Rake's Reform. Marie-Louise Hall

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      “Perhaps that is because I was born in America and spent the first sixteen years of my life there,” Janey snapped. She was in no mood for condescension from a pair of aristocratic dandies who were probably incapable of tying their own cravats. “Now, if your curiosity is satisfied, will you please go away!”

      “With pleasure,” Lord Derwent moaned, “but this—” he wrinkled his nose distastefully as he gestured to the trap “—this vehicle is in our way.”

      “You have my permission to move it!” she retorted, brushing back a strand of dishevelled fair hair from her face with her free hand. “Unless you would prefer to hold the child? I thought not!” she said scathingly as her hazel eyes blazed across Derwent’s horrified face. “It might spoil your gloves!”

      “But surely there is a lad—” Derwent said.

      “Not any longer! You hear that woman weeping—she has just heard that ‘her fine lad’ is to be hanged for the firing of a rick, which he was not even near—”

      “Hanged! Bigod!” Lord Derwent’s fair brows lifted. “Damned inconvenient timing, but I suppose he deserves it.”

      “Deserves—” Her voice came out of her throat as a hiss of contempt. “Do you think anyone deserves to die for the price of a hayrick, when his employer is a mean-minded cheat who will let men, women and children starve to death? Is hanging a just punishment for such a crime?”

      “Should have thought of that before he set fire to the rick. Common knowledge that arson’s a capital offence,” Lord Derwent drawled.

      “He did not fire the rick!” Janey found herself almost choked with rage. If they did not go soon, arson would not be the only capital offence to be committed of late. She could easily murder the pair of them. “I do not know how you can be so complacent! So arrogant!” she said fiercely.

      “Quite easily, really. Someone has to support the rule of law, you know.”

      “The trap, Perry?” Jonathan interposed quietly, speaking for the first time when he saw Janey’s free hand clench upon the crossbar of the gate as if she were intending to rip it off and hurl it at Derwent like a spear. “Now, if you would not mind?”

      “Must I?” His companion’s answer was one sharp glance that sent Lord Derwent down from the box in a moment.

      The hazel eyes followed Derwent, and the soft rose lips silently framed an epithet that the Honourable Jonathan Lindsay had never heard from a lady, and certainly not from a Rector’s wife. His cool blue gaze flicked to the hand she had put up to push away another stray strand of hair from her eyes, leaving a smudge of soot upon her slanting cheekbone. No ring upon the slender fingers—the daughter, then?

      A pity, he thought. With her great angry dark eyes, slanted dark brows and wide, soft mouth, she was all passion and fire, a veritable Amazon. Quite unlike the insipid blue-eyed misses who were English society’s current ideal, but put her in Paris and she’d have ’em falling at her feet. If she had been married, country life might have proved more entertaining than he had expected, but he had a rule of never seducing unmarried girls. There were some depths to which one could not sink, even to relieve boredom.

      And then, with a start, he realised that those extraordinary hazel eyes were fixed upon his face, regarding him with a coolness that he found distinctly disconcerting. He was not accustomed to women looking at him as if he had just crawled from beneath a stone. Possessed of a large fortune, and good looks since the age of sixteen or so, he had always been the recipient of frank admiration, dewy-eyed adoration or thinly veiled invitations from females of all ages.

      “Lord Derwent is not as unkind as he sounds, I assure you,” he said, wondering why that cool dark gaze should make him feel as if he should apologise to her. After all, why should he care what she thought of him?

      “No?” The fine dark arch of her brows lifted as she glanced to where Lord Derwent was somewhat ineffectively coaxing the unwilling pony away from the weed in the wall. “Perhaps I misjudged him…perhaps he is merely stupid.”

      “Derwent is far from stupid. He is overly flippant at times,” he said tersely, knowing that it was equally true of himself. “It has been a habit of his for so long he no longer notices himself doing it.”

      “Flippant!” Her voice was as contemptuous as her stare as she looked at him a second time, taking in the studied carelessness of his Caesar haircut, the immaculately tailored grey topcoat that emphasised the broad width of his shoulders, leanness of his waist and hips, the glossy perfection of riding boots that did not often have contact with the ground. “If you think that an excuse, then you are as despicable as he is.”

      Her gaze came back up to his, defiant and decidedly judgmental, he thought. She might as well call him a dandy and a plunger and have done with it as look at him in that fashion. Well, if that was how she wished it—

      “Oh, no, I really cannot allow you to insult Derwent in such a fashion,” he drawled and returned her scrutiny with a blatancy which sent the colour flaring in her cheeks. “I’m worse, much worse, I assure you.”

      “That I can well believe,” she replied, involuntarily lifting her free hand to the little white ruff collar at the neck of her grey gown to be sure it was fastened. And then, aware that his mocking blue gaze had followed the gesture, she let her hand drop swiftly back to her side and lifted her chin to glare at him again.

      “But I do have my saving graces,” he said, drily feeling a flicker of satisfaction that he had succeeded in disconcerting her. “A sense of humour, for instance.”

      “Really?” Her faintly husky voice was pure ice as her gaze blazed into his eyes. “I cannot say I find hanging a source of amusement.” Hitching the infant more firmly upon her hip, she made to turn away.

      “Wait! My apologies. You are right, of course—hanging is no laughing matter.” He found himself speaking before he had even thought what he was going to say. “This lad who is to be hanged—if you tell me his name and circumstances, I might be able to do something. I cannot promise, of course, but I have some influence as a Member of Parliament.”

      “You are a Member of Parliament?” There was astonishment in her voice and in the wide hazel eyes as she turned to face him again, and, he noted wryly, deep suspicion.

      “Difficult to believe, I know, but it is the truth,” he drawled.

      “For a rotten borough, no doubt,” she said, half to herself.

      “Positively rank, I’m afraid. My father buys every vote in the place,” he taunted her lightly. “But the offer of help is a genuine one.”

      She regarded him warily for a moment. There was no longer mockery in either the blue eyes or that velvety voice.

      “You mean it?” she said incredulously. “You will try—?”

      “My word on it,” he said, wondering how he had thought her hair was mouse at first glance. It was gold, he realised, as a shaft of weak sunlight filtered through the clouds. A warm tawny gold, like ripe corn under an August sun. And it looked soft. Released from that tight knot, he would wager it would run through a man’s hands like pure silk.

      “His name is Jem, Jem Avery, he’s fourteen years old and he was sentenced at Salisbury Assizes, by Judge Richardson.”

      Jonathan СКАЧАТЬ