The Wicked Marquess Read online

  Mr. Hazelett raised his eyebrows. “I hesitate to commit myself.”

  Miranda’s own sympathies lay with the latter. “Colum admires the works of Capability Brown, who states that one should construct scenes that waken ‘the Poet’s feeling’ and please ‘the Painter’s eye’, at the same time removing all defects left by history and nature, and creating a landscape characteristic of the locality. He does not have a taste for the picturesque, or think that gardens should seem to have been arranged by other than nature’s hand. You will find no crumbling towers or broken arches or Gothic ruins at the abbey. Rather, you may find all those things, but not in the gardens, which is in my opinion a great pity, because the abbey seems well suited to that ‘pleasurable melancholy which can be inspired so agreeably by the contemplation of Nature in the rough.’ “ As she spoke, Miranda allowed Mr. Hazelett to draw her down a graveled path. “Colum also believes in informing the plants of a death or disaster in the family, and that burying a dead cat under a rosebush will inspire the shrub to better growth, so make of all that what you will.”

  Mr. Hazelett led her deeper into the gardens. “You must tell me more of Colum’s lore.”

  Either the man had an explorer’s instinct or he was more familiar with the abbey gardens that he cared to admit. Still, Miranda was pleased to encounter someone who wasn’t cross with her. “A traveler who carries mugwort on his person will be immune to fatigue. The walnut has merely to be placed among most deadly plants for all poisons to be expelled. Eating figs will remove wrinkles from the face.”

  “You have no need to eat figs, Miss Russell.” Mr. Hazelett drew her arm through his. “I have never seen a lovelier face.”

  Fustian. Flummery. Further proof that Miranda was bred for depravity, because a stranger’s compliments were cheering her no little bit. “You have been ruralizing too long, sir. Else you would not grow so bored as to try and empty the butter-dish over the head of every chance-met miss.”

  “I am grown sadly out of practice, judging from your response.” Mr. Hazelett indicated that Miranda should sit down beside him on an ancient oaken seashell bench. “Miss Russell, I admire you very much.”

  Here was an opportunity to discover just how depraved she was. Miranda fixed her gaze on Mr. Hazelett’s superbly tied cravat. “Tell me about Launceston,” she said.

  An odd request, thought Mr. Hazelett, for a young woman on the verge of being kissed – and Miss Russell was indeed on the verge of being kissed. But he could wait a few moments for her maidenly hesitations to subside. “What do you want to know? Launceston was the ancient capital of Cornwall. It is still an important market center. In Saxon times it was the site of a Royal Mint.”

  Perhaps she was not so bred for depravity as everyone expected. Now that she was seated side-by-side with Mr. Hazelett, Miranda was not certain she wished to be embraced. “You are well-informed about Launceston,” she said.

  “I have visited here before.” Mr. Hazelett slid one arm behind Miranda and moved closer. “And now—”

  Miranda had no small experience in these matters. She scooted sideways on the bench. “And now, sir, I would like to hear about The Cornish Bruiser, and The Black.”

  Mr. Hazelett was discovering, as had many a gentleman before him, that Miss Russell was not easily wooed. “You want me to talk to you about prizefighters?” To converse with a young lady about sporting matters was hardly the thing.

  “I do.”

  Since it was also hardly the thing to try and embrace a young lady in her fiancé’s garden, the topic of their conversation was rather beside the point.

  Mr. Hazelett capitulated: “Very well.” The Cornish Bruiser, he explained, was a native of Cornwall. The brute was as much noted for the form of side-stepping he employed as for his use of the straight left. The Black was a Negro from America, a cabinet-maker turned semi-professional boxer who had knocked his last opponent cold in less than a minute. There was considerable local feeling that the upstart should be put in his place.

  Miranda imagined the scene. Gladiators stripped to the waist and circling the ring, displaying rippling muscles and brute strength; chopping at each other with swift naked fists, dislodging teeth and flattening noses and tearing eyes from their sockets while blood spattered on the grass—

  Mr. Hazelett grasped Miranda’s hand and pressed it to his chest. “I am your servant to command, Miss Russell,” he murmured. “Just feel the beating of my heart.”

  She could hardly fail to feel it. Mr. Hazelett’s heart was beating very fast. Miranda was tempted to prescribe leaves of the willow, bruised and boiled in wine and drunk, to cool his overheated blood. “I did not realize that prizefighting inspired gentlemen to such transports.”

  Mr. Hazelett drew, or dragged, her closer. “You might be astonished what odd things inspire gentlemen to transports. There, I have taken you by surprise. Although I don’t know why I should have, for you must know that you are irresistible.”

  Irresistible? Benedict did not think so. Was Mr. Hazelett going to kiss her? Would she like it if he did?

  He leaned closer to Miranda. His grip tightened on her arms. His lips pressed against hers. He poked his tongue into her mouth.

  Thus was her question answered. One kiss was not like another, and gentlemen’s lips could not be interchanged. Miranda pressed her palms against Mr. Hazelett’s chest, and shoved. At the same time she bit down, hard. He clapped a hand to his wounded mouth. “Pfthlasht!” he said.

  Miranda whisked herself off the bench. “It would be inadvisable for you to venture further in those gardens, Mr. Hazelett.” Before he could formulate a coherent answer – though his eyes spoke angry volumes – she slipped through Colum’s prized yew hedge. The hedge had been clipped and trained into a gallery with openings called clairvoyes that provided a sheltered walk in inclement weather.

  No sounds of pursuit followed. Miranda slowed her pace. By the time she arrived at the greenhouse, her pulse had returned to nearly its normal rate.

  The abbey greenhouse was no simple structure of stone and iron and glass. Landscape murals covered the interior walls. In addition to the usual geraniums and heaths, Colum also grew violets and primroses and cowslips to make a pretty display during winter months. Here he also conducted his more exotic experiments, such as growing chrysanthemums on tomato plants.

  Miranda passed a row of cold frames. Mr. Hazelett’s kiss had not made her heart beat faster, or her flesh pop up in goose bumps. She had experienced no desire to fling off her clothes. Miranda could only conclude that she had already been kissed by the rascal destined to break her heart. She supposed this was preferable to her breaking his.

  Perhaps if they exchanged no more kisses, swore no wedding vows, no hearts would be broke. But that was hardly a Tipoo-way to live one’s life.

  This was no good moment to recall that the sultan, despite all his tiger-like tendencies, was dead.

  Miranda wandered among Colum’s tender tropicals, his cannas and coleus and wax begonias. Now she must experience remorse not only for all her previous misbehavior, but also for the liberties she had encouraged Mr. Hazelett to take with her.

  At least no one knew about those liberties except Mr. Hazelett and herself. She hoped the man would keep a still tongue in his head. Miranda glowered at one of Colum’s less exceptionable experiments, a new variety of double yellow rose, so fiercely as must surely impede the poor plant’s growth.

  She heard the crunch of footsteps. Had her jailers come looking for her? Miranda had been left unchaperoned for an astonishing amount of time. Or was Mr. Hazelett in search of retribution for her mistreatment of his tongue? Many gardening tools were scattered about the greenhouse, from spades and rakes to displanters and transplanters and dibbles, wheelbarrows and double ladders and garden shears.

  Not Paul Hazelett stepped through the greenhouse doorway, but Lord Baird. “Have we come to this?” he asked, as he looked from Miranda’s defiant expression to the gardening shears that she held thr
ust before her as if they were a fencing sword.

  She regarded him suspiciously. “Have you come to read me a scold?”

  Benedict strolled further into the greenhouse. “Do you think I should?”

  Miranda considered. “I was very rude to Lady Darby,” she allowed.

  “So you were.” Benedict plucked the shears from her hand and set them aside. “My grandaunt was also rude to you. Since you have taken each other’s measure, I trust you may be civil when next you meet. That is enough about Odette. There is something I would like to show you, brat.”

  ‘Show you something’ sounded promising, if ‘brat’ did not. “I would like that very much,” Miranda said.

  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.