Judith Ivory (7 page)

No, no. What could possibly be worth staying up all night—what it would take to get all they had done here today entered into their books—with a lot of numbers and papers? Emma said sweetly, “I have to get home to my aging father—”

“Surely, he could wait a few—”

“He has to have help: He’s lame.”

“But a few hours more, one way or the other—”

“And deaf.”

“We’d pay handsomely.” He hesitated, looking for an enticing amount that yet wasn’t too much that he’d regret offering it. He settled on, “Four shillings an hour for your time.”

Emma pressed her lips and looked up, not pleased. But the idea began to rattle around inside her head,
the books, the books
. She might be able to do something with them, alter them. Such a thing was more complicated than forging a withdrawal—though
not
more complicated than forging Stuart Aysgarth’s ridiculous signature. No, unlike
that,
it was actually possible. Plus four shillings was a fine wage for a female, though they’d pay a male bookkeeper more.

She might have bartered. She was sure, under the circumstance, she could have bilked them for eight or ten shillings an hour; they were desperate. But such outright thinking for herself might have made her suspect. She bowed her head, looking at her hands, and nodded, murmuring, “How generous. I’m sure my father would appreciate”—she glanced up pitifully, almost tearful with gratitude—“new spectacles. You see, he’s nearly blind as well.”

From above her, the viscount asked in his slow, even voice, “How old is he?”—his tone so low, so soft, like the rumble of distant, harmless thunder.

She glanced toward him to see his arms folded, his hat brim low again on his head, his arms once more in his marvelous coat. It hung open. She was struck again by how inter
esting he was, how unexpected somehow. He stood squarely, erect. Though no older than she, it occurred to her, he was yet so much more world-weary somewhere.

There was something about him, something that said he was less gullible than the others, though neither did she think he was on to her. Just suspicious, less susceptible to sentimental ploys.

“Ninety-two,” she answered, which was near the truth. Had her sheep-shearing father been alive, bless his soul, he would have been exactly that many years.

“Then it’s settled,” the bank’s governor was quick to say. He stood. “We’ll take care of everything and have your accounts functional by tomorrow afternoon. The larger cheques should clear by the end of the week.” He smiled as the viscount nodded and turned.

And turned and turned. There was so much to him. It was not just his entourage and their shuffling of chairs. It was the man himself. His greatcoat had all the excess and drama of a Russian novel: As he buttoned it about him, tight and fitted, it showed the line of his shoulders, narrowing down his broad chest to a slim waist, after which it billowed to the floor. Then he tugged on a silvery cuff, ran a hand down a wide lapel. A coat Karenin would have worn in St. Petersburg. Emma had never been there, but she had read of the book. A coat out of a Tolstoy novel.

Which was from where, come to think of it, some of the funds were coming. Stuart Aysgarth, never mind the viscountcy, had land in Russia, among other places. He had lived there. It was the origin of his clothes, she realized, some of his tastes. A Continental flair with a whiff of the East.

The new English viscount adjusted his soft black kid glove down over a knobby ring underneath, then folded a gray scarf down into his coat. His silk cravat bloused more generously than anything an Englishman would wear and tucked down into a vest, she remembered, of blue silk, silk as bright as if cut from a nomad’s tent. He was a piece of work, Mount Villiars.

She watched him pull himself together, preparing to embark out into a cold winter afternoon. Their separate ways, she thought and felt a little sad, his life so different from her own. Still, she felt an unnameable kinship, too. Or perhaps it was just sympathy. The new viscount wasn’t a dandy so much as that he had become a foreigner. A stylishly sophisticated one, yet as separate from all the English understatement around him as might be, oh, a sultan. Or Tzar. A stranger in his own country, having claimed an estate in a shire where he didn’t fit in with his neighbors for dozens of reasons, his un-Englishness only one of them. He had power here, but he would not immediately have friends.

And, given how often he smiled—he had not cracked one the entire afternoon—under the best of circumstances, she suspected, he had few enough of those. Minions, she thought again. He was a man to have minions, not friends.

She knew a moment of pity for him, compassion. There he was, so seemingly full of himself. The bigger they are, et cetera, she thought. Distant, unreachable.

Then, in a kind of whirl of manly shuffling and doffing of hats, he and his entourage made their hasty way out into the cold. Poor fellow, she thought.

The bank governor and deputy governor waited till the viscount had left before they brought out the bank’s books, then laid them on the table in front of Emma.

She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with them, but she opened them up. And—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—it was like opening up a gift, an answer to a prayer. It was the ledger of all transactions of the York Joint-Stock Banking Company for the month of December. She glanced down the columns of numbers and format. Quite standard. She smiled, took up her pen. As the fill-in bookkeeper, they expected her to record the day’s transactions, and in particular the viscount’s, from a stack of slips and documents. The entries would be in her own hand!

She grew more excited. Of course she would have to write it in correctly on the present pages. Others might check. But it was a sewn binding, and she was a lovely seamstress. Her mind raced. The binding thread could be lifted in a piece; she could reuse the cord. As she wrote down the transactions, her own creativity on the spot amazed her.

She could undo the seam and lift out any old pages she chose—they were the variety that ran in sixteen-page sheaves to a quarto with plenty of unwritten bundles. And she would only need to replace one. Given time, she could alter anything in the bank’s bookkeeper’s hand, readjusting her own entries to suit. And here was the real beauty: She didn’t need to take the money today. She found a cheque among the viscount’s documents, one made out to Stuart Aysgarth for fifty-six pounds eight shillings. Close enough. She would invent a third account at a branch bank, one under a very similar name to Aysgarth, then simply sign the cheque for deposit into that account, put it into the bank’s system, then pick the money up later. There would be nothing new, nothing in addition. Just a tiny, redirected amount, every ha’penny neatly accounted for in the bank’s books and in Mount Villiars’s accounts themselves.

Perfect, she thought. Then—again for no reason she could name—that little needle of guilt or regret or something visited her. This time, though, she admitted to herself part of it at least had to do with the unexpected attraction she felt. She would like to have seen him again, watched him—all right, talked to him again, as dangerous as that would be. The impulse was no more than a dim-witted womanly esthetic: the way, when entering a room of, say, a hundred men, she would have been inclined to ignore them all, then seen one, only one, so specific she could have pointed to him. That one. I would like that one to see me, to come over and talk to me, because of something in the way he slouches and the angle of his hat and the way his jaw muscle flexes when he chews his cheek.

The misfits and scoundrels. Yes, they were her sort—she’d taken up with two of them, married one, and had silent, biding crushes on another half dozen. Though
misfit
and
scoundrel
didn’t truly describe a sitting member of the House of Lords. Not really. Not one who raced back to London to vote. Which left only Mount Villiars’s dark demeanor. Was that what attracted her?

Dark.
The word made her remember a bit of his history, then, she thought, no small wonder this man seemed to walk around under a pall of grief: His mother, when alive, had been an object of pity, her husband abandoning her the day after their wedding night. Quite the scandal, if Emma recalled correctly. What she did remember was that Stuart’s mother had been unattractive, and that was a kind way to put it. Ugly Ana, they’d called her down in the village. Stuart’s father, the eldest son of an impoverished viscountcy, had been pressured by his family to marry her; she’d been filthy rich. All the money over which Stuart and his uncle were arguing undoubtedly came from her side.

Village stories, rumors. It was hard to know what was true. Still, it seemed likely, given the evidence of his absence, that Stuart’s father had stood in open opposition to the match, that he truly might have called himself “sold, a lamb to the slaughter,” as rumor said. Though “lamb” wasn’t how Emma had heard it later.
Horror
was more like it. Once he had money, the life he led in London made people pale; it made him notorious. When the infamous father had made one more trip to Dunord—to claim his offspring—the village had been glad to hear that the young man had been palmed off onto some public school: glad he’d escaped a father too busy leading a dissolute life to deal with his own son, only wanting him for the pleasure of taking him away from the wife he hated.

Emma tried for a moment more to remember how the old viscount had recently died. It was tragic, too, though such a minor event in her life, she couldn’t recall the details. Still,
there was tragedy enough here to make the little boy on the hill a quiet man, a circumspect man.

Pity. That was the reason she remembered. Conscience. If Stuart was arrogant and difficult, insensitive—whatever adjectives for him her anger wished to drum up—he was almost surely a ruddy sight better than his father. Not that that forgave him anything. His father was dead. He himself was an adult. He was responsible for his actions.

She looked down at the entries, blinked. Yes, there were many transfers to branch accounts into the nether regions in the English countryside. One more would disappear among them. Realizing how straightforward it all ultimately was brought release. Not quite the joyous sort she had hoped for, but nonetheless a sense of justice. For six weeks she’d been waiting for it. And here it lay in neat columns, entirely within her ability.

She looked up at Mr. Hemple sweetly. “I shall need a pot of tea and another nib if you have it.” And while you’re at it, get the shears.

She bent over the books, thinking,
Roll over, dear heart. I like to do the belly first. There you go. You’ll feel lighter, perhaps even freer for it later. We both will. Let Emma lead you through the dance.

S
TUART
waited at the front of the bank, inside his coach, himself wedged back into the far corner of the vehicle, the leather covering of the window beside him closed tightly to keep the wind from cutting through—the far carriage door hung open. He sat in his corner, his hat angled down, his fur collar and lapels snugged up about his neck and cheeks, his chin tucked into a cashmere scarf. He was cold, but somehow comfortable—another reason simply to sit here: He rested in the mild inertia of a man having found a cozy nook, a man who’d been in flight for months finally at rest, if only for the moment.

His coachman, as the fellow had climbed atop the carriage, had expressed grave concern that they should “tarry in this weather.” “Five minutes,” Stuart had told him. They’d waited twenty already, though of course the man was right. The Viscount Mount Villiars needed to be a dozen places, none of them here. (
Viscount Mount Villiars.
There. He’d thought the name without wincing. When he’d first arrived, when people had first addressed him as such, he would star
tle, then find himself warily looking about for his father. Good, he was getting over that.) The new viscount had a hundred worries, a thousand things he could do to avert half of them.

Still, Stuart sat in his corner, his eyes peacefully closed, waiting, vaguely mindful of inconveniencing everyone and everything else. He could feel the jostle of the footmen behind and overhead shifting on their perches, the carriage responding a degree this way, then that on its springs; he could hear the stomp of the horses, restless, rocking the wheels an inch forward, then back as the whip leaned on his brake: the tug of animals, human and otherwise, that knew all was ready, yet here they stood in the snow. Because their employer withheld the signal to leave on hardly more than a whim.

The snow was falling faster. Whenever Stuart cracked his eyelids, he could see its furious descent through the white-bright rectangle that was the open carriage doorway. He remained unimpressed. Yorkshire snow fell like tiny feathers, crystalline bits of nothing; it lay in mounds one could kick with one’s feet. As if the clouds overhead were
duvets
ripped open, a continuing, downy earthward drift. The English knew nothing of cold—cold so blasting it could freeze the sea to a foamy frazil of churned ice and free-floating plates. Russia was cold. Finland was cold. Yorkshire was merely seasonal. It was winter, the perfect time to enjoy a fire, a shot of brandy, and the comforts of another body alongside one’s own down under a mountain of covers, sweating and panting beneath them.

That was the goal here. A warm body alongside his own tonight. Warm and easy.
Easy
was very high on his list. He didn’t have time for anything else. One night. Thank you, my dear. Good-bye.

Meanwhile, he considered it a very encouraging sign that his mind would aspire to such an end for even a night. After four months in England, he’d begun to think he might never again fret over anything beyond money and the complicated
thievery of his uncle Leonard—every day revealing a new twist to it, every new kink removing Stuart, who should have been an extremely rich man by now, another degree from full use of his own money, except in dribs and drabs. Today should have helped, though it by no means solved the whole of his problems. Nonetheless, it solved enough that this afternoon Stuart did indeed aspire to fulfilling more human needs than those of mere coin.

Even as his body gave a faint shiver, he felt also a wonderful flow of blood elsewhere, low in his belly. It was faint, but thank God he could still feel it; it was full of promise. And all due to the woman inside the bank. He couldn’t even remember why she took his fancy, but few enough Englishwomen did that he was willing to sit in the cold and wait till she came out. He’d reasoned that she had to eat, and there was no food in the bank—and that she had enough spunk in her and meat on her bones that he was fairly certain no one could starve her.

Meat on her bones
. Yes, he liked that. He sat there, warmed by the glow of anticipation, trying to remember what else he’d liked. It was all rather vague. She was—

What? He had to think, then decided upon
cute
. All blond ringlets and Wedgwood blue eyes, sitting there in a dress that looked both in fadedness and fit as though she’d bought it at fourteen. Ah, a fourteen-year-old country innocent. Perhaps that was it; perhaps he was becoming more perverse than even he’d realized. This one was older than fourteen, of course, though he couldn’t tell by how much. She was still youngish. And so helpful and self-effacing: so feminine. So impressed with him.

Aah.
Stuart smiled inwardly and snugged down further into his coat. He loved to be impressive, especially to women. He closed his eyes again and waited, promising himself:
easy.
He didn’t expect a rich, handsome fellow such as he to have a moment’s trouble with a little amanuensis, especially if even half the nonsense about her ailing father were true.

In fact, though, his wooing did begin with the small trou
ble of having to wait almost forty-five minutes (his servants ready for mutiny), before the bank doors opened and spilled her out: a little trundling bundle in a hurry. Before she got very far, his footman waylaid her, directing her to the open coach door. She came right up and stopped before it, blinking, puzzled, her lovely pale face shining out from layers of wraps as snow filtered down onto her shawl-covered head. Her face, a little moon shining out, was round with creamy skin, more flawlessly smooth in the white afternoon light than memory had allowed. A blue-eyed, English pink face. This face scanned the interior of the coach, seemingly unable to find Stuart inside—it must have been too dark, he decided, with the window up and no lamp lit.

She jumped when he said, “Would you like lunch?” and he was sure he’d taken her by surprise completely. She hadn’t been certain there was anyone in the coach at all.

Her answer was to stare, eyes widening, directly into the coach, searching, yet unable to locate him. He enjoyed her bewilderment a moment: his being able to see her completely, her knowing he was there but unable to identify his presence—though he was aware of the moment when she located the toe of his boot. It gleamed from the floor’s shadows where his legs were stretched out. Her gaze tried to follow the boot up, but couldn’t apparently, for she leaned, daring to peer closer, her expression a wonder of contradiction: startled, cautious, interested, utterly taken aback. Like a blinking deer staring down the barrel of something unknown, unthinkable.

“Lunch?” Stuart repeated, then remembered the English didn’t eat lunch. Ah, he tried to keep the tedium from his voice as he corrected, “Tea?”

“No!” she said swiftly, straightening.

In the darkness, he raised his eyebrow. No? Why would a poor young woman refuse a meal with a rich man? A mistake; it could be corrected. With a rap of his gloved knuckle, he indicated the interior, tapping the drawn leather window curtain as he said, “Step inside.”

“Goodness, no!” She stepped back. She looked of two minds: about to run, yet so amazed she was unable to move her feet.

Good. Amazement was good. “Then I’ll come out.”

He lifted his long body, bending down and forward, having to doff his hat to get under the doorframe. Bareheaded, he leaned out into daylight: And the girl took another step back, banging her rather generous, bundled bottom on the leather armrest of the open door. This startled her further, catapulting her forward just as he stepped down onto crunching snow. He caught her in his arms. She was light for all her layers—her worn gray coat, a plaid shawl inside it up over her head, another woolly navy scarf sticking out at the neck. Alas, as he held her, inside all her wintry clothes she squirmed like a bagged rabbit, scrambling to get free with nothing short of panic.

He let go rather than alarm her further, and she stepped backward fully three feet, as far as the edge of the door would let her, looking faintly horror-struck. He could see the rate of her rapid breathing in puffs of air before her mouth.

Now, Stuart was used to frightening women just a little. First of all, his presence—his height or the dark severity of his looks or perhaps a…a dourness, he wasn’t sure, his glumness—took them universally aback. Secondly, his social position, especially when much higher as here, often did little to improve matters. Most importantly, though, he rather enjoyed frightening them: a little cat and mouse before putting them at ease. It gave him the upper hand, which he relished. But with this young thing it was slightly ridiculous. She’d seemed feisty enough inside the bank. Presently, though, she looked appalled enough as to expect he might murder her here on the street.

He told her, “I’m not actually that dangerous,” then with a dry laugh added, “not to you at least.”

She blinked, not at all reassured. She was shorter than he’d remembered. A plump, pretty little bumpkin. That was it.
That
was what he so liked: sweet, naive. Simple. Deeply impressed with wealth. Hardly a brain in her head. Yes, his favorite. Why, he hadn’t had a country girl in—

He’d never had one, he realized. They didn’t live in Paris, or else in Paris they quickly became something else. The variety who visited Petersburg didn’t smell right to him. But this one, in the bank’s lobby as they’d looked for her pen, had smelled of…he remembered: clover, English clover. How did she do that in the dead of winter? Oh, yes, this one was ideal. He felt such a pleasant response to her right here as they stood in the street, he wished he could simply drag her into the coach—

Not that he had to be primitive about it (though
primitive
had its appeal at the moment). Returning his hat to his head, he nodded once in deference to a woman almost a foot shorter than he, a woman with startlingly blue eyes as big as saucers. Gorgeous eyes. After her creamy skin, her best feature: the eyes of an angel. And—aha!—for all their fright, these eyes were curious. Another mark in her favor. Stuart mated best with women who possessed a high degree of curiosity, being an adventurer in that realm, to say the least.

“So where do you live, Miss Muffet?” he asked. On a tuffet? he wondered.

“Muffin.”

“Muffin. Yes.” Perfect. Delicious, edible. “So, Miss Muffin, where in York do you live?”

For all the politeness in his voice—and he did try to seem gallant, cordial—the enormity of what he asked became apparent to her. He liked that. He took back the brainless part. She was sharp enough, just unsophisticated. Her face realized immediately that he was asking not for conversation’s sake but for himself, for the possibility—since lunch was apparently out—of arriving at her address.

Stuart wouldn’t have dared ask a female of his own class such a forward question. Which allowed him to enjoy the astounded confusion that spread onto the girl’s face, for he shouldn’t have asked her either. But what could she do? Nothing. A man who was completely out of reach in terms of courtship or marriage had just declared his interest in calling on her. A man who was important to her employer, a man she didn’t wish to offend. Easy, he told himself. Like picking off ducks from a pond with swan shot.

Her reaction fascinated him. She blinked for a second, then frowned, smiled hesitantly—a flicker—then winced. He enjoyed the wince, the little flicker of conflict, of virtue compromised. Her wince became a scowl, which in turn pressed her lips together. Her compressed mouth, almost despite itself, then turned up a tiny bit at the edges, a smile in spite of the unseemly context as she at last relaxed a little. She even seemed…almost relieved. (Relieved? Why? What on God’s earth
else
could he have possibly wanted of her?) She bowed her head, hiding whatever expression might have come afterward on that remarkably open, responsive face of hers.

Stuart himself felt removed from his own emotions, while this woman clearly lived in the thick of hers: They flitted, one following the other so fast across her features, they changed too quickly to catch them all.

Then a surprise. A strong emotion made itself aware in
him:
He utterly loved the commotion he produced in her. He adored it. He found himself watching the air she breathed, the movement of her chest beneath her heavy coat, its rise, the little pause, then the letting-go of warm air in little clouds out her slightly chapped mouth. Her cheeks, where her shawl met her face, were turning bright pink. A lock of silver-blond hair escaped at one side, just one piece. She had a hole in her coat, a place worn through at the side where her arm rubbed against her full breast.

She was poor. Yet, despite the obvious advantages of
obliging him, she shrugged shyly almost in apology, as if she would very much like to accommodate such a fine lord but couldn’t see how. Her fright had evaporated though. He had no idea what had become of it. Clearly, he’d been more reassuring than he’d realized.

Or intended, which made him laugh somewhere inside: at himself.

He watched snow gather lightly on her eyelashes before dissolving, making her lashes spiky as she smiled rather boldly up now.

No doubt about it, she was delightful: She went to speak and, instead, little clouds of condensing giggles came out. “Oh,” she said and looked down, uttering more visibly nervous—literally—laughter; it came out in puffs. “Oh, I can’t believe—my goodness—” Now that she understood what he wanted, she was flattered.

Good.

“I couldn’t possibly—”

Bad. “Why not? Of course, you could.” Could what? What specifically were they discussing? His heart gave a little leap.

Then she said, very kindly—and the kindness was the killer: the intended discouragement. “No. Though thank you. But really, no.” When she laughed again, he wasn’t misled by her laughter; she meant what she said. Yet somehow she found their exchange—perhaps even something larger, life itself—funny.

My Lord, he thought, she was like champagne. He wanted to drown in her minute movements, in all the ticks of emotion that came off her: tickle her, do things to her till she laughed herself into tears, till she screamed. “Why?” he asked. “What’s the harm in saying where you live? I was only curious.”