The Toplofty Lord Thorpe (4 page)

Lucy's bright smile blazed up at him before she replied confidently, “Because I'm a bloody fool, my lord. Why else?”

 

L
UCY AND
R
ACHEL
were up at the crack of dawn the next morning, setting the kitchen staff at sixes and sevens with their requests for an early breakfast, while the third underfootman was not best pleased to be ordered out into the streets to procure copies of every newspaper in the city.

Two of the papers had declined to run the story sent to them by one Susan Anscom, but a third, less scrupulous publication (or perhaps less indebted monetarily to Lord Thorpe) printed the entire letter on the first inside page.

It was a thoroughly damning epitaph, set forth with a thoroughness not usually looked for in hysterical females. The missive detailed her seduction at the hands of Lord T—, her inevitable pregnancy, and that same man's callous indifference to her plight. It recounted how she planned, presumably after posting her condemnation, to fling herself into the small pond behind her home in Alsop-en-le-Dale, a scant four miles from Lord T—'s country home, an action she did in fact take, according to the newspaper report. The story ended with the intelligence that Miss Anscom's suicide had “put a period to her young life and set loose the biggest scandal in many a year.”

As if the article by itself were not enough, the footman also produced a few assorted caricatures from local print shops, where patrons could buy ludicrous drawings depicting Lord T— either standing with his heel crushing the head of some helpless infant, departing on horseback while an obviously increasing damsel stares distractedly into a becoming pool of water, or one particularly repulsive colored print (which cost all of a guinea, but with the ladies footing the bill, it seemed a small expenditure) that showed Lord T— actually stuffing Miss A— into a sack in preparation for tossing her into the water. This last print Rachel wisely kept from Lucy's sight.

“How dare they lampoon him like this!” Lucy protested, ripping one of the cartoons into small pieces.

“If Prinny himself is not safe from such attack, my dear, I doubt Lord Thorpe can be considered above it,” Rachel answered, shaking her head. “I can only wonder how Lord Thorpe is taking it. The story must have been fairly well spread last night for society to have already mounted a snub of such proportions. But now, now that every man on the street has been made aware of it, there's no telling what will happen next. Poor man,” she ended, taking a sip of chocolate. “Poor, proud man.”

Lucy sat back against her chair, her blue eyes clouded by the memory of Lord Thorpe as she had last seen him outside the Selbridge mansion. Standing ramrod straight, his wide mouth set in a thin line, he had thanked his rescuer with formal politeness before stepping into his waiting coach and driving away without a backward glance. The fact that he had neglected to see that the Gladwin carriage had been called for or wait until such time as it had arrived fairly screamed out his distraction.

“I should think he would like nothing more than to sit in some dark room and cry his eyes out,” Lucy said now, wiping away a tear of her own. “He has been totally devastated by this thing. It is terrible to watch the mighty fall. Lord Thorpe has no experience of failure, you know. He has lived his life within a charmed circle. But now he knows how false his life has been and he cannot cope.”

“Oh, Lucy, I think you might be overstating the
case,” her aunt contradicted weakly. “Surely not all the
ton
have turned their backs on the man. Why, I wager that by this morning he has found that many friends have rallied around him. Surely it is all a nine days' wonder, and the whole matter will be forgotten by next week.”

“Really, Aunt? And they say I am an optimist!” Lucy stood up in preparation for leaving the sun-drenched dining room. “Well, one thing is for certain.
I
shall not leave him to face this morning's news alone. Aunt? Are you coming with me, or are you afraid to be seen entering his lordship's place of residence for fear of being tarred with the same brush?”

Laying down her fork, giving one long, wistful look at the curried eggs Cook had concocted just for her, Rachel rose and followed her niece out of the room. “I should have said yes to Lord Manton,” she remarked to no one in particular. “Marriage to that wet-palmed man would have been tedious, but at least it would have been peaceful.”

 

I
F
L
UCY
G
LADWIN THOUGHT
that Julian Rutherford was spending his morning sobbing into his porridge, she was fair and far out in her judgment of the man. Oh yes, he had been more than a little overset at the Selbridges' when he found himself on the receiving end of an
en masse
cut direct, but he had no intention of slitting his wrists over the affair. There had to have been some mistake, that was all. A few hotheads, a few eager gossip-mongers, had succeeded in stirring up a tempest in a teapot. It would soon blow over,
once his friends realized that he, Lord Thorpe, was not only too gentlemanly ever to lie to a woman, but too fastidious to bestow his favors randomly upon females not schooled in preventing what would otherwise be the inevitable outcome of such activities.

Why, at any minute his butler would enter the room to announce the arrival of friends come to support him in his hour of need. Hadn't he dressed and made himself available to callers on the basis of just this assumption? It was of no real consequence that Lord Royston, Lord Storm, the Earl of Lockport, the Duke of Avonall, and several other of his cronies were at the moment deep in Sussex at a house party—there were others he knew he could count on to rally to his side. Ah, ha! There went the door knocker just now! Patting down his already perfect cravat, Lord Thorpe rose to receive the first caller come to declare himself an ally.

“Miss Rachel Gladwin and Miss Lucille Gladwin, my lord,” the butler intoned solemnly before bowing the two ladies into the drawing room and withdrawing to finish the letter he had been penning to his cousin, majordomo to a duke, requesting his aid in obtaining a position for him in a less-tainted domicile.

“How can we help?” Lucy said baldly, not wasting precious time with formalities.

“I don't think you can,” Lord Thorpe replied tonelessly, rather deflated by the thought that so far the only troops that had rallied to his cause were wearing petticoats.

“Oh, come now, my lord,” Lucy admonished as
she sat herself down on a nearby chair. “All is not so black as you may think. Have you no touch of spunk?”

“If you mean, have I yet ordered a length of rope sufficient for hanging myself from the chandelier in the foyer, no, I have not sunk that far,” he returned, his upper lip curling just a little bit.

Lucy turned to her aunt, just now sinking into a chair set away from the center of the room, hoping to fade into the background. “See, Aunt Rachel, it's just as I told you. The man lives on his pride. Just like Mr. Darcy in Miss Austen's
Pride and Prejudice.
Of course,” she added, looking back at her unwilling host, “he isn't quite the right coloring, is he? But no matter. It is much the same thing in the end. Mr. Darcy learned that pride has its price and overcame
his
failings.”

When it looked as if Lucy was about to gift him with a synopsis of the plot of the novel that had just lately been published in the metropolis, he cut in, saying, “In my heart of hearts I'm
sure
there is a reason for this visit, ladies, or at least I devoutly hope so. I regret that I shambled off so abruptly last evening, but you must understand that I was preoccupied with a personal matter. If I did not thank you sufficiently for your assistance at the time, I will try to remedy that lapse now.”

“Oh, cut line, my lord,” Lucy interrupted, wrinkling her nose at his fustiness. “We all can read, you know, and I doubt calling Susan Anscom's suicide a personal matter will wrest her story from the lips of
every muckraking busybody in town. No, what we must do is defang the vipers.”

“We?” his lordship repeated heavily. “I was not of the opinion that I had requested you or anyone else to become a martyr in my cause. Besides, what makes you think I would want your help?”

“Indeed,” Aunt Rachel piped up from her corner of the room. “Seeing as how the place is already littered thick with those wishing to spring to your defence.” Her small bit said, she closed her mouth and sat back to see if her little stab had pricked his lordship's arrogant demeanor.

The silence in the room following Rachel's blunt declaration was almost as ominous as the dark expression that had descended on the earl's fair features. Lucy could feel a slight prickle of nervousness creeping up her spine, and she wasn't even the target of his piercing gaze. But when Rachel kept her eyes averted, calmly running her gloves through her fingers, he realized that, facetious though her remark might have been, there was a germ of truth in what she said.

He walked over to the bell-pull and summoned a servant, requesting refreshments be brought immediately, and then sat himself down in a seat across from the one Lucy had taken up when she came into the room. “All right, ladies,” he conceded in rare good humor, “you have made your point. However, I still fail to see why you are here. Especially,” he added more softly, “considering the shabby treatment you have lately suffered at my hands.”

Smiling broadly at his lordship's admission that his handling of their recent confrontation had been shabby in the extreme, Lucy decided once again that her reading of her beloved's character had not been in error. “Why, we are here to tell you that we don't believe a word of this nonsense about you and Miss Anscom,” she told him fiercely. “And to offer our services, of course.”

“Your services for what?” Lord Thorpe was moved to ask, still trying to shake the feeling that he was lost in the middle of a nightmare and showing no signs of waking up in the near future.

Lucy leaned forward conspiratorially and said grimly, “I have given this a good deal of thought since last night. I feel this whole thing is a plot to rob you of your good name and drive you distracted into an early grave.”

“Oh, I seriously doubt that,” Julian replied, biting back a laugh at the sight of Lucy's intense expression.

“No, really,” she assured him, shifting so that she sat perched right on the edge of her chair. “Only think how thorough this Miss Anscom was—writing to all the papers.”

“Hmm,” he mused back at her, “and then drowning herself in the village pond just to lend credence to her story. I must agree, the woman certainly
was
thorough.”

Now Lucy supplied the coup de grace. “My Lord Thorpe, how deep is the village pond?”

“I haven't the faintest idea. It is certainly not a big body of water.”

“Exactly! The pond near our home is no more than three or four feet deep, even in the center. I imagine Miss Anscom's pond to be about the same depth. If she did indeed drown, as the newspaper says it has confirmed, I find it mind-boggling to understand how she could have had such perseverance—holding her own head beneath the surface for the length of time required.”

Lord Thorpe jumped to his feet, two high spots of color in his cheeks. “This is how you're going to help me? By spreading about the insinuation that I've
murdered
this Miss Anscom? A little more ‘help' from you, madam, and I shan't have to go to the trouble of purchasing my own rope!”

I
T DID PRECIOUS LITTLE
to relieve Lord Thorpe's uneasy mind that Lucy Gladwin had been the only visitor ushered into his drawing room in the two interminable days following his embarrassment at the Selbridge ball. He was so alone in his misery, in fact, that he had almost begun to regret the fact that he had, at the time of that visit, come within ames ace of tossing that same Lucy Gladwin out onto the flagway on her dainty little ear.

“I
am
getting desperate,” he told himself ruefully as he slouched inelegantly in a chair in his private sanctum, his book-lined study at the rear of the Thorpe mansion. “Anyone who would feel the least pang at the absence of that outrageous little baggage has got to be desperate. Or else,” he muttered, looking owlishly into the near-empty brandy snifter he held in his hand, “well and truly corned, which I do believe I am.”

Poor, poor Lord Thorpe. He was truly a man alone, with his only company the half-dozen decanters of fine old brandy he had been consuming steadily ever since bolting himself inside his study the previous morning. His fine clothing, donned the day before in anticipation of putting on a brave front for his supporters as they rallied around him, was now sadly
crushed and dotted with brandy stains—and perhaps a tear stain or two?

That he had dealt so cavalierly with the one supporter who had braved society to comfort him he reconciled to the fact that the dratted chit had, while supposedly lending him solace, damn near come out and accused him of murder!

“Perhaps it is better I am alone,” he told a bust of Nelson that sat in a niche across the room. “Many more like her and I'll find myself in Old Bailey fighting for my life.” The admiral only stared off into the distance with his one good eye, refusing, so it seemed, to acknowledge his lordship's scandal-tainted presence.

His lordship's servants had been cutting a wide berth around him, but had delivered to him the small box that had arrived earlier by messenger, a box containing the Rutherford ancestral betrothal ring and nothing else. After Lady Cynthia's behavior when last he saw her, Julian had not been too surprised, although her action had not measurably enhanced his opinion of women, which had never had much reason to be more than it should be.

Tossing off the remainder of his drink, he thought fleetingly of his mama, the grande dame who had been the first to impress on him the honor and duty attached to being born a Rutherford. That she was for the moment in the far reaches of Scotland, dutifully burying a distant relative (and sniffing about for any bit of inheritance that might come her way), could only be considered a gift from the gods, for the old
lady would have murdered him for allowing his good name to be dragged in the mire in this tacky way.

“Here's to you, Mama,” the earl quipped, holding out his empty snifter and then dashing it to the hearth. “You taught me everything I needed to know about being a titled gentleman. 'Tis a great, bleeding pity you didn't teach me how fickle it all can be.”

He stood and walked to the fireplace to inspect the damage he had wrought and found it to be depressingly insufficient. Turning back to face his desk, he swept the pile of tradesmen's bills from the surface with one angry swipe of his arm. “The meanest cut of all,” he observed feelingly as he watched the papers flutter about the room before settling on the floor. That the common man had felt the need to call in their bills showed just how far his disgrace had plunged his good name.

But if he had thought he was already as low as a man could go, the note his butler brought him a few minutes later showed him that he had no idea of the thoroughness of his fall from grace. Clutching the note in his fist, he called for a servant to send word to have his closed carriage brought round immediately.

And as he gave his coachman Lucy Gladwin's direction, he took the first step into becoming the man Lucy had thought him to be all along.

 

“I
DESPAIR OF EVER
making him understand,” Lucy said gloomily as she sat in the morning room, her embroidery lying forgotten in her lap. “When I think
of how…
overset
…Lord Thorpe was when I mentioned that bit about the pond, I cannot help but despair of his
ever
listening to reason while there is still time to help him.”

Lucy's audience of one—her long-suffering Aunt Rachel (who had been hearing this sad refrain for the past four-and-twenty hours)—now replied evenly, “A bit more ‘despair,' pet, and I shall begin to believe it is
you
who are going into a sad decline, and not Lord Thorpe. Really, my dear, I think you refine too much on this murder theory of yours. This is just another garden-variety
ton
scandal, and will blow over by next week.”

“I think not, Aunt!” Lucy returned earnestly. “A scandal of these proportions does not blow away like a puff of smoke. Oh no! Mark my words—I smell a deep intrigue here, I'm sure of it.”

“You scent a chance to endear yourself to Lord Thorpe while that man is vulnerable to an assault on his tender feelings, you mean,” her aunt contradicted without rancor. “You may hoodwink others with that wide-eyed look of innocence, missy, but you're wasting your efforts in trying to convince
this
particular audience of your selflessness.”

“Oh, pooh!” Lucy tossed out lightheartedly. “I never said I didn't hope to take advantage of this chance to alert Julian to my finer qualities. But I do mean it when I say I think he is in real danger. Someone went to a lot of trouble to launch this scandal, and I can't make myself believe simple mischief was the motivation.”

“The Earl of Thorpe, ma'am,” the butler intoned in a suitably awed voice from the doorway, then stood aside as his lordship lurched past him into the room.

Lucy could not help the involuntary gasp of incredulity that escaped her lips at the sight of the disheveled earl. He looked, so she thought, as if he had just come off the loser in a heated battle, and she could only stare at his unshaven face and red-rimmed eyes.

“My lord,” Rachel said calmly, indicating a nearby chair, which Julian dropped into gratefully. “Biggs,” she said in an aside to the gape-mouthed butler, “I do believe we should like a pot of coffee as soon as possible. A rather
large
pot, actually.”

“Oh, I knew it!
I just knew it would come to this!
” Lucy exclaimed, rushing to shut the door on Biggs's departing back. “They're after you, aren't they?”

“Who's after me?” the earl questioned, staring at Lucy owlishly as that female threw her back against the closed doors as if to ward off an imminent invasion.

“The constable! The Bow Street Runners! The
law!
”

“It pains me to disappoint you, brat,” the earl said, regaining a bit of his dignity, and with it his sarcastic wit. “I am not, alas, in imminent danger of being clapped into irons and hauled off to jail. However, if you wish me to send one of the servants round to Bethlehem Hospital, I'm sure you'd find sufficient drama in having your own private piece of Bedlam to call your own. Really, Miss Gladwin, you must learn to control these wild flights of imagination. I do
believe such transports may be injurious to your spleen or something.”

Rachel choked delicately into her handkerchief as Lucy, her expression suitably chastened, returned slowly to her seat, at last ready to listen to what his lordship had to say. “Pardon me, my lord,” she begged, her lower lip trembling appealingly. “I let my fears run away with me for a moment there, didn't I? But you look so…that is to say, you are not looking yourself…not that you don't look fine as ninepence, you understand…but…but…”

“I apologize for burdening you both with my outlandish appearance, for there is no need to dress it up in fine linen—I look like a common ruffian and I know it. I don't know exactly why I am here, to tell the God's truth, except that I could not think of any other door in all of London that would be open to me.”

His little bit of humble pie swallowed, Lord Thorpe leaned heavily against the back of his chair and stared at the crumpled piece of paper he still held tight in his hand. “They've asked me to resign from my club,” he muttered half under his breath. “Six generations of Rutherfords have been members. My disgrace is now total.”

While some females may not have understood the gravity of this last snub delivered to Lord Thorpe by his contemporaries, Lucy Gladwin, who had been raised by a worldly-wise father, immediately recognized that the worst, the absolute
worst
had happened.
“Oh, you
poor thing!
” she exclaimed, dropping to her knees at his feet.

Biggs interrupted the proceedings at that moment, bringing in the coffee tray—which might have been a good thing, for Lord Thorpe, at Lucy's show of sympathy, was perilously near to unmanning himself in the company of females, a truly unpardonable breach of gentlemanly behavior. Rising to walk over to a nearby window, pretending to look out over the rear garden until he could regain control of his emotions, he waited until the door had closed behind the butler before turning to face the women. “I…I'm sorry, ladies. It seems such a piddling thing, doesn't it, when compared to the rest? But somehow…somehow—”

“Mr. Dexter Rutherford,” Biggs proclaimed, excitement evident in his voice as a dazzling young Tulip of Fashion brushed past him to stand in the middle of the morning room, quizzing glass stuck to his eye.

“I say, Julian, your man was right,” the young exquisite remarked after bowing to the ladies. “Strange sort of bolt hole, I thought at the time, right here smack in the center of Mayfair, but then I said to myself, where else could Cousin Julian go? Surely not to Piccadilly!”

The earl looked at his cousin, his expression more pained than angry. “I trust you will explain that remark, Dexter.”

Crossing his legs carefully after making much ado about the spreading of his coattails before sitting him
self down in the most comfortable chair in the room, Mr. Rutherford expanded graciously, “I was on the hunt for you this morning, of course. I had to listen to a load of drivel from your butler—the man has handed in his notice, by the by, seeing as how he cannot allow his name to be linked with yours now that you are fallen so low—who told me you had hightailed it over here like some madman, without even lingering long enough to change your linen. I see the man was correct,” he ended, looking his cousin up and down and shaking his head in sorrow. “God man, can anything be that bad, that you would run about in your dirt for all the world and his wife to see you?”

“They've asked him to resign from his club,” Rachel put in softly, content to sit back and watch events as they unfolded, only tossing in a word or two at appropriate times to keep the thing lively.

“Oh, that's too bad of them!” Dexter commiserated feelingly. “Though I imagine they'd do much the same to me, except that in the clubs I frequent, such notoriety would probably get me a free round of drinks!”

Lucy, who had been in deep thought ever since Dexter's name had been announced, finally spoke. “They're after you too, aren't they, Dex? And it's that, and not cousinly concern, that has you flying over here this morning.”

Dexter flashed his cousin an insouciant smile. “Sharp as a tack, ain't she, coz? Like Lucy excessively, you know, always have. But she's right, of
course. You know, when I first heard of your plight I thought, couldn't happen to a nicer, more deserving bloke. The whole thing, actually, would have been ever so amusing except that now the world has got the needle into
me
—seeing as how I'm living on m'expectations. Only stands to reason—if you go down, your heir goes right along with you. I should think you would have considered me a little bit before tumbling the chit. Poor sporting of you, Julian, it really was.”

A sound much resembling a low animal growl issued from his lordship's throat as he made to throttle the handsome blond, slim, younger version of himself as that gentleman stepped swiftly to stand behind Lucy's chair seeking petticoat protection in hopes it would save him from a bloody nose.

“Now, now, my lord,” Lucy intervened, rising to her feet and putting out her hands in warning (and barely hiding the smile that lurked at the corners of her mouth). “You can't blame poor Dex for feeling sadly used. Just think—all his props have just been cut out from under him, and when he runs to his beloved cousin for guidance, he finds you wallowing so deeply in your own self-pity that it is no wonder his tact has gone a begging.”

“His
wits
have gone a-begging,” the earl contradicted meanly. “I never thought my own flesh and blood would believe these calumnies broadcast against me.”

“Oh, he doesn't really believe them,” Lucy explained. “It's just that he's upset.”

“I don't? I am?” Mr. Rutherford ventured confusedly. “That is to say, of course I don't! How could I believe such a thing of Julian? After all he's an arrogant bas—that is to say, a high stickler, he's a good old fellow for all that. Towed me out of River Tick more than once, as a mater of fact. I was merely overcome for a moment, wasn't I, Lucy?”

“Exactly.” Lucy nodded emphatically, changing a look out of the corners of her eyes to see that his lordship, only slightly mollified but still very weary, had subsided once more into his chair.

“If I were an enterprising sort of female,” Rachel remarked to no one in particular, “I should be out in the square selling tickets to this circus. Lucy,” she prompted, deciding to stir the pot a bit more, “why don't you tell Mr Rutherford your theory about this whole thing being a conspiracy to have Lord Thorpe sent to the gallows.”

Lucy's eyelids narrowed as she assessed the young man. She had been looking about for a likely suspect behind the plot, and Dexter Rutherford, next in line to the peerage, seemed as good a place as any to start. “I don't think it wise to discuss strategy with our prime suspect, Aunt Rachel,” she intoned heavily.