A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (14 page)

Immediately, the two of them were bristling like a pair of cats, scarlet with rage and stiff-legged.

Evie remained poised to intervene in case more hair-pulling ensued.

“You’re only here because you want to impress the vicar,” Amy finally said with low venom.

Josephine gasped. “As if he’d look at you! Do you think he wants a slew of beetle-browed children?”

“At least I’ve an actual suitor.”

“Because your papa bought him for you!” Her voice was truly raised now.

“Enough,” Mrs. Sneath barked. “You will not discuss the vicar in those terms. He is a good man of unshakable morals whose head cannot be turned by such frivolous matters.”

She was speaking to the girls, but she aimed the comment at Evie.

Evie interjected coolly. “Do you want to know a secret about handsome men, ladies? Not just the ordinary handsome men, but the ones that stop the very heart?”

They froze in place, swiveled, arrested by the poetry, and by the momentous notion that she was about to lift the lid on her Pandora’s box of knowledge.

“Yes or no, please.”

They nodded eagerly.

Mrs. Sneath was instantly nervous. “Perhaps you ought to tell me first, Lady Ware—”

“Shhhh,” Josephine said abruptly. Riveted.

It was Mrs. Sneath’s turn to bristle.

“Most of them, the truly magnificent-looking ones, find it irresistible when you pretend you aren’t interested in them at all. They’re accustomed, you see, to the attention. They expect it. I’ve a word you should clutch to your bosoms: ‘aloof.’ This sort of man finds it fascinating. And heaven knows you oughtn’t fight over a man. For shame! You deserve to win him on your own merits.”

That was fundamentally true. Though she suspected if the vicar knew she’d just told them to be aloof, he’d be abjectly grateful.

“Really, Lady Wareham, is now the time for such a lesson?” Mrs. Sneath objected.

“It’s just, Mrs. Sneath, that it’s distressing to see your excellent cause undermined by such division between these worthy young ladies, when men are often the cause of problems in the world. Managing them, I do believe, is the key to peace on earth.”

A number of conflicting emotions rippled over Mrs. Sneath’s features as she contemplated the ways in which Evie had likely managed men.

“You … do have a way with words, my dear,” Mrs. Sneath approved conditionally. She seemed poised to spring and clap a hand over Evie’s mouth should something too notorious seem about to slip from it.

“Where is their father? Mr. O’Flaherty?” Eve asked. “Is he home?”

The chickens appeared to be coming closer. Nonchalantly studying them out of the corners of their tiny, evil eyes.

They all took a shuffling step backward.

“John O’Flaherty? If he’s not at the pub he’s flat on his back somewhere snoring off inebriation beneath a tree. He’s often simply missing for weeks at a time. No one knows where he gets to. He’s an unpleasant man, to be certain. I think Mrs. O’Flaherty and the children are afraid of him.”

Evie would have wagered her life on it. She knew all too well that kind of fear.

“Well, he must come home now and again if there are this many children inside. Are they all his?”

The girls flushed slowly pink again and looked in a variety of different directions. At their feet, up to the sky, at the tree in the yard.

Mrs. Sneath interjected hurriedly, “Really, Lady Wareham. Is it appropriate to speculate to unmarried young ladies—”

Evie rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Where do you think children come from?”

“They’re all the spit of him. Ginger hair and voices that could pierce the eardrums of the dead. Even the baby. Perhaps especially the baby.”

Evie’s estimation of Miss Amy Pitney rose with this report. But did this young lady with the stern brows yearn for the vicar?

“She’s a good girl,” added Mrs. Sneath pointedly. “Mary O’Flaherty is. Only the one man for her.” Deciding perhaps that Evie needed to be reminded of her place.

“Of course she is,” Eve said. “And everyone knows that good girls are always justly rewarded.”

Everyone missed her irony.

Miss Amy Pitney cleared her throat. “Lady Wareham … since we’ve all done our best to help the O’Flahertys and haven’t succeeded in the way that we’d hoped, we thought you might have a go.”

Six eyes regarded her, glittery with challenge again.

Evie studied their faces for clues as to what sort of challenge might await her but saw none.

Honestly, given all the other things she’d experienced in a lifetime, surely the O’Flahertys and their multitudes of children would scarcely rank. It could hardly be dangerous? Surely these women wouldn’t allow her to walk into a lion’s den?

“I’ll give it a go,” she said brightly. “I’ll consider it a privilege.”

“Wonderful!” Mrs. Sneath boomed. “As we’ve forgotten the food and clothing we intended to bring for the children, we’ll return for you in a few hours.”

“You’ll …” She froze.

The three women were wearing expressions of studied innocence.

“I see. Very well. I’ll just get started, shall I?”

Eve took a few cautious steps forward into the yard, through the gate.

She paused. She took three more.

Looked over her shoulder.

The three women waved gaily at her.

So she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and marched confidently, if not speedily, forward, flicking her skirts at the menacing chickens, who stalked her toes like footpads in a St. Giles alley.

She slowed as she approached the door, however. The windows were all but obscured with the smut of cooking smoke, as though no one had scrubbed them for years, or as though whoever was inside didn’t want anyone on the outside to peer in.

And the high-pitched sound was … definitely louder. Definitely discernible now as voices.

When she was about the length of her own body away from the door, Josephine called:

“And—oh! They’ve a dog!”

Just as a huge, yellow dog burst from the house.

Evie stared into the gaping, slavering maw punctuated with white teeth and emitting ear-shattering bays and knew these were the bowels of Hell.

“Christ Almighty!” she shrieked.

She tried to run from her doom, but the dog lunged and reared and planted its huge paws on her shoulders, holding her fast. Its breath was like the devil’s own privy.

It painted her face from her chin to her forehead with a big wet pink tongue. Twice.

It wasn’t about to get a chance to do it again.

“Take liberties with me, will you, you great … fetid … beast?” she growled, and gave it a hearty push. It fell from her shoulders, issuing deafening woofs and slapping a huge, fernlike tail like a club against her calves, body wiggling with the sheer ecstasy of having a new person to sniff. Which it tried to do, both from the front of Evie and from the back. She found herself rotating in circles like a dog chasing its tail to avoid the nose.

She heard giggling from out near the fence. And then the jingle of tack and the crunch of sound of hooves and carriage wheels pulling away.

Finally, she was able to plunge a hand into her basket of tea cakes. She hurled one across the yard.

“Fetch!” she implored the dog.

The tea cake ricocheted off one of the oak trees and slammed into the dog’s great head.

It yelped in surprise and retreated, then sat down and regarded her with soulful betrayal.

Well. That rather answered questions about Mrs. Lanford’s tea cakes.

Chapter 11

“FINE WATCHDOG YOU are,” she said with disgust. She got hold of its ruff and led it up to the door, while it wiggled and thumped its tail all the way there. It was thin, she saw now, and she wondered that it hadn’t helped itself to a meal of chickens. Or maybe it had, and that’s why the chickens were so resentful.

“She has a big voice and a big body, so not many learn she’s a rank coward and a bit of a slut, aren’t you, Molly?”

The dog grinned up at Mary O’Flaherty, who stood at the door. She was wearing a faint smile and an apron splashed with what appeared to be an infinite variety of effluvia over a faded-muslin morning dress, clearly washed, ironed, picked out, and resewn any number of times. A baby was in the crook of one arm and a small child clung to her hip. Both were sniffling, teetering on the brink of sobs.

And now that the dog had ceased its woofing, Evie heard it now: the screaming.

It wasn’t so much screaming as simultaneous laughter, bellows, shouts, kicks, singing, and sobbing. Punctuated by thumps and thwacking sounds.

Evie smiled slightly. And tightly. She knew the sound well. Her own childhood had sounded very like it.

She released the dog, and it bounded in to join the melee.

One peer around the shoulder of Mrs. O’Flaherty told her the house was chaos itself.

Her heart raced; every cell in her body hummed a warning. She knew it wasn’t rational, and yet the feeling was a bit like swimming back toward a wrecked ship after one has at last safely reached the shore. She’d tried never to look back at her past since she and her brothers and sisters had escaped from Killarney to London in a tinker’s cart so many years ago. And here it was, so familiar, it was as though she’d never left.

“I never seem to catch up once a new baby arrives,” Mary said wearily. “I would apologize, but it speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”

Evie didn’t deny it. “From where do you hail, Mary? I’m a Killarney girl, myself. My name is Evie Duggan.”

“Ah, a Duggan from Killarney? Did ye perhaps know the Duncans?”

“Doesn’t everybody? I assume you mean the John Duncans.”

Mary smiled. “Oh, aye. But they said ye was a countess. The ladies from the committee.”

“I am. And who says a girl from Killarney can’t do well for herself?”

Mary O’Flaherty smiled wearily. Her hair, a faded red and curly, was raked back into a knot, but bits of it straggled down and clung to her cheeks, and she’d deep purple crescents beneath her eyes, and her skin had the drawn, grayish cast of someone who’d likely not had a decent night’s sleep in many a year. Everything about her face was narrow: her mouth, the bridge of her nose, her blue eyes. “Well, I’ve come up in the world, as ye can see.”

Evie decided she liked Mary.

But stepping all the way into the cottage took a good quotient of her courage. It exerted such a potent association, part of her was certain she’d never escape it once she did. The smell and noise became one and crashed over her senses in a wave: that unmistakable boy smell, of feet and sweat and dirt, old food and dog and sour milk all mingled with the high-pitched, excited cacophony of children.

She plunged in, took a deep breath, and immediately employed one of the several useful things her brother Seamus had taught her:

She put two fingers in her mouth and gave a melee-shattering whistle.

The children froze, astonished, and stared at the interloper.

Long enough for her to count them, and to get a good look at the tableau. Including the baby and the toddler clinging to Mrs. O’Flaherty, there were seven of them. Three identical little boys and two girls, none older than eight years, all thin and pale and sharp-featured and topped with dazzling red hair. They were dressed presentably enough, or at least they were covered in clothing, but there didn’t seem to be a single pair of shoes between them, and not one of them could be described as clean. This was abundantly clear even in the dim, smoky light of the room, which featured two beds, a hearth, a smoky stove, a quantity of mismatched wooden chairs that seemed to have all been tumbled to create a fort of some kind, dishes scattered across a scarred table and tipped over a frayed carpet, and a cat, who slept up on a high shelf. Everything wore a coat of dust and smoke—the curtains, the furniture, the counterpane, the hearth, the cat.

And then she noticed that all of the children were wearing what appeared to be crude, blunt, wooden swords—fashioned from oak sticks, no doubt—strapped to their hips. Two of the boys, about six years old if she were to guess, were wearing admiral’s hats folded from old sections of broadsheet. They’d wound up a third smaller brother in twine from shoulders to hip, and he writhed like a caterpillar on a sagging settee. They’d been hovering over him and prodding him with their swords when she walked in.

“Halp!” he squeaked.

“Silence!” one of the boys hissed, and gave him a poke with a sword.

The littlest girl appeared to be cheering them on. The tallest girl was standing near the stove and stirring something in a kettle. She wore a sword on her hip, too.

Eve was reminded of a production she’d once participated in at the Green Apple Theater, which involved bawdy pirates. Inspiration struck—as it will occasionally in circumstances of dire need.

“I’ll have your attention!” Evie snapped out sharply. “Right this instant!”

They whirled on her, surprised, and froze. Before they could rebel or stir or squeak, she demanded, in the frostiest, most stentorian, most intimidatingly aristocratic voice she could muster, the kind that carried to the backs of theaters:

“I’d like to speak to the captain of you children at once.”

This was met with wide-eyed, drop-jawed, perplexed silence.

“But … we’ve no captain,” said one of the boys. Sounding worried.

“Halp,” whispered the tied-up boy.

“No captain?” She advanced into the room and took a dark, frowning look around. “No captain? We must remedy that at once. Quickly: Which one of you is the oldest? Tell me now!”

All the heads swiveled toward the hearth.

“That be me.” The little redheaded girl, her blue eyes narrowed, hands on her hips.

“Your name?’ Evie barked.

“Katharine.”

With a pang, with a sense of vertigo that came from looking back more than a dozen years, she saw herself in that pinched white face. All the bravado and fear and distrust, eyes that had seen far too much for her age. She likely went to sleep hungry, woke up afraid, did her best to help her mother and avoid her father. But she still had a capacity for awe and hope, which flickered over her face as she looked up at Evie and saw her face and her fine clothes. But she drew a shutter down over it quickly. Awe and hope made one vulnerable. Katharine had already learned that, clearly.