The Defiant Lady Pencavel (7 page)

“I’m too old to scavenge in the river mud for booty.” Her abigail bent over the book, her round face thoughtful. “Teach me some o’ that Eyetalion, if I’m to go wi’ ‘ee to Italy.”

“I detest it when you’re right.” Melwyn slammed the book shut with a slap. “Nevertheless, I’m in no mood to teach one who had no education in the first place, as servants aren’t bothered to be educated, especially women, as unfortunate as that may be.” She softened her rhetoric. “I’ll teach you later if you behave.”

“‘Tis true. People is afeared we low-borne might get airs above ourselves, isn’t they?” Clowenna fluffed out a feather on her lady’s straw hat. “Instead, lessons be wasted on privileged toffs like ‘ee.”

“Mine weren’t wasted. At least they won’t be if I can tweeze that thorn of a scoundrel out of my life.” She’d almost said “heart” but the idea stunned her. She couldn’t be falling in love with Lord Lambrick. She trembled. Oh the dreadfulness of it! She nearly fell off the soft feather mattress under its intricately carved rococo headboard.

“That be the gist of your melancholy, m’lady?” Clowenna hauled up the chamber pot from under the bed. She opened the closest window. “Are ‘ee that sad his lordship follows about an’ harasses, or that he said he left for Cornwall, an’ cannot harass ‘ee no more?”

Melwyn wrapped her flimsy nightgown around her, tucked her feet under her and tapped her cheek in thought. Torrid lips on hers invaded her memory, making her quiver. “You’ve come to the nucleus of the problem, I must admit.”

“Whatever ‘nucleus’ might mean.” Clowenna leaned out the window. “
Garde à l’eau!”
she shouted before dumping the pot’s contents. “Oh, la, I might o’ hit the muckraker; but at least he’s there to tidy up.”

“I’m certain I’m only distracted by that cur of a lordship’s ruthlessness, nothing more. He only wants a doxy, which I am not.” Melwyn stood, fighting the sag of her heart. “Brush off my finest riding habit. I’m to ride a hired horse in Hyde Park, while Auntie and the duchess trundle along in a carriage, following me as killjoy chaperones.”

“I’m all agog at your finally goin’ out.” Clowenna opened the clothes press where garments were neatly folded. “Don’t embarrass them too much, m’lady. O’ course that be too much to ask.”

Along Rotten Row, through the stately oaks of the park, Melwyn sat awkwardly in the side saddle her aunt insisted she had to utilize. The broad bay mare undulated beneath her, clopping evenly, snorting occasionally, the scent of horse sweat sharp.

Red poppies and yellow buttercups sprinkled the stretch of lawn that surrounded the Serpentine pond where geese fluttered about like...geese in the April air. The flowers’ light fragrance mixed with the mossy smell of the park.

She squirmed on the saddle, the pummel digging into her draped-over leg. At home at Langoron House she rode astride like a boy, though never when her father watched. The groom didn’t mind allowing her this freedom. Still, it rankled her that she was so suppressed as a female she had to think of it as an
allowed
freedom, rather than her due as a person.

In Italy and Greece she’d pass herself off as a widow, since those women were given more leeway in their actions. She laughed softly. Every high-spirited young lady should pretend to have a dead husband.

She kicked the horse’s flank, and the mare cantered away from the following carriage, where Aunt Hedra and the Duchess of Dumfort prattled on about a subject that was far less than stimulating, Melwyn was assured.

She reveled in the motion of the horse, her own swaying hips and shoulders, the breeze caressing her face. The sun warmed her back. Birds squawked in the branches above her, but why did she search the area, the other riders, for the brooding form of Lord Lambrick? He should be well on his way back to Cornwall by now.

“Do wait up, Mellie, darling!” Aunt Hedra stuck her head out the window, her mound of hair barely moving in the wind, her hat flapping atop like a trapped bird. “I’m meeting my Royal Society friend over near Speakers’ Corner. You did want to be introduced, didn’t you?”

Melwyn reined in her horse, turned the mare around and joined the ladies. “You promised me at Vauxhall to meet this illustrious person. I wonder if you tease me, and made him up, Auntie dear.”

“Is this a ghost?” the duchess asked, her ringed fingers clicking together. “How delightful, I love ghosts. Yet no one has shown me an actual one, so that I might be convinced they are real. Regardless, they must be well-behaved spirits; no chain rattlings and the like.”

“No, no, your grace, he is very real; that is, he’s not a ghost.” Aunt Hedra tapped on the coach ceiling. “Head for Speakers’ Corner, please, driver.”

Melwyn followed the coach, still scanning the park for anyone who might be watching her, such as a certain rakehell she had no interest in meeting up with.

“I’m trying to mollify my niece, your grace,” Aunt Hedra whispered in the coach, though Melwyn heard her plainly. “She has foolish notions of grave digging, or some such rot, in foreign climes, and refuses to marry. My poor milquetoast of a brother wishes her safely married, and settled—as all good fathers would.”

“Grave digging? How repulsive. You must nip that in the bud at the onset,” the fatuous
duchess replied in shocked tones. “Is
that
where we uncover the ghost, in a grave? Then I have no wish to be a part of it.”

Melwyn stifled a laugh as they neared the far corner of the park. Here, anyone, quality or no, could stand and expound on any subject they preferred.

“We’ll have to make sure the gel never gets a passport,” Aunt Hedra said with a slap of her fan. “I don’t understand why she is so against accepting her lot in life as a female.”

“My husband, the duke, insists that Bath is full of such uncultivated women, and he’s forbidden me from joining him there because of it; bad influences and all that entails,” the duchess prattled on in her safe ignorance as the coach stopped.

“I’m certain your venerable spouse keeps busy reading religious tracts,” Aunt Hedra replied with an arched mouse skin-covered eyebrow. If she hadn’t shaved off her own, as was the past fashion, she wouldn’t need these bizarre replacements.

The driver jumped from the box, let down the step, and Aunt Hedra alighted.

“Isn’t your niece betrothed to that dashing rascal, Lord Lambrick?” the duchess asked as she squeezed her voluminous skirts from the coach with the driver’s assistance; her outmoded panniers rattled like the chains she’d rebuked. “Though she did seem interested in that young man I introduced her to at Almack’s.”

“I doubt that lamentable boy will hold my niece’s attentions for half a second.” Aunt Hedra motioned to the driver, who now assisted Melwyn down from her mount in the middle of her struggles to dismount by herself. “She requires a decidedly stronger hand.”

“I require no hand but my own,” Melwyn intoned. “Weren’t the Old Tyburn Gallows near here?” She brushed down the skirt of her lavender habit. “There must be many frightening ghouls lurking about, unfairly hanged over the centuries, anxious for revenge.”

The duchess gasped and held a handkerchief to her nose as if the stinking corpses might rise from the earth at that instant. “Upon my word. Young ladies certainly have changed since I was at finishing school. I would have had no knowledge of hangings.” She pulled a small, silver vinaigrette box from her sleeve and opened the hinged lid. “I need my smelling salts.”

Aunt Hedra dragged Melwyn close, painfully close. “You are incorrigible, my dear. Definitely inherited from your regrettable mother’s side of the family. Now, here is my friend, Mr. Fernworthy, the scientist.”

A rotund man stood there, his belly protruding from under a tight waistcoat that strained at its buttons. His nankeen breeches seemed to barely contain his wide thighs. He pinched his pince-nez over a bulbous nose. “My dear Hedra, always so good to see you. Terrible thing about Penpol; liked the man, I truly did. But ashes to ashes and dust to dust, as is written.” He greeted and bowed to the duchess in turn.

“That was five years ago I lost dear Penpol, Fernworthy. Do keep up.” Aunt Hedra sighed, her roughed lips in a twist. “Anyway, I asked you here to speak with my niece and show her the folly of her ways. She wants to go to digs.”

At that moment, a tall man in a black cape ascended the block of stone, designating a speech was about to begin.

“Excavations, to be correct, Auntie. I wish to be part of unearthing ancient treasures, and lost cities, Mr. Fernworthy.” Melwyn scrutinized the man on the block, at first thinking it was Lord Lambrick playing a trick on her. Her heart twinged. But, alas, he wasn’t handsome at all, and distinctly drunk, judging by the way he weaved.

“Eh, are you speaking of archeological excavations?” Fernworthy leered at her. “But you’re a woman, in case you haven’t noticed. No women are allowed there. Bad form to even think of it.”

“Thank goodness.” The duchess clasped her chest. “Grave digging is reprehensible, and filthy. Once someone’s in the ground, they need to stay there.”

“Bodies are needed for medical science!” the drunk on the block announced in a slurred voice. “Even
if
it is against the law.”

“Would any women be allowed to even witness an excavation?” Aunt Hedra persisted, then whispered to her male friend, “Make it sound as odious as possible.”

“Well, I am a botanist not an archeologist, but I can say, without any qualm, that no woman would be allowed anywhere near such a...
odious
undertaking. Too dusty, and dangerous. And I hear the ones in Pompeii have lewd graffiti on the walls.” Fernworthy eyed Melwyn as if she sprouted two noses. “Be a good girl and go home, marry and have a dozen children.”

“Botany? An overrated gardener? Many women have excelled in that vocation, sir. Such as the Countess of Strathmore.” Melwyn smiled, while inside she cringed. She walked away from the supercilious gnome. “And women are multi-talented. I’ve read that in America, the natives strap their babies to their backs, and continue to weave baskets, create beaded necklaces, work in the fields, and skin buffalo.”

“All womanly tasks, so your example falls flat.” Fernworthy snorted, then confided to Hedra, “No one will marry her, unless they’d first cut out her argumentative tongue. They never should have taught women to read, therefore to think, and dare to speak on subjects they know nothing about, very bad form. The Royal Society, founded in the previous century, is full of philosophers who promote knowledge, but not for addle-brained females.”

“I take exception to that, Mr. Fernworthy. Why keep women ignorant, so men may dominate us? It shores up your own insecurities and proves your lack of enlightened moral fiber.” Melwyn glared at the pompous botanist. “I shall send you a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
.”

“And she’s witty, lovely to look at, and luscious to kiss, I’ll be bound,” the drunk crooned as he swayed.

Melwyn eyed the soused speaker in annoyance. “Stay out of this, sir! You are clearly foundering in your cups.”

The stranger jumped from the block, snatched Melwyn around the waist, and ran to a waiting horse hidden behind a tree. He hoisted her up, climbed on behind her, discarded his ugly mask, and rode off, holding her tightly.

“That inebriated fellow just tore off his own face!” The duchess swooned and Fernworthy caught her, but they rolled to the ground like two water-filled sheep’s bladders.

“Very curious, indeed.” Aunt Hedra raised her quizzing glass and glared at the departing stallion. “That man looks peculiarly familiar.”

Melwyn struggled for breath, in much too much shock to think rationally as she wriggled to be free of muscular arms.

Chapter Seven

She felt so soft and warm against him, though she squiggled so much Griffin could barely concentrate on the galloping stallion between his thighs.

“Hold still, you hellion! I don’t wish to harm you.” He grimaced. “But if you keep struggling, I may have to.”

“Unhand me, sir. What in darnation do you think you’re doing?” Miss Pencavel pinched at his fingers through his suede leather gloves. “I am completely flummoxed, and much put out, and these coincidences are becoming pathetic.”

Griffin slowed his horse on the other side of the huge expanse of Hyde Park, near the brick edifice of Kensington Palace, a renovated Jacobean mansion now used by lesser royalty. “I’m kidnapping you, you little idiot.”

“But why? Why do you follow me like a hound dog chasing a bitch in heat? And I’m certainly
not
in heat.” Her narrow shoulders struck back at him in her tailored riding habit jacket.

“Such foul words, my lady.” He reined in the beast. The horse snorted and slapped his tail. Why was he following her, instead of on his way home to Merther Manor? He had no explanation for his actions, except she had bewitched him. He couldn’t possibly care about this bratty baggage. “No prospective groom would be enchanted.”

“You
do
want to marry me, don’t you?” She said it as an accusation. “But I still don’t want to marry anyone, least of all a rapacious ruffian such as you.”

“So you keep telling me. I don’t relish a wildcat in my bed either.” He tamped down the stirrings inside him at her wriggling in his lap. He’d never minded a lusty bedmate, but this young lady was treacherous. “But I think you’ll be safer back home in Cornwall. Promise me you’ll return to your father as soon as possible.”

“I will return when I’m ready and not before.” She jerked at his fingers again. “You have no authority over me, and never will.”

“If you’d let me finish.” The scent of her hair intoxicated him, much more than any brandy. He resisted dipping his nose into her silken locks. “Return home, and we’ll discuss this very inconvenient betrothal, with your father present.”

“You must assure me that you will refuse me in writing, to soothe my father’s sensibilities.” Her words sounded hopeful—and he was strangely disappointed. “I can keep my dowry and sail to Italy the day I turn one and twenty.”