The beleaguered Lord Bourne Page 9

  “He most assuredly will not!” replied a feminine voice, and the three small men turned to see Miss Ernestine Bundy descending the staircase, twin flags of color lighting her otherwise sallow face. “Not that I approve of you—er—gentlemen for one moment, you understand. If it were up to me I’d have you all out of here before your feet even knew they were moving. But it was Miss Jane—I mean, Lady Bourne—who had the hiring of you, and it is she and only she who can have the firing of you. It is only fitting—as his lordship, being away in the wilds of Spain for these past years, must surely have forgotten. Such a breach of etiquette,” she sighed, shaking her head at the earl’s indiscretion. “Lord knows I’ll have my hands full trying to keep this household within the bounds of courtesy and propriety.”

  “Whew, boys, there’s a ’ell of a goer, iffen ever Oi clapped my peepers on a finer piece!” Bob pronounced, awestruck, as he watched Miss Bundy’s departing back disappearing into the morning room. “Kinda puts me in mind of mine aunt.”

  “Yer not sayin’ that rum blowen is anythin’ like that bawd in Tothill who calls herself an abbess—’er wit that covey of barber chairs and bats she calls ’er girls?”

  Ben cuffed Del’s ear in reprimand—for how dare he call Miss Bundy a whore? Miss Bundy was a fine lady, that’s what she was; and if she were an abbess, he’d bet his eye and Betty Martin she’d have a better stable than one filled with bawds common enough to be called bats or barber chairs! To the uneducated, like Renfrew, who was listening to this interchange with great interest from the other side of the drawing-room door, a barber chair was a whore so common she allowed a whole parish to sit in her to be trimmed, and a bat—why, that unfortunate creature was no more than an ugly whore who could only get a customer after dark, when no one could see her face. In consideration, it might be seen as a good thing that Renfrew’s education was lacking in this area, for not even Miss Bundy would prevail if Renfrew got on his high horse and decided Ben, Del, and Bob must go.

  Del, holding his injured ear and sniveling into his sleeve, apologized to Ben, obviously the leader of the small gang, and peace once more reigned in the foyer. The three then took up positions on the long bench and rubbed their hands in eager anticipation of the vails the Bourne guests would offer them when they visited, and the revenge they would wreak on any so silly as to try to slip them a bum copper.

  KIT WAS CHIRPING MERRY by noon. By three he was half seas over, and by five of the clock he was quite in his altitudes, which was how Ozzy Norwood found him when he sauntered into the club.

  “Kit, old fellow, how goes it?” Mr. Norwood inquired, genially, sitting himself down in the chair next to his friend. “Dashed early in the day to be so deep in your cups, isn’t it? What’s to do? Surely it can’t be your lovely wife who has you diving into the bottom of a bottle—and more than one, by the looks of it. What’s forward? Bad news from the Peninsula?”

  Kit looked up at his friend from beneath his furrowed eyebrows. “Ozzy,” he remarked, spearing the man with his eyes, “you’ve known me almost all my life. Can you recall any great sin, any terrible crime, I may have committed in that time that I should be so cruelly persecuted now?”

  “Persecuted, Kit?” Ozzy repeated, clearly at sea. “Nonsense, man. You’re an earl, you’re neck deep in money and estates, and your wife is the prettiest thing I’ve seen in three Seasons. You’re blessed, man, not persecuted.”

  “She hired a black giant named Tiny and a dwarf who calls himself Goliath to man my stables. I’ve got three lowlife felons guarding my front door and a pregnant tweeny sniffling and sniveling her way up and down the hallways, and heaven only knows what other surprises await me in the remainder of the staff. And if that’s not bad enough, I now have a wife who seduces me and then says it’s my fault! What do you call that, Ozzy, rolling in the lap of happiness and pure bliss?”

  While Kit’s first comments did no more than extract a small, bemused smile from his friend, his last statement had Ozzy eagerly pulling his chair closer, his tongue nearly hanging out as he silently urged his friend to continue his monologue.

  Lord Bourne leaned back in his chair, cradling his glass between his fingers. “Ah, I have got your attention, have I, Ozzy? Were I not so well and truly corned, I should die before admitting it, but Jennie has me as you see me, totally beyond thought of my own dignity. I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he went on, leaning confidingly in his friend’s direction, “but I find myself in quite a quandary. It seems I had a bit of a nightmare last night—something I won’t go into now—and my dear virgin bride, overhearing my calls of terror, came into my chamber to comfort me. Came into my bed, actually,” he added as a sort of afterthought. “Anyway,” he pressed on, pulling a face as he tried to concentrate his mind on what he was saying, “I woke up to the sight of my half-naked wife with her arms around me. Well, one thing led to another, so to speak, and suddenly we…er, never mind.”

  “Are you quite sure?” Ozzy inquired shakily, trying not to sound as eager as he felt. “Really, old man, I’m more than willing to listen to whatever you have to say. Go ahead, Kit, it’s me, your old schoolboy chum—pour your heart out!”

  Kit was drunk, but he wasn’t totally beyond rational thought. Smiling a secret smile, he said shrewdly, “Use your imagination, Ozzy, if you cannot rely on your own experience. Perhaps you may have read a book—I do believe I once recall your saying you have read a book—that will explain the interlude that followed.”

  “Spoilsport,” Ozzy commented gloomily, pushing out his full lower lip in a disappointed pout.

  Kit laughed, although his humor did not last long. “Down, Ozzy, you’re making a spectacle of yourself, salivating like that. I don’t know why I am talking about this with you anyway, seeing as how you’re not married and are unacquainted with the vagaries of the female mind.”

  “I am not. I have three sisters, you know,” Ozzy pointed out mulishly. “You’re the one lacking in experience—I’ve years of trying to cope with females.”

  “And have you learned anything?” Kit was so desperate as to ask.

  Ozzy nodded his head vigorously. “I learned not to try to understand ’em. They’re kind of like good whiskey—you don’t try to analyze how it came to be, you just enjoy it.”

  “Yes, well, that may work well enough for you, but then you’re not sitting here getting pie-eyed trying to figure out how you came to be the guilty party just because you made love to your own wife—and mighty good lovemaking it was, if memory serves. Well, I’ll tell you this,” Kit said earnestly, his liquid libations making him a little bit pot-valiant, “it’ll be a cold day in hell before I’ll let that silly chit dictate to me! I am master in my own house, and I’ll not have some wet-behind-the-ears child cast me in the role of villain. In fact,” he said, rising rather unsteadily from his chair, “I think I’ll go home now and tell her so. And I’ll jolly well toss her three footmen onto the flagway, just for good measure!”

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” came a silky voice from behind Kit. “Ozzy, mind if I join you? It seems my friends are late.”

  Ozzy got to his feet and extended his hand to the modishly attired gentleman who had spoken. “Dean, how good to see you. Where have you been? It’s been an age.”

  Kit subsided into his chair, somewhat awestruck by the sight of the man Ozzy introduced as Dean Ives, a tallish, thin young sprig of fashion whose top-of-the-trees appearance would have made Leon weep with ecstasy. Mentally comparing the dashing Mr. Ives with the rather short, chubby Mr. Norwood, Kit could find little that would make anyone believe these two had a single thing in common. Yet, Kit noticed as the two fell into conversation, it seemed as if they were almost bosom chums—or had been until Kit returned to town and began monopolizing so much of Ozzy’s time.

  Why this friendship should bother Kit he had no idea, except for the rather selfish one that had him realizing that he had always quite enjoyed the near hero worship with which he had always been treated by Ozzy. Pe
rhaps that is why he regarded Dean Ives in a rather cynical light, listening to the man’s conversation for no more than a few minutes before deciding him to be an overly ambitious, vainglory sort of fellow, and a moody chap into the bargain. I’ll bet he used to tie cats to trees and light their tails, he thought nastily, curling his lip. He couldn’t suppose anyone more totally opposite to the mild-mannered, foot-in-mouth Ozzy if he tried.

  It may have been this uneasiness, or this selfishness, that changed Kit’s mind and had him accompanying Ozzy and Dean on a round of drinking and gambling rather than returning home to have it out with his wife. Kit didn’t know.

  He did know, even as tipsy as he was, that it was definitely the lesser of two evils.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TWO DAYS HAD PASSED since “it,” as Jennie tended to think of the incident, had happened—two days during which she had spent her time variously devising ways to avoid her husband and wishing he would present himself so they could have it out once and for all.

  At eleven of the clock on the morning of the second day, Renfrew entered the drawing room and presented his mistress with a heavily embossed card “Miss Lucille Gladwin to see you, my lady,” he said, making her perusal of the calling card an unnecessary exercise. “Shall I tell her you are not at home?”

  “Lucille Gladwin?” Jennie pondered aloud, tapping the edge of the card against her teeth. “Lucy Gladwin!” she exclaimed at last, her memory having been sufficiently nudged so that she recalled a distant cousin named Lucy—a rather rough-and-tumble tomboy, if her recollections were correct. “Oh, dear, can it really be she? Send her in at once, Renfrew. She’s m’cousin, you know, and I shouldn’t like to think we’ve kept her waiting.”

  Jennie rose and moved toward the door, her hands held out in front of her, and Lucy hastened into her cousin’s embrace. “Thank goodness, Jane,” the bubbly brunette vision in stylish pink-and-green sprigged muslin exclaimed. “For a moment there I thought you had forgotten me, not that you’d ever be so shabby as to forget the cousin who nearly drowned you in the lake. But, I tell you sincerely, it gave me quite a turn to be standing out there in the foyer with those footmen of yours. I had the uneasy feeling they were toting up the price of every stitch on me and planning their resale in Petticoat Lane.”

  “Not really, Lucy,” Jennie laughed, leading her cousin to the settee, “but I would advise you to give them generous vails on the way out if you ever plan to set foot in Berkeley Square again.”

  “Jane, dear, I can’t believe it! Look at you, you’re all grown up!” Lucy exclaimed, bouncing up and down on the settee like a child who’d just been offered a treat. “I’m prodigiously sorry I haven’t been to see you sooner, but Papa had banished me to the hinterlands for some folly or other I committed—I disremember right now which one it was—and I only just saw the wedding announcement in the Gazette when I returned to town and caught up on my reading of the back editions. One must always strive to stay au courant with the gossip, you know. So tell me, however did you snare an earl? I’m hanging out for one myself, you understand, and making a dashed mishmash of it so far, so you see my interest is truly self-serving.”

  Jennie made a face. “Actually, it was quite easy, Lucy. I just got caught in an animal trap, impulsively impersonated a village lass, was then punished for my sins by means of the earl’s haphazard attempt at seduction, and ta-da—I’m a countess! It was really prodigiously simple.”

  “He compromised you!” Lucy chortled happily, clapping her hands in glee. “Oh, how delightfully romantic. And now, of course, the two of you are madly in love and about to live happily ever after. Jane, you always were the lucky one.”

  “And you were always twice the dreamer I was,” Jennie returned, forcing a laugh.

  Lucy was not so overcome with her visions of true love not to notice the unhappiness in her cousin’s eyes. “Jennie,” she inquired concernedly, using her childhood pet name for her younger relative, “I know Christopher Wilde has something of a reputation as a womanizer, but I have it on the best authority that he has not so much as a single dasher in keeping since his return from the war. Oh, dear,” she went on, seeing Jennie’s frozen expression, “I fear I have shocked you.”

  “Not really, Lucy,” Jennie assured her. “Association with Kit has taken me a long way from the schoolgirl miss you remember. I am a woman now, a wife—more’s the pity.”

  Lucy sensed a juicy story somewhere and leaned forward, intent on prying every single detail out of her cousin, which was not a difficult thing to do considering Jennie’s unhappiness and her natural reluctance to confide in Miss Bundy.

  Within a very few minutes Lucy, wearing a sympathetic expression worthy of the most compassionate father confessor, had the whole of it, and her indignation knew no bounds. “That cad,” she pronounced severely. “That unmitigated cad! Well, I can see I have arrived on the scene none too soon. How dare Kit—I shall call the monster Kit, since you do—incarcerate you in this great mausoleum whilst he gads about town like some carefree bachelor out on a spree? And then to use you like some sort of unpaid mistress—why, it is the outside of enough, I vow it is. Shabby, absolutely shabby!”

  Jennie, although embarrassed at having bared her innermost secrets to Lucy, cousin or not, was intrigued. Here, she thought, was a true woman of the world—a woman who had three London Seasons beneath her belt. Surely Lucy would know just what to do, just how she should go on. If she were to put herself in Lucy’s hands—as her cousin had already so kindly suggested—Kit would never know what hit him!

  “’ere ya go, dearie, tea an’ cakes, jus’ like that old buzzard Renfrew said fer us ta bring ya. Sit up now, dearies, and ’ave at it.” Lucy raised her head at this interruption and her mouth dropped open in amazement at the sight of two mirror-image dyed-blond women of indeterminate years, their faces made up like the lowest of painted harridans and their full figures tightly contained in the uniforms of parlor maids. They looked, she thought dizzily, like characters from one of Sheridan’s lesser plays—a farce, no doubt.

  Jennie looked up at the newcomers, smiled kindly at their appearance in the uniforms she had ordered made for them, and bade them put their burden on the table. “Thank you, Tizzie. You too, Lizzie, although I must remind you once again, it is not necessary for you to follow along in Tizzie’s footsteps constantly. You must learn to operate independently of your sister sooner or later. Not that I’m reprimanding you,” she added hastily as Lizzie seemed about to burst into tears.

  The maids dropped elegant curtsies worthy of a matched set of duchesses and departed, watched all the way by the greatly intrigued Lucy, who felt she had somehow been catapulted onto the stage at Drury Lane. “I give up, Cousin,” she said when at last she could find her voice, “Who or what were they? If I had been drinking, which I must point out is something I never do since that sad incident at Vauxhall last year, I would vow I was seeing double.”

  Jennie laughed, Lucy’s bewildered expression banishing the last of her doldrums. “Those were my new housemaids. I have hired quite a bit of staff since my arrival in London. Tizzie and Lizzie are ‘resting’—as actresses say when they are out of work. Of course, since they have been resting for the past eighteen months or more, I do believe they should revise that and say merely that they have chosen to retire. Not that they had not tried to find employment on the stage; but there is little call for identical twins nowadays—especially female twins ‘on the windy side of forty,’ as Tizzie explains it. The poor dears were desperate, you know. I had no other option but to employ them. After all, only a heartless creature could cast two such helpless lambs out into the street.”

  Lucy dissolved in giggles as her memory was jogged by Jennie’s story. “Oh, Jennie, how this takes me back! Do you recall the summer you were ten and I was sent—much against my wishes, you know, since I was all of fourteen—to bear you company while our fathers went gadding off somewhere in the wilds to hunt some poor defenseless animals? I’ll never f
orget Simpkins, the groom you employed in your papa’s absence. He was wanted for murder or something, wasn’t he?”

  “He was not!” Jennie protested vehemently. “Well,” she temporized, “I guess he was, at least a little bit, wasn’t he? But it was all a misunderstanding, you know. Anyone of any sense could see Simpkins wouldn’t harm a fly. And I was proved correct in the end, if you’ll recall, and Simpkins was exonerated from all charges. He’s still on the estate, you know,” she added complacently, “although Papa refused to keep him on as groom after he fed Papa’s favorite stallion half his pork pie one afternoon when he was too fatigued to fork out a new load of hay. Simpkins is now in sole charge of Papa’s guns and fowling pieces—it seems he has an uncanny knack for firearms.”

  “I wonder why,” Lucy pondered, tongue in cheek.

  Wiping her hand daintily on a napkin after disposing of two of the sugar cakes served on the tray, Jennie changed the subject and began pumping Lucy on the various social doings currently on the agenda in town, and her cousin was soon prattling nineteen to the dozen about the many routs, balls, and parties the two of them could attend just as soon as she put it about that the new Countess of Bourne was ready to enter Society. “Lady Sefton’s card party is tonight, and my invitation extends to include a second person. It will be prodigiously boring, but Sefton is such good ton, you know. What say we launch you this very evening? After all, if you wait for that disagreeable husband of yours to take you about, all your new gowns will be sadly out of date.”

  Talk of gowns soon led the two women upstairs for a critical perusal of the countess’s new wardrobe. Goldie, sitting in a corner where she was repairing a rent in one of Jennie’s underslips with large stitches and unmatched thread, was quietly amazed at the thoroughness with which Miss Gladwin inspected and disposed of first one outfit and then another, at last deciding on a demure yet stylish white silk frock decorated with blue stitching at the neckline and hem.