Lady in Green (10 page)

“Perhaps she should have!”

“You are an insolent old bat!”

“You are a licentious, loud-mouthed fribble.” And they continued to stand in the dimly lighted hall, glaring at each other, until Lord Gardiner felt an unavoidable urge to scratch his nether regions. He couldn’t, not in front of this green-glassed she-dragon. A gentleman could curse and carry on in a female’s presence under certain circumstances, but some things were simply beyond the pale. The housekeeper crossed her bony arms over her flat chest, almost challenging him. So he did it, he scratched his arse, right there in front of her. Then he was ashamed when he heard her gasp at this ultimate insult.

“Told you I had sensitive skin,” he muttered, looking away and so missing the smile Annalise couldn’t hide.

“Oh, stop whining about it like a sulky child,” she told him, almost feeling sorry for what she’d done. “I’m sure Henny has something in her kitchen for the itching, or else I can mix something up from Grandmother’s book of receipts.”

He grunted something that may have been a thank-you.

She didn’t wait for him to follow. That way he couldn’t see the grin on her face; she didn’t feel quite so bad, now.

Gard sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, and immediately jumped up again, squealing like a stuck pig. Or peer. He pulled a needle out of the back of his robe.

“Oh, is that where I left the silly thing? I searched high and low for it, too. Thank you,” Annalise said sweetly, putting a pot of water on to boil before returning to her search through Henny’s medicine shelf. “I’ll have to consult Grandmother’s book. She kept an excellent stillroom, so we can only hope Henny—Aunt Henny—stocks the right ingredients. Tea will be ready in a minute.”

“Wine,” he grunted, scratching his leg.

“I’m afraid alcohol will only heat your blood, making you itch more. How about some lemonade? And don’t scratch, that makes it worse, too.”

What was it they used to do with witches, Gard wondered, burn them at the stake? That was too good for Mrs. Lee. Here he was, in the middle of the night, in his charming little love-lodge, swollen and spotty and being lectured at by a shriveled old prune. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, defeated and disheartened. And despising Mrs. Lee the more for seeing him thus.

Still, the lemonade did cool a throat parched by shouting, and the damp cloth she placed on his forehead while she mixed her potion was refreshing. Maybe a heart did beat in her narrow chest after all.

“I think you are supposed to bathe in the stuff, but we don’t have enough of some of the wild things, like dock, so I’ll just spread some on, like this.”

“Like this” was burning hot. His lordship yowled and jerked his foot away.

“I thought men were supposed to have a code about stoicism, stiff upper lip and all that. Why, you’re worse than a colicky infant.”

So the earl sat there, suffering as silently as he could, while his housekeeper tortured his already agonized limbs. He muttered almost to himself: “I bet Mr. Lee threw himself in front of the French cannons on purpose.”

“You leave Jake out of this,” she said, applying a measure of the hot salve with unnecessary vigor.

“I thought his name was Jamie.”

“It was. James Jacob Lee.” She kept spreading the stuff on his feet and ankles.

“He must have been a rake of the first order.”

“That’s a shameful thing to say, my lord. Why ever would you think a thing like that? Don’t you believe any man can be constant? Or do you just doubt that any man could be faithful to me?”

“You’re putting words in my mouth. I just thought he must have been a womanizer, to have you so set against the breed. You obviously do not approve of me or my life-style.”

“That’s not for me to say, my lord.”

“And that hasn’t stopped you before. What, did you suddenly remember your place? I’m asking you, Mrs. Lee, as your employer, why are you so bitterly resentful of a man having a bit of fun?”

“I am not in your employ any longer, my lord. You dismissed me, remember?”

Gard remembered. But that stuff she was spreading on his legs was working on the itch, after the initial sting, and Mrs. Lee apparently had a gentle touch when she wished. Besides, he noted as he watched her work, the housekeeper’s wrists were perhaps the thinnest he had ever seen on a woman not begging in the streets. If she lost this position, no one would hire the harridan, and then what would become of her? The earl did not want her wasting away on his conscience. “Perhaps I was a bit hasty. I’ll reconsider, if you swear to rid that room of its wildlife. And if you answer my questions.”

Annalise nodded. “Very well, I shall fumigate the bed chamber, and no, I do not approve of your ways.”

“You do not believe in innocent fun?”

“Innocent fun is sleigh-riding and picniking, not your hellraking. My lord.”

“Come now, hellraking? I don’t go around raping innocent women and ravishing the countryside. My, ah, companions are all willing, nay, happy to spend time with me.”

“So happy that Kitty flew out of here as if she’d been scalded, and Corinne had to drink herself into oblivion before facing you?” Annalise got up to mix a fresh batch of the ointment.

“Those were two instances out of many.” He spoke angrily, to her back.

“Many. Exactly. You make a travesty out of what should be a sacred act of marriage. You have no faithfulness, no loyalty, no real love.”

“Lud, how did a moralist like you ever get on with Lord Elphinstone?”

“I, ah, had few dealings with his lordship, but Lady Ros always spoke highly of him. Trust and respect, that’s what they share. And friendship, of course.”

“Friendship? You cannot be bacon-brained enough to think that’s all Lady Ros and Elphinstone share!”

Annalise had nearly convinced herself such was the case. She absentmindedly dabbed at the earl’s knees with the freshly heated salve as she explained: “Lady Rosalind lost her heart many years ago in a tragic romance. She remains true to her first, dead love. That’s why she and Lord Elphinstone could never marry.”

“You’ve been reading too many novels, woman,” he said through gritted teeth. “That’s a touching story. Perhaps you should tell it to Elphinstone’s wife.”

“Wife?” Annalise let the cloth she was using fall into the bowl. That explained a lot. Poor Aunt Ros was being exploited by another no-account libertine, just like the one grinning at her discomfiture now. Annalise thrust the bowl into his hands. “You can finish the rest yourself.”

He kept grinning. “I was wondering when you’d reach that point. Do you think you could force yourself to put some of that stuff on my back, though, where I cannot reach?”

Annalise could not refuse such a reasonable request. She took the bowl while he turned around, straddling the chair, and shrugged the robe down over his shoulders. Annalise tried not to think of those broad shoulders or wavy muscles. “Lady Ros is no trollop!” she stated instead.

“I never said she was. I never heard a rumor of her going with another man, Annie.”

Miss Avery stiffened, there behind his back. First he was half naked, now he was getting familiar. In her most haughty, lady-of-the-manor voice she declared, “I did not give you permission to use my given name.”

He laughed. “I don’t need your permission, ma’am, now that you’re back on my payroll. Lud, you’re not like any servant I ever knew.”

And the situation was like no other he’d been in since he was five and some nursemaid or other had pulled nettles out of his hide. She’d put on the same smelly concoction,
too,
most likely. She never aggravated him or taunted him or made him feel like the lowest kind of reptile. He could feel the housekeeper’s antipathy through the slaps on his back. “By George, I’m only being friendly. You’d think I was asking for
droit du seigneur
or something.”

“I am finished, my lord,” she said, slamming the bowl down on the table. “And of course you can call me what you will, my lord. As you said, I work for you. However, I do not wish your glib friendship. Save your honeyed words for the women who accept money to listen to
them, my lord.”

Gard turned around in the chair again and began to daub at the welts on his chest. “Don’t be so quick to condemn those women and the men who support them. You have an honest job now, but where would you be if you had no position and no family to help you?”

“I’d find some way other than selling my body!”

“You’d have to,” he said without even looking up to see the rigidity in his housekeeper’s stance.

“If men would keep their minds more on their business and less on their pleasures,” she snarled at him and his bare chest, “they’d be better able to provide for their daughters.” Affront was interfering with Annalise’s breathing, that and knowing the robe was draped just across his hips and thighs. She took a deep breath. “For men to use women so is deplorable. There is no excuse for lives based on satisfying lower appetites, lives ruled by vulgar passions.” She gasped as his hand moved beneath the robe’s covering. “And don’t think you can force your unbridled lust on me!”

Lord Gardiner laughed till tears came to his eyes. “You can rest assured, Annie Lee, that is the last thing in the world I’d ever do!”

Chapter Eleven

His lordship went to Suffolk to nurse his wounds while the Laurel Street lodgings were being de-infested. “Estate business,” he claimed to Lady Stephania, making his excuses to visit a place where he could wear loose clothing.

“But Lady Martindale and her daughters are coming for dinner Tuesday next, and we are promised to the Ashford-Farquahars’ come-out ball on Friday. Twins, you know. Both well favored and fabulously wealthy. And that Irish widow, Lady Campbell, called again this afternoon. She said she wanted your advice about buying a carriage. Encroaching female, coming to tea as if she were one of my boon companions, but you did make an offer to help, it seems. What shall I tell them?” Her cane rapped the floor, fractions of an inch away from his toes. “What shall I tell your father when he wakes me in the middle of the night to ask why you are not paying court to any of the reigning Toasts?”

“You may tell Lady Martindale and her fubsy-faced daughters to go hang. And that goes double for the Ashford-Farquahar twins. You may tell Lady Campbell that I shall call as soon as I return, although a visit to Tattersall’s is not quite what I offered. And you may respectfully tell my father not to worry about finding his ice skates. Hell will freeze over before I dance attendance on one of the spoiled society darlings you keep tossing at my head.”

“But you gave your word to look around for a countess!”

“I gave my word to show more responsible interest in the earldom, my lady. That’s what you wanted, and that’s what I shall be doing in Suffolk.”

This time the cane caught him firmly in the ankle. “I meant in providing it with heirs, you lobcock, not giving the estate managers advice they neither want nor need!”

*

Miss Avery, meanwhile, was stalking rats. She’d burned pastilles in the master bedroom, boiled all the linen, beat all the rugs, changed the mattress. Now she and Clyde were on the hunt.

Mangy rats, she sought. Plague-carrying rats. Red-eyed, yellow-toothed rats as nasty as the vermin who had the nerve to laugh at her. There she’d been feeling sorry for the cad, all lumpy and swollen. Then he’d called her Annie. What was she supposed to call him? Gard, as his friends did, according to Lorna? He was so arrogant, so self-assured, he most likely preferred to be called God. Heaven knew he had the same morals as those old Greek basket-scramblers. He even looked like a god with his dark curls and ripply muscles and finely detailed features, flea bites notwithstanding. Still, he was a rodent.

“Whyn’t you just put down some poison, chickie, if you’re so worried about pests gettin’ into the house? Get rid of the problem onct and for all.”

So she consulted Grandmother’s stillroom book, took her market basket, and stomped off to the apothecary. When he read her list, the assistant there gave her an odd look, undecided whether to call for the manager or the constable. Annalise glanced over both shoulders, the high one and the low one, to make sure no one overheard, then whispered, “Mistress runs a school for wayward boys. Springtime, don’t you know.”

The assistant put the powders and salts in a sack. “This should take care of the problem for her.”

*

Her house in order, or soon to be, Miss Avery went riding in the park. Smuggling Napoleon out of Elba had to be less complicated.

At seven o’clock in the morning, Rob walked Annalise the three blocks to the Holborn road. No one in the neighborhood who was awake at the time saw anything unusual about the new servants from Number Eleven setting out on their errands. They were used to Tuthill the stableman and his widowed niece who kept house because she was too ugly to get lucky twice.

The pair was met at the Holborn road by a hackney carriage, a former associate of Rob’s at the ribbons. The housekeeper entered the coach, a black cloak covering her from collar to toes, a black coalscuttle bonnet concealing most of the rest of her.

When the carriage pulled up at a livery stable behind Cavendish Square, an establishment also owned by a friend of Rob’s in his earlier days, an
elegant
young woman stepped out. There was no question that this was a lady, not with her noble bearing and obviously expensive green velvet riding habit in the latest military style, which she filled to admiration since the habit’s alterations.