Regency: Rogues and Runaways. Margaret Moore

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СКАЧАТЬ “What the deuce are you talking about?”

      “I threw my potatoes at the men attacking you to make them run away. And they did.”

      Was that what he’d been trying to recall? “How did I come to be in this room?”

      “I brought you.”

      “By yourself?”

      Anger kindled in her brown eyes. “Is this the thanks I am to get for helping you? To be questioned and everything I say treated like a lie? I begin to think I should have left you in the alley!”

      Trust a Frenchwoman to overreact. “Naturally I’m grateful you came to my aid.”

      “You do not sound the least bit grateful!”

      His jaw clenched before he replied, “No doubt you would prefer me to grovel.”

      “I would prefer to be treated with respect. I may be poor, Sir Douglas Drury, barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, but I am not a worm!”

      As her eyes shone with passionate fury and her breasts rose and fell beneath her cheap gown, and those little wisps of hair brushed against her flushed cheeks, he was very well aware that she was not a worm.

      She marched to the door and wrenched it open. “Since you seem well enough to walk, go!”

      He stepped forward, determined to do just that, but the room began to tilt and turn as if on some kind of wobbly axis.

      “Did you not hear me? I said go!” she indignantly repeated.

      “I can’t,” he muttered as he backed up and felt for the bed, then sat heavily. “Send for a doctor.”

      “I am not your servant, either!”

      God save him from Frenchwomen and their overwrought melodrama! “I would gladly go and happily see the last of you, but unfortunately for us both, I can’t. I must be more badly injured than I thought.”

      She lowered her arm. “I have no money for a doctor.”

      Drury felt his coat. His wallet was gone. Perhaps she’d taken it. If she had, she would surely not admit it. But then why would she have brought him here? “You must tell the doctor you have come on behalf of Sir Douglas Drury. He will be paid when I return to my chambers.”

      “You expect him to believe me? I am simply to tell him I come on behalf on Sir Douglas Drury, and he will do as I say? Are you known for getting attacked in this part of London?”

      Damn the woman. “No, I am not.”

      He could send for his servant, but Mr. Edgar would have to hire a carriage from a livery stable, and that would take time.

      Buggy would come at once, no questions asked. Thank God his friend was in London—although he wouldn’t be at home on this day of the week. He would be at the weekly open house held by the president of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.

      “Go to 32 Soho Square, to the home of Sir Joseph Banks, and ask for Lord Bromwell. Tell him I need his help.”

      The young woman crossed her slender arms. “Oh, I am to go to a house in Soho Square and ask for a lord, and if he comes to the door and listens to me, he will do as I say?”

      “He will if you tell him Sir Douglas Drury has sent you. Or would you rather I stay here until I’ve recovered?”

      She ruminated a moment. “Am I to walk?”

      That was a problem easily remedied. “If you take a hackney, Lord Bromwell will pay the driver.”

      “You seem very free with your friend’s money,” she noted with a raised and skeptical brow.

      “He will pay,” Drury reiterated, his head beginning to throb and his patience to wear out. “You have my word.”

      She let her breath out slowly. “Very well, I will go.”

      She went to a small chest, threw open the lid and bent down to take out a straw Coburg bonnet tastefully decorated with cheap ribbon and false flowers, the effect charming in spite of the inexpensive materials.

      As she tied the ribbon beneath her chin with deft, swift fingers, a concerned expression came to her face now prettily framed. “I am to leave you here alone?”

      Drury’s crooked fingers gripped the edge of the bed as he regarded her with what his friend the Honorable Brixton Smythe-Medway called his “death stare.” “I assure you, Miss Bergerine, that even if I were a thief, there is not a single thing here I would care to steal.”

      She met his cold glare with one of her own. “That is not what troubled me, Sir Douglas Drury. I do not like leaving an injured man all alone, even if he is an ungrateful, arrogant pig. But never mind. I will do as you ask.”

      Drury felt a moment’s shame. But only for a moment, because even if she had helped him, she was still French and he had his ruined fingers to remind him of what the French could do.

      Juliette marched up to the first hackney coach she saw, opened the door and climbed inside. “Take me to number 32 Soho Square.”

      The driver leaned over to peer in the window. “Eh?”

      Her arms crossed, she repeated the address.

      Beneath the brim of his cap, the man’s already squinty eyes narrowed even more. “What you goin’ there for?”

      “I do not think it is any of your business.”

      The man smirked. “Bold hussy, ain’t ya? Show me the brass first.”

      “You will be paid when I arrive, not before. That is the usual way, is it not?”

      Even if she’d never yet ridden in a hackney, Juliette was sure about that. She thought the driver might still refuse, until his fat lips curved up beneath his bulbous nose. “If you don’t have the money, there’s another way you can pay me, little Froggy.”

      She put her hand on the latch. “I would rather walk,” she declared, which was quite true.

      He sniffed. “I’ll drive ya—but I’d better get paid when I get there, or I’ll have you before a magistrate,” he muttered before he disappeared.

      With the crack of a whip, the hackney lurched into motion. As it rumbled along the cobblestone streets, the enormity of what she was doing began to dawn on Juliette. She was going to a town house in Soho in a coach she couldn’t pay for, to ask a British nobleman to come to her lodgings, to help a man she didn’t know, who had been attacked and robbed by four ruffians in an alley.

      What if Lord Bromwell didn’t believe her? What if he wouldn’t even come to the door? What if the driver didn’t get his money? He could have her arrested, and she could guess how that would go. It wasn’t easy being French in Wellington’s London even when she kept to herself and quietly went about her business.

      Biting her lip with dismay, she looked out the window at the people they passed, СКАЧАТЬ