How to Master Your Marquis (2 page)

Old Bailey, London

July 1890

T
he courtroom was packed and smelled of sweat.

James Lambert, the Marquess of Hatherfield—heir to that colossal monument of British prestige, the Duke of Southam—was accustomed to the stench of jammed-in human perspiration and did not mind in the slightest. He feared, however, for the young woman who sat before him.

Hatherfield couldn’t watch her face directly, of course, but he could sense the tension humming away in her body, like the telephone wire his stepmother had had installed into her private study last year, in order to better command her army of Belgravian sycophants. He knew that her back was as straight as a razor’s edge; he knew that her eyes would appear more green than blue in the sulfurous light waxing from the gas sconces of the courtroom, and that those same eyes were undoubtedly trained upon the presiding judge with a fierceness that might have done her conquering Germanic ancestors proud.

He knew his Stefanie as he knew his own hands, and he knew she would rather be boiled in oil than sniff a human armpit. His darling Stefanie, who thought herself so adventurous, who had proved herself equal to any number of challenges, had nonetheless been raised a princess, with a princess’s delicate nose.

The judge was droning on,
precedents
this and
brutal nature of the crime
that, and Latin tags strewn about with reckless enthusiasm. He was a man of narrow forehead and prodigious jowl; the rolls about his neck wobbled visibly as he spoke. A large black fly had discovered the interesting composition of the curling white wig atop his pear-shaped head and was presently buzzing about the apex in lazily ecstatic loops. Hatherfield watched its progress in fascination. It landed atop the fourth roll of wiry white hair with a contented
bzzz-bzzz
, just as Her Majesty’s judicial representative informed the mass of perspiring humanity assembled before him that they were required to maintain an open mind as to the prisoner’s guilt
ad captandum et ad timorem sine qua non sic transit gloria mundi et cetera et cetera et cetera
.

Or perhaps he was now addressing the jury. Hatherfield couldn’t be certain; the man’s face was cast downward, into his notes; or rather into the jowls overhanging his notes. Like that chap at Oxford, that history don, the one who would insist on taking tea at his desk and dropping bits of crumpet unavoidably into the jowly folds, to be excavated later as he stroked his whiskers during lectures. On a good day, the dais might be strewn with the crumbly little buggers, and a positive trail left behind him on the way back to his chambers. What had they nicknamed him? Hatherfield screwed up his forehead and stared at the magnificent soot-smeared ceiling above.

Hansel, that was it.

A flash of movement caught his eye. Something was going on with Stefanie’s fingers: She was scribbling furiously on the paper before her, biting her tender lower lip as she went. She looked up, locked eyes with him, and flashed the paper up and down again, the work of an instant. He saw the words, nonetheless. They were written in large capital letters, underlined twice for emphasis:

PAY ATTENTION!!

Ah, Stefanie. He tapped his fingers against the rail before him and composed his reply in Morse code:

I AM PAYING ATTENTION. TO YOU. YOU LOOK EXCEPTIONALLY HANDSOME IN THAT WAISTCOAT. I SHOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO KISS YOU.

He watched as her eyes dropped down to his fingers. He tapped the message again.

She changed color. Well, he couldn’t see her well enough to verify, but he knew anyway. The flush would be mounting up above her stiff white collar, spreading along the curving wedge of her regal cheekbones and beneath her mustache. The tip of her nose would be turning quite pink right about . . . now. Yes, there it was: a little red glow. Just like when he . . .

With her elegant and agile fingers, Stefanie tore the paper in half, and in half again; she assembled the quarters together and tore them rather impressively once more. She hid the pieces under a leather portfolio and locked her hands together. Her knuckles were bone white; Hatherfield could see that from here.

Familiar words struck his ear, jolting him out of his pleasant interlude: his stepmother’s name. “. . . the Duchess of Southam, who was found murdered in her bed in the most gruesome manner, the details of which will become clear . . .”

The Duchess of Southam.
Trust her to toss her bucket of icy water over his every moment of happiness, even from the grave, merely by the sound of her name in a room full of witnesses. He had tried by every means to deny her that power over him, and still she laid her cold hands on his body.

Hatherfield found he couldn’t quite bear to look at Stefanie now. He trained his gaze instead on the judge. The fly had disappeared, frightened away perhaps by the thunderous vibration of those tempting white curls, as the speaker worked himself up to an indignant climax—a theatrical chap, this judge, for all his comical jowls—and asked the prisoner how he pleaded.

Hatherfield’s hands gripped the rail before him. He straightened his long back, looked the judge squarely in the eye, and replied in a loud, clear voice.

“Not guilty, my lord.”

Devon, England

Eight months earlier

P
rincess Stefanie Victoria Augusta, a young woman not ordinarily subject to attacks of nerves, found to her horror that her fingers were twitching so violently she could scarcely fold her necktie.

True, it was a drab necktie. She had longed for one in spangled purple silk, or that delicious tangerine she had spotted through a carriage window on a dapper young chap in London, before she and her sisters had been hustled away by their uncle to this ramshackle Jacobin pile perched on a sea cliff in remotest Devon. (For the record, she adored the place.) But the array of neckties laid out before her on the first morning of her training had offered three choices: black, black, and black.

“Haven’t you any
interesting
neckties?” she had asked, letting one dangle from the extreme tips of her fingers, as if it were an infant’s soiled napkin.

“My dear niece,” said the Duke of Olympia, as he might say
my dear incontinent puppy
, “you are not supposed to be interesting. You are supposed to be the dullest, most commonplace, most unremarkable law clerk in London. You are
hiding
, if you’ll recall.”

“Yes, but must one hide oneself in such unspeakable drab neckties? Can’t they at least be made of silk damask?” Stefanie let the necktie wither from her fingers to the tray below.

“Law clerks do not wear silk damask neckties,” said her sister Emilie. She was standing before the mirror with great concentration, attempting a knot under the anxious supervision of His Grace’s valet.

“How do you
know
they don’t?” asked Stefanie, but Olympia laid a hand on her arm.

“Stefanie, my dear,” he said affectionately, for she was his favorite niece, though it was a close secret between them, “perhaps you don’t recall what’s at stake here. You are not playing parlor games with your courtiers in charming Hogwash-whateveritis . . .”

“Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof,” said Stefanie, straightening proudly. “The most charming principality in Germany, over which your own sister once reigned, if you’ll recall.”

Olympia waved his hand. “Yes, yes. Charming, to say nothing of fragrant. But as I said, this is not a friendly game of hide-and-seek. The three of you are being hunted by a team of damned anarchist assassins, the same ones who killed your own father and kidnapped your sister . . .”

“
Attempted
to kidnap,” said Princess Luisa, smoothing her skirts, except that her hands found a pair of wool checked trousers instead and stopped in mid-stroke.

“Regardless. No one is to suspect that you’re being scattered about England, dressed as young men, employed in the most invisible capacities . . .”

“While you and Miss Dingleby have all the fun of tracking down our father’s murderers and slicing their tender white throats from end to end.” Stefanie heaved a deep and bloodthirsty sigh.

Miss Dingleby had appeared at her other elbow. “My dear,” she’d said quietly, “your sentiments do you credit. But speaking as your governess, and therefore obliged to focus you on the task at hand, I urge you to consider your own throat instead, and the necktie that must, I’m afraid, go around it.”

F
our weeks later, the neckties had not improved, though Stefanie had become a dab hand at a stylish knot. (
Too stylish
, Miss Dingleby would sigh, and make her tie it again along more conservative lines.)

If only she could make her silly fingers work.

The door opened with an impatient creak, allowing through Miss Dingleby, who was crackling with impatience. “Stefanie, what on earth is keeping you? Olympia has been downstairs with Sir John this past half hour, and we’re running out of sherry.”

“Nonsense. There are dozens of bottles in the dungeon.”

“It is not a dungeon. It’s merely a cellar.” Miss Dingleby paused and narrowed her eyes at Stefanie’s reflection in the mirror. “You’re not nervous, are you, my dear? I might expect it of Emilie and Luisa, straightforward as they are and unaccustomed to subterfuge, but
you
?”

“Of course I’m not nervous.” Stefanie stared sternly at her hands and ordered them to their duty. “Only reluctant. I don’t see why
I
should be the law clerk. I’m by far the shadiest character among the three of us. You should have made me the tutor instead. Emilie will bore her pupil to tears, I’m sure, whereas
I
would . . .”

Miss Dingleby made an exasperated noise and moved behind her. “Take your hands away,” she said, and tied Stefanie’s black neckcloth with blinding jerks of her own competent hands, to a constriction so exquisitely snug that Stefanie gasped for breath. “The decision was Olympia’s, and I’m quite sure he knew what he was doing. Your Latin is excellent, your mind quick and retentive when you allow it to concentrate . . .”

“Yes, but the law is so very
dull
,
Miss Dingleby . . .”

“. . . and what’s more,” Miss Dingleby said, standing back to admire her handiwork, “we shall all be a
great deal
reassured by the knowledge that you’re lodged with the most reputable, learned, formidable, and upstanding member of the entire English bar.”

Stefanie allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led out the door to the great and rather architecturally suspect staircase that swept its crumbling way to the hall below. “That,” she said mournfully, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

Olympia and his guest were waiting in the formal drawing room, which had once been the scene of a dramatic capture and beheading of a Royalist younger son during the Civil War (Stefanie had verified this legend herself with a midnight peek under the threadbare rugs, and though the light was dim, she was quite sure she could make out an admirably large stain on the floorboards, not five feet away from the fireplace), but which now contained only the pedestrian English ritual of a duke taking an indulgent late-morning glass of sherry with a knight.

Or so Stefanie had supposed, but when she marched past the footman (a princess always greeted potential adversaries with aplomb, after all) and into the ancient room, she found herself gazing instead at the most beautiful man in the world.

Stefanie staggered to a halt.

He stood with his sherry glass in one hand, and the other perched atop the giant lion-footed armchair that had been specially made a century ago for the sixth duke, who had grown corpulent with age. Without being extraordinarily tall, nor extraordinarily broad framed, the man seemed to dwarf this substantial piece of historic furniture, to cast it in his shadow. His
radiant
shadow, for he had the face of Gabriel: divinely formed, cheekbones presiding over a neat square jaw, blue eyes crinkled in friendly welcome beneath a high and guiltless forehead. He was wearing a dark suit of some kind, plain and unadorned, and the single narrow shaft of November sunshine from her uncle’s windows had naturally found him, as light clings to day, bathing his bare golden curls like a nimbus.

Stefanie squeaked, “Sir John?”

The room exploded with laughter.

“Ha-ha, my lad. How you joke.” The Duke of Olympia stepped forward from the roaring fire, wiping his eyes. “In fact, your new employer has the good fortune of traveling with company today. Allow me to present to you the real and genuine Sir John Worthington, Q.C., who has so kindly offered to take you into his chambers.”

A white-haired figure emerged dimly from the sofa next to the fire and spoke with the booming authority of a Roman senator. “Not nearly so handsome a figure as my friend, of course, but it saves trouble with the ladies.”

With supreme effort, Stefanie detached her attention from the golden apparition before her and fixed it upon the source of that senatorial voice.

Her heart, which had been soaring dizzily about the thick oaken beams holding up the ducal ceiling, sank slowly back to her chest, fluttered, and expired.

If Stefanie had been a painter of renown, and commissioned to construct an allegorical mural of British law, with a judge occupying the ultimate position in a decorous white wig and black silk robes, bearing the scales of justice in one hand and a carved wooden gavel in the other, she would have chosen exactly this man to model for her and instructed him to wear exactly that expression that greeted her now.

His eyes were small and dark and permanently narrowed, like a pair of suspicious currants. His forehead was broad and steep above a hedgerow brow. His pitted skin spoke of the slings and arrows of a life spent braced between the dregs of humanity and the righteous British public, and his mouth, even when proffering an introductory smile, turned downward at the ends toward some magnetic core of dole within him. Atop his wiry frame was arranged a stiff gray tweed jacket and matching plus fours, with each leg pressed to a crease so acute that Stefanie might have sliced an apple with it.