The Wicked Marquess (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

Whatever Miss Russell had anticipated that Lord Baird might show her, it was not the secret passages that honeycombed the abbey. One corridor linked the library and the master bedroom, another led to the roof. Priest holes and hides, secret rooms and tunnels – if none of these served, the old medieval brickwork drains could be used as an emergency means of escape.

Quite naturally, Miranda had to inspect the passages herself. She was fascinated by a staircase hidden in the thick old walls, and crawled into the hiding place that was accessed by removing three steps; she followed a narrow passage that led to a small room hidden behind the beams of the roof, the walls thickly lined with ancient rotting cloth meant to muffle sound. She drew the line, however, at entering the hide that lay between the floor of a garderobe chamber and the roof of a bread oven.

“Astonishing!” she said. “Your ancestors must have been an adventurous lot.”

“Or architecturally ill-advised.” Miranda acted as enthusiastic about the abbey’s secrets as Benedict and his brother once had been, to their nursemaids’ horrified dismay. “A great many of these nooks and crannies are result of renovations. We recently discovered a staircase hidden behind a hinged pilaster. It led to two attics that had been entirely forgotten.”

“Was anything of importance found?” Miranda pushed her hair back out of her eyes.

 “There were no chests of hidden treasure, no moldering skeletons. Just dead mice and bat droppings and a great deal of dust.” The marquess raised his lantern and guided his companion into a dark corridor that had been created when a new outside wall was built around the main part of the Tudor building. He lifted up the floorboards to reveal a black space some eight feet deep. Miranda followed him down a ladder into the long disused regions beneath the house.

The vast cathedral-like area was dark and damp. The lantern cast only a small oasis of light. Rats skittered in the shadows. Miranda pressed close to Benedict’s side. He squelched an impulse to set down his lantern and back her up against a filthy crumbling wall and get on with the proceedings interrupted by Percy Pettigrew.

With self-control that the Polite World would have found astonishing in Sinbad – and which Sinbad was rather startled by himself – he instead guided her through the vast deserted spaces that had been state rooms in the abbey’s Tudor incarnation. Much of the fine old brickwork remained. Another passage led away from the sealed-off portions of those old rooms, beneath two first floor bedrooms, and over the roof of the family chapel on the first floor. Benedict tugged an ancient nail. A section of the chimney slid aside.

Miranda stepped through the opening and into the library. “That was wonderful! How fortunate you are to have such a home.”

Benedict would not ask again if she cared to share it with him. “Ah, yes. I am the owner of an authentic ruined abbey, with all the appropriate accoutrements. Perhaps I should adopt a costume designed on Gothic lines, and gaze up at the Gothic battlements, and think Gothic thoughts.”

Miranda laughed. “There is a great deal of difference between building a crumbling tower in one’s garden and possessing the real thing.”

So there was. For one thing, the abbey cost an exorbitant amount of money to maintain. Benedict doubted Miss Russell would be interested in such mundane details.

Odette, conversely, would be most interested in the details of his betrothal to Miss Russell. Benedict was in no hurry to endure a confrontation with his aunt. He settled on an ancient carved box chair decorated with mythological figures entwined with flowers and birds and beasts, and proceeded to entertain his houseguest with an irreverent overview of the family, from the Baron’s Revolt and the Magna Carta through various battles and grievances and revolts, and Henrys and Edwards and Richards, up to the time of Henry VIII and the dissolution of the abbeys, with a brief aside on papal dispensations and beheaded wives.

Miranda reclaimed her own carved high-backed chair and listened with a rapt expression that had little to do with her host’s tales. Certainly those tales were fascinating, but it was the narrator himself who held her so bespelled. He was irresistible even decked about with cobwebs. Miranda suspected he would be even more irresistible wearing nothing at all.

Thousands of women had seen Sinbad in a state of nature, if gossip was correct. Sinbad had seen
her
almost entirely unclad. Had touched her. Had suckled at her breast.

Gracious, but the library had grown heated. Miranda fanned herself. Benedict stopped talking. He regarded her quizzically.

“What exciting lives your family has led. Mine can boast nothing comparable,” said Miranda, before she remembered what her family
could
boast; to wit, faithless females. “Do tell me more about Lady Dulcibella!” she added hastily.

Benedict wondered what had stained her cheeks so pink. “Why am I not surprised that you are curious about our ghost? Lady Dulcibella had a Puritan upbringing. Marriage was permitted by St. Paul only as a way to make up for the weakness of the flesh. ‘Better to marry than to burn.’” He paused. “This may not be a conversation I should be having with you.”

Miranda wanted very much to have this conversation. She must convince her host that she was, if not a woman of the world, old enough to be seduced. “Talking is the least of the things we should not have done together. Continue, if you will.”

Benedict dragged his memory away from those other things they had done together. “The Puritans viewed sexual relations as a dangerous and corruptive force introduced to humanity by the Devil,” he continued, not without some sympathy for this point of view. “They concluded that such activities were necessary for reproduction but declared it sinful to derive any enjoyment from the act. Women were considered temptresses because they enticed men to lose control.

“Oh?” Miranda said.

Benedict overlooked the interruption. “Females and males were permitted equal freedom from age three to about age twelve. From that point on, the girl was closely watched both day and night. Once a woman married, these restrictions might or might not be partly relaxed, at her husband’s whim. A husband could do anything with or to his wife that he wished. He might well have killed her if he suspected her of adultery.”

Miranda knew about adultery. Her forebears had practiced it with regularity. “Poor Lady Dulcibella,” she murmured.

Had someone seen fit to watch Miranda day and night, Benedict might never have met her. He could not make up his mind whether or not that would have been a bad thing. “Poor Lady Dulcibella indeed, but not for the reasons you might think. Her family made a political marriage for her, to my ancestor Robin. That same ancestor had, in the course of a stormy political career, managed to annoy both Cromwell and King Charles. Fortunately, no one stayed angry with Robin for long. During the King’s exile, Robin and the Duke of Buckingham spent considerable time with him at a country estate where they hunted and played at games of sport and gained reputations for laziness and debauchery.”

Miranda suspected where this tale was headed. “Your ancestor was—”

“A rakehell,” supplied Benedict. “Charles’s courtiers followed the example of their king. It was the age of the
maítresse
, the mistress, and every gentleman who wanted to be taken seriously had to possess at least one. Charles usually had several at a time. And spaniels as well, though unlike the mistresses the dogs were not held responsible for society’s moral decline. Marital monogamy was considered fit only for commoners.”

“A viewpoint,” guessed Miranda, “that Lady Dulcibella did not appreciate.”

“Lady Dulcibella boxed Buckingham’s ears when he grew too familiar.” Benedict rose from his chair to stroll around the room. “She had a temper, from all accounts. Those same accounts inform us that she genuinely loved her Robin, as he loved her, despite their differences. As result of those differences, Robin spent a great deal of his time with the King and Court, and Lady Dulcibella spent a great deal of her time here.” He paused by the almanac. “Then the Great Plague came to England. London was no stranger to the plague, but this was a particularly virulent strain. People caught it and died within hours. Sufferers were locked in their houses, along with their families. Cats and dogs were said to spread the disease, so the Lord Mayor ordered them all killed. The King and Court fled to the country, most doctors and priests followed, and anyone with the means to leave London did so quickly. For Robin it was already too late.”

Miranda leaned forward in her chair. “He died of the Black Death?”

“Robin had visited one of the poorer sections of London, and was exposed to the sickness there. When the telltale lumps appeared, he sequestered himself and wrote a last letter to his wife. Considerable time passed before the missive reached the abbey. Letters from London were treated as if they were poisonous; were scraped, heated, soaked and aired to eliminate any pestilential matter than might somehow be attached.”

“And when she did receive the letter,” sighed Miranda, “she flung herself from the parapet, her heart quite broke.”

“So goes one version of the story. Another claims that she was hurled from the battlements. By whom, the tales don’t say. Odette claims to have seen her ghost.”

 Miranda had heard enough of sudden deaths and shattered hearts. “I hear there is to be a prizefight in the neighborhood.” 

Benedict frowned. Miranda had spoken to no one but Colum, so far as he knew. Colum was not likely to have talked to Miranda about prizefights. Colum seldom talked of anything other than his plants.

Surely Benedict could not resent his gardener, even if Miranda did seem to like Colum better than himself. Before he could comment she added, “Between The Cornish Bruiser and The Black.”

Did her voice sound wistful? “No! You may not attend. I will send Jem so that he may provide you with a blow-by-blow account. You must content yourself with that.”

Miranda suspected contentment was not in her nature. Look at her mama and grandmama. Worse, look at how she had betrayed Benedict with Mr. Hazelett, for surely that was what she had done. Would not kissing other gentlemen, even in the interest of scientific inquiry, qualify as such?

Perhaps it was not truly a betrayal since she and Benedict were not truly betrothed. But they were betrothed in the eyes of the world, and so her behavior had been unconscionable.

But not half so unconscionable as she intended. Miranda rose and shook out her rumpled dress, which had not benefited from crawling through dark passages and exploring hidden rooms. “That is very kind of you,” she said. “But you must not tell my uncle or your aunt or we will both be in the suds.”

There were a great many things Benedict did not intend to tell her uncle or his aunt. He grasped Miranda’s elbow and brushed debris from her skirt.

The mere pressure of his fingers made tingles run up her arm. Miranda had not experienced the slightest tingle when Mr. Hazelett embraced her. She realized it was entirely possible that no one else would ever make her tingle again.

She took a deep breath. “It is true that I do not mean to marry, but all the same I find I would like to learn more about—” Delicately, she paused.

Benedict dropped her elbow as if he had hold of a hot coal. “You would like to learn more about what? The abbey’s history? Lady Dulcibella? The lives of noble ladies in Restoration times?”

Miranda felt like swatting him. The man was being deliberately obtuse. “I have decided I can hardly say we do not suit when it is obvious we
do
. You are not to worry, because I will come up with something else. In the meantime, just because I do not mean to take a husband does not mean that I care to remain—  Ah! In other words, I wish you would continue with my ravishment, my lord.”

She
had
meant what Benedict thought she had. Miranda was standing very close to him, her eyes demurely downcast.

Her thick lashes lay against her cheek. Her scent filled his nostrils. Her breasts would have fit perfectly into his palms, had he not kept his hands firmly clenched. “Are you asking me to make love to you?” Benedict inquired, just to make certain that his various tribulations were not muddling his brain.

Miranda pondered the distinctions between ‘ravishment’, ‘seduction’, and now ‘making love’. “If you please.”

If he pleased? Benedict would have been more than pleased to take her right there in his great carved chair, if not for his blasted conscience, which was jumping about upon his shoulder and shrieking warnings in his ear. “Do you know what you are asking?” His expression was so harsh and forbidding that Miranda almost quailed.

Tipoo Sultan would not have quailed, even before an onrushing tiger. Benedict was not so ferocious as that. “I know that I liked what you were doing when Mr. Pettigrew burst it on us,” said Miranda. “I wish you would do it again.”

God save him from innocents, and tittle-tattles, and the complications attendant upon involvement therewith. “Then you had better ask someone to further explain the business!” Benedict flung himself out of the room before he abandoned what remaining fragments of honor he might still possess.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Nonie lay on a chocolate red daybed ornamented with floral arabesques. She was awaiting the results of a decoction of thistle and wine. Thus far the distillation had done little for her nervous belly, but she was enjoying a fantasy featuring an Elizabethan gentleman with a dashing moustache and pointed beard, his long fair hair fastened back with colorful ribbons, his features as perfect as the archangel’s must have been. His high-collared cloak was fashioned from gold-embroidered fabric, faced with pearl embroidery and lined with silk. The sleeves of his indigo satin doublet were slashed to reveal fine white linen beneath. He wore long velvet breeches; spurred boots that fitted to the calf before widening out to a deep cuff; a soft-brimmed hat with ostrich plumes.

A long Toledo walking sword hung in a silver scabbard against his thigh. Diamonds, cameos, and turquoise adorned his fingers. On his thumb gleamed a great signet ring. From one ear dangled a golden bauble, most likely a love token from the lady of his heart. He winked, and disappeared.