the table. "After one spends hours nursing feverish patients, one learns to mark the signs—clear eyes, good color, a degree of alertness in expression."

      
"How long have you been working in this place?" he asked.

      
"I began to work with Dr. Atherton when I was around thirteen. Then Dr. Byington replaced him."

      
"Thirteen!" he echoed, appalled at the thought of hours,

much less years, in such a hellish environment. "Why, you were only a child."

      
'That was before I began helping with Papa's missionary work among the climbing boys and prostitutes. After helping to found the shelter, I grew up."

      
"Why do you do these things—I mean devote your entire life to charity?"

      
"I want to be useful, to make a difference in this world, Alex. Besides, it's not as if I were offered a carriage load of choices," she added dryly. "Bookish young women with neither beauty nor dowry to recommend them scarce have suitors beating down their doors."

      
"You have other qualities to recommend you besides a dowry, although your uncle should have seen to that."

      
"Bother the earl, he disowned his only brother," she said testily. "Besides, I would not want a man who'd wed me for an inheritance."

      
"What for, then—your mind? You have an agile one. Being bookish is not all so bad a quality if a sense of humor accompanies it."

      
"Considering your earlier confession about being sent down from university for not attending your studies, that is a remarkably turnabout opinion."

      
He shrugged, then winced when his stitches pulled. "Believe it or not, I have read a book or two between bouts of debauching."

      
Her expression was dubious as she began to change his dressing. "So pray tell me about these two books."

      
One gold eyebrow arched. "You wound me."

      
"La, your companions of the evening have already done that. At least I gave you the benefit of the doubt and allowed two books, not just one."

      
He squinted in mock concentration. "Let me see if I can recall them. There was Mr. Franklin's remarkable autobiography."

      
"A pro-French libertine."

      
"President Jefferson's essays, Tom Paine's pamphlets, Washington Irving's new satire."

      
"You have read more than I would have credited," she conceded, concentrating on tying off the fresh bandage, "but they're all Americans."

      
"How about Andrew Marvell?"

      
She sniffed. " 'To His Coy Mistress' is too risque to edify the mind or uplift the human spirit. I prefer Wordsworth's 'Intimations of Immortality.' "

      
Waggling his eyebrows he replied, "Ah, yes, I did experience a bit of 'splendor in the grass' growing up in the Georgia backwoods."

      
"Somehow I don't believe we experience it in quite the same manner here in England." Bantering like this was truly delightful. She could enjoy matching wits without engaging her heart... or so she hoped.

      
Alex laughed heartily. "Being a lover of all manner of strays, I suppose you enjoyed ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’."

      
"As a matter of fact I did, even if Mr. Coleridge is an opium eater."

      
He shrugged, carefully this time. "No one's perfect."

      
"My real love, since you mentioned political tracts earlier, is the writing of Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft." She waited to see if he even knew who they were.

      
He tsked mockingly. "I might have known you'd favor women's rights apologists."

      
"You don't look at all horrified. Most men—even my father and his friends, are quite appalled that I advocate economic, political and social equality between the sexes."

      
"I come from a revolutionary country, if you recall," he said, chuckling. 'To give your father the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it is not Miss Wollstonecraft's ideas on women's rights he rejects, but those on free love."

      
She bit her lip consideringly. "Yes, he has mentioned it

a time or two, even though I've assured him I do not share that view with her."

      
"I'm certain he was much relieved," Alex said dryly. "You are a woman of many parts, Miss Jocelyn Woodbridge."

      
"And you are an utter charlatan, feigning ignorance of literature and ideas as if you cared more for gaming hells and Cyprians."

      
He rubbed his chin. "If I had to choose, my dear Joss, I fear you'd be much disillusioned with me. Since discovering all the lusty vices of the Great Wen, I'd be hard pressed to give them up."

      
"Perhaps some day you shall, Alex."
When you find the right woman
. But Jocelyn Woodbridge knew it would never be she.

Chapter Five

      
Joss stood by the window gazing out into the warm spring sunshine where the children scampered about Alex. Their squeals of delight had drawn her from her preparation for the afternoon classes. She watched in amazement while Alexander Blackthorne, resplendently dressed in cream doeskin trousers and a deep bottle green jacket, picked up little Verity Blaine, one of the most destitute of the children, and let her grimy little fingers tug on his snowy white cravat, pulling it loose. He seemed unconcerned, laughing and teasing the crowd of urchins surrounding him. They seldom saw a toff in these mean dirty slums. When they did, the "gentlemen" drove recklessly past, cursing, and sometimes running them down as they begged for coins.

      
But Alex was different. He drew them to him like a golden beam of sunshine. Children had a way of sensing the goodness—or evil—in adults. The moment he'd appeared at the schoolyard gates, they had responded to his warmth and laughter as he asked their names and answered their awestruck questions. Shortly they had gathered from all around the small bare yard to hear stories of his adventures with his Muskogee relatives. He tossed stones with the boys and even joined the girls in a game of hopscotch.

      
Joss could have stood all day simply basking in the pleasure of watching him. His way with the children did not surprise her. Everything about Alex Blackthorne was magical. She had seen little of him in the months since his awful brush with death. Yet each time when she became certain he had forgotten a boring spinster such as she, he would turn up, enchanting her with charm and laughter. Perhaps it would be better if he did not come by ever again.
I am losing my heart more each time he reappears.
Joss started guiltily, knowing that her heart must have been on her sleeve.

      
When Mary Breem walked up to her and stared out at Alex and the children, she opined, "A wastrel rogue such as that shouldn't be mixing with young impressionable minds." Mary sniffed primly, her thin, pinched lips compressed in a harsh line.

      
"Considering that most of their mothers are prostitutes and their fathers—if one could even find them—are probably cutpurses, I doubt Mr. Blackthorne will be much of an additional corruption," she replied crisply.

      
Mary stiffened indignantly. "The reverend would be shocked to hear you speak of such lascivious matters. 'Tis most indelicate."

      
" 'Tis the truth, Mary," she answered gently this time, striving for patience. Mrs. Bleem had volunteered long hours helping her organize the school for these children born into hopeless poverty. If Mary was a bit on the priggish and judgmental side, she was a tireless worker and zealous member of her father's congregation.

      
"I know his type and they prefer the pleasures of the flesh to being about the Lord's work. Why does he come around here?"

      
"Mr. Blackthorne is a good friend ... of the reverend's

as well as mine. He saved Papa's life on the docks."

      
Excusing herself, Joss walked outdoors to greet Alex, fighting the urge to straighten her hair. The knot of braids had come loose earlier when she'd had to break up a fight between two of the boys. Now it hung askew in a most ungraceful clump against her neck. What difference did it make? she chided herself. No matter what she did with her hair, it could add nothing of charm to a squint-eyed, gawky creature such as she.

      
Alex listened gravely as Tessa Jones explained in a piping lisp how she had lost her two front baby teeth. She looked worshipfully into his face, then giggled at his whispered confidence.

      
Do I reveal such puppyish adoration?
Praying not, Joss cleared her throat as she approached him, calling out for the children to return to the classroom for their noon meal.

      
"I would not have expected a rakish gamester to have such rapport with children," she said, teasing.