Vixen (34 page)

“I wish I knew,” he said, sighing. He addressed his cousin. “Ma’am, I should beat a retreat if I were you; I have a feeling this is about to become ugly.”

Lady Smallwood looked from Chloe’s set face and indignant eyes to Hugo’s calm but determined features and took the advice. She had found Chloe’s will impossible to bend and her views utterly resistant to guidance. So it was with relief that she handed the matter over to the clearly stronger hands of the girl’s guardian.

“Hugo, why must you be so stuffy?” Chloe broke out as soon as the door closed on her chaperone. “Why can’t I wear what I wish to wear?”

“Because what you wish to wear, lass, is completely unsuitable,” he said. “I do not understand why you should have been born without the first inkling either of
what suits you or is socially appropriate, but sadly it seems to be the case. Therefore you must learn to accept the judgment of those who know better.”

“I don’t,” Chloe said mutinously, stroking the silk sleeves of the spencer. “I think I look very sophisticated in this … and I will
not
cancel the evening dress and buy some wishy-washy pastel thing, whatever you say.”

“Oh, Chloe, don’t throw down the gauntlet,” he said, cajoling. “It will make everything so uncomfortable.” He held out a hand. “Come, kiss and make up, and we’ll go out and choose a truly beautiful gown. It doesn’t have to be wishy-washy.”

Chloe stood unmoving, her dislike of quarreling with Hugo warring with her absolute resistance to submitting to him over this. She’d been long enough in London now to know what sophisticated women wore, and it didn’t suit her plans for Hugo to insist upon seeing her as a youthful debutante. He had to realize she was quite mature enough and sufficiently up to snuff to make him a perfectly suitable wife despite the difference in their ages. She was no fluttering virgin, after all. So why should she dress like one?

“I don’t see why I should have to suffer your interference in something as personal as my wardrobe,” she said finally. “I spend all my life in brown serge, and then I ought to be able to buy whatever I like, and everything I like you tell me I can’t have. It’s not just.”

Hugo sighed and gave up conciliation. “Just or not, lass, it’s the way it is. While I hold the reins, I’m afraid you’ll run as I choose, in this as in everything. Now, let’s be on our way.” He went to the door, leaving Chloe fighting chagrin in the library.

She stomped after him into the hall, where he was instructing Samuel to bring around his curricle. “I don’t see why you need me to go with you, since I’m not
allowed to have an opinion. It’s just a waste of my time.”

Both Hugo and Samuel blinked at her unusually petulant tone. Then Hugo said blightingly, “Don’t be such a brat.”

Chloe flushed and turned away, swallowing tears as her tone and words replayed in her head. It was no wonder Hugo refused to consider marrying her. What grown man would want to marry a petulant brat?

Hugo regarded her averted back and drooping head with a slight smile. Castigating a seventeen-year-old for being seventeen seemed hardly just. “Hey!” he said softly.

She turned slowly to face him. “I’m sorry.”

“Go and fetch your hat and we’ll do some proper shopping. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

“I shall be,” she said, but with a clear effort to make it sound humorous.

Resigned, Chloe accompanied him outside to where his curricle waited at the curb. Hugo had agreed to purchase a curricle and pair, and a barouche and pair for Chloe and her duenna. Society would look askance at anything less in a fashionable household, but he was very uncomfortable with his own extremely expensive acquisition paid for from his ward’s fortune.

He was just handing her up, when a shout of greeting came from two horsemen farther up the street.

“Oh, it’s Gerald and Miles,” Chloe said, waving. “I forgot we were going riding.”

The two young men drew rein, bowing from their mounts. “Good afternoon, sir.” They greeted Hugo punctiliously, but their eyes were on Chloe.

“Miss Gresham was kind enough to agree to ride in the park,” one of the two said somewhat disconsolately. “Have you changed your mind, Chloe?”

“I’m afraid her guardian is decreeing a prior claim,”
Hugo said with an easy smile at the two youngsters. They wore impossibly starched cravats and shiny curly beaver hats and they were fresh-faced and glowing with health and energy.

A fleeting thought of himself at that age crossed his mind. He’d been taking his pleasures with the Congregation. No fresh-faced innocent he. Haggard and heavy-eyed most of the time, his mind smudged with the herbal substances and alcohol, his body surfeited with sensual excesses.

“We have to go shopping,” Chloe was explaining. She glanced at Hugo, and that chill crept up her spine again. He had the look she dreaded. She laid a hand on his arm and he seemed to haul himself back from whatever grim territory he inhabited at those times.

“Necessary errands, I’m afraid,” he said, nodding at the two horsemen. “I’m sorry to disrupt your plans.”

“Oh, not at all, sir,” Miles Payton said, although he didn’t sound convinced. “Perhaps tomorrow, Chloe?”

“Yes, tomorrow afternoon,” Chloe said. “And I shan’t permit anything to prevent it … not even Sir Hugo.” She looked up at them through the thick fringe of her eyelashes, her mouth curved in an entrancing and utterly inviting smile.

Hugo reflected that while he’d told her to flirt, he hadn’t somehow expected her to take to it with such alacrity, or to evince such expertise. He wasn’t in the least surprised at the melting looks of her two prospective swains.

“Up you get,” he said, putting a hand under her elbow.

Chloe jumped into the curricle with a speed that did nothing to diminish the grace of her movements. “But I’ll see you at Almack’s tonight,” she called as Hugo gave his horses the office to start.

“You promised me the first waltz,” Gerald said, moving
his horse alongside the curricle as they trotted down the street.

“No, you promised it to me,” Miles said hotly, ranging himself on the other side.

Hugo raised his eyebrows, wondering how long he was going to have this rivaling escort. “You’d better settle the dispute quickly, lass, before we turn onto Park Street. It’s too narrow for outriders.”

“I really can’t remember,” she said, laughing. “Why don’t you toss a coin and I’ll accept the result, as I trust you will.”

They turned onto Park Street and their escort fell back. “Shame on you,” Hugo said amiably. “Of all the flirtatious moves, offering two men the same dance is quite the most unseemly.”

“Oh, but I’m sure I didn’t,” she said with a complacent smile. “They’re always quarreling over me. Anyway, I thought my suggestion was a very fair one.”

“Very fair,” he agreed. “I’m glad to see you’ve recovered your good humor.”

Anxious to make amends for her earlier shrewishness, Chloe offered no resistance to Hugo’s selected replacements. She did cast one longing look at the striped evening gown, but when the modiste produced a cherry-red taffeta over a half slip of rose pink embroidered with seed pearls, she was constrained to admit that it did look satisfactorily dashing.

They left Three Kings Yard very much in charity with each other and turned onto Brook Street.

“What’s going on?” Chloe leaned forward as Hugo uttered one of his short naval words and checked his horses.

A small mob was coming down the street toward them, waving staves and shouting. They stopped in front of one of the tall, double-fronted houses and a stone flew through the air and crashed against the front
door. The mob surged up the steps, and their shouts grew louder. Another stone flew and a first floor window shattered. A stave hammered against the front door.

“They’re attacking Lord Douglas’s house,” Hugo said. “It’s been happening all over the city.”

“Lord Douglas?”

“Cabinet minister,” he told her abstractedly as he tried to decide whether he would do better to turn his horses or drive straight past the crowd.

They were angry but not wild, he judged. But how would they react to two members of the hated aristocracy driving straight past them? These small mob attacks on the houses of government ministers had become frequent in the past months. The massacre at St. Peter’s Field, now universally christened Peterloo in ironic comparison with Wellington’s great victory, had fanned the disaffection, as well it might. There were many members of the government as horrified by that panicked savagery as were its victims and the members of the reform movement. But the hungry workingclass victims of repressive labor laws and harsh employers drew no distinction between their government sympathizers and those who would grind them even deeper into the dirt of powerless poverty.

“Go on,” Chloe insisted. “They won’t hurt us, and I want to hear what they’re shouting.”

“I’ve no intention of exposing you—”

“I was at Peterloo,” she interrupted. “I’m on their side.”

While he still hesitated, she suddenly sprang down and ran up the street toward the crowd.

“Chloe!” He thrust the reins into the hands of his tiger and leapt to the street, chasing after her. She had dived into the middle of the mob by the time he reached its outskirts.

“Eh, what’s wi’ you, guv?” a burly man demanded. “Slummin’, are ye?” He waved his stave, and his beery breath wreathed around Hugo.

“No more than you are,” Hugo said shortly. The milling throng seemed to have little direction. A few more stones were thrown, a few more jeers hurled, and then the mob eddied and broke.

Chloe was sitting on the steps of the minister’s house as the crowd fell back. She had her arm around a shivering girl.

“The next time you shoot off on frolics of your own, Chloe, you are going to taste the full measure of my displeasure,” Hugo declared furiously. “I am sick to death of these darting forays into the middle of some disturbance.”

“She was knocked over,” Chloe said as if none of this speech had penetrated. “And she’s having a baby, but she’s only a child herself. Look how thin she is, and she’s so cold.” She rubbed the skinny shoulders vigorously.

Hugo recognized defeat. He had early in his experience of warfare learned when the odds were insuperable. The child Chloe held was perhaps thirteen, although she looked little more than ten. Her swollen belly pushed against the threadbare material of her striped petticoat, her only protection against the sharp autumnal wind. Her lips were blue in a painfully thin, ashen face, and her feet were as bare as they’d been at her birth.

How Chloe had found this piece of society’s flotsam, he didn’t bother to question. They seemed attracted to her like iron filings to a magnet … or was it the other way around? Either way, he knew they would be housing the girl and saw no point in bootless discussion.

“Come along.” He strode back to the curricle that his tiger had brought level with the house.

Chloe helped the girl to her feet, murmuring softly to her as she encouraged her to the curricle.

With a sudden exclamation of terror the child pulled back as Hugo moved to help her up. “I ain’t goin’ in there. Where you takin’ me? I ain’t done nuthin’ wrong … I ain’t goin’ to no Bridewell.” Her eyes wide with fear in her thin dirty face, she struggled, kicking out as Hugo tried to hold her.

“Hush,” Chloe said, taking her hand. “No one’s going to hurt you. No one’s going to take you to Bridewell. I want you to come to my home, where you’ll be warm and can have something to eat. When did you last eat?”

The girl’s struggles ceased and her eyes darted between them, suddenly sharp and focused. “Dunno.”

“I promise we won’t hurt you,” Chloe repeated. “When you’ve had something to eat and I’ve found you some warm clothes, then you can go anywhere you wish. I promise.”

“You one a them do-gooders?” the girl demanded. “I bin wi’ the likes a them. All preachin’ and nuthin’ to eat but a bite a bread and a bit a gruel … an’ you don’t
get
that ’n you don’t say as ’ow yer a fallen’ woman an’ sorry fer it.”

“Oh, I’m a fallen woman too,” Chloe said cheerfully, oblivious of Hugo’s sharp intake of breath. “So you’ll be quite safe from any preaching. And I detest gruel, so we don’t have any of that in the house.”

Hugo closed his eyes in despair. “Not another word!” he snapped, conscious of the tiger’s big ears. “You have not a grain of discretion. Get up!” Releasing his hold on Chloe’s new prize, he caught his ward around the waist and swung her into the curricle. “Are you coming?” He turned back to the pregnant girl, who hadn’t taken advantage of her freedom to run.

“ ’Spose so,” she said. “But we’re not goin’ to no Bridewell?”

“No!” Hugo said impatiently. “We are not.”

The girl scrambled into the somewhat overcrowded curricle with Hugo’s helping hand.

“Let go their heads,” he said curtly to the fascinated tiger as he took up the reins.

“Right you are, guv.” With a cheery grin the lad released the team and dashed for his perch at the rear of the curricle as it took off down Brook Street.

Chloe scrunched up on the seat to make room for the girl beside her. It put her in very close contact with Hugo, who glanced down at her with a look that guaranteed retribution. She offered a tentative smile and squiggled closer so that her thigh was pressed hard against his. Hugo’s expression didn’t soften.

Chloe turned her attention to the girl. “What’s your name?”

“Peg.”

“How old are you, Peg?”

“Dunno.”

“Where do you live?”

“Nowhere in partic’ler.” She shrugged her scrawny shoulders and hunched over her belly, folding her bare arms against the chill wind.

“You don’t have a home?”

Peg shrugged again. “Sometimes I sleep at me nan’s. She’s cook in a big ’ouse, and sometimes they lets me sleep in the wash’ouse. But the ’ousekeeper’s a right tartar an’ if she found me, she’d ’ave me nan turned off wi’ no character.”

“What about the baby’s father?”

“What about ’im?”

“Well … well, where is he?”

“Dunno. Dunno who ’e is.”

“Oh.” Chloe was silenced at the ramifications of this statement.

Hugo drew rein outside his house and jumped down.
He helped his passengers to alight and then followed them into the house.