Dangerous 01 - Dangerous Works

DANGEROUS WORKS

CAROLINE WARFIELD

SOUL MATE PUBLISHING

New York

To Greg,

the hero of all my works.

Acknowledgements

The publication of this story has been long in coming. It would not have seen the light of day without the support of many folk. I am grateful to the Central Ohio Fiction Writers for giving me structure, training, and opportunity. I’m delighted to work with Debby Gilbert and the good folks at Soul Mate Publishing to bring this story to fruition. Above all I owe thanks to the Debs, my online circle of friends, for their unflagging encouragement, their refusal to let any of us give up, and their determination to remember, as Churchill said, “We will never give in!”

Chapter 1

Cambridge 1816

Books be damned and women with them
.

Andrew Mallet lay on a narrow bed while Harley—former batman, loyal servant, insolent bastard—massaged the twisted muscles of his back with ruthless determination. Through a door Andrew could see his friend, Jamie Heyworth, slouched in the battered leather of a well-worn chair, oblivious to the exquisite Tudor roses and honeybees carved in the finely waxed walnut mantel that crowned Andrew’s study.

He ignored Jamie’s drunken stupor, eyes focused with angry resentment on two small books resting innocently on his worktable. In a room filled with books, two more should have had little impact. Andrew, however, one-time soldier and would-be scholar, couldn’t just leave them at the bookseller’s. The walk there inflicted wrenching agony on his back and hip, and he immediately regretted it.

“What you need is a woman. Warm your bed and serve a better table.” Jamie’s voice managed to sound emphatic even though he slurred his words. Andrew ignored him.

A woman? Hardly.
His bookstore foray had thrust him into an ugly scene. He tried not to think about the woman who had set the bookseller off. Her pretense of scholarship set the old misogynist off on a rant.
The damned bookseller behaved like a pretentious fool
.

“Watching that brute of yours manipulate your back isn’t my idea of an evening’s entertainment, Mallet, I must say,” Jamie rambled on.

“Perhaps you should find someone else to visit.” Andrew turned his face into the bedding and let soft linens muffle his words.

Jamie heard him anyway. “Unkind. You know I worry about you. A woman. One would do this household no end of good.”

“You think my injuries don’t provide me with enough discomfort? You want to inflict a woman on me as well? What I need is work.” He groaned in response to one of Harley’s more vigorous movements.

“Work? What is the point in that? You’re a nabob. The army left you well enough off. I can see where keeping your father’s little house has some appeal, even if it is too cramped in here for company, but damn it, Andrew, you could afford a proper staff. That ham-handed ruffian is no one’s idea of a proper anything.”

Harley cast him a baleful look, finished his ministrations, and left the room with a basin full of towels.

“Are you angry because Harley left you for me? You liked him well enough as your batman in Portugal.” Andrew rolled onto his side, faced his visitor, and flashed his odd, lopsided grin.

“True enough. He would’ve left me for you sooner, though, if you were in camp more often. Too busy running the hills with the partisans to stay for long. He preferred your pretty face.”

“Ah, Jamie, you malign me. He preferred my abstemious habits.” Andrew ignored the reference to his face and watched his companion fill his glass again. Jamie was four or five rounds in.

“You weren’t so abs … abst …” A loud belch punctuated his sentence. “Abstemious about women. And they all liked your pretty face. That’s for certain. Remember Colonel Stafford’s wife? A beauty, that one.” Jamie Heyworth flashed a grin full of pure wickedness as only he could, drunk or sober.

“Not my fault!” Andrew took the teasing with good humor. Jamie’s habitual conversation bristled with sharp needling but never with cruelty. Andrew swung his feet around, sat up, and stuffed his shirt into his trousers. “I explained that to you before. She bribed poor Corporal Collins, who kept my things, to get into my bed. I tossed her out.”

“Didn’t hurt your reputation none. The great, dark, mysterious Major Mallet–all the more interesting for being so difficult to catch. What happened to the corporal?”

“Stripped of his rank—back to private. Back to the infantry. Don’t know after that.” An uncomfortable silence followed that remark. Both men knew well what the infantry endured in the last years of the war.

“Still, a proper gentleman needs a proper staff to run a proper household. Glad I’m going back to London tomorrow where it is civilized.”

“Where you can bunk in with Glenaire, you mean.”

“Of course!” A swift wink punctuated Jamie’s words. “Keeps a fine cellar, our Richard does. He can afford me. Rich as Croesus is the Marquess.” He raised a glass in mock salute.

Andrew cringed. He once held Richard Hayden, the Marquess of Glenaire, as one of his closest friends, bound by school ties and shared adventure. Jamie had no idea what had caused the rift between them, and Andrew didn’t plan to enlighten him.

“Rich as Croesus,” Jamie repeated, “And generous to his friends.” He downed the contents of the glass and poured another.

Glenaire remained loyal in his way, but Andrew didn’t plan to let him or any member of the Hayden family interfere with his life again. Glenaire’s entire clan had made Andrew’s life a misery, particularly the Hayden he encountered in Groghan’s bookshop that afternoon, Glenaire’s sister.

Jamie mumbled into his glass, less coherent by the minute.

Andrew brooded against the doorjamb, staring at sparks flying up his chimney. He’d earned his peace after eleven bloody years and intended to enjoy it without interference.

“I’ve had my fill of the damned Haydens,” he snarled, “and I’m not about to tolerate interference from Richard.”

Jamie ignored him. “Still, a wife would do you good. Don’t look like you wish me to the devil! Mistress then. Clean you up a bit.”

Andrew pushed himself upright. “I need cleaning?”

“‘Spose not. You’re fastidious enough. Meant this place.” He waved an unsteady hand in a gesture that encompassed the entire room.

“No clutter here but my papers. A man needs something to work on.”

“Scholar like your father? Are you going to tutor the careless sons of privilege, browbeat ‘em into learning like he tried to do to me? Write pretty poetry? What?”

Andrew shrugged into the dressing gown. “The world has enough bad poetry. It isn’t my gift, and I haven’t the patience for teaching. I’ve a notion to try my hand at translating, just something to keep my mind and hands busy.”

Andrew kept his need to create something clean and good after eleven years of war to himself. Guilt regarding his father crippled him as effectively as his scars. He couldn’t explain his driving need to do something–anything–the old man would have been proud of, not
even to Jamie.

“Sounds deadly dull to me. If a woman can’t clean you up, she might cheer you up. Visiting you is like visiting a mausoleum. Find some jolly girl with laughing eyes.”

“Her eyes wouldn’t laugh at the sight of me.” A subtle but unmistakable change transformed Andrew’s tone.

“That’s it then? The face? Don’t bother me none. Would think some kinds of women would find it romantic.”

Andrew thought Jamie believed what he said. The line that sliced Andrew’s face in two didn’t revolt him as it did others. Jamie looked Andrew directly in the face, but few respectable women did the same. He knew his features attracted women before; not so now. The revulsion, the swift look away, told him what he needed to know. Then again, when Jamie suggested a woman, he probably didn’t mean the respectable kind.

“I’m surprised half the unmarried women in Cambridge aren’t here already,” Jamie went on, “bringing calves’ foot jelly and tisanes to cheer you. Most of the married ones, too.”

“They can keep their pity. Think what would happen if they got past my face. They’d have to see the rest of me.” He didn’t want to find out what it would feel like to see revulsion on a woman’s face at an intimate moment. He limped into the study and dropped into a soft armchair with a loud groan.

“You walk a far sight better than you did right after Waterloo. I thought the fancy physician Richard found fixed you right and tight.”

“He helped. I’m on my feet at least, but army surgeons set the left leg badly to begin with and not quite even with the right. Richard tried to send me on to a surgeon in Edinburgh, but I preferred to come home.”

“Richard let you come? He’s like a dog with a bone. If he thought you needed more—”

“Even Richard Hayden—exalted damn Marquess of Glenaire—can’t keep an Englishman from his home if he wishes to be there.”
Particularly one who missed his own father’s funeral.

When no reply came from the other chair, Andrew grumbled. “He may have been right, though. Damn him.”

“Isn’t he always?” The slurred words faded out at the end.

Andrew continued as if Jamie hadn’t spoken. “Something isn’t healing. When I move the wrong way, it still feels like the very devil.”

Silence greeted that statement. Andrew reached over and removed the glass that dangled precariously from Jamie’s hand. The man was dead asleep.

Andrew sunk deeper into the soft leather and looked up at the beams of his ceiling. His study—he still thought of it as his father’s study-provided his only sense of home. Books lined the walls. Bookshelves ran over doorjambs and around the diamond-paned casement window that opened over the lane below. Books filled small stands, ingeniously wheeled so they could be pulled up to the worktable or pushed back for space. He came here for healing and to pick up the strands of his disjointed life, but today contentment eluded him.

Jamie’s talk of women and Richard Hayden raised unsettling memories. The confrontation at the bookseller’s raised even more. Images and voices swirled up from dark places where he locked them away—a broad flagstone terrace stretching out to a garden filled with the scent of lilacs and the deep darkness of a moonless night. For a moment he hovered there in the April night, a woman warm in his arms—Georgiana Hayden, young and shy, responsive beyond his boyish dreams.

Then there was Georgiana today. He rammed a fist down on the arm of the chair to stifle the memory.
What was the blasted woman doing in Groghan’s bookstore?
Groghan catered to the Cambridge elite, the fusty crowd of male scholarship and ego.
What misbegotten quirk of fate sent her there the one time I decide to pick up my own orders?

“Some’un sent a message.” Harley’s growl startled him, but he welcomed the distraction.

“Bring it then.” He reached for the thick package of folded vellum sealed with the Hayden family crest. Painfully familiar handwriting covered it, and it smelled of lilacs.
Hell and damnation
. Andrew Mallet harbored many nightmares. The memory of sweetness and lilacs caused misery to well up in him as violently as other buried memories–a French prison cell or the noise and blood of Waterloo.

She had risen up today at Groghan’s, filled with aristocratic outrage, and demanded service from a business that rarely saw a woman cross its threshold much less expect to order books. The sight pole-axed him.
Really, Georgiana, Greek?
Old Groghan about had apoplexy, and for a moment, Andrew thought he would refuse to hand over the books she requested. He took her coin, however.

When the woman turned and faced Andrew, his mind had fogged at the sight of her. In shock and unable to think, he pretended he didn’t know her.
Damned fool!
I ought to have guessed she wouldn’t let it be.

Jamie snored loudly, oblivious to what had been happening around him. Andrew let out a long breath and tore the message open.

Dear Mr. Mallet,

It has come to my attention that you suffered the loss of your father some time ago. I regret that I was unable to express proper sympathy at the appropriate time and wish to extend my condolences now.

Yours Sincerely,

Lady Georgiana Hayden

She chose to ignore his rudeness. Her perfectly proper and impeccably formal message sounded inoffensive, but he knew better.
She wants something. Blasted aristocrat. What the hell does she want?

Using one hand to push himself up, he swayed a bit before he staggered toward the hearth. He held one corner of the vellum to the fire and let it burn in his hand. The final piece dropped into the fireplace at the last possible moment.

“Will there be a reply?” Harley’s longsuffering voice exhibited neither respect nor fear of reprimand. Their long relationship made the first unnecessary and the second unlikely. “The man that brought it here is waiting.”

“No reply.”

Silence, apart from the low rumble of Jamie Heyworth’s drunken slumber, lay thick in the room; firelight flickered in the hearth; shadows embraced the corners. Andrew felt Harley’s eyes fixed on his back, but he stared, without wavering, into the fire. Neither man moved. Mallet looked back over his shoulder, annoyed.

“That will be all. If Lady Georgiana wishes a reply she will be disappointed.”

He turned his damaged face back to the fire and studied the silent embers. He still heard no movement behind him.

“Harley, leave me. Now.” With an exasperated sigh, Harley did what Andrew told him.

What is that blasted woman up to now?