A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (13 page)

“I’ll bring my carriage round to Damask Manor at eight o’clock in the morning. Until then, Lady Balmain.”

They all curtsied their farewells. Josephine trailing a look and a smile at the vicar.

She turned to Adam, a question on her face. “The O’Flahertys?”

“That would be Mr. and Mrs. O’Flaherty,” he said slowly. “They’re a poor family. I’ve rallied some men to help with repairs there. We’ll begin tomorrow.”

“Is there anything in particular I ought to know about the O’Flahertys?”

He paused. “Let me put it like this, Lady Wareham. I think you’ve just been given the equivalent of the task of cleaning the Augean stables. Figuratively speaking.”

“What are the Augean stables?” She wasn’t the least bit sensitive about the gaps in her education. There was no point in apologizing for it. She simply acquired information as she could from whom she could, and she quite liked knowing things. As she’d told him, it was remarkable what could be useful.

“Do you know who Hercules was? Strong chap, Greek, was given a lot of tasks to perform to prove his worth?”

“Mmmm. A friend may have mentioned him to me once or twice,” she said vaguely. “My education in the classics is a trifle patchy, Reverend, and I admit I wasn’t trained in the traditional feminine arts, so to speak. Though I do know how to sing, play a little pianoforte, sew passably, and I do know quite a number of useful French phrases. Je voudrais fumer ton cigare,” for instance.”

She thought she might succeed in disconcerting him through stealth. She’d just said, in the most conversational tone achievable, very nearly the most prurient thing possible.

It was a French euphemism: “I would like to smoke your cigar,” which of course meant something else entirely.

She did like how still he went. How the blue of his eyes intensified. How he didn’t blink for a good, oh, three seconds or so.

But then he just shook his head ever-so-slightly, to and fro.

And in the end, she was the one who felt the flush beginning.

How did he do that?

“The Augean stables were filled with endless horse muck, Lady Balmain,” he told her. “Piles and piles of it.”

“Oh, Reverend Sylvaine. You’re such an incorrigible flirt.”

He grinned and touched his hat. “Good day, Lady Wareham. I’m off to retrieve my ginger cake. Good luck tomorrow.”

Chapter 10

WHEN HE RETURNED to the vicarage an hour or so later, he discovered Colin sitting comfortably at the kitchen table, eating an apple.

Adam reflexively, guiltily, thrust the basket holding the ginger cake behind his back.

“Oh, there you are, cousin,” Colin said pleasantly. “And a good day to you. Mrs. Dalrymple let me in.” He finished his apple with a final bite and balanced the core delicately on the table.

Then he shifted in his chair, fished about in his coat pocket, and one at a time, counted pound notes out onto the table while Adam watched. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

“Because I heard you lost your mind and bought a ginger cake for five pounds. And I know you can’t spare the blunt.”

Olivia must have tattled.

Adam scowled at him. And then he heaved the basket up onto on the table.

Colin peered in. “Looks like a ginger cake, all right.”

“All of those people supposedly gathered self-righteously to help the poor, then shunning something that could have been had for a shilling. The pleasure people take in mass condemnation … people I know and generally like were savoring the torture of her. I would have done it for anyone.”

“Now, here’s a philosophical dilemma for a vicar … is it a lie if you don’t know you’re lying? Is it a lie if you’re lying to yourself?”

“Is it a sin if I tell my cousin to bugger off?”

Colin laughed. “Very well. You might well have done it for anyone else. And it’s a rare day ginger cakes baked by countesses who used to be courtesans come on the market. One must snap them up when one can. For the bargain price of five pounds. Nothing quixotic about that at all.”

“Very well.” Adam shook himself out of his coat. “For the sake of discussion, let’s assume you’d baked a ginger cake and donated to the auction. Here you sit now, a churchgoing, cow-raising, cousin-tormenting ordinary sort of bloke besotted by his wife. But all of those things are recent developments. You weren’t even given a proper shunning when you were in Newgate. Instead, you were immortalized in song. A broadsheet with your signature on it fetched a good hundred pounds, from what I understand, for a pub owner in London. In other words, when you were at what many would consider your most incorrigible, the townspeople would have been rioting for the opportunity to buy your ginger cake. Not sitting in cold silence and savoring your discomfort over something that could have been had for a shilling. Now that I think of it … fetch me my quill! I feel a sermon about hypocrisy coming on. ”

Colin listened to all of this with equanimity, nodding along. “Oh, I wager if we dig about some, we can find a few pockets of resentment toward me. I assure you I wasn’t, and I’m still not, beloved by everyone. But it’s not Evie I’m worried about. I know I’m hardly in a position to judge her, am I? I’m worried about you.”

Adam was silent. And then:

“What,” he ground out, with infinite, infinite patience, “precisely are you worried about?”

Colin opened his mouth to speak. Then shut it again. Considered what he was about to say. “Will you … sit for a moment?”

Adam sat. Heavily. Whipped off his hat, flung it across the table so that it skittered like a dealt card, loosened his new cravat. Glared balefully at Colin.

Colin seemed to be considering where to begin. He toyed with the apple core somewhat diffidently.

“Have you ever been in love?”

“Colin. For the love of God.”

“I have,” he said bluntly. “And when you lose love, it tears a hole out of you. The pain can be gruesome. I thought I lost Madeline once, and I swear for a few days I thought I might never be whole again.”

“Perhaps you should write a poem about it. Add another verse to your song.”

Colin blithely ignored the sarcasm. “But you see, I had a lot of practice with women even before she appeared. A lot of it. And Evie Duggan … how shall I put this? It’s as though … you’re fencing with a foil, and she’s fencing with a sabre. You’re in two very different classes, my friend.”

“Oh, please. Certainly you can manage more originality than a sword metaphor?”

“Listen to me, Adam. Men have made fools of themselves over her since she first showed an ankle at the Green Apple Theater. For most of her life it has practically been her professional responsibility to break hearts. She plays them like a hand of cards, keeping, discarding, coming up trumps. She’s not cruel, she’s just practical. I suppose we all do what we need to get by. Her past is likely to crop up at unlikely moments, and not in pretty ways. Me, I’ve made a fool of myself countless times in so many ways over many women. But you’re … just not the sort. You’re like Chase, or Marcus: You’ve an innate … dignity. An authority, which I suspect you were born with. Useful in a vicar, that. And as I rather like you, it would pain me to see her make a fool of you. And I should hate to see you hurt.”

“I see. So my new directive is to spare you pain.”

“I know you will because you’ve an altruistic nature.”

Adam barked a laugh, and it tapered into a long-suffering sigh. “If you’ve such a high opinion of my gravitas, consider the possibility that my judgment is just as solid.”

It was interesting to be compared to Captain Chase Eversea, Colin and Ian’s brother, who was born with an air of command and had proved it in the war. Colin, as the youngest of his family, ought to know how Adam had come by his gravity. How watchful and careful he’d learned to be, and why.

“Ah, see. You’ve just demonstrated your dangerous naïveté. Some women are simply like shooting stars; you have to look. You have to reach for them. You have to try to catch them. Judgment doesn’t figure, Adam. Other … things … figure.”

“Sabers,” Adam suggested sardonically. After a moment. Figuratively speaking, of course.

“Sabers,” Colin agreed. “Sabers always figure. And from what I understand, the lady truly knows how to handle a sword.”

Adam’s curled his fingers into a fist, and the knuckles whitened. Je voudrais fume ton cigare.

He disliked hearing her discussed this way.

Which really rather proved Colin’s point.

“I expect the town will view your ginger-cake heroics as charity. I’ll finance your folly this time, but if you lose your head again, I can’t promise anything …”

“Thank you for your concern. But I didn’t lose my head this time,” Adam said with infinite, infinite patience. “and I don’t intend to lose it. My dignity, you see, makes this impossible.”

Colin grinned at this.

All of the things Colin said about her were likely true. And it was true she attempted to steer him with flirtation. And it was probably true she’d given her body to men in exchange for money. But these things warred with the other things he knew about her: Her expression when she spoke about her husband and how he died. How her hands knotted when she talked about wanting friends. Her leap to the defense of Margaret Lanford and her tea cakes, even after what the audience had done to her. And then there was her beauty, and he seemed to find something new in it every time he saw her. All of this had wound tighter and tighter and tighter. Until the auction …

Watching what the audience had done to her had been unbearable.

Colin was right, of course:

He had lost his head today.

Possibly the first time in history Adam Sylvaine had ever done such a thing. It had been as reflexive as defending himself against a blow.

It wasn’t as though he had five pounds to spare.

“My mother is proud of you, you know, Adam. Genuinely. She thinks you might just be the dawn of a new age of respectability for the Everseas, never mind that Genevieve managed to marry a duke. ‘Imagine—my nephew, a vicar, and an excellent one, too.’ ‘We’re glad we gave the living to him, when there were so many other choices.’ She goes on like that, she really does.”

“I’m grateful,” Adam said shortly. Abstractedly.

He was. He always would be.

But never had the yoke of his own respectability chafed so completely.

They sat in thoughtful silence a moment. And then Adam looked up.

“Do you want to know the worst of it, Colin? I did lie.”

Colin looked at him sharply.

“I don’t like ginger cake.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Splendid,” Colin said mildly. “I’ll just take this off your hands then, won’t I?” He scooped the basket toward him with one arm.

Adam was irrationally tempted to forbid it. But he pocketed the five pounds. He would donate it to the church fund.

“Tell me if it’s edible, so I can compliment the countess.”

“I will. And oh—I almost forgot. This arrived for you. He gestured to a package tied up in string on the sideboard. “Sent over by Mrs. Sneath. A gift from her niece, apparently.”

Adam slipped off the paper and string.

He beheld a pristine new cushion. Surrounded by exquisitely embroidered cornflowers were the words:

Love Thy Neighbor.

MRS. SNEATH KEPT an elderly barouche, and it was in this that she, Evie, Miss Amy Pitney, and Miss Josephine Charing were carried to the outskirts of Pennyroyal Green the following morning, past Miss Marietta Endicott’s Academy for Young Ladies, past the remains of the gypsy encampment, down a road that grew increasingly rutted, until they took a turn into a little valley.

The three women sat opposite Evie, who sat alone alongside the basket of tea cakes she’d purchased for ten pounds. She hadn’t yet sampled them. She suspected the O’Flahertys would have a greater use for them, anyhow.

They now stood outside what an optimist might call a cottage; though if not for the smoke spiraling from the chimney, it could almost as easily pass for a haystack. She suspected it had been built shortly after The Conqueror had landed on English shores though a few modern conveniences, like the chimney and a few windows, had been added since. The thatched roof appeared to have contracted mange. The fence skirting the tamped-earth yard was fashioned partly of weathered boards, but primarily of what looked like the sort of long branches shaken from trees in storms. It was splintering in some places and collapsing in others. A sorry, weathered barn sagged behind the house, as did a sorry, weathered mule. Another building, which was likely meant to hold crops, was picturesquely deteriorating in the distance behind it. Enormous, leafless, oak trees ringed all of it.

A scattering of feral-looking chickens alternately stabbed at the ground with their beaks and eyed the visitors menacingly from the corners of their tiny eyes.

“Do you hear that?” whispered Josephine.

They all held very still.

Faintly, Eve heard a high-pitched sound, almost like a chorus of mosquitoes.

“And that’s from a distance,” Amy Pitney said. “Just wait until you get closer. It’s screaming. That is what Joshua should have brought to the walls of Jericho. A few days of this, and the soldiers would have turned tail and run.”

“There are six of them,” Josephine confided on a whisper. Though why they were whispering when they were easily fifty feet away from the cottage door baffled Evie. “Possibly seven. Or there could be eighteen. They never hold still, so it’s difficult to count, and their mother is so tired she can barely finish a sentence, so I’ve never been able to get a clear answer. They’re all running about like dervishes. They climb things. And leap about. And scream. Oh, how they scream. And it’s everywhere sticky. With jam and … things I don’t want to think about.”

“She won’t even go in the house,” Amy said contemptuously, looking at Josephine. “Not after what happened that first time.”

“I don’t see you diving in, either, Miss Nose-in-the-Air.”

“At least I never wept like a baby.”

“You’d weep, too, if one of the little beasts yanked the combs straight from your hair! I’ve such fine hair and a tender scalp. Then again, you wouldn’t know about that sort of thing. All of your hair went to your eyebrows.”