“Let it be a lesson to her, eh?” Tolliver said, chuckling. “What lesson was that, I wonder? How to deliver a jawbreaker?”
“Jawbreaker?” Carruthers echoed indignantly. “And how could he be talking if it was? I vow, you must be half blind. It wasn’t the uppercut that dropped him. It was that curious acrobatic trick of hers.”
“I’ve heard of such things,” said Crenshaw. “Something to do with balance, I collect. All the rage in China or Arabia or some such—and about what you’d expect from those heathen inscrutables.”
“About what you’d expect from Lady Grendel, then,” said Carruthers. “I heard she was born in a Borneo swamp and reared by crocodiles.”
“More like Seven Dials,” Tolliver said. “You heard this lot, cheering her on. They know her. She’s one of their own, spawned in the back-slums of the Holy Land, I don’t doubt.”
“Where’d she learn heathenish fighting tricks, then?” Crenshaw demanded. “And how is it no one ever heard of her before a few months ago? Where’s she been keeping all this time that no one remarked a Long Meg like her? It isn’t as though she’s hard to see, is it?”
He turned back to Vere, who was swatting mud from his trousers. “You’d a close enough look and listen, Ainswood. Any hint of the Holy Land in her speech? London bred, would you say, or not?”
Seven Dials was the black heart of one of London’s seamiest neighborhoods, St. Giles’s parish, which was also known ironically as the Holy Land.
Vere doubted that the Grenville gorgon would have needed to travel beyond its boundaries to learn the kinds of dirty fighting tricks she employed. That he’d discerned no Cockney accent meant nothing. Jaynes had grown up in the back-slums, yet he’d lost all traces of the accent.
Perhaps she had sounded more like a lady than Jaynes did a gentleman. What did it signify? Plenty of lowborn wenches tried to ape their betters. And if Vere could not at the moment recall a single one who’d made it seem so natural, he could not, either, discern a single reason to stand here blithering about it. Covered with mud outwardly and simmering inwardly, he was in no mood to encourage this lot of morons to exercise their limited intellects upon this or any other point.
Leaving them, he made for Brydges Street in a storm of outrage, the likes of which he hadn’t experienced in years.
He had hurried to the curst female’s rescue and found her all but begging for a riot. His timely intervention had beyond question spared her a knife in the back. In reward, he’d received an earful of brimstone and taunting defiance.
Miss Insolence had actually threatened to black both his eyes. She’d threatened him—Vere Aylwin Mallory—whom even that great big-beaked brute Lord Beelzebub couldn’t pound into submission.
Was it any wonder that a man so goaded should adopt the tried and true method of silencing a scold?
And if she didn’t like it, why didn’t she slap his face, as a normal woman would? Did she think he’d hit her—any woman—back? Did she think he meant to ravish her in Vinegar Yard before a mob of drunks, pimps, and whores?
As if he’d ever stoop so low, he fumed. As if he needed to take a woman by force. As if he didn’t have to fight off their advances with cudgels, practically.
He was halfway to Brydges Street when a loud voice penetrated his indignation.
“I say—Ainswood, ain’t it?”
Vere paused and turned. The man calling to him was the one he’d pulled out of the cabriolet’s rampaging way.
“Couldn’t place the name at first,” the fellow said as he reached him. “But then they said something ’bout Dain and m’curst sister and then I recalled who you was. Which I should’ve done in the first place, him mentioning you more than once, but I’ll tell you the truth: I been hurried and harried from pillar to post till I feel like what’s-his-name the Greek fellow with them plaguey Fury things after him, and it’s a wonder my brainworks ain’t closed up shop permanent. So it’s like as not if the tall gal did run me down I wouldn’t know the difference, except maybe it’d be the first rest I had in weeks. All the same, I’m much obliged, since I’m sure it’s a deuced awkward way to go, havin’ your bones crushed under a wheel, and I’d be honored if you’d share a bottle with me.”
He stuck out his hand. “Mean to say, it’s Bertie Trent—me, that is—and pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Lydia shoved the Duke of Ainswood to the darkest corner of her mind and focused on the girl. This was not the first damsel in distress she’d rescued. She usually took them to one of London’s more trustworthy charitable organizations.
Early in the summer, though, Lydia had rescued a pair of seventeen-year-olds, Bess and Millie, who had run away from harsh employers. She’d hired them as maids of all work—or slaveys, as such servants were often called—because her intuition told her they’d suit her. Experience had proven her intuition correct. The same forceful inner voice told her this waif would also do better with her.
By the time Lydia had squeezed her and Susan into the cabriolet, she was certain the girl was not of the laboring classes. Though she spoke with a slight Cornish accent, it was an educated one, and practically the first words that came out of her mouth were, “I can’t believe it’s you, Miss Grenville of the Argus.” Maidservants and simple country girls were unlikely to be familiar with the Argus.
The girl’s name—definitely Cornish—was Tamsin Prideaux, and she was nineteen years old. Lydia had guessed fifteen at first, but on closer inspection the maturity was more evident.
Tamsin was a smallish girl, that was all, except for her eyes, which were enormous and velvet brown. They were also extremely shortsighted, it turned out. Apart from what she wore, her spectacles were the only belongings she had left. They were sadly mangled, with one lens cracked.
She had taken them off shortly after alighting from the coach, Miss Prideaux explained, in order to clean them, because by then they were thickly coated with road dust. There had been a great crush at the coaching inn, and someone had pushed her. The next she knew, someone tore her reticule and carpetbag from her hands so violently that she unbalanced and fell. When she got up from the ground, her box was gone, too. At this point, the bawd had come, feigning sympathy and offering to take her to the Bow Street magistrate’s office to report the crime.
It was an old trick, but even hardened Londoners were assaulted and robbed daily, Lydia assured her.
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” she told the girl as they reached the house. “It could happen to anyone.”
“Except you,” Miss Prideaux said. “You’re up to every rig.”
“Don’t be silly,” Lydia said briskly while hustling her indoors. “I’ve made my share of mistakes.”
She noticed that Susan showed no signs of jealousy, which looked promising. She had also resisted the temptation to play with the new human toy. This was considerate of the mastiff, since the girl had been terrified out of her wits already, and—misinterpreting affectionate canine overtures—might start screaming, which would upset Susan very much. Nonetheless, as they entered the hall, Lydia took precautions.
“This is a friend,” she told the dog while lightly patting Tamsin’s shoulder. “Be gentle, Susan. Do you hear? Gentle.”
Susan licked the girl’s hand, very delicately.
Gingerly, Tamsin petted her.
“Susan is highly intelligent,” Lydia explained, “but you must communicate with her in simple terms.”
“They used mastiffs to hunt wild boar in olden times, didn’t they?” the girl asked. “Does she bite?”
“Devour is more like it,” Lydia said. “Still, you’ve nothing to fear from her. If she grows too playful, tell her firmly, ‘Gentle,’—unless you’d rather be knocked down and drowned in doggy drool.”
Tamsin chuckled softly, which was an encouraging sign. Bess appeared then, and in a little while the guest was borne off for tea, a hot bath, and a nap.
After a quick washing up, Lydia adjourned to her study. Only there, w
ith the door closed, did she let her mask of unshakable confidence slip.
Though she’d seen a great deal of the world—more of it than the majority of London’s most polished sophisticates, male and female—she was not altogether as worldly as the world believed.
No man had ever kissed Lydia Grenville before.
Even Great-Uncle Ste, kindly if misguided, had never done more than pat her on the head—or, when she started sprouting into a giantess, upon the hand.
What the Duke of Ainswood had done was very far from avuncular. And Lydia found she was very far from immune.
She sank into the chair at the desk and pressed her bowed head against the heels of her hands and waited for the hot inner tumult to subside and her neatly ordered, well-controlled world to settle back into place.
It wouldn’t. Instead, the chaotically uncontrollable world of her childhood flooded her mind. The tide of images ebbed and flowed, to settle at last upon the scene most deeply etched in her memory: the time when her world and sense of who she was had changed irrevocably.
She saw herself as she had been then, a little girl sitting upon a battered stool, reading her mother’s diary.
Though Lydia never would, she could have written the tale much in the same style she used for The Rose of Thebes.
London, 1810
It was early evening, several hours after Anne Grenville had been laid to rest in the parish burial ground, when her eldest daughter, ten-year-old Lydia, found the journal. It lay hidden under a shabby collection of fabric scraps intended for patches, at the bottom of her mother’s sewing basket.
Lydia’s younger sister, Sarah, had long since cried herself to sleep, and their father, John Grenville, had gone out to seek solace in the arms of one of his trollops or in a bottle—or both, most likely.
Unlike her sister, Lydia was awake and her blue eyes were dry. She had not been able to cry all day. She was too angry with God, who had taken the wrong parent.
But then, what would God want with Papa? Lydia asked herself as she pushed away a stray lock of golden hair and searched for a patch for Sarah’s pinafore. That was when she found the little book, its pages filled with her mother’s tiny, precise penmanship.
The mending forgotten, she sat huddled by the smoky hearth and read on through the night the vastly puzzling story. The diary was small, and her mama had not made entries faithfully. Consequently, Lydia reached the end before her father staggered home sometime after dawn.
She waited until midafternoon, however, when he was sober and the worst of his ill temper was abating, and Sarah was in the alley playing with a neighbor’s child.
“I found something Mama wrote,” Lydia told him. “Is it true she was a lady once upon a time? And you acted upon the stage once? Or was Mama only making believe?”
He had started hunting in the clothespress for something, but paused and gave her a faintly amused look. “What does it matter what she was?” he returned. “It never did us any good, did it? Do you think we should be living in this hovel if she’d come with a dowry? What does it matter to you, Miss High and Mighty? Fancy yourself a great lady, do you?”
“Is it true that I take after Mama’s ancestors?” Lydia asked, ignoring her father’s sarcasm. She had learned not to let it upset her.
“Ancestors?” He opened a cupboard, shrugged at the meager contents, then slammed it shut. “That’s a grand way of putting it. Is that how your mama explained it?
“She wrote it in a book—a diary, it seems to be,” Lydia persisted, “that she was a lady from an old, noble family. And one of her cousins was a lord—the Marquess of Dain. She wrote that she ran away with you to Scotland,” Lydia continued. “And her family was very angry and cut her off as though she was ‘a diseased branch of the Ballister tree.’ I only want to know whether it’s true. Mama was…fanciful.”
“So she was.” Papa got a crafty look in his eyes, much worse than the mockery and even the dislike he sometimes forgot to conceal.
Then, too late, Lydia realized that she shouldn’t have mentioned the diary.
Then all she could do was want to kick herself. But she hid her feelings—as usual—when he said, “Bring me the book, Lydia.”
She brought it and never saw it again, as she’d expected would happen. It vanished as so many of their belongings had vanished before and continued to do in the following months. Lydia had no trouble figuring out that he’d pawned her mother’s journal and would never reclaim it, or had sold it outright. That was how he got money. Sometime he lost it gambling, and sometimes he won, but Lydia and Sarah seldom saw much of it.
Neither did the people John Grenville owed.
Two years later, despite numerous changes of name and residence, his creditors caught up with him. He was arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark. After he’d lived there for a year with his daughters, he was declared an insolvent debtor and released.
Freedom came too late for Sarah, though. She’d already contracted consumption, and died not long thereafter.
What John Grenville learned from the experience was that England’s climate was unhealthy for him. Leaving thirteen-year-old Lydia with his uncle and aunt, Ste and Effie, and promising to send for the girl “in a few months,” he set sail for America.
On the night of her father’s departure, Lydia began her own journal. The first sadly misspelt entry began: “Papa has gonne—for ever, I fervantly hope—and good riddents.”
Normally, Vere would have fobbed off Trent’s offer of a drink as easily as he shrugged off the fellow’s thanks.
But Vere was not feeling like his normal self.
It had started with the ferret-faced Jaynes’s preaching about carrying on the line—when it was obvious to any moron that the Mallory line was cursed and destined for extinction. Vere had no intention of getting sons, only to stand by helplessly a few years later and watch them die.
Second, the virago of the century had to come rampaging across his path. Then, when Her Brimstone Majesty was done with him, his so-called friends had to debate who she was and where she came from and the technique she’d used to fell him. As though they actually considered her—a female—his adversary. At fisticuffs!
Trent, in contrast, offered a courteous and calm “much obliged” and the sporting reward of a drink.
This was why Vere let Trent follow him home. Then, after a bath and change of clothes—with a sour-faced but mercifully silent Jaynes in attendance—Vere set out to give the younger man a taste of nightlife in London.
This taste couldn’t include entering the abodes of Polite Society, where hordes of marriage-hungry misses pounced upon any male with money and a pulse. The Mallorys’ last hellion would rather be disemboweled with a rusty blade than spend three minutes with a lot of simpering virgins.
The tour included instead establishments where drink and female companionship cost only coins. If this evening His Grace happened to choose places London’s scribblers were known to frequent, and if Vere spent most of his time listening not to Trent but to the other customers, and if the duke came to taut attention on the two occasions he heard a certain woman’s name mentioned, these matters easily escaped Sir Bertram Trent’s notice.
They wouldn’t have escaped Jaynes, but he was an annoyingly sharp fellow, while Trent…was not.
“The greatest nitwit in the Northern Hemisphere” was how Lord Dain had described his brother-in-law.
It didn’t take Vere long to perceive that Beelzebub had put the case mildly, to say the least. In addition to getting himself into sentences the Almighty with the aid of all His angels would never find a way out of, Trent demonstrated a rare talent for getting under horses’ hooves or directly beneath falling objects, for colliding with obstacles both human and inanimate, and for toppling from whatever he happened to be standing, sitting, or lying upon.
Initially, all Vere felt toward him—in the brief intervals when his mind took a breather from fretting and fuming about blue-eyed
dragons—was amazement, mingled with amusement. Furthering their acquaintance was the farthest thing from his mind.
He changed his mind later in the evening.
Not long after exiting the Westminster Pit—where they’d watched Billy the Terrier perform the astounding feat of killing a hundred rats in ten minutes, as advertised—they met up with Lord Sellowby.
He had formed part of Dain’s circle in Paris and was well acquainted with Trent. But then, Sellowby was acquainted with everybody and every single thing they did. He was one of England’s foremost collectors and disseminators of gossip.
After they’d exchanged greetings, he sympathetically enquired whether “Your Grace had sustained any permanent injuries as a result of today’s historic encounter with Lady Grendel? In glancing over the betting book at White’s, I counted fourteen separate wagers regarding the number of teeth you had lost in the—er—altercation.”
At that moment, Sellowby was in imminent danger of losing all of his teeth, along with the jawbone they were attached to.
But before Vere could initiate hostilities a red-faced Trent burst into an indignant rebuttal. “Broke his teeth?” he cried. “Why, it were only a tap on the chin, and anyone could see he were only playactin’—tryin’ to make a joke and turn the crowd good-tempered. If you’d been there, Sellowby, you’d’ve seen what a mob of ugly-lookin’ customers come rushin’ in from everywhere, primed for head-breakin.’ Not to mention you seen for yourself what my sister done in Paris, which shows how females are when they get worked up—and this one almost as tall as I am with the biggest mastiff bitch you ever seen….”
Trent went on in this vein for several minutes, without letting Sellowby get a word in edgeways. When the baronet finally stopped to refill his lungs, His Lordship hastily took his leave.
For a moment—and the first time in years—Vere was rendered speechless himself.