Miss Molly Robbins Designs a Seduction (4 page)

He’d have to correct her about something. Anything to restore order. After searching for several moments, Carver found a point to make. “Oh, and Robbins, since you are no longer my servant, the correct address is
your
lordship
, not
my
lord
. Try to remember the distinction.”

“Yes, my—your lordship.”

No
longer
his
servant.
The words echoed inside his skull. “Good gracious, Robbins, is that a smile I see attempting to meander across your prim lips with the stealth and ease of a leprous cripple?”

“No, your lordship. It was an exhale of relief.”

“Relief?”

“Since you are infamously all bluster and breeches, I thought you might claim that you were in your cups before, and that you didn’t mean what you said when you offered me a loan. That you were merely being mischievous, tempting me to abandon my wedding plans just to see if I would. Fancy me having such doubts that you would keep to your word! You, the Earl of Everscham. Of course you would not let me down.”

Her steady gaze reached right inside his head and, like a thief in the night, turned everything upside down and rifled through it. For all her upright manners, Molly Robbins secretly nurtured the steely temperament and cunning demeanor of a grave robber. But just when he thought she might smile at last, there went the familiar tightening of her damned lips, denying any sign of it. Wretched, self-righteous creature. Cluttering up his library with her…her scornfulness. Forcing him out of bed at a decent hour.

Carver Danforthe suspected he’d signed away far more than two hundred pounds. Perhaps even a few body parts. Now she was leaving his household, just when he’d begun to realize that Molly Robbins might be a creature of some wit and worth keeping around.

She’d even talked Carver into paying her for leaving him.

So much for her “honest” face. It was, he thought—with the peevish anger of a man newly and reluctantly awakened to the fact that he’d been bested by a woman—as honest as it was plain.

Anxious to know why his sister had not returned to London with Molly Robbins, Carver wrote immediately to the Hartleys, with whom she would stay while in the country. She had known the Hartleys as long as she’d known Molly, and since they were the parents of the jilted groom, they should know everything that had happened. He did not wish to ask the runaway bride more than he had already, and she was reticent with her answers, as if it was none of his business when, of course, it was very much his business. Not only was this abandoned wedding connected to a former member of his household staff, but Molly Robbins was also his sister’s closest friend and confidant. Perhaps the most important fact was that the groom, Rafe Hartley, was once married—for three hours—to Carver’s sister.

Fortunately he was able to get the marriage annulled, as both Mercy and Rafe were too young, and neither had permission to marry. But Carver now worried that his sister’s heart was not quite as free of the matter as she’d let him believe. He’d allowed her to attend Rafe and Molly’s wedding in Sydney Dovedale because she was now engaged to another, and he thought she was old enough not to make another mistake of that nature. Edward Hobbs, the Danforthe family solicitor, and the only other soul who knew about Mercy’s past elopement with Rafe Hartley, had suggested someone ought to travel with her into the country.

“My sister can look after herself,” Carver had replied to the solicitor’s quiet concern.

Perhaps, he thought now, chagrinned, he had misjudged both the situation and his sister, but he
had
been right about Molly Robbins. He’d warned his sister that Robbins could not be happy with marriage to a country farmer. Curious, but it seemed as if he understood the workings of that maid’s mind more than he knew the thoughts of his own sister. From that first scowl, that first stab with a pin, Molly Robbins had told him where she stood and what she thought of his nonsense. She apparently never felt the need to lie to him or flatter with false words of admiration. She was a unique presence in his life.

He had not realized how unique until the day she left his house.

***

“You’ve done
what
?” His friend Sinjun Rothespur, Earl of Saxonby, was incredulous and already slightly drunk. Swaying in his chair, he demanded Carver repeat what he’d just said. “My ears must be playing tricks upon me.”

“I have loaned money to my sister’s maid to start a business.” He paused to let the words land and settle this time, but it was still no earthly good. They continued to make less and less sense the more often he uttered them. He had not meant to speak a word of it to anyone, yet here he was spilling the secret to his oldest friend. It could not be contained any longer. Carver downed another gulp of brandy and fell back into the warm embrace of a leather chair. “Dressmaking. Apparently she’s very talented.”

“Talented, eh?” Sinjun chuckled drowsily and winked. “So this is the maid who ran away from her own wedding. Now I see!”

“No, you do not see. It’s not like that.” Rolling his head against the dimpled chair back, he tried to get his thoughts in order. “It’s not like that at all. Absolutely not. She’s a grim creature, dull and drear. But I’m assured she has a very neat stitch and a good eye for design.”

Who had told him that, he wondered. His sister? The Mouse herself perhaps, although it seemed unlikely. She was not the boasting sort. He kept seeing her unfolding the contract and placing it before him—her clause “No Tomfoolery” underlined in thick ink. Except she’d misspelled the word as Tomfollerie. Had he been more awake when she brought that contract to him, he would have teased her and asked who the devil Tom Follerie was. But hers had been a surprise attack and, of course, even misspelled, her disapproval of his varied activities with the ladies could not be mistaken for anything else.

“She’s ambitious,” he muttered. “Dedicated. Quite determined.”

“
What
?” His friend sputtered with amusement. “But she’s a woman. I’ve never heard you speak so admirably of the enemy.”

“Nonsense.” Attempting to hoist himself more upright in his chair, he found it too much work and slipped down again, even farther. “I give credit where ’tis due. And she is far from a usual woman.”

Life
should
move
forward, my lord, not lie stagnant. Isn’t progress the very essence of being alive?
Her snuffled question had stayed with him as if imprinted on his mind, along with the unwanted Mr. Tom Follerie. She was right, of course. One must move in order to live.

He thought then of his father, who had given up on moving forward and on life. A once vital man, he wasted away only a few years after their mother’s death. His sister liked to think their father died of a broken heart, but Carver recalled it differently. Their father was a selfish man who had no patience for sickness or frailty, not even his own. Forced to end his days in a wheelchair, he spent his last few years staring out of a window, shouting at everyone because he was miserable and wretched, angry at his lost youth, frustrated with an aging body that let him down daily. He saw no point in life anymore if he could only watch it happen around him. So he’d commanded that everything inside the country house remain exactly as it was when his wife died. Nothing was allowed to change. From that day, the Everscham Sussex estate was sealed in time. All very dramatic and befitting one of those romantic novels his sister liked to read, but it was truly their father’s own youth he mourned, as much as—perhaps more than—the loss of his wife.

Carver had spent twenty years in that house on the Sussex estate, struggling for his stern father’s approval, and almost as many years hoping for his busy, glamorous mother’s attention. She’d barely looked at him. He knew an older brother, a precious firstborn son—doted upon by both parents—had died suddenly in childhood, so Carver grew up with the knowledge that he was the heir by tragic default. Anxious for paternal approval, he’d struggled to measure his own feet to his father’s steps, but there was always a barrier in his way, an invisible wall between them that prevented any affection showing through. The old earl believed in raising his remaining son with the help of a stern rod. Nothing Carver did was ever quite good enough to escape the swing of that cane, and after a while, he gave up trying so hard. By the time his father died, Carver had given up altogether, accepting his role as a disappointment, the default son and heir. The whipping boy.

When he came into his title on the death of their father, he left the estate and purchased the London house, making it his primary residence even out of Season. He now returned to the country for brief visits, mostly to the horse stud farm in which he had the most interest, but he was never comfortable at that grand estate, for it felt as if his father’s spirit roamed the extensive corridors, still ready to faintly disapprove of anything Carver said or did. Still mourning for the favored son.

Now he considered his preference for Town and realized that after his father’s death he’d gravitated toward life—activities, people, and noise. Here in London, things changed, moved forward, and he—shocking as it might be—liked that. Did it make him a revolutionary? Heaven Forbid. He could hear his father’s bones grinding as he turned in his grave.

Carver had begun to look at things differently. He was restless.

“The world is moving,” he mused aloud to Sinjun, “and we must too, or be left behind.”

“Zounds! Next thing we know, you’ll actually be taking up your seat in the House of Lords, and not just on those occasions when you need somewhere to sleep undisturbed for a few hours.”

“I must ask you to desist, Rothespur, before my breeches split from the hilarity.”

“When I heard about parliament burning down last autumn, I imagined they’d find you, the sleeping culprit, spread out on a bench, charred to a crisp with the remnants of a cigar in your mouth.”

“And I’m sure you got out the mourning black.”

“No. I would have celebrated in your honor, old chap. I know how you despised the place. I’ve heard you, more than once, declare the House of Lords in need of fireworks to wake it up. Naturally, I thought you’d finally done something about it.”

Carver smirked into his brandy. “You know me better than that, Rothespur. I’m all bluster and breeches, according to some. Never get anything done.”

“True,” his friend replied amiably. “But now you’ve invested in this business venture, I hope you realize you’ll get all sorts begging at your door for similar assistance. The Everscham Benevolent Fund for Runaway Brides.”

Carver was barely listening, too intrigued by thoughts of one particular runaway bride. What did one do with a woman who made it clear from the start that he needn’t try flirting with her?

“I suppose she might be a useful acquisition,” Sinjun exclaimed. “Your own personal dressmaker for the women always in and out of your life, someone to discreetly mend ravaged frocks. I’m sure there’s no other fellow who can lay claim to a tame
modiste
at their disposal, all hours of the day…and night.”

Clearly, despite protests to the contrary, Sinjun still thought there was more to this than a business investment. Perhaps there was.

Raising his glass to the candlelight, Carver thoughtfully observed the gleaming amber twinkle through the cut crystal. This was a rare, fine brandy. He’d thought it bitter at first, but the taste mellowed going down and lit a glowing warmth in his gut. The brandy’s effects had crept up on him. Like she did.

“One thing is certain,” he muttered, “if I want that loan repaid, she’d better find some customers.” Of course, two hundred pounds was not a great loss. He’d forfeited more than that in one night of wagers at White’s. Truth be told, he was concerned about the country mouse. She was thin enough already, and lack of regular meals would do her no good whatsoever. He also suspected she was too proud to admit herself in the wrong and return to Sydney Dovedale. There was a wild spark in her. He’d seen and felt it. An animal snared in a cruel trap would try to bite off its own leg to escape, and there was something of that same savage determination inside Molly Robbins. Carver recognized the flame that burned strongly inside her. He felt that warmth when she looked at him and tried not to smile.

Fate had put her in his way, as if he, the “good-for-naught,” could actually be of some use.

Hope.

He looked at his glass again, slightly bemused. Was it brandy that made him think this way?

Or was it the Mouse?

***

When Lady Mercy Danforthe first offered to make her a companion and lady’s maid, Molly had never traveled more than a few miles beyond the village of Sydney Dovedale. A wide-eyed girl, prone to bouts of muteness, she’d arrived in the great metropolis with her new mistress at her side to point out all the attractions and hazards of Town. It was the noise that hit her first. The crisp clatter of countless iron-ringed pattens in the street, the seemingly endless charge of horses and carriages, the sing-song of tradesmen and flower sellers, church bells ringing out in every corner of the place. Eventually she grew accustomed to it, and then the quiet of her old village, whenever she returned to visit her family, became the stranger of the two.

All these years later, returning to London for a new adventure, she did not have Lady Mercy to lead the way or “guide” her in that indomitable fashion. This time Molly was on her own, but she was not afraid. She might be a woman of little consequence and no beauty, but her bones—however thin—were hardy, and she’d been told she had a quick mind. Now she was a moving part of the finest metropolis in the world, a little cog in the great mechanism of London. The place where all classes of life bubbled and brewed together, where there were folk she would never meet if she’d stayed in Sydney Dovedale. She was no longer just a person to whom things happened; she made the happenings for herself.

Her hopes, in those first days, were high indeed.

The rooms she leased with Mr. Edward Hobbs’s assistance were small and damp, leaning so close to the next house that by reaching through her small side window she might shake hands with her neighbor—if she could bear to open the shutters and suffer the foul odors that rose from the alley beneath. A second dormer window peeked out through the slate roof and overlooked the street, where the smells were not exactly sweet either, but certainly more tolerable and often fast moving, as opposed to the stagnant air of the side alley. Through this window the lively sounds of the town churned away, from the first song of a street vendor to the last call of the night watchman on his rounds. An elderly lady sold salop from her still on the pavement outside, and she was often there from the late to the early hours, providing her drink for its restorative qualities to those suffering the bad effects of too much liquor, as well as for sober customers in need of a morning jolt of vigor before they went about the business of the day. With so much life going on in the street outside at all hours, Molly never had the chance to feel lonely.

She spent hours at her window, watching the people pass, assessing their garments with a quick eye. Often she could imagine the entire life of a woman walking by just from the cut of her coat or the decoration in her bonnet. She saw no one as well dressed as Lady Mercy, her former mistress, but witnessed quite a few ladies rather overdressed and definitely overpainted. Few people Molly had ever seen used color and pattern as eagerly or with as much confidence as Lady Mercy, whose love of fashion had introduced a whole new world to Molly when she was a young girl handed her first copy of
La
Belle
Assemblee
.

One morning, while seated at her window with a small breakfast of bread and cheese, Molly spied a familiar gentleman on a fine black horse. He approached along the other side of the street and paused, watching the building with a frown.