Читать книгу The Marquis's Awakening - Elizabeth Beacon - Страница 10

Chapter Four

Polly was glad to be alone as the very idea made her clamp her legs together against a hot rush of wanton excitement at her feminine core that felt sinful and delicious in equal measure. ‘Oh, heavens,’ she husked on a long, expelled breath that felt as if it had come on a very long journey all the way from her boots.

The most appalling images of a naked, sweat-streaked and vital Lord Mantaigne were cavorting about in her head like seductively potent demons now. He was disgusting, she told herself, and in more ways than one. He was certainly physically filthy, and she ought not to find that the least bit appealing in the man. There had even been a streak of ancient grey dust right across the front of his disgracefully open shirt and, come to think of it, that garment had clung to him as if it loved him as well. She could recall exactly how the dust darkened across the bare torso visible under that once-pristine linen and the powdery stuff had clung to the sweat on his tanned and glistening skin like a fond lover.

If she had dared let even a hint of her fascination with his work-mussed person show, he would have played on it as shamelessly as an actor in a melodrama, but even willpower couldn’t control the physical response of her body to his now he’d gone and her wicked imagination had taken over. Of course it was folly to wonder how it would feel to be his equal in sophistication and passion and flirt right back at him, to risk the shame and scandal of being a fallen woman for the absolute pleasure of being such a devastatingly masculine yet civilised and urbane man’s lover. He was an accomplished breaker of women’s hearts and it was good that she was nothing like the females such finicky men of the world chose as their paramours.

She brushed a hesitant, wondering hand tentatively over her breeches and up to her slender waist with the feeling she was leaving stardust in its wake, then she gasped as she realised where her too-vivid imagination was taking her again. So horribly conscious of her own body that she suddenly felt as if it had a life and demands independent of the rest of her, she slammed a door on the image of lordly Lord Mantaigne luxuriating in the makeshift bathing room they’d made in one of the laundries. It would be steamy, the air warm from the fire Dotty would have lit for the comfort of the weary labourers as they got rid of all their dirt, because Dotty had a soft heart under her gruff manner and she openly admitted making men comfortable had been the mission of her youth.

Thank goodness the self-appointed castle laundress was middle-aged and didn’t continue with her life’s work in quite the same way nowadays. The image of his lordship in his tub with a very willing and gleeful female seemed utterly disgusting somehow, as the one of him in it with the likes of her that hesitated on the edge of her thoughts never could be, even though her everyday self wished it was.

‘Oh, no, the valise!’ she yelped and ran out of the room to find Sam Barker before there was the slightest risk of the marquis carrying out his implied threat to parade about the castle naked if someone didn’t produce his clothes in time. ‘Useless dandy,’ she grumbled as soon as she’d run Sam to earth in the kitchen and met his amused gaze as he reassured her the master of the house had already been safely reunited with his clothes and there was nothing for her to panic about.

‘That’s what he thinks,’ she mumbled to herself as she went back upstairs to put out a few of their precious store of wax candles in honour of their unwanted guest.

* * *

‘So, what do you think?’ Tom asked his supposed secretary-cum-agent-cum-lawyer half an hour later.

‘Nobody would think you even knew what a broom looked like now, let alone how to use one,’ Peters told him distractedly as he did his best to shave by the light of a flickering candle.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Tom told him grumpily, wondering why the world thought him such a peacock. ‘I was asking your ideas about the self-appointed keepers of my castle.’

‘From what I’ve seen so far, they seem a very mixed bag.’

‘True, but I’m ready to defer to your superior knowledge of the criminal classes. Do you think any are active law-breakers?’

Peters seemed to consider that question more seriously as he wiped the last of his whiskers from the blade of his razor and was himself again, whoever that might be. ‘I doubt it,’ he said, as if the fact surprised him as well.

‘So do I,’ Tom said with a preoccupied frown as he used the square of mirror his confederate had vacated to brush his hair back into gleaming order. ‘I suspect Lady Wakebourne would have them marched out of here faster than the cat could lick her ear if she had the slightest suspicion any had gone back to their old ways.’

‘It’s not just that. They respect her and Miss Trethayne. Even that battered old rogue in the gatehouse seemed more concerned about them than his own doubtful claim to employment and a roof over his head.’

‘So why are two ladies living in what should be an abandoned barrack with a pack of reformed rogues and criminals?’ Tom mused as he decided he was ready to face the world outside the castle laundry once again.

‘Some don’t seem the type to have ever been out-and-out rogues, so maybe they were all victims of an unlucky fate.’

‘Maybe, but what sort of circumstances would set two ladies so far apart from their kind? They must have been dire to leave them squatting in such a bleak old barn of a place, scratching a living from whatever they have managed to find here to sustain some sort of life on.’

‘Dire ones indeed,’ Peters said starkly, confirming Tom’s own conclusions.

He frowned at his now-immaculate reflection and came to terms with the idea he couldn’t simply come here, take a look round and walk away again as he had half-hoped when he was given Virginia’s letter ordering him to come here, find out what was amiss, then make up his mind if he wanted to demolish the castle or accept the duties and responsibilities that went with being born the heir of Dayspring Castle.

‘Dire indeed if I meant to bring in a full staff and live here, since they would then have to leave the place.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘Of course not, man. Would I have avoided it like the plague all these years if I had the slightest desire to settle in and play lord of all I survey here?’

‘I really couldn’t say, my lord,’ the supposedly quiet and unassuming Mr Peters said, as if he had his own opinion about Tom’s feelings for the place but was keeping it to himself.

‘Good,’ Tom drawled, squaring his shoulders at the suspicion the man might be right.

* * *

‘Is Lord Mantaigne’s bedchamber ready yet?’ Lady Wakebourne asked Polly from the doorway of the great parlour.

‘It would take an army to make that echoing barrack room ready for him,’ Polly snapped back and felt the new tension in the air now the rightful owner was back in his castle. ‘They can both sleep in the South Tower with the rest of the men,’ she added, knowing all the same that nothing here was ever going to be the same again. ‘We can’t get them into the staterooms fast enough for my taste, but lodging the man in a musty and bat-ridden chamber in the empty part of the house won’t endear us to him in any way.’

‘And we don’t want him to feel more uncomfortable than he has to here.’

‘No, indeed,’ Polly agreed with a weary sigh.

‘Nor should we allow him the chance to form any wrong ideas about a lady residing under his roof, my dear. You must resume your petticoats in the daytime as well as at nights now, Paulina, whether you like them or not.’

‘I don’t. They’re confoundedly restricting and make it well-nigh impossible to for me to do any work,’ Polly complained, knowing her ladyship was right.

Casting a last glance round the comfortable room at the odd family they had made out of a pack of rootless strangers used of an evening, she wondered how many would stay in their own quarters tonight to avoid the puzzle of how the sweepings of the King’s Highway dined with a marquis. Biting back a wistful sigh for yesterday, when they had no idea the impossible was about to happen, she nodded her agreement and bit her lip against a furious protest against the darker whims of fate.

‘Never mind, my dear, it won’t be for long. The boy must loathe the place, given the terrible things the locals whisper about what he endured here as a boy, and this is the first time he’s been near Dayspring in twenty years. He probably won’t be back for another twenty, once he’s done whatever it is he came here to do.’

‘And whatever that might be, he certainly didn’t expect to find us here,’ Polly answered glumly. ‘I can’t imagine why you wrote to his godmother about whatever is going on here. You must have done that months ago, since the old lady has been dead three months,’ she said sharply, as all those nights when she had lain awake worrying about whoever was making incursions into the castle at night reminded her Lady Wakebourne was a devious woman.

‘He is the only person who can tell them to go, my dear. I wasn’t going to risk you losing your temper one day and confronting them, then maybe leaving those boys of yours even more alone in the world than they are already.’

‘Oh, then I suppose I can see your point,’ Polly conceded reluctantly, knowing she had a tendency to act first and think later, although of course a measured risk was perfectly acceptable and she had weighed that one up already and decided she needed more information before taking it.

‘And I am very fond of you, my dear. I want you to be safe and happy as much as any of us.’

‘Thank you, I am very fond of you to,’ Polly admitted.

‘Then there is no harm done between us?’ The lady actually sounded anxious about that and Polly had to nod and admit it.

‘No, but I now know you are a splendid actress and will be very wary of you in future.’

‘I don’t think I’ll take to the stage to repair my fortunes even so. Now run along upstairs and put some petticoats on, my dear, if only for my sake.’

‘Very well, but I still hate them.’

Going back across the courtyard to the women’s quarters, she climbed the stairs to her lofty room and washed hastily. Trying not to give herself time to think too much, she bundled herself into the patched and fraying quilted petticoat, wide overskirt and unfashionably long bodice she wore when she absolutely had to. It felt ancient and impractical, and she hated the corsets she had to wear to make the bodice fit and the curb the heavy skirt put on her long stride so she must mince along or hold them so high they were indecent and defeated the purpose of wearing them in the first place. Without the hoops and panniers the gown was designed for, it hung limply about her long legs, but it was the only gown she’d found that wasn’t so short on her it was more revealing than her breeches, so what couldn’t be cured must be endured.

Until she had come here and discovered the liberty of breeches and boots she must have spent her waking life enduring the wretched things, she supposed with a sigh. As she lifted her skirts to descend the stairs without tumbling down them, she wondered how she’d borne it for so long. She minced impatiently into the housekeeper’s kitchen they used instead of the vast castle kitchens and tried hard not to knock anything over now she felt several feet wider than usual.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, girl, you’d look a fright even without the sad state of your hair,’ Lady Wakebourne exclaimed as she turned from stirring a saucepan for Prue with a look of despair at Polly’s unfashionable array.

‘What’s wrong with me now?’ Polly replied defensively.

‘It looks as if you last ran a comb through it about six months ago.’

Polly raised a hand to feel if she was right and realised the hasty plait she’d twisted it into first thing this morning had gone sadly awry and she might as well be wearing a bird’s nest on her head. She felt herself blush at the spectacle she must have made when Lord Mantaigne first laid eyes on her. She wasn’t surprised he’d let his gaze linger on her long legs and what curves she had to her name so impudently now. No, she was, she had to be. His preoccupation with her long limbs proved to her that any reasonably formed female body would do for him to bed a woman, she reminded herself militantly.

‘I’m not primping and preening for any man, let alone him,’ she said, even as the idea of sharing a meal with that finicky, arrogant aristocrat looking as if she had been left out in a tempest for a day made something deep inside her cringe.

‘Don’t worry, I think we would know that, even if you did the rest of us the courtesy of taking a brush and comb to that wild mess now and again.’

‘I’m not going all the way back to my room to try and turn myself into a sweet and docile lady for the marquis’s benefit.’

‘Not much risk of you ever being one of those, Miss Polly.’ The girl stooping over the fire to turn the spit for her sister Prue straightened up as far as she could to eye Polly critically. ‘If you wouldn’t mind watching this for me, your ladyship, I could take Miss Polly along to my room and tame that tangle into something closer to how it ought to look.’

‘Of course, Jane dear. Far be it from me to stand in the way of such a noble undertaking,’ Lady Wakebourne said cheerfully and took over the task with an ease her former friends might find a little distasteful if they could see her. Since they had turned their backs when she found out her husband had gambled away his fortune, Lady Wakebourne’s dowry and a whole lot more before he shot himself, Polly was very glad to have missed out on knowing them.

* * *

‘You have such beautiful hair, Miss Polly,’ Jane said when she finally persuaded Polly to sit still on a three-legged stool in her bedchamber on the other side of their makeshift kitchen from the men’s sleeping quarters, where the heat of the fires at least warded off the chill from the southwest winds and ancient walls left too long without enough fires powerful enough to warm them.

‘It gets in a mess as soon as I’ve finish tying it back every morning.’

‘That’s because it needs thinning here and there and if you’ll let me take a few inches off the ends, I’m sure you won’t find it so hard to manage,’ Jane said shyly as she undid the heavy mass, then brushed and combed it into a crackling and vital cloak about Polly shoulders.

Even her hair seemed imbued with some of her impatience with being primped until suitable for the lord of Dayspring to set his noble eyes on so he wouldn’t be put off his dinner. Polly wondered how long Jane had wanted to be a lady’s maid and it was a hope unlikely to ever come true, given society’s prejudices, so if playing one for a night made her feel better, Polly found she could keep still after all.

‘Do what you like with it then,’ she said with a restless shrug.

‘Only if you promise to sit quiet,’ Jane chided, then produced a pair of sharp scissors and began snipping at Polly’s hair as if shaping it was a work of art. ‘Sit there while I fetch a branch of candles. I can’t see well enough to do this properly,’ Jane said just as Polly was beginning to hope she’d finished.

So Polly had time to sit and wonder why she was doing this. Surely she didn’t want that popinjay to admire her as he might have if their eyes met across a crowded ballroom? She squirmed at the idea of being sized up as the other party in a wild and fleeting affair by a society rake and told herself it was because her seat was too low and rather hard, not because the very thought of Lord Mantaigne made her feel as if a crucial part of her insides might be melting. She despised unprincipled dandies and who could doubt he was one of those when he wore that ridiculously elegant get up as if he was about to take a stroll across Mayfair instead of camp out in a dusty and crumbling castle?

If she’d first seen him sauntering down Bond Street in that exquisitely cut coat, tightly fitting pantaloons and gleaming Hessians she would have shot him a scornful look, then forgotten him as a man of straw. If he’d raised his perfect top hat from his gleaming golden curls and bowed as if he knew her, she would have given him the cold stare of a lady dealing with an overfamiliar gentleman and moved on with a dismissive nod. How she wished she had seen him like that, in his natural orbit and revealed for what he was under the cool light of a London Season.

Except she had only ever heard about such beings in Lady Wakebourne’s tales of former glory. Miss Paulina Trethayne had no youthful rites of passage to look back on; she had never stood on the verge of womanhood, waiting nervously to meet a hopeful youth who might marry her and make her and her children secure for the rest of her life, or might gamble and whore his way through every penny of his fortune and her dowry. She never would now and, since she was already a woman who knew the best way to feel secure in life was to rely on herself; that was just as well. If she came across the Marquis of Mantaigne outside the castle walls it would be as his unequal in every way and she refused to regret it.

So why did a part of her she didn’t like to admit existed long to dance with him at grand society balls and drift about the dance floor of Almack’s Club during a dazzlingly intimate evening of gossip and dancing? The flighty Paulina Trethayne she might have been, if things had been very different, stopped twiddling her thumbs in boredom with the mundane life she had been forced to live beyond the playgrounds of the haut ton