Кейси Майклс – An Improper Arrangement (страница 9)
“Good morning to you, sir,” the valet chirped cheerfully, his voice setting up an anvil chorus between his employer’s ears. “I have been waiting without, the tray at the ready, until I heard you moan—er, sounds of you stirring, sir. I brought coffee, against my better judgment, as I believe your stomach would do better with Adam’s ale in your present condition.”
“Water? You want me to drink water? Pour the coffee, Horton, or hand over the pot. As for whatever is beneath those covers, thank you, but no.”
Only after he’d singed his tongue on some of the hot, dark liquid did he ask, “What time is it, Horton?”
“Nearly noon, sir,” the valet said, his voice containing just a hint of censure. Horton was by and large a good valet, but he did on occasion assume a proprietary role, especially when Gabriel’s inconsideration of altering the man’s schedule came into play.
“All of noon, Horton? Shame on me.”
“Indeed, sir. Your friend the baronet sends his apologies, but as you didn’t seem to wish to seek him out last night, and the fun you promised him seems to be over, he departed just after breakfast this morning. He did also leave behind a note.”
So saying, Horton handed it over.
“The seal is cracked,” Gabriel said, looking up at the valet, who quickly busied himself removing the offending tray, leaving only the small silver pot behind.
“It may have been urgent, sir.”
Gabriel squinted at the note, attempting to make out Rigby’s chicken scrawl.
Horton lent his assistance by throwing open the draperies blocking out the noonday sun.
Servants could torture a man more than any regiment of foreign gaolers.
“Thank you, Horton.” Gabriel, although blinking rapidly, refused to acknowledge the man’s punishment. “There’s nothing else in the note save what you’ve already told me.”
“Which is why I waited until you awoke on your own, sir, yes,” Horton answered, as if explaining something to a child. “The duchess asks that you amuse Miss Neville this afternoon, as Her Grace will be occupied with the duke. She thought a drive about the estate would be pleasant, and that you and Miss Neville could become better acquainted.”
“Yes, that’s precisely what I need after a night of injudicious imbibing. Stilted conversation of no merit combined with a bumpy drive to soothe this damned headache.”
Even Horton apparently had no answer to that one. “Your bath is prepared in the dressing room, along with a suit of clothes I deemed appropriate for a day in the country.”
“Since Her Grace has undoubtedly already informed her guest of the excursion, please see that Miss Neville’s maid is told to have her ready and downstairs by one. And thank you. What would I do without you, Horton?”
“It’s not to be thought of, sir,” he replied, blushing to the very crown of his nearly bald head.
Horton had been with Gabriel for several years before his master had gone off to war, only to come home looking overly thin and haggard, and sporting bruises too fresh to have been left over from the day of the doomed battle. The valet had fussed over him, Gabriel had allowed it and now the man seemed to believe he’d gained some sort of privilege above that of a mere employee.
Which he had, and deservedly so.
An hour later, when the chime of the hall clock struck one, the sound buried somewhere under the squawking and wing fluttering going on in the grand-entrance-cum-aviary, Gabriel trotted down the staircase and opened, then quickly closed the door behind him, expecting to see Miss Neville dutifully waiting for him at the main entrance.
“Georgie, have you seen the young lady?” he asked a shirt-sleeved youth industriously cleaning one of the cages. “And please tell me that’s not today’s newspapers from London you’re laying in there.”
“Yes, sir, the last one. Mr. Hemmings always hands ‘em to me onct the family’s lunched. All they’s good for, Mr. Hemmings says, onct they’s read.”
“Wonderful.” The newspapers might be two days old before they reached Cranbrook Chase, but everything remained new until it was learned. “And the young lady?”
“Miss Neville? Yes, sir. She said as how to tell you she’d be outside, away from the moltin’, and you was to find her out there because you sure as check wasn’t goin’ to find her in here.”
Clearly the woman wasn’t shy about voicing her opinions. Gabriel smiled as he headed outside to see Miss Neville pacing back and forth in front of his town curricle. Both the groom holding his bays’ heads and his tiger watched her progress rather as if they were viewing a tennis match at Wimbledon.
She certainly was a sight to behold.
She wore a short, tight dark blue jacket that reached just to her ridiculously small waist. It was unbuttoned, to show the ruffled white lawn blouse beneath, with matching lace protruding from the hem of each sleeve. That in itself was intriguing, to say the least. But when he dropped his gaze below her waist,
Gabriel glared at the groom, who quickly dropped his own gaze to the ground, and then at his tiger, who was younger and only grinned his appreciation.
“Miss Neville, I’ve kept you waiting. How bad of me,” he said, and then watched as she turned her head to him and gave him a quick glance of impatience before managing a smile and curtsy.
“Nonsense, sir,” she replied sweetly, “I haven’t been here above a moment. I’m only glad it wasn’t me who kept you waiting. I hear you spent a restless night. It wasn’t the turbot served at dinner, was it?”
It might be too soon in Gabriel’s mind for mention of the buttered fish and spiced mussels, but he wasn’t going to let her know that, especially since he felt certain she’d somehow learned he’d poured himself into a bottle the previous evening.
“Lovely bonnet, Miss Neville,” he answered, motioning for the tiger to hop up on the back rail of the curricle as he personally helped Thea up onto the seat. “Are you quite sure it will protect your nose from the sun? Her Grace is most concerned about your freckles.”
She didn’t answer until he’d walked around the curricle and taken the reins handed up to him by the groom. “Her Grace would also like me half a foot shorter, but there are some things that are impossible. And I rather like freckles. I’m told they’re unusual with hair dark as mine.”
This statement of course compelled him to look into her face as the footman released the horses and they headed around the circular drive. “Debutantes take great care, even extreme measures, to avoid freckling. I doubt many of them so much as see the sun for weeks on end.”
“This may be my first exposure to English Society, sir, but I am far from a debutante. I was presented at a Christmas ball when I was only just past my sixteenth birthday.”
“Young but not unheard of.” Gabriel turned his attention back to his horseflesh. “Two and twenty now, sixteen then. That’s a half-dozen years, Miss Neville. You didn’t
He really should be hanged. Or at least gagged. But right now he was not in charity with the young lady, fetching freckles and long legs notwithstanding. She had sealed his fate, and she didn’t even know it.
But she only laughed and asked him what species of trees lined the drive ahead of them. She was too bright not to know he’d insulted her, which put him less in charity with her because she’d ignored his jab and left him feeling lower than a worm and now beholden to treat her better.
“Those, Miss Neville, are black mulberry trees. As opposed to white mulberry trees. A difference we English learned to our disappointment during the sixteenth century. They grow quickly, are easily replaced if one dies and one of the earlier dukes liked them, even though their berries are useless, either as juice or jam. Unpleasant would be putting it mildly. Worse, silkworms don’t like them.”
She looked again at the row of dark-leaved, fairly squat trees. “Silkworms? I didn’t know the English were part of the silk trade.”
“That’s because we aren’t, although certainly not for lack of determination. Our first King James ordered a field, farm, nursery of trees—whatever you’d call it—installed at Buckingham Palace. He followed that planting by ordering landowners all over England to purchase and plant ten thousand more of the trees. We were going to rival China in the production of silk, even sell our silks to France, rather than the way it was—and is—with France smuggling silks across the Channel to us.”
They’d left the black mulberry trees behind them as Gabriel turned his horses to the right, following the carefully constructed circuit that meandered about the estate, for the use and pleasure of ladies visiting Cranbrook Chase.