Lady Silence (5 page)

Well, perhaps he did. But his temper had
flown, and he was ashamed. His mockery of a name for her—Lady
Silence—seemed far too close to the truth. If the chit was shamming
her noble bearing, she was remarkably good at it.

Delightful. He had in his employ an underage
runaway of good family. He could expect a visit from Bow Street at
any moment.

After six and a half years? If she were truly
someone of importance, she would have been found by now.

Damon stepped away from the desk,
sketched a quick gesture to indicate the girl could get up. She
faced him warily, poised to run. Afraid? Was she actually afraid of
him?
Damnation!
He
had
grabbed her, thrust her into his
chair, come close to stabbing her hand with his quill. No wonder
she looked at him so. Beneath his breath the colonel muttered a few
succulent Spanish oaths, adding a resounding, if silent,
Merde!
for good measure. He
supposed, in Katy Snow’s eyes, he was usurping
her
bookroom.

Perhaps his eyes
could
use an occasional rest from his quill and
foolscap, from all those rows and rows of leather-bound volumes.
And she smelled good, standing there so close in front of him, the
top of her head barely reaching his shoulder. Lavender? He wasn’t
sure. But the scent was light, evoking memories of England, not of
the heavier perfumes worn by the dark-eyed ladies of
Iberia.

Regarding her as quellingly as he had
his newest recruits, Damon announced, “Mapes clumps over the carpet
like a cart horse over cobbles, yet you enter a room as stealthily
as you have entered our lives.”
Ah . . .
that caused her to blink
. “Therefore, I assume you can
continue to deliver tea and biscuits without disturbing my work.”
As hope dawned, light flickered in her eyes, the nicely rounded
body settled into a waiting stance.

“
You know how to sharpen quills?” A
vigorous nod. “You are perhaps acquainted with the location of most
of the books in this library?” Another eager nod.
Devil it
, her whole face was
beginning to glow. He had designs on her virtue. What little
gentleman was left within did not care to see her so eager to
plunge to her doom.

“
And I suppose you write a fine hand,
good enough for a fair copy of my scribbles?” Yet another nod. She
was smiling now. Foolish, foolish girl. Did she not understand he
was dangerous?

“
And when I do not need you,” he added
sternly, “you will sit in that wingchair over in the corner and not
make a sound, is that understood?”

She seized his hand and kissed it, eyes
shining with joy. Her lips burned straight down to his black soul.
Damon stifled a groan and shooed her off. “You will report to me in
the morning at nine,” he told her sternly. “A female secretary is a
most exceptional concept, but it is possible you may be useful. We
shall see.”

A brief flash of green before she dropped her
eyes and bobbed a curtsy, exiting the room with a decided bounce to
her step.

What the devil was he thinking? He had just
condoned the chit’s crime, undoubtedly aiding and abetting a
runaway’s escape from her guardian. He was as soft as all the
others in his household. Colonel Damon Farr heaved a sigh. If only
that were true. Perhaps in years to come the layers of armor laid
on for the war might gradually peel away, leaving him a ordinary
man, a man capable of loving and being loved. Or perhaps he would
never be that person again. To survive the Peninsula, he had become
cold and hard. Cloaked in iron with no sign of a chink redemption
might slip through. Nor an arrogant little minx like Lady
Silence.

Odd, though, that she should trigger such
maudlin thoughts. The chit was a servant, as far from a lady as the
bar maid at The Hound and Hart. What possible influence could she
have on his life?

Katy, the girl the cat dragged in. No
significant influence . . . but fair game for the caged lion. After
all, had she not insisted on entering the cage?

Ever so slowly, Colonel Damon Farr’s lips
stretched into a thin smile.

“
Katy!” hissed a voice that carried
down the empty corridor outside Lady Moretaine’s bedchamber.
“Katy—this way!”

Katy, who had taken her leave of the countess
at the sound of the bell signaling it was time to dress for dinner,
looked swiftly around, then followed the whisper around a turn in
the corridor. A hand beckoned from an unused bedchamber. Having no
doubt to whom the hand belonged, Katy entered the room and closed
the door behind her.

The hand, and the body attached to it, had
retreated to the far side of the room, with the exaggerated stealth
of a conspirator in the pantomime the servants had been allowed to
view last Twelfth Night. Beaming at Katy, finger to her lips, was
Clover Stiles, an upstairs chambermaid so bent on becoming a
dresser for a fine London lady that she did not even walk out with
the footmen or the young men from the village. She had ambition,
did Clover Stiles. A fifteen-year-old scullery maid when Katy had
come in from the snow, Clover had taken the waif under her wing,
and not even Katy’s continued silence nor her rapid rise in status
had curbed a friendship born so long ago.

The two girls were a striking contrast—Katy,
delicate and blond; Clover, a big-boned, dark-haired farmer’s
daughter, seemingly born to nurture the weak and wounded around
her. “Well?” Clover demanded. “You were in the bookroom, alone with
him for an age, my girl. Did he behave himself?”

Katy blinked, appearing genuinely startled.
She nodded. Decisively.

“
Well, let me warn you,” Clover said.
“The master used to be a great one for slap and tickle. Not that he
did more, I grant—many’s the time I’ve heard Mrs. Tyner boast that
Damon Farr knew better than to muddy his own pond—“but he cut a
swath outside these walls, from tavern wenches to a widow near
twice his age.”

Satisfied by Katy’s wide-eyed stare, Clover
gasped for breath and plunged on. “And now he’s come home a sour
old crab, aglowerin’ at everyone, even his ma. Not too big a
surprise, I say, to find he left his better self back in that far
place where they was fighting. So y’ve got to remember he’s a man,
and you’re naught but a rare morsel, fit for pluckin’. With you not
even able to say yay or nay nor scream for help, he’s like to snap
you up and spit you out afore you knows what’s happenin’.”

Slowly, Katy backed away from her
friend.
No. No, he wasn’t like
that
. Even though she had ample reason to know that
men tended to think with something other than the brains God gave
them, she found herself shaking her head. Damon Farr was an
honorable man. Crotchety. Narrow-minded . . . but not more so than
the rest of his class. He was . . . a man wounded in war. And, even
as she fought him, her heart went out to him. The lines on his face
called to her to soothe them.

“
Katy, are you listening to me? I heard
Mapes and Tyner talking. They said you might be going to help the
colonel in the bookroom. Is that true?”

Katy laid her hands, palms together, up to
one ear, pantomiming her question.

“
Well, of course, Mapes was listening
at the door,” Clover declared, well accustomed to Katy’s sign
language. “Butlers have to know what’s going on, now don’t
they?”

Katy plumped herself down on a ladderback
chair, frowning mightily. Propping her chin on her hands, she
glared at the Turkey carpet.

“
Forgive me, love,” Clover cried,
dropping to her knees beside Katy’s chair. “’Tis just I’m that
worried about you. The countess’s pet you may be, but to the
colonel you’re fair game. Miss Nobody from Nowhere. Just be careful
is all I’m saying. For all he looks twenty years older and as sour
as Billy be Damned, he’s a man. And with you twitchin’ your tail
right there in front—”

Eyes sparking green fire, Katy shot to her
feet, quivering with rage, fists clenched at her sides.

“
Well, indeed I’m sorry, love, but
there’s the wood with no bark on it. He’s a man, you’re a woman.
You’ll need eyes in the back of your head. And knitting needles in
with your hairpins mightn’t be amiss.”

Knowing full well that Clover was right did
not mean Katy could accept her words with grace. But Clover was a
friend. Katy took a deep breath, forcing her anger to drain away.
Was that not what she always did? Only true ladies, cosseted and
well-dowered, could afford to lose their tempers. She proffered a
smile, albeit wan. Pantomiming her need to dress for dinner, Katy
Snow, waif, left Clover standing in the bedchamber, her brow still
wrinkled in concern.

~ * ~

Katy lost a spirited, if silent, argument
with Lady Moretaine about her strong desire to once again abandon
her customary place at the countess’s table. A decided, “Nonsense!”
was all the reply Katy received. That, and a violent shooing motion
as the countess sent her back to her room to dress.

And now, here they sat, the three of
them, Lady Moretaine talking nineteen to the dozen on one side of
the master of the house and Katy, eyes sparking fire on the other,
quite certain this dinner gave new meaning to the term
awkward
. The colonel offered an
occasional mumble or glum nod to his mother and even glummer looks
at Katy’s décolletage, which seemed to be what had turned him so
twitty in the first place. One glance at the neckline of the
primrose lustring gown the countess had insisted was all the crack
in London, and the colonel had turned positively purple. Not once
had he spoken to her, but he’d sneaked more than a few
peeks.
Blast the man!

As soon as the two ladies left the colonel to
his port, Katy fetched the countess’s shawl, draped it over her
shoulders, then pleaded to be excused. Lady Moretaine, not unaware
she was about to suffer a tedious session with the son who seemed
to have turned into an ogre, waved the girl upstairs. If only she
had had a premonition, some inkling of how Damon would react to
Katy Snow’s elevation . . . No, she would not have changed a thing.
The child was most certainly a gentlewoman, if not a lady. Worthy
of her trust. She had not made a mistake.

“
So, mama,” said the colonel as he
strode into the drawing room, after perhaps more port than was
wise, “just what were you thinking when you dressed mutton as lamb?
Or is it, perhaps, appropriate to expose a guttersnipe as if she
were Harriette Wilson? Shouldn’t the gown have been red, instead of
pink?”

“
Sit down!” his mother snapped. “And
mind your manners.” When the colonel had slumped onto the opposite
end of the sofa on which she was sitting, the countess said, “I am
happiest with beautiful things around me, Damon. It is a fault I
freely acknowledge. Furniture, paintings, carpets, Oriental vases,
ormolu clocks, marble sculpture, gardens . . . beautiful people. I
do not wish to have my companion in drab, looking like a cloud
about to pour down rain. It pleases me to see her shine. As I have
told you, if you cannot like it, we shall remove to
Bath.”

Damon dropped his head into his hands. “My
apologies, mama. I fear I have come home, but have not left the
crudities of war behind.” He drew a ragged breath, finding he could
not let the subject go. “Mama, I cannot understand why you did not
try to locate her people. She can write. Why did you not ask her
who she was?”

His mother shook her head. “My dear, can you
truly think we did not? But she refused to answer. Just sat there
with her hands folded in her lap, head bowed, as if she knew we
were going to toss her down the front steps if she did not tell,
yet she would not do it. Nothing would move her. I promise you, we
tried.”

“
Of course you did,” the colonel
murmured, thoroughly ashamed of the confused and angry thoughts
chasing through his head. Had he himself not recognized the same
stubborn desperation in the chit when he had attempted to discover
her history. “She’s a baggage, mama. I know it. I do not believe
she cannot talk.”

Silence hovered between them, as Lady
Moretaine’s brow wrinkled in thought. “But why?” she inquired at
last. “And surely she could not have maintained such a masquerade
for so long?”

“
What sets us apart from our servants,
mama?” Damon asked. “From the common soldiers on the march, the
women trailing in the dust of the baggage train? ’Tis easy enough
to take mutton and dress it as lamb, but the way we talk is bred in
us. The upper class speaks in accents all its own, carefully
polished by parents and tutors until it is perfection. For everyone
else the way we talk depends on where we live. From broad Yorkshire
to the almost unintelligible mutterings heard in the London
gutters. Clearly, your Lady Silence is hiding her
origins.”

“
You know, my dear,” said the countess
mildly, “you have come home with a remarkably nasty
mind.”

“
Yes, mama, I know.”

“
Damon?” Lady Moretaine paused,
uncharacteristically uncertain. “Perhaps I should not have
suggested Katy assist you in the library. But she loves books, and
I thought she might be useful. Yet now I realize that I, too, have
been guilty of placing Katy in an anomalous position. Neither fish
nor fowl nor rare roast beef. If I truly knew her to be a young
woman of good family, I would not have thought of offering her to
you—” The countess broke off, crying, “Merciful heavens, Damon,
what have I said?”