Barely a Lady (2 page)

Olivia froze. Shock skittered across her skin like sleet.

“Since these are the only pair of hands I own,” Lady Kate was saying lightly, “I imagine they will just have to adapt.”

Olivia couldn’t move. Sound suddenly echoed oddly, and movement seemed to slow. Lady Kate was looking just past her to where the man who had addressed her obviously stood, and Olivia knew she should turn.

It wasn’t him. It
couldn’t
be. She had escaped him. She’d hidden herself so thoroughly that she’d closed even the memory of him away.

“A generation of young exquisites would go into mourning if you suffered so much as a scratch,” he was telling the duchess in his charmingly boyish voice.

Still behind her, out of sight. Still possibly someone who only sounded terrifyingly familiar. Olivia desperately wanted to close her eyes, as if it could keep him at bay.
If I don’t see him, he won’t be there.

She knew better. Even if she refused the truth, her body recognized him. Her heart sped up. Her hands went clammy. She couldn’t seem to get enough air.

And there was no escape. So she did what cornered animals do. She turned to face the threat.

And there he was, one of the most beautiful men God had ever created. A true aristocrat with his butter-blond hair, clear blue eyes, and hawkish Armiston nose, he stood a slim inch below six feet. His corbeau coat and oyster silk smalls were only a bit dandified, with a silver marcella waistcoat, half a dozen fobs, and a ruby glinting from his finger. He was bestowing an impish smile on the duchess, who seemed delighted by it.

Olivia had once thought that his handsome looks reflected a kind soul. She would never make that mistake again.

“Dear Gervaise.” Lady Kate was laughing up at him. “How thoughtful to persist in your delusion that I am a fragile flower.”

His grin was disarming, his laugh like music. “Been thoroughly put in my place, haven’t I? Daresay you’ll ignore my heartfelt wish to safeguard your looks, and then where will you be when they’re gone?”

Lady Kate laughed again and held out her hand to him. “Doing it up much too brown, Gervaise. You know full well that I’m content simply being outrageous. I’ll leave you to hold the torch for natural perfection.”

Gervaise bent over Lady Kate’s hand, but suddenly he wasn’t looking at her. He had just caught sight of Olivia.

She was probably the only one who caught the quickly shuttered surprise in his eyes. The glint of triumph. She wanted to laugh. Here she’d been hiding herself from judgmental mamas, when there had been a viper in the room all along.

“It seems I arrived just in time,” he said, straightening with a delighted smile as he shot his cuffs. “As quickly as this place is emptying, I might have missed you all. I know Miss Fairchild, of course, Kate, but who is this?”

“Make your bows to Mrs. Olivia Grace, Gervaise,” Lady Kate said. “Olivia, this is Mr. Gervaise Armiston. He is about to take me over to the door so I can see off our brave soldiers. I have no brave soldiers of my own. Only Gervaise.”

Gervaise chuckled good-naturedly and extended an arm. “I also live to serve, Kate,” he protested. “It’s just that I only serve you.” Giving Olivia a quick bow, he nodded. “Mrs. Grace.”

Olivia swallowed against rising bile. “Mr. Armiston.”

Lady Kate rested a slim white hand on his midnight sleeve. “Excellent. Come, Gervaise. Let us now go and remind our soldiers what they fight for. Grace, Olivia… tomorrow.”

The duchess had barely turned away before Olivia’s legs gave out from under her, and she sat down hard.

“Olivia?” Grace Fairchild asked, her face creased in concern. “Are you all right?”

Olivia looked up, trying desperately to quell her nausea. Suddenly, from the streets below, military drums shattered the night. Trumpets blared, and the Duchess of Richmond rushed about the ballroom, urging the men not to leave until after dinner had been served.

“Just another hour!” she pleaded.

Officers lined up at the doors to get a farewell kiss from the lovely Duchess of Murther. Some girls wept, while others swept off to dinner with the remaining men. And in the corner where the chaperones sat, Olivia’s world collapsed.

Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She had to warn Georgie. She had to warn them all.

She couldn’t. Any contact with them would lead Gervaise right back to them, and that would prove fatal.

Just as it had before.

Oh, Jamie.

Grace touched her shoulder. “Olivia?”

Olivia jumped. “Oh…,” she said, trying so hard to smile as she climbed to still unsteady legs. “I’m fine. I suppose it’s time to go.”

“You’re sure you’re all right? You’re pale.”

“Just the news.” Gathering her shawl, she avoided Grace’s sharp gaze. Pasting on a false smile, she turned. “I wish I were more like Lady Kate. Look how she’s making all the men laugh.”

Grace looked to where the duchess was lifting on hertoes to kiss a hotly blushing boy in rifleman green. “Lady Kate is amazing, isn’t she?”

“She’s a
disgrace,
” one of the nearby women hissed.

Several other heads nodded enthusiastically.

“Glass houses,” snapped a regal older woman at the end of the row.

Everyone looked over at her, but the woman ignored them. Reticule and shawl in hand, she rose imperiously to her feet. She was a tall woman, with exceptional posture and a proud face beneath thick, snowy hair. She’d taken only two steps, though, before she caught her toe and pitched forward, almost landing on her nose. Olivia jumped to help, but Grace was already there.

“Dear Lady Bea,” she said, steadying the elegant woman. “Do have a care.”

The older woman patted her cheek. “Ah, for the last Samaritan, my child. For the last Samaritan.”

“That’s
good,
Lady Bea.”

“Indeed it is,” the older woman agreed. Grace smiled as if she knew what the woman meant and ushered her on her way.

“Lady Kate’s companion,” Grace confided as they passed.

“Mrs. Grace!” Mrs. Bottomly screeched. She was bearing down on them like a particularly skinny elephant with her calves in tow. “We are leaving.”

Peacock feathers bobbing, Mrs. Bottomly herded her hopefuls toward the door. Olivia had no choice but to follow. Lady Kate waved as Olivia passed and then hugged a burly dragoon. Olivia saw that Gervaise wasn’t with the duchess anymore and instinctively knew where he would be. She almost turned back for the safety of the ballroom.

He was waiting for her, of course. Olivia had made it only a few steps into the hot night when he stepped out of the crowd.

“I’ve missed you, Livvie,” he said, reaching out a hand. “You’ll see me, won’t you?”

Not a request. An order wrapped in etiquette. Olivia couldn’t prevent the sick cold or trembling that beset her.

She could hold her ground, though. She could face him eye-to-eye. The days of downcast eyes and prayed-for escape were long over. “Why, no, Gervaise,” she said just as amiably. “I won’t.”

And before he could respond, she swept down the steps and into the chaotic night.

Chapter 2

Saturday June 17, 1815

T
hey had gone.

Olivia stood in the foyer of her little pension and stared at the battered portmanteau on the floor in front of her. She’d just run from the Namur Gate, where she’d spent the day caring for the wounded who had begun to flood into town the night before. She felt stupid with exhaustion, standing there in her stained, wet dress and trying to understand what that poor, solitary bag meant.

She’d gone to the medical tents that morning with Mrs. Bottomly’s blessing, just as she had the day before. “No, no, my dear,” the little woman had said, her mouth full of muffin. “You must help those poor men. We shall make do here until we can arrange transport home. Although I fear it might already be too late to leave.”

It was indeed too late, but evidently only for Olivia. Thunder cracked overhead, and rain beat on the windows. The skies had opened not twenty minutes ago, forcing everyone inside. Olivia had run for the shelter of her lodgings.

No, not her lodgings. Not anymore. Madame La Suire, the landlady, had just made that point clear when she’d briskly informed Olivia that the English madame and her so-stupid daughters had decamped not an hour after Olivia had left that morning. If Olivia chose to stay, she would need to pay the tariff herself.

Gone. While she’d been kneeling on the cobbles giving sips of water to wounded men, her employer had snuck away without her. It made no sense.

“Did Mrs. Bottomly leave anything for me, madame?” Olivia asked as the stout woman set down a pitifully small bandbox next to the portmanteau. “A letter? A small reticule?”

The reticule she’d left behind with Mrs. Bottomly, where it would be safe. Where she couldn’t lose it among the crowds of injured and dying who overran the streets, the civilians who clattered about, swinging from excitement to blind panic. She had every ha’penny she’d earned in the last six months in that reticule, ready to send home to Georgie.

“She said nothing, that one,” Madame said. “She gave nothing. I packed what you see here, and there is no reticule. She leaves with the oh-so-handsome English lord.” Casting a severe eye at her former border, she lifted a blunt finger. “And do not try to accuse me. I thieve of no one.”

Olivia couldn’t seem to think. She still had blood on her hands from the young dragoon who had spilled his life out on the road not twenty feet from the gates. She’d reached him only moments before he died, gasping and pleading and so very young, just one among hundreds stumbling back from Quatre Bras.

She’d held him in her arms as his lifeblood drained onto the cobbles, and she’d watched his eyes fade and still. She’d closed those eyes—Brown. Hadn’t they been brown? She had laid him down as gently as she could and run from the rain. And now she had nowhere to go, and it was all she could seem to think of.

Madame had turned away to leave Olivia in the foyer when she stopped. “The handsome English lord, he had a message, him.”

Olivia started. She managed to focus on the sour-faced woman. Lightning lit the room in a blinding blue, briefly stealing her vision.

“An English lord?” she echoed. The awful portent of those three words began to break through her confusion. “What English lord?”

Thunder cracked overhead. Olivia stood dripping all over Madame’s tiled floor and waited for the inevitable.

The woman actually smiled like a girl. “But, yes, the nice man, him, who arranged for the Bottomlys. He says you wait right here, and back he comes for you.”

There was only one handsome Englishman still in Brussels who knew Olivia.

Suddenly everything made perfect sense. Ignoring the departing Madame La Suire, Olivia spun around and grabbed her portmanteau and bandbox. She straightened to see that rain poured in sheets against the windows. Thunder pounded and growled, and the trees whipped in a frenzy. Lightning shuddered across the lowering sky.

She couldn’t go out in that. She’d be drenched in a second. Yet she didn’t have a choice. Madame had already disappeared back into the kitchen, and there was no one else she could turn to for help. Besides, the men she’d been caring for were still outside, lying helpless in that deluge. She had to get back to help them.

She had just balanced her things on one arm and reached for the door when it blew open. Before Olivia could react, Gervaise strolled in.

He was dripping wet, his umbrella turned inside out from the wind. Even so, he looked perfectly put together, the rain only making his hair glisten. And he was smiling.

Olivia detested that smile, for it seemed she was the only one who saw past it.

“Excellent,” he said happily as he closed the door behind him and set his umbrella against the wall. “You waited for me.”

Olivia fought the sheer terror those words incited. “I did no such thing. I was just on my way back to the medical tents.”

Gervaise took a considered look out the window. “In this? I think not.”

“In the last fires of Armageddon if I have to. Get out of my way, Gervaise.”

He stepped closer instead, so close Olivia could smell the tobacco he used, the vetiver cologne he preferred. The mingled scents turned her stomach.

She should have known. The minute she’d recognized him, she should have anticipated this very moment. She should have run.

He let his gaze drift to the neck of her dress. “Are you still wearing it, Livvie?”

It was all she could do to keep from reaching up and laying a protective hand against her chest, where her locket lay hidden beneath her dress.

He smiled. “Does it really help?”

Panic hit, a hot, sweat-producing urge to flee.
Please God, don’t let him know
.

“It’s the least I can do,” she whispered.

He nodded. “He was a beautiful boy. It’s so sad you couldn’t protect him.”

Another well-dressed threat. A reference to what he had done. What he would do again if necessary.

“It’s just one more thing I love about you, Livvie,” he said as if he meant it. “Your strong protective instincts. I could have helped, you know. Don’t you think I can now?”

She thought he’d destroy her, just as he had before.

Reaching up, he stroked a finger down her cheek. “You’re so brave, Livvie,” he said, his voice gentle and confiding. “I have to admit, I’m impressed. Going to the lengths of becoming a companion for one of the most odious cits I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet.” He flashed a mischievous smile. “She was
aux anges
when I happened on her in the Parc Royale. When I offered to help her flee the city, she was so grateful it never occurred to her to wonder why I wasn’t able to include you.”

Olivia was trembling, and it made her furious. She deliberately stepped back. “Do
you
have my reticule?”

“Only because I felt that if you had any money, you might be tempted to make an unfortunate decision. I’m the only choice you have, Livvie. This won’t be like those other times you lost your position because you were exposed. This time you’re hundreds of miles from home with no way back. And you know that even if you could get there, you’d find no one to help you. Certainly not your family. As for your friends here, they won’t last once they learn who you really are.”

She knew he expected her to weep. To plead. She held still.

“You know I love you, Livvie,” he said, stepping closer again. “Isn’t it better sometimes just to give in?”

Her heart was pounding; he had to hear it. “Not to you. Never to you. Now get out of my way before I knock you down.”

“And then what, my dear? Shall you get another position? Shall you throw yourself on the mercy of one of the other crow-faced women I saw you sitting with last night? They’d be more likely to chase you into the streets themselves. You, my love, are a notoriously ruined woman.” Horribly, his expression grew sad. He looked so damned sincere. “I offer you so much more. I always have.”

“And I have always refused. I haven’t changed my mind.”

“No, Liv,” he said. “Not always.”

She had to swallow to force the bile back down her throat.

Then he sighed.
Sighed.
“Oh, Livvie. When are you going to learn that I never give up?”

She saw how benign he looked and knew that even as he expressed nothing but concern, he was really envisioning her stripped and helpless, in his absolute control. And he would never think to question his right to have her there.

No
. She had not come to this. She
would
not. Not with this man who had destroyed her life as if it were sport. She had been safe for three years. She would be so again.

If she could just get past him to the door.

He anticipated her. Before she could move, he grabbed her by the arms. Olivia bucked against him, suddenly panicked. She couldn’t let him do this. She couldn’t surrender after all he’d done to her. To Georgie and Jamie.

“Let me go!”

“Or what?” he asked, leaning closer. “You’ll scream?”

She opened her mouth to do just that when the door blew open again, shoving him into her. Struggling for balance, he pulled her closer. She rammed her knee into his groin.

Gervaise howled and crumpled. Lurching back, Olivia took better hold of her bags and bolted for the door. But it was blocked again. Lady Kate was standing in the doorway.

Olivia shuddered to a halt. She thought she was hallucinating. She blinked, expecting the duchess to disappear. What possible reason could Lady Kate have for coming here?

The duchess walked in as if on a morning call and shut the door. Olivia opened her mouth, but she couldn’t manage one word.

“Why, Gervaise,” Lady Kate crooned as she noticed him curled on the floor, his hands between his legs. “And I thought you had the smoothest address in the
ton
. If this is the best you can do, you should probably return to your lessons.”

“It was… an accident,” he groaned, still curled in a ball.

She smiled brightly. “I would never assume otherwise.”

Then she straightened to take in the sight of Olivia, standing there with her pathetic luggage clutched to her chest. “Isn’t it lovely that we actually do have a certain advantage over them, though?” she asked with a conspiratorial grin. “I’m delighted you aren’t too nice to attempt it.”

“Your Grace—”

“Now, Olivia, haven’t we just been standing side by side at the amputation table? Can you truly not call me Kate?”

Olivia still felt so slow and dull-witted; she couldn’t think how to answer. All she knew was that she had to get out of this place. Gervaise was still writhing at their feet, but he would recover quickly. And here was the duchess, appearing like a provident angel, still looking sleek and neat in her bishop’s blue kerseymere round gown, even after a day of wading through the worst of the wounded and a surprise thunderstorm.

Olivia felt so overwhelmed she thought she might find herself laughing like a lunatic. Could she dare ask the duchess for help? Could she put this lovely woman at risk?

“I’m sorry,” she said, knowing how panicked she sounded. “Could you…? I mean, well, I must leave as soon as possible. You see, my patron, Mrs.—”

“Bottomly.” The duchess nodded, carefully brushing water droplets from her skirt. “Yes, I heard she’d done a bunk. Left you in a lurch, did she?”

“I’m afraid so. I thought I’d take my things to the tents with me. I will be able to look for another position later, when things… when…”

“When we know whether we’ll be speaking English tomorrow or French,” Lady Kate said with a brisk nod. “Yes. Well, you won’t have to worry. You have a position now. Amazingly enough, I need a companion. Dreadful having to fetch my own shawls. It’s beneath a duchess’s dignity, don’t you think?”

Olivia gaped like a landed fish. “What of Lady Beatrice?”

Lady Kate patted her like a child. “Oh, no. Bea isn’t my companion. She is my dearest friend. I am looking for someone who can help me organize my somewhat chaotic house.” Taking one last look at Gervaise, who by now had made it gingerly to his feet, she took hold of Olivia and turned her to the door. “Indeed, I think we should go right now. There is a prodigious amount for you to do. Fetching, carrying, fawning…”

“Lady Kate, it distresses me to say this,” Gervaise protested, his hand out. “But you don’t know who she truly is.”

Ah,
Olivia thought, feeling her heart shrivel in her chest.
Here it comes
.

But Lady Kate was evidently in an eyebrow-raising mood. “Darling Gervaise, surely you know by now that while I enjoy gossip, I believe very little of it.”

“But you should know—”

The duchess glared him back a step. “No. I don’t think I should. And, I think I don’t want to know from you, most especially if it distresses you. It would sully that beautiful Botticelli mouth of yours. No, I insist you leave it all to me.”

Reaching over, she relieved Olivia of her bandbox and pushed her toward the door. “Now, Olivia, let’s be on our way. My carriage is here, and we have little time. I have accepted some of the wounded into my house, and they need care.”

Olivia should have protested. She should save her new friend the embarrassment of having to dismiss her when the truth came out, since that could be the only outcome. One look at the frustration that darkened Gervaise’s eyes made her decision for her. She couldn’t risk the truth yet, even to protect Lady Kate. Even to save her own soul.