Lord Perfect (10 page)

"Pity, ain't it?" said another. "Big,
strong fellow like that. The Quality likes them tall, strapping
fellows, I heard. Is it true, ma'am?"

"Yes," she said. "Tall
footmen are
de rigeur
."

When he'd retrieved all her parcels,
she started away at a brisk pace, leaving the audience to argue about
what
de rigeur
meant.

When they'd turned a corner and the crowd was out of
earshot, he said, "I'm a footman?"

"You should not have come to this neighborhood
dressed so fine," she said. "Clearly you have no idea how
to travel incognito."

"I had not thought about it."

"Obviously not," she said. "Luckily, one
of us comes of a long line of accomplished liars. Your being a
footman accounts for both your elegant dress and your air of
superiority."

"My air of—" He broke off. "You are
walking in the wrong direction. Is not Bleeding Heart Yard the other
way?"

She stopped. "You found out where I live."

He nodded over the bundles stacked under his jaw. "It
is not Popham's fault. I bullied him. I wish I had not. I despise
bullying. But I was… exceedingly annoyed."

"With Popham?"

"With my brother-in-law. Atherton."

"Then why did you not bully your brother-in-law?"

"He is in Scotland. Did I not tell you that?"

"My lord," she said.

"Ah, here is a quiet churchyard," he said,
indicating the place with his chin. "Why do we not go in? We
shall be private without giving an appearance of impropriety."

She was not so sanguine about what appeared improper and
what didn't. Still, if he had his hands full of bundles…

She went in, and paused at a spot close by the gateway.

He set her purchases down on a gravestone. "I am
obliged to take Peregrine to Scotland in a fortnight," he said.
"His father makes anarchy of our neat arrangements. He has had a
fit of responsibility and decided to foist his offspring upon
Heriot's School in Edinburgh."

She suppressed a sigh.
Good-bye,
shiny coins
, she thought "Is that
not a good school?" she said.

"Peregrine will never fit in any of our great
British schools," he said, his voice clipped. "But one
cannot explain this to Atherton by letter. One can scarcely explain
anything to him at all. He is too impatient, impulsive, and dramatic
to reason matters out."

To Bathsheba's surprise, Lord Rathbourne began to pace
the pathway. He did it gracefully, of course, being perfect, but with
a contained energy that seemed to make the air churn about him.

"If he would only view the matter in a rational
way," he went on, "he would see that the methods of the
British public school are antithetical to Peregrine's character. One
learns everything by rote. One is expected to do as one is told
without question, to memorize without making sense of what one
memorizes. When Peregrine insists upon knowing why and wherefore, he
is deemed disrespectful at best, blasphemous at worst Then he is
punished. Most boys require only a few beatings to learn to hold
their tongues. Peregrine is not most boys. Beatings mean nothing to
him. Why can his father not see this, when it is obvious to a mere
uncle?" the uncle concluded, shaking his fist.

"Perhaps the father lacks the uncle's ability to
imagine himself in the boy's place," she said.

Rathbourne halted abruptly. He looked down at his
clenched hand and blinked once. He unclenched it. "Really. Well.
I should have thought Atherton had imagination enough for half a
dozen men. More than I, certainly."

"Parents have a peculiar sort of
vision," she said. "They can be blind in some ways. Does
your father understand
you
?"

For a moment he looked shocked, and she was as well, to
discern so strong a sign of emotion. She'd seen at the start that his
was a tell-nothing countenance.

"I sincerely hope not," he said.

She laughed. She couldn't help it. It had lasted but a
moment—he was back to looking inscrutable—but for that
brief time he had seemed a chagrined schoolboy, and she thought she
would have liked to know that boy.

Dangerous thought.

He stood for a time, looking at her and smiling the
almost-smile. Then he approached. "Did you really fall in my way
on purpose?" he said.

"That was a joke," she said. "The truth
is, I was shocked witless to see you in Charles Street. I wish you
would give warning the next time you decide to come looking for me. I
had rather not walk into a shop front and black my eye or fall over a
curb and break my ankle."

He had come too near, and his gaze
was a magnet, drawing hers. She was caught for but a moment—time
enough only for her to breathe in and out—yet it was time
enough to lure her in deeper. Looking into those eyes, so dark, was
like looking down a long, shadowy corridor. Too intriguing. She
wanted to find out what was at the end of it,
who
was at the end of it, and how great a distance it was from the man on
the outside to the man on the inside.

She looked away. "I did not mean you ought to come
looking for me," she added. "I was not issuing an
invitation."

"I know I ought not to have come," he said. "I
could have written to you. Yet here I am."

She could not let herself be drawn in again. She focused
on the gravestone behind him, where her parcels lay.

"Yes, well, I must be going," she said.
"Olivia returns home from school soon, and if I am not there,
she finds things to do. Usually it is something one had rather she
didn't."

"Ah, yes, how remiss of me." He moved away, to
the gravestone, and started collecting her belongings. "I should
not have troubled you in the first place, and I have compounded the
offense by trespassing too long upon your time."

He hadn't trespassed for long enough. She hadn't found
out a fraction of what she wanted to know.

Think of your daughter
,
she told herself.
Curiosity about this
man is a luxury you cannot afford
.

"I prefer to carry them now, my lord," she
said. "A footman will be out of place in Bleeding Heart Yard. It
would be best if we went our separate ways."

* * *

BENEDICT DID NOT want to go his separate way.

He wanted to stay where he was, talking to her, looking
at her, listening to her. She had laughed—at what must have
been a comical look of horror on his face when she asked whether his
father understood him.

The sound of it wasn't what he'd expected. It was low,
deep in her throat.

Wicked laughter. Bedroom laughter.

The laughter seemed to hang in the air about him as he
returned to the hackney. It hung there during the short journey home.
It followed him into the house and up to Peregrine's room.

He found the boy kneeling in the window seat, bent over
a colored plate from Belzoni's book. It illustrated the ceiling of
the pharaoh's tomb, with an assortment of strange figures and symbols
in gold on a black background, possibly a representation of the
nighttime sky and constellations as the ancient Egyptians saw them.

Benedict refused to puzzle over it. The ancient
Egyptians were too aggravating for words.

He told the boy what Atherton had decided.

Peregrine frowned. "I do not understand," he
said. "Father said he was done with sending me away to school.
He said I was welcome to grow up illiterate and ignorant. He said I
did not deserve a gentlemanly education when I could not behave as a
gentleman ought. He said—"

"Obviously, he has changed his mind," Benedict
said.

"It is exceedingly inconvenient," Peregrine
said. "I am not done studying Belzoni's collection. In any case,
it makes no sense to leave so soon. The term will have already
started by the time I get to Edinburgh. If one must be a new boy, it
is better to start at least with the other new boys. Now I shall be
the newest new boy, and I shall waste a lot of valuable time fighting
when I might be here, improving my Greek and Latin and organizing my
tables of hieroglyphs."

Peregrine would not be bullied. He would not be any
boy's lackey. As a consequence of this, and of eternally being the
new boy, he spent a good deal of time making his position clear by
means of his fists.

"I am aware of this," Benedict said. "The
fact remains, your father commands, and you must obey." He did
not mention the word or two he intended to have with Lord Atherton.
Benedict did not hint at his intention to bring Peregrine straight
back, if it was humanly possible, and hire a proper tutor for him, as
should have been done ages ago.

He did not want to get his nephew's hopes up. In any
case, a son must obey his father.

Parents must be treated with respect, whether one
wants to strangle them or not.

Whatever else Benedict was prepared to do on Peregrine's
behalf, he would not encourage disobedience.

"I thought he had washed his hands of me and put
you in charge," Peregrine said. "Lord Hargate must think
so, because it was you, not Papa, he told to find me a drawing
master. And what is to become of my drawing, I cannot think. I shall
never get on at this rate. I have only now begun to make progress.
No, it is true," he said when Benedict's eyebrows went up. "Mrs.
Wingate says so, and she does not flatter me, you know. 'Lord Lisle,
you have been drawing with your feet again,' she will say when I have
made a muck of things." He smiled. "She makes me laugh."

"I understand," Benedict
said. She made him
want
to laugh. She'd done it at the Egyptian Hall, when she'd quizzed her
daughter about attacking Peregrine. He'd wanted to laugh in front of
Popham's shop—at her blank astonishment when informed that
Peregrine had an ambition—and at her response to this. He'd
wanted to laugh today, when she'd joked about throwing herself at
Benedict.

She was droll. She said and did things he didn't expect.

He could still hear her laughter.

"Well, I suppose there is no help for it,"
Peregrine said. He closed the book. "Still, I have a fortnight.
I shall have to make the most of the time."

Benedict had prepared himself for a good deal more
trouble. Peregrine had not sought a fraction as many whys and
wherefores as expected. Perhaps he'd at last realized that his
father's behavior seldom had any rational basis, and had given up
looking for one.

Perhaps the boy was maturing, learning, finally.

"If you please, sir, may I go to the British Museum
tomorrow?" Peregrine said. "I should like to have another
go at the head of Young Memnon. I had asked Mrs. Wingate if we might
have an extra lesson on a Saturday, there or at the Egyptian Hall,
but she hasn't time. She will be in Soho Square for most of tomorrow
morning and early afternoon, she said."

"A portrait commission, probably," Benedict
said. One of the tradesmen whose daughters she taught must have
recognized her talent.

"I believe she's looking for lodgings there,"
said Peregrine.

Benedict supposed that Soho Square might seem to some an
improvement over Bleeding Heart Yard. Yet both addresses teetered on
the edge of unsavory neighborhoods. "I should advise her against
it," he said. "She is unwise to move so close to Seven
Dials. It is as bad as if not worse than Saffron Hill."

Peregrine frowned.

"Not that it is any of our concern where she
chooses to live," Benedict went on. "You want to visit the
British Museum. You had better go with Thomas. There is no reason for
me to hang about while you practice drawing."

"Indeed not," said Peregrine. "You would
be dreadfully bored. Naturally I assumed I must behave as though it
were a lesson day. Even if one of the museum directors happens by, I
shall say nothing to him about the red granite sarcophagus in the
courtyard—the one Aunt Daphne is so troubled about—though
it truly is shameful, sir, the way they have treated Signor Belzoni—"

"So it is, and sooner or later, Rupert will start
throwing the directors out of windows," Benedict said. "You,
however, will hold your tongue."

The last thing in the world he needed now was to become
involved in the wrangling about Belzoni's acquisitions: what belonged
to whom and who ought to pay for it. He had carefully deflected all
Daphne's attempts to lure him into fighting that exasperating battle.
He had enough battles to fight as it was. The primary one at present
involved Peregrine's future.

"I shan't breathe a word about it, sir, upon my
honor," said Peregrine.

"Very well, then, you may go with Thomas."

Then, relieved to have one troublesome matter settled so
easily, Lord Rathbourne left.