Gentlemen Prefer Mischief
Read Gentlemen Prefer Mischief Online
Authors: Emily Greenwood
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical romance, #Regency
Copyright © 2013 by Emily Greenwood
Cover and internal design © 2013 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover art by Anna Kmet
Photography by Jon Zychowski
Models: Cassie Keller and Derek Zugic/G&J Models
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For A & S
It was the ghost nonsense that started it.
Lily Teagarden had seen the phantom lights herself at night, flickering among the wide strip of trees that divided Thistlethwaite, her family’s property, from the estate belonging to their absentee neighbor, Viscount Roxham. The trees belonged to him as well.
She did not believe in ghosts or spirits of any kind.
But most of Highcross village did, doubtless in part because as children they’d been told of the two people who’d met a dastardly end in the Mayfield woods fifty years before. Since no trace of the villain had ever been found, legend held that the crime had been done by an evil spirit—one who might still linger among the shadowy underbrush. Generations of misbehaving children had been warned that the barbarous Woods Fiend would find them if they didn’t mend their ways.
That well-developed fear was doubtless behind what had just been delivered to the little stone building at the back of Thistlethwaite Manor, where Lily was currently standing with her hands folded tightly in front of her and frustration deepening her breath. Before her stood a large crate of neatly folded shawls over which she’d toiled with persistence and a deep sense of purpose. A note had been sent with them, which read in part:
I regret that I must return these unsold shawls, but I can no longer have them in my shop. Because of the situation near your property and its proximity to the sheep that produce the yarn, ladies no longer wish to be seen wearing them. Mrs. Croat was actually followed by a small crowd who forced her to take her shawl off and burn it.
Doubtless things would not have gotten to such a state had Mary Wortham not been wearing one of the shawls when the little tree fell on her, but with the rumors circulating about the Thistlethwaite sheep, superstitious people can talk of nothing else.
Perhaps in the future if the problem is resolved, we might again do business. Until then, I see no market for your shawls.
Yours,
Thomas Trent
Lily folded the letter and creased it sharply. This was doubtless the reason Helen hadn’t come to work for the last three days. Helen was the one who’d seen Parsley coming out of the woods—the sheep had been rolling her eyes and Helen had said, in a quivering voice, that Parsley had been taken over by the Woods Fiend. Lily had said it was midges.
Apparently, Helen had been talking.
The September afternoon carried late summer warmth, and the back of one of Lily’s sticky hands was covered with fluff from the wool she’d been picking through. As she considered the crate of shawls, she meticulously picked the fluff off her hands and gathered it into a neat puff that she put on the table. An unruly trickle of perspiration slid downward from the immaculate knot that kept her white-blond hair tidy and threatened to soak into the collar of her pale blue frock, but she brushed it away with a precise swipe of her index finger.
“So our sheep are possessed,” she said aloud, giving vent to her frustration. “What, are they going to float into our rooms at night and
nibble
us all to death?”
“Oh, Li—ly,” her younger sister Delia sang out as she rushed through the door of the little house, “I have the most amazing news.” At fifteen, Delia never walked when she could rush. “Wait, what do you mean we’re going to be nibbled to death?”
“Apparently everyone thinks our sheep are haunted or possessed or some such.”
Delia let out a bark of laughter before clapping her hand over her mouth.
“I’m sorry, Lil,” she said when she had collected herself, “it’s just that Rosemary and Thyme would make such adorable ghosts.” She saw the crate of shawls. “But what’s all this?”
Lily found that she was clenching her teeth, and she made herself relax. This would be—surely it
must
be—resolved if only the Mayfield estate would do its part. She’d gone there last week when Helen had first suggested the Woods Fiend was responsible for the phantom lights, and Mr. Prescott, the estate manager, had listened and nodded, but there’d been no result. She’d even considered investigating herself, but if something nefarious were going on in the woods, she’d be ill equipped to respond.
She
couldn’t
do without the money the shawls made.
“Mr. Trent sent them back,” she explained. “Between Helen gossiping about evil spirits and what happened to Mary Wortham, our shawls are now very much
non
grata
.” Lily sat down at the table and dropped her chin onto her upraised palm and considered what to do. She forced herself not to dwell on the owner of Mayfield, even though it was no surprise that Roxham should be a neglectful landlord.
“Oh, dear. That
is
bad news,” Delia said as she moved closer and perched on the edge of the table. Her blond hair was a few shades darker than Lily’s—of the four Teagarden siblings, Lily had the lightest hair—and arranged in a pretty style that Delia had devised herself.
She reached for Lily’s hand. “I know how much you like your clandestine shawl-making. All that special knitting, even late at night. And it’s worked out having Helen as the public face of the business all these years.” She squeezed Lily’s hand as if to shore her up. “But now that every penny from the business doesn’t need to be saved anymore…”
Oh, yes, every penny did need to be saved, Lily thought. But her plans for her proceeds from the business were her secret.
“The shawl business is important to me,” she said, though she knew Delia didn’t see why. Their brothers, Rob and Ian, didn’t understand either why she persisted in making the shawls herself. The business had been started four years before, as part of the siblings’ efforts to pay off the large debts that were discovered when their father died. The fact that Lily did much of the work herself had always been kept secret so it wouldn’t be known she was engaged in trade. But now that the debts had been paid and Lily continued to work, her siblings looked on it as her odd secret hobby. Though Lily loved them, she wasn’t ready to say why she needed to keep working.
“But it’s not genteel,” Delia said with a faint air of impatience.
To
the
devil
with
genteel
, Lily wanted to say. Genteel was about papering over what really went on in people’s lives. But it wasn’t Delia’s fault that she knew little of the unpresentable side of life, and Lily was glad that she didn’t.
“Well,” Delia went on, “with Mr. Trent not wanting to sell the shawls… maybe this is a good time to give up the business.”
“Oh, I’m not going to give it up,” Lily said, “and certainly not over this Woods Fiend nonsense.”
“But what else is there to do if nobody wants to buy the shawls?”
“Nobody wants to buy them because they think they’re tainted. But if someone from Mayfield would resolve the problem, people would want the shawls again.” Lily stood up.
Delia stopped swinging her leg and narrowed her eyes. “You’re not going to do something strident, are you?”
“Strident? It’s perfectly acceptable to ask that our neighbor do the right thing.”
Delia hopped off the table and took hold of Lily’s sleeve. “But you can’t do that! It’s—it’s unseemly. At least wait a few days, until Rob and Ian come back.”
“I’m too annoyed to wait. Mayfield has been a careless neighbor of late, and something must be done.”
“But what will Roxham think?”
“He won’t think a thing—he’s never there. As far as I can tell, he’s washed his hands of the estate.”
“But that’s what I came to tell you,” Delia said, giving Lily’s sleeve an urgent shake. “He’s here, with a party of ladies and gentlemen.” She finally released the fabric and threw her arms in the air. “There’s going to be a ball at Mayfield—and we’re invited!”
Lily blinked at this gust of information. “What? After years away, the lord has come back to the manor? It can’t be true.”
“But it is! His sister herself came just now to deliver the invitation. And, oh, Eloise Waverly is unbelievably fashionable and charming.”
“Of course she is.”
Delia tilted her head. “Didn’t you like Eloise when they used to be at Mayfield?”
“I suppose she was nice enough.”
Privately, Lily admitted that perhaps she’d let her animosity toward Hal—no, Viscount Roxham, as she made sure to think of him now—color her feelings about his younger sister. She’d known his family from childhood—their families were neighbors and the two most important families in the area, even if the Teagardens were far lower on the social scale than the viscount’s family.
“Well,
I
like her so far,” Delia said. “And she’s sixteen, too—only a bit older than me, so I hope we’ll be great friends.”
“You’d be great friends with a kitten if she were sixteen, you’re so starved for company. I’ll just go and have a quick word with the viscount.”
Delia’s face fell. “Oh, Lily, no. I’m begging you not to go to him over the Woods Fiend. He’s a viscount now, for goodness’ sake—he needn’t concern himself with something like this. Besides, they’ve just invited us to a ball, and it will seem ungrateful to complain.”
“I
am
ungrateful if they’re not going to be good neighbors.”
Delia crossed her arms. “Rob wouldn’t like it, your going over there about this.”
Lily didn’t exactly like the idea of approaching Roxham either; she couldn’t think of the last time she’d seen him without shuddering from the bottom of her soul.
“Rob needn’t even know.”
“Oh,” Delia fairly wailed, “but you are so uninterested in being pleasing to gentlemen. I still squirm when I think of how you wouldn’t let Mr. Easton give you flowers last week at the fair.”
“He was going to pick them from a bush where they were growing so beautifully. It was wrong.”
“No, he wanted to do something gallant because he thinks you are pretty.”
“There, you see. I don’t want Mr. Easton to think I’m pretty.”
“Argh, Lily. You always have to be so focused on things being
worthy
.”
Lily laughed. “Very well, I promise to do at least one unworthy thing in the coming week. See how agreeable I am?”
Delia sighed. “Well, if you really must go, put on something pretty first. That blue frock is so plain. You want to look your best if you are going to see Roxham. And be your most winning. He’s—”
“Yes, I know. Lord Perfect. All the ladies adore him,
et
cetera
, even though he’s vowed not to marry until he’s fifty-one. I know perfectly well what he looks like and that he knows how to charm,” Lily said, cherishing a hope that he was getting fat by now, or was a wasted wreck of a man, or at the very least in constant despair over the fact that he was a shallow person. It would only be fair, really, if he’d developed a case of persistent boils.
Delia, gazing off into space, missed the scorn in her sister’s voice. “First a dashing, brave army captain, and now he’s a viscount. I can barely remember him, but he must be so handsome now, like Achilles.”
“Achilles wasn’t even real! Honestly, Delia. I just want him to see to his property so we don’t all suffer.”
And in fact, as she set out toward Mayfield with her dog, Buck, beside her, Lily was glad that she wasn’t finely turned out. If she’d looked her best, she might have been tempted to try to charm Lord Perfect herself. But she was a different person now from the silly sixteen-year-old she’d been when last she’d seen him.
And she didn’t need him to like her anymore.
***
Under the domed, ornate roof of the small rotunda on the eastern edge of the Mayfield estate, Hal, Viscount Roxham, crouched next to his young nephew, Freddy, who had eyes for nothing but the burning length of a slow match on the stone floor before them and the twist of paper in his uncle’s hand.
Sitting on tall-backed chairs that servants had brought were Freddy’s mother, Diana, and Hyacinth Whyte, a pretty widow. Occasional faint bursts of Italian, along with clattering sounds, came from a site somewhat distant where two men were at work amid a pile of stones.
“I really don’t know that a child of five ought to be lighting things, Hal,” Diana said.
“Nonsense,” he said. “It’s a rite of passage. Men love fire, don’t we?”
“Yes!” Freddy said gleefully, doubtless thinking of his napping brother. “It’s only for men.”
The firecracker felt insignificant in Hal’s hand; he was aware of an itching desire for something larger, like a rocket.
“Roxham is very good at setting things on fire,” Hyacinth said suggestively. Hal could feel his sister-in-law lifting an eyebrow in his direction. The firecracker lesson had been partly motivated by a wish for less time alone with Hyacinth, which was shabby of him, as he was the one who’d invited her. He’d thought he might enjoy her silliness and chatter, but he hadn’t. Which didn’t necessarily have anything to do with her.
“So, Freddy,” Hal said, “take the firecracker”—Freddy took hold eagerly—“and you’re going to press the part that’s sticking up on the slow ma—”
Freddy pressed the firecracker to the match before Hal could finish instructing.
“Throw it, boy!”
The firecracker sailed from the rotunda, emitting a loud crack. This was immediately followed by a sharp cry that came from behind the rotunda, along with a series of barks.
“Heavens,” Diana said as they all turned to see Mayfield’s butler approaching them in company with a petite, pale-haired woman and a black-and-white hound. “Who is that?”
At first glance, Hal didn’t know—and then, as she drew closer and the detail of the prim set of her mouth could be added to the near-whiteness of her hair, recognition dawned, along with a spurt of gratitude at the diversion she would represent.
“Miss Teagarden to see you, my lord,” Johnson said. Hal was already walking toward her.
“Lily Teagarden.” He bowed. Teagardens… he’d forgotten all about them. It had been ages since he’d seen any of them.
“My lord.” Her curtsy was a sketch, a brisk reference to what was owed a viscount. He wouldn’t expect formality from such close neighbors as the Teagardens, and the last time he’d seen her he’d been merely a captain in the Foot Guards and the younger brother of a viscount. Still, there was no warmth in her greeting either. Her eyes flicked to the floor of the rotunda, where the still-burning slow match was gradually disappearing.
