Courtney Milan (17 page)

“It depends,” he responded. “I’m trying to decide whether I favor round numbers or complete information.”

Toford frowned. “For God’s sake, Grantham, use English. What the devil do you mean by that?”

They were standing in a corner of the churchyard, looking over the crowd. It was a fine day at the end of summer, and all the ladies were wearing their loveliest—and their lightest—gowns. The young ladies had been casting welcoming glances his way throughout the rector’s lengthy sermon. Jonas was young, handsome, and—with Parwine now retired—in possession of an excellent income.

Those curious, hopeful glances had made him feel very nice indeed. The breeze was refreshing, the sun was warm, and the ladies were all vying to make a good impression on him. It was a damned good time to be a man.

He was watching the ladies in return. No point in pretending he wasn’t; he intended to take a wife and had only to choose her. But Toford was still staring at him in confusion.

“I mean,” Jonas told him, “that during the service, I made a rank-ordered list of the ten prettiest young ladies in Leicester. I intend to speak with every one of them.”

Toford nodded thoughtfully. “Good plan, Grantham, good plan. I did much the same thing last year, and see how it served me.”

Mrs. Toford had teeth that were far too large. She wouldn’t have ranked anywhere on Jonas’s list. Jonas managed a polite murmur of approval.

“Ten, though,” Toford continued. “Ten’s a lot of women to speak with. You’re tall. You’re respectable. Why not limit yourself to three, maybe five? It’s hard enough work, trying to see if
one
woman will suit you. My head hurts just thinking of the effort.”

Jonas waved this off. “Yes, well. I have demanding tastes. What if number one snorts when she laughs? What if number six is untidy? What if number eight doesn’t like me?”

“Doesn’t like you?” Toford’s brows rose. “Grantham, I think you have it all wrong.” He looked around and then lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “See here,” he said. “We’re men. We don’t have to marry. These girls, here? They’ve seen their sisters, their friends placed firmly on the shelf. They know their prospects if they don’t catch a man. It’s not their place to like or not like. It’s their place to marry any way they can, and it’s ours to choose.”

“Be that as it may. One never knows what a woman might find off-putting. I’d rather cast my net broadly than miss altogether. And, as it happens, I have a few defects in my character.”

For instance, he was fairly certain that his list of local beauties, arranged by degree of physical attractiveness, was not something that members of the opposite sex would find particularly compelling. Also, he had decided it would be best not to mention his main reason for wanting to marry—that he thought it expedient to procure a regular source of sexual intercourse without risking syphilis.

“Defects?” Toford squinted at him. “Huh. Strange, irrational creatures, women are. Miss Charingford is what number on your list?”

There was the problem. “Eleven. Well, ten, sometimes—but only some of the time. Miss Perrod is usually ten. But at some angles, in some lighting…” He shrugged. “You see my conundrum. If I want to talk to the ten loveliest young ladies, I might need to include Miss Charingford. But if I do, I’ll have eleven, not ten. Both results make my hands itch.” He rubbed them together, but it didn’t help. That unpleasant sensation he felt in the palms of his hands was an illusion, a mere echo of that same itch somewhere in his brain.

“Maybe,” Toford said, “maybe you should talk to her—not for the list, mind you, but just as a way of seeing her up close. Evaluating whether she should be included or not.”

“Ah,” he said in relief. “Good thinking.”

Which was how he found himself walking around a park a few days later, with Miss Lydia Charingford on his arm, wondering how quickly he could extricate himself from the conversation. Closer examination revealed that she was number eleven. Most definitely eleven, with those freckles that he hadn’t noticed from a distance and that too-wide smile. Furthermore, she fussed with the ribbons of her gown and responded to his conversational overtures in monosyllables.

“This is fine weather for September,” he tried.

“Is it?” She stared straight ahead, her mouth pinched in a way that could have sunk her to twelve.

“Yes,” he replied. “It is.”

They walked on in blighted silence.

“Much has changed in Leicester since my absence,” he tried again. “That’s a new façade on the hat emporium, is it not?”

She didn’t even look in the direction that he pointed. “Is it?” she asked.

Her terse responses brought out the devil in him. He’d not been lying when he said he had a few defects in his personality. He turned to her and spoke with no effort at politeness. “Did you know that before I spoke this sentence, you had uttered twenty percent of the words in the conversation? Now we are much closer to ten percent. It won’t do, Miss Charingford. It won’t do.”

Beside him, she tilted her head. “Won’t it?”

He clenched a fist, annoyed beyond measure. He’d used up his rather limited store of polite conversation already, and she wasn’t even trying. In fact, she was looking up at him resentfully.

“I think it
will
do,” she said. “I think it will do very well. I know what you are thinking, Doctor Grantham. You’re thinking that I’m easy prey.”

“I’m thinking that?” He wrinkled his nose.

She looked about, as if to verify that nobody was nearby. “That because you know of my faults, of what has happened to me, that I’ll be susceptible to your blackmail and flattery.”

“Blackmail!” he repeated in surprise.

“I don’t care what you think of my
moral decay,”
she hissed. “I am still alive, and I intend to remain so. I refuse to be ruined. If you try anything, you’ll be sorry.”

It was the look on her face that sparked his recognition—that defiant, accusing glare directed at him once more. It made him catch his breath, remembering the girl from five years ago. He’d worried about her after he left. Every time he’d seen an unwed mother or a prostitute in those intervening years, he’d wondered what horror his silence had brought to her.

The answer, apparently, was…nothing. Holding his tongue hadn’t had any consequence. Because she was here, accepted by all. She’d not only survived, she’d managed to do so with her reputation intact.

And she was glaring at him. “So stop measuring me for your bed, Grantham,” she told him. “You aren’t going to have me.”

He stared at her, collecting his confused feelings. He hadn’t recognized her, but she’d recognized him—the difference between fifteen and twenty, apparently, being far greater than the difference between twenty-one and twenty-six. She was being uncivil to him on purpose. She thought—oh, God—she thought he was trying to—

“Rest easy, Miss Charingford,” he said. “I wasn’t attempting to seduce you. I had come to no conclusions about your virtue. I was only talking to you because you were the eleventh prettiest young lady in Leicester.”

Faint dots of pink appeared on her cheeks. “Oh?” There was a dangerous tone to her voice now. “Eleven, am I?”

“That is—I mean—” He looked away. “Shite. I didn’t mean to say that.”

She didn’t gasp at that obscenity. “Work your way on to number twelve,” she snapped. “Number eleven wants nothing more to do with you.”

She lifted her nose in the air—the eleventh prettiest nose in the entire town—and stalked away. He watched her go, his insides a total muddle.

She’d lived. She’d survived. Her reputation hadn’t suffered. She crossed the park to another woman who had been waiting for her on a bench. Their heads bent together under their hats, black hair touching tawny honey, and then they laughed.

He’d never seen anything so vibrant, so full of life.

“Shite,” he breathed again.

Her laughter seemed like a complete repudiation of the superstitions of the last century. It was a great light cast on the dark miasmas of the last century of medicine.

Live, Miss Charingford. Live.

She linked arms with her friend—a young lady who hadn’t ranked at all—and strolled away.

He felt as if he’d been hit straight on with a cannon blast. One of the defects in his personality was a taste for the perverse. Being told he couldn’t have something only made him want it more. And at the moment, he wanted. He wanted her very badly.

Toford came up behind him. “Well? What number is she?”

“Eleven,” he answered.

“Not on the list, then.” Toford shrugged.

“No.” He still couldn’t take his eyes off her. “No, she is. This list goes to eleven.”

It was a lie. He knew it was a lie even as he said it. His rational mind, usually so predominant, kicked up a protest. He had hoped to establish his household within the next few months. And he had
really
been looking forward to securing that source of safe, regular sexual intercourse. There were literally dozens of women who would be willing to provide it—pretty ones, who actually smiled at him in encouragement instead of accusing him of seduction.

Miss Charingford didn’t even want to talk to him. It made no sense to consider her.

But it was too late. Miss Lydia Charingford wasn’t just
on
the list.

She
was
the list, and he hoped God would have mercy on his soul.

Chapter Two

Sixteen months later

M
ISS
L
YDIA
C
HARINGFORD STOOD UP FROM HER SEAT
in the Nag’s Head Hostelry and began to gather her things.

“Good of you, Miss Charingford,” Corporal Dalling said next to her. “Very good indeed, to take on the role of secretary on such short notice.”

Lydia smiled at him as she put the stopper in her bottle of ink. “I told Minnie I would be happy to take her position on the Workers’ Hygiene Commission,” she said. “And you deserve as much commendation as I do, filling the shoes of those who…are no longer here.”

“Indeed,” Dalling said, with a sober bow. “Indeed we are.”

In the last month, Miss Wilhelmina Pursling—Lydia’s best friend, who she missed dreadfully—had married and gone to London. Shortly thereafter, Captain Stevens—Lydia’s former fiancé, who she missed not in the slightest—had been sentenced to six months of hard labor.
Good riddance.

Lydia didn’t want to think of Stevens. Instead, she blew on her notebook one last time, slipped the blotting paper between the pages, and checked the stopper on her ink.

“You’re rather livelier than Miss Pursling,” old Mr. Crawford said from across the way.

“And less practical,” Lydia responded. “Happy Christmas, Mr. Crawford. Is your daughter coming up from Buford?”

Mr. Crawford’s face creased in a smile. “Imagine your remembering a thing like that! Yes, she is coming, and bringing her little ones.”

“How lovely! And why you think I shouldn’t remember, I don’t know. I played with Willa until I was nine. Please say I might stop by and bring a basket for her and the children. You wouldn’t deny me the pleasure.”

As she spoke, Lydia gathered up her things and placed them carefully in her satchel, securing the container of ink in a side pocket so that it wouldn’t be jostled about. She was aware that she was humming as she did so—a rendition of “Good King Wenceslas
.
”

Christmas was almost on them, and she couldn’t have been happier. The air smelled of cinnamon and ginger. Pine boughs decorated lintels, even here at the Nag’s Head. It was a time for wassail and cheer and—

“Happen we all miss your Miss Pursling—that is, the Duchess of Clermont,” Crawford said softly. “Yes, my Willa would love your company.”

The smile froze on Lydia’s face.

Wassail, cheer, and the slight, selfish emptiness she experienced when she remembered that her best friend was no longer a mere hour’s journey away, but a hundred miles distant.

But she forced her lips into a wider grin. “La, silly,” she said. “I’ll see her again next autumn, just as soon as Parliament lets out. How could I miss her?” If she smiled wide enough, it might fill that space in her heart. She pulled on her gloves. “Happy Christmas.”

The group scattered in a shower of holiday greetings. Lydia waited until they were all gone, waving cheerfully, wishing everyone the best for the holidays.

Almost everyone. Her cheeks ached from smiling, but she would
not
look to her left. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Well,” a dark voice said to her side as the door closed on Mr. Crawford, “you are chock-full of holiday spirit, Miss Charingford.”

Lydia looked pointedly in front of her at the ivy-and-pine centerpiece on the table. “Why, yes,” she said. “I suppose I am. Happy Christmas, Doctor Grantham.”

He didn’t thank her for the sentiment. He surely didn’t return a polite greeting of his own. Instead, Doctor Grantham laughed softly and her spine prickled.

Lydia turned to him. He was tall—so very much taller than her that she had to tilt her neck at an unnatural angle to stare him down. His eyes sparkled with a dark intensity and his mouth curled up at one corner, as if he nursed his own private amusement. He was handsome in a brooding sort of way, with those eyes, that strong, jagged nose. All the other girls giggled when he looked their way. But Grantham made Lydia remember things she didn’t like to think about.