Stephanie and the Wicked Deceiver (Wild Marchmonts #2)

2. The Wicked Deceiver

Chapter 2

The Wicked Deceiver

H edley was amused but also touched. His little rescuer, with those strange rimless eyes, had breathed words of encouragement into his ear and tried to spare his pride at being a weakling saved by a woman. His wicked humour had sent off his friends, and he had overplayed his injury, but it really was too delicious to have her leave immediately after this propitious start.

His valet had taken her place kneeling at his side after she had left but had to duck as the earl swung his leg from the sofa. ‘My lord!’ he squealed. His hair was pulled back in a queue with an immaculately pressed black silk bow binding it, and he was dressed in silken knee breeches but a more discreet waistcoat. ‘Your leg!’

‘Is quite recovered, but my blasted arm needs rebinding. Help me take off my coat, Brumby!’

‘Yes, my lord.’ The little man eased it off with a delicacy that Hedley found annoying, so he pulled at it himself, cursing when it hurt his arm. ‘Put on the boot.’

Horace Pettigrew, a jolly-faced man in his early twenties with a shock of brown curls, came in. ‘What was with the squawk?’

‘When I fell I managed to do it on the bad arm,’ said Hedley, holding it.

‘You mean the one you injured rescuing Misty?’ Sir Rupert Armitage asked as he entered and swept up the fuzzy grey cat.

‘Yes.’

‘It is your fault, Rupert, for naming a stupid mouser, and feeding her,’ said Pettigrew. ‘Else she would be off hunting and not hanging around making Max fond of her and take the risk.’

‘I heard you say you hurt it in a fight .’ Armitage threw himself on a chair. ‘Oh, you deceiver!’ He crossed his legs and negligently caressed the cat. He was a handsome, urbane figure with a sharp satyr’s face and slanting dark eyes.

‘I did not lie!’ said Hedley with dignity. ‘It was a fight with Misty. She did not wish to be rescued from the tree. If she hadn’t used her claws, I should not have missed my footing.’

‘You did not lie ?’ Pettigrew jeered. ‘You had that poor girl think we were a pile of cutthroats.’

‘It was your ridiculous masks that confused her. I simply did not disabuse her.’

‘But why?’ asked Pettigrew.

‘Are you mad, Horace?’ said the reclining baronet, stroking the cat, ‘Because she is lovely, of course.’

‘A bit odd-looking with no lashes!’ remarked Pettigrew.

‘But unusually divine!’ countered Armitage. ‘Still, young girls are not your style, Max.’

Hedley sighed and looked at his friend as though at an infant. ‘I am not romancing her, I am teasing her! She rather walked into it by taking me for a weakling.’

‘I know! And you with those shoulders!’ said Pettigrew. ‘Is she blind?’

‘No, I think it was the tassels on my boots that convinced her,’ Hedley admitted.

‘A step too far,’ Sir Rupert Armitage agreed sagely. ‘I said so at the time…!’

‘And I disagreed, but they made her think me a frivolous, fashionable wretch.’

‘Anyone would, seeing those boots,’ Armitage persisted.

Hedley shot him a quietening look and sighed. ‘She also seemed to object to my coiffure.’

The valet, who had not quite left the room, looked hurt at this and Hedley waved him off.

‘Ha! She thinks you no more than a Macaroni!’ said young Horace Pettigrew with glee, mentioning the overblown exquisites of the previous century.

‘Did the girl just disdain the Earl of Hedley, the most famous Corinthian in town?’ laughed Lord Benjamin Fortescue, the dark-haired young baron, the third of the Hedley’s cutthroats, who had just joined them all. Fortescue was the most sensible of the friends, a calming presence, but he had a darkly sarcastic humour at times.

‘Disdain? No, she pities me. She means, I think, to make a new man of me.’ Hedley raised an arched brow and the three friends were amused.

‘What will you do?’ asked Pettigrew.

‘Well, Horace, I will let her instruct me, of course,’ said Hedley, in a servile tone.

‘She was quite spectacular today, I thought.’ Armitage was still stroking the cat. ‘She had some real skill with a foil, though I feel she was waving it about a bit to distract us.’

‘I saw a ball of blue roll on the ground and rise so swiftly,’ remembered Pettigrew. ‘How brave! She must have leapt from the carriage while it was moving.’

‘But she was fierce, too!’ said Fortescue. ‘What a spitfire! If she finds you out, Max, she will not let you off!’

‘I fear you are right!’ Hedley’s tone was resigned.

‘What does she mean to instruct you in ?’ asked Pettigrew, still amused.

‘Many skills, I believe. We begin with riding and driving.’

‘Once she sees Atlas, she will no longer believe you a bad horseman,’ remarked Armitage.

‘No – so I intend to ride Sally.’

‘Your aunt’s mare?’ cried Fortescue.

‘Yes, but I must rename her for the present. How does Proudfoot sound?’

‘As though you have lost your mind,’ Sir Rupert informed him and shook his head mournfully.

‘And Metcalfe is in London, isn’t he?’ Hedley remembered. ‘Joseph must ride over to his head groom and borrow his pair.’

‘Those plodders?’ cried Pettigrew. ‘In the shafts of your curricle?’

‘She’ll think my driving arrangements like me, all show and no substance,’ laughed the earl.

‘Why should you do this crazy thing?’ said Fortescue.

‘Have you never been taught to receive a gift with grace, my lord?’ asked Hedley with faux disapproval. He laughed. ‘She wishes to gift me with sporting instruction and I am graciously accepting.’ He placed a hand to his breast and bowed a little.

‘Still, to fool a child…’ said the noble baronet.

‘It is no more than a game, Armitage!’ Hedley protested. ‘I mean her no harm.’

‘That goes without saying, Max,’ said Baron Benjamin Fortescue. ‘Only — be careful.’

‘Oh, I shall. She is so sincere in wanting to help me that I cannot resist.’

‘You devil!’ exclaimed Pettigrew.

‘She told me she has been cast off by her family for the moment and is afraid of boredom. My game will alleviate that , at least.’

‘Salve your conscience how you may, my lord earl!’ declared his best friend Armitage, still stroking the cat.

There was nothing that could be said to Miss Stephanie to put her off course from visiting the earl again. Morag’s concerns had been lightened by her past knowledge of Hedley’s family – but not by much. Miss Stephanie was an innocent, and he was an unknown quantity. He looked like a gentleman, but Morag had been confused by something in his gait, and she had found his victimhood a little suspect. Yes, there had been the footpads, but she had seen a look of amusement in the man’s eyes when he had gazed at his rescuer in the aftermath.

‘Why on earth did you suddenly become so caring to that gentleman? The only other time I have seen you that way was when Miss Berthe fell down that gully. And even then, when we got her up ye didnae fash as ye did today. Is it because he is handsome?’

Stephanie went off into a paroxysm of laughter at so ludicrous a thought. ‘I am not Roseanna , moved by any pretty face, and he is a pampered poodle! Anyway, I do not like gentlemen in the way of my silly sister, which is why Mama concluded I should not attend ballrooms this Season. She says I will like them in the future, but I doubt it. If I am not interested in a thing it is quite useless to force me, as Mama knows well. But I couldn’t help but feel for Lord Hedley after he suffered the humiliation of being saved by a woman. And he is such a … dandy that he has been distracted from doing what a real man should do.’

‘A real man?’ asked Morag, interested.

‘Oh, like Papa or Richard or even Eliot — men who are strong and capable. And yet, Hedley is at least trying and I admire that. Perhaps he has some skill with the foil, but he wished to practise with his other arm since his right one was injured. That shows some spirit. I am willing to wager that his papa was a fashionable fribble also, and that he has no brothers, no one to show him how to be a man.’

Morag threw up her hands. ‘And so you , a lass in her eighteenth year, are going to do so?’ she demanded incredulously.

Stephanie, seeing nothing ridiculous in this, said, ‘Yes!’

‘Och miss!’ said Morag when she saw Stephanie already clothed at the breakfast table the next morning. The girl was wearing her old, navy-blue cotton dress with her red curls hanging loose to her waist. She was putting on the old bonnet, too, the one with the large brim that kept her face from the sun but was not made for fashion at all. Morag herself had purchased it but only because the child, who had such delicate skin, usually spent fourteen hours a day outside.

‘There’s a gig in the stables but no horse to pull it – one of the team will do.’

‘Yes, but that Italian manny can ride along,’ Morag cautioned.

‘No. I will ride Emperor. You can drive Pietro, if he must come.’

‘Oh, he must indeed !’ said Morag, brooking no argument. ‘Until I know that earl’s intentions, the evil little imp will come with us everywhere.’

‘If he must!’

An old grey cape that Stephanie must have added to the packing trunk herself went over the old navy ‘outside’ dress. Morag whimpered, ‘When you have three perfectly good pelisses that I brought with us!’

‘They are London coats. I don’t want to wonder if they will be soiled.’

‘Your mama will be overwhelmed by your thriftiness, Miss Stephanie, but she would still wish you to wear a decent pelisse!’

Stephanie was outside by now, and the gig and Emperor were at the door, so Morag fairly ran so as not to be left behind. ‘I’m too old for this!’ she muttered as the Neapolitan vaulted up beside her with ease.

As they followed behind Miss Stephanie’s tall, magnificent stallion, a dappled grey, Morag sniffed at the sight of Pietro but then wished she had not, for the old cut-down frock coat that he was wearing had a whiff of something unpleasant.

The maid ignored him the whole journey long.

Stephanie found the stables, let Emperor be led away and walked back to the Court on foot. By that time the gig had arrived and a groom had taken the reins to hold the horses’ heads.

She went ahead of her two servants as a footman in green livery held the tall, Gothic-arched door open for her.

The butler ushered her into the red salon once more where the earl was sitting, clothed in elegant riding dress, his hair a little more primped and curled than it had been the previous day. Stephanie sighed at the careful fold in his muslin cravat, the enormous cuffs on his coat and its padded shoulders and nipped-in waist, and the offending tassels on the white-topped boots. She had seen just this sort of thing in Town, gentlemen whose coats must cost ten times that of her brother Richard’s but who could barely keep their seat on a horse if they rose to a canter.

But she was undaunted; moreover, she did not wish to start his lessons with a complaint. ‘I see you are ready to ride, my lord. Does the foot pain you?’

‘No, it is quite recovered, I thank you. If we are to ride, I will have the horses sent round.’

‘One for our groom, my lord,’ said Morag.

‘We shall be escorted by a groom, I assure you!’

‘That’s your groom, my lord, not ours!’ Morag folded her arms.

‘Quite!’ Hedley nodded for the footman to leave. ‘You are dressed rather differently today, Miss Marchmont,’ he said, appraising her.

‘Oh, those others were my London clothes. Mama made us smart for London, I daresay, but I prefer my old gowns for outside. They are sturdier, you know, and one does not know what one might encounter in the country.’

‘Mmm!’

‘Ah. You value fashion and think I should wear a frogged riding habit and a shako hat like my sisters.’

‘Not at all! I quite see you are more practical than I.’

‘Oh, I am. That, perhaps, should be the first lesson. Your every garment should be practical when engaging in sporting pursuits!’

‘Ah!’ said Hedley accepting the lesson.

‘Everything I wear is. My apparel may not be beautiful but it is serviceable. I wear old boots, for example. And look!’ To his shocked surprise, she lifted her skirts.

Morag cried out, ‘Miss Stephanie!’

Hedley saw not a calf above her boots but a sort of thick striped cotton pantalon leg pulled into a ruff by the ribbon that kept it tight against the top of her short boot.

The look he gave the long-suffering maid as the young lady showed him twelve inches of leg was nothing to the look he gave the strange little Neapolitan at her side, who was gazing back at him evilly. The little man lowered his eyes and moved his frock coat to display a pistol at his waist. It was over in a second, but Hedley had received his warning.

Miss Marchmont had lowered her gown before his eyes returned to hers. ‘What garments were those?’ he asked to her innocent face.

‘Unique, are they not? But practical. Mama had me wear my brother’s old buckskins beneath my dresses at first so that I did not scratch my legs when climbing trees.’

‘I had not previously conceived how unequal to the task of tree climbing feminine apparel might be,’ said Hedley, as though much struck.

‘Yes! And for rock climbing and many other things! Gowns are useless. If one falls in the river, for example, one’s petticoats weigh one down in a frightful and even dangerous way!’

‘They must!’ agreed Hedley.

‘So when we went to Tremaine Towers to live, Mama thought to have these made for me as being rather less disturbing than buckskins if the Royal family should see them when I climbed.’

‘The Royal family—?’ he began, but the butler announced that the horses had been brought round.

Stephanie headed off, telling him, ‘I shall tell you on the ride.’

Following her, Hedley thought that assuredly he was enjoying himself.

Morag the maid was becoming even more sure that there was something wrong with this whole situation. The coat the gentleman was wearing, for instance, was indeed expensive but it must have been made by the worst tailor in the world. It was at least an inch too tight around his shoulders, which produced a sort of pleat at the back waist of which Morag the seamstress disapproved. At this rate, it would split as he pulled himself onto the horse. She was disappointed when it did not do so.

‘Your arm?’ said Miss Stephanie as she also mounted. Hedley nodded his fitness. ‘Is that horse not a little small for you?’ she asked.

‘Is it?’ he replied blandly.

This was another thing, Morag thought. What man would not know such stuff as riding? And there was that innocent look again; it was overdone, though her little miss did not realize. Morag wanted to go with them but she was not much on a horse and the gig could not follow over the park grounds. She must trust to the little Italian fiend to do his best as he followed along with the groom.

And the leg that the earl had been hobbling on yesterday was looking suspiciously fine. Morag would write to her lady as soon as they returned home; all she could do now was to take the advice of the butler and go to the kitchen for a little refreshment and a drop of something to keep out the chill.

Wilson was the butler’s name. He took her to the kitchen himself, saying to footman in passing, ‘They can come down now!’ which cryptic phrase sent the man upstairs with alacrity.

Morag hardly noticed; she had her own woes.