Lady Anne's Lover

253 Pages·2013·1.58 MB·English

by  Robinson Maggie

Books by Maggie Robinson
THE LONDON LIST SERIES
Lord Gray’s List
Captain Durant’s Countess
Lady Anne’s Lover
THE COURTESAN COURT SERIES
Mistress by Mistake
“Note Quite a Courtesan” in Lords of Passion
Mistress by Midnight
Mistress by Marriage
Master of Sin
“To Match a Thief” in Improper Gentleman
LADY ANNE’S LOVER
M R
AGGIE OBINSON
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents Books by Maggie Robinson
Title Page
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
EPILOGUE
LORD GRAY’S LIST
Copyright Page
C 1
HAPTER
Wales, December 26, 1820

L
ady Imaculata Egremont had danced naked in a fountain. She’d eloped to
France with a rackety gentleman she’d just as soon forget. She’d sold chestnuts
on the street. There was no reason on earth why she could not pick up a dead
mouse and dispose of it with her usual élan.
She fought back an unfortunate gag and told herself to stop breathing. To
think of lilac bushes in her mother’s Dorset garden in the spring. Great purple
masses of them, their heavy cones bursting into flower, gray-green leaves
shivering in the warm breeze. She was not in Wales. It was not winter. She was
not standing bent over a tiny desiccated body in a grim hallway that smelled like
death.
And gin.
Somewhere her new employer must have spilled a vat of it and had probably
joined the mouse. He certainly had not opened the door to her as she was
injuring her hands, pounding on it for a full five minutes while standing on the
misty doorstep. She’d finally taken the initiative—anyone would tell you Lady
Imaculata was bold as brass—and pressed the latch herself, finding the door
unlocked. If she were truly a housekeeper, she supposed she should have entered
by way of the kitchen, but Lady Imaculata was an earl’s daughter, and some
habits were hard to break.
The possibly dead Major Ripton-Jones had not sent any transportation to fetch
her, either. She’d gotten off the mail coach in Hay on Wye foolishly hopeful, but
in the end she’d arranged for a donkey cart herself to bump her along to
Llanwyr, hoping her presence had not been noted by her father’s spies. She was
still almost frozen from the long ride, and the temperature in Ripton Hall’s hall
was not much warmer than outside. She was probably giving the dead mouse a
run for its money with her own eau de bourrique.
Lilacs. Think of lilacs. Her favorite flower. Not donkeys or dead mice. It was
abundantly clear why the old man had placed an advertisement for a
housekeeper in The London List, and she hadn’t even gone ten paces down the
dim and fragrant hallway. What would she find when she opened the closed
doors? Alas, it was too late to run after the donkey cart.
She may have been raised a lady, but Lady Imaculata was now Mrs. Anne
Mont. Anne was her humble middle name, much more suitable for a
housekeeper. What her parents had been thinking at her christening was a
mystery for the ages. Anyone who named a child Imaculata was asking for
trouble. Much like those named Chastity or Christian or Prudence, the
Imaculatas of the world were bound to disappoint, and she had been no
exception—in fact she had taken a toe or two over the edge of propriety so often
she was at a perpetual tilt.
As if a mere change of name would help her with the Herculean task at hand,
she thought grimly. She’d need to reroute the Welsh equivalent of the Alpheus
and Peneus rivers to wash away all this dirt and dust. She was very much afraid
she’d gotten in over her head, and not for the first time.
With determination, she set down her portmanteau and got to work. Anne
Mont needed this job, at least until she turned twenty-one and became Imaculata
Egremont again, to come into her funds. Two years was not so very long to
endure isolation and filth, and anyway, she’d fix the filth or die trying. She
closed her eyes, gingerly scooped the dead mouse up with her handkerchief, and
tossed it out onto the frost-covered drive, the handkerchief right along with it.
Let the poor mouse have its embroidered shroud. She couldn’t imagine ever
blowing her nose delicately into it again, even if she knew how to do laundry.
Mrs. Anne Mont didn’t have the first idea how to wash a handkerchief or
anything else, but supposed that was one of the things a housekeeper would have
to learn. The major was apt to have handkerchiefs and clothes now, wasn’t he?
Her benefactress Evangeline Ramsey had pressed upon her an ancient copy of
The Compleat Housewife before she left London, and Anne had plenty of time to
read it and become dismayed on her journey west. The title page alone had been
daunting—“Collection of several hundred of the most approved receipts, in
cookery, pastry, confectionery, preserving, pickles, cakes, creams, jellies, made
wines, cordials. And also bills of fare for every month of the year. To which is
added, a collection of nearly two hundred family receipts of medicines; viz.
drinks, syrups, salves, ointments, and many other things of sovereign and
approved efficacy in most distempers, pains, aches, wounds, sores, etc. never
before made publick in these parts; fit either for private families, or such
publick-spirited gentlewomen as would be beneficent to their poor neighbours.”
The author Eliza Smith must have been wonderfully efficient, but then she’d
never had to deal with Major Ripton-Jones’s house and his dead and living pests.
The major’s house was a dismal wreck, and she would earn every bit of the
pittance he’d promised to pay her.
Anne batted the worst of the spider webs away with her wet black bonnet,
hoping none of the spiders decided to take up residency in her hat. Satisfied she
could now walk the gauntlet of the hallway, she opened a shut door. It revealed a
monstrously large, cold double drawing room, big enough to host a cotillion,
badly furnished. Great swaths of cobwebs hung in every corner, Dust lay thick
on every surface, windows were so smudged one could not see the frigid rain-
washed fields beyond them. The fireplaces at either end were heaping-full of
cold ashes. No one had sat on the mice-shredded satin sofas in a long while.
Next was the monstrously large, colder dining room, in worse repair—not a
chair looked able to hold her weight, and she was quite a little thing. She could
have written her name on the dust on the long dining table, if she could
remember that she was Anne Mont now.
The door at the end of the hall was locked, but she swore she smelled peat
burning beyond it. And gin. She took a long sniff, filling her nose with the
distinct aroma of drink and unwashed man.
Definitely no lilacs.
Her elderly employer was behind it, most likely, and he was snoring. He must
have doused the room in alcohol—she may as well have been outside a
ginhouse. Anne damned her new friend Evangeline Ramsey and Evangeline’s
newspaper, The London List, with an extremely naughty oath for sending her
here to the back of beyond to cater to a drunken old man.
But, Anne reminded herself, Major Ripton-Jones was better than her father,
and if he wasn’t, she would bean him on the head with a kettle if she could find
one in the kitchen. If she could find the kitchen.
Everyone thought her papa was a saint. If they only knew what he had tried to
do with his only child once the candles were blown out, they would soon change
their mind.
Anne was still a virgin. Her father had attempted but not succeeded in getting
very far. Nor had the rackety gentleman she’d run off to France with, although
he’d tried to alter her not-quite-innocent state before they had gotten to an altar.
She’d actually been relieved when the private detective her father had hired
found them, even if she had punched poor Mr. Mulgrew in the nose.
She had faced her demons for the past four years, at first wondering what it
was about her that brought the devil to her doorstep. Her father, she knew,
blamed her for his unnatural lust and beat her for it. He had looked at her oddly
after her mother died, when she was so lost in grief and had turned to him for
comfort. But when he’d finally taken her in his arms, it was not as a father, but a
man. Anne had been shocked and confused, then sick with fear. She supposed
she could have countered him in any number of ways—leaping to her death from
the roof, chewing up some foxglove, shooting herself—or better yet, him—with
her pearl-handled pistol.
She had done none of those things. Instead, she had fought him off and made
herself a byword of scandal from the moment of her debut, and she had the
newspaper clippings to prove it. As a debutante she had been very naughty
indeed. Lady Imaculata had sought low, even subterranean society in order to
escape her father’s predatory attentions, thinking that he’d let her have her
mother’s fortune and wash his hands of her if she misbehaved sufficiently. But
no matter what foolish—and sometimes dangerous—thing she’d done, he had
kept her a prisoner.
So fiery, flame-haired Lady Imaculata Egremont was no more. In her place
was frowsy brunette Anne Mont, reluctant and incompetent housekeeper. Anne
had noted some of the brown color had rubbed off on her pillows as she’d spent
the night in coaching houses. Whatever elixir Evangeline had used on her was
fading fast. Unless she could find some Atkinson’s Vegetable Dye, she’d have to
confess to the major that he’d hired a redheaded imposter. Maybe the old man
was so blind he’d never notice. If he could bear to live in his current squalor,
appearances could not possibly matter to him.
Anne gathered her courage and used her most confident voice. She was a good
mimic, and it was necessary for the major to think he had hired a forthright
woman rather than a foolish, inexperienced girl. She had played a part or two in
her time. Surely she could convince an old sot that she was a housekeeper, even
if she didn’t know how to remove mouse excrescence from a handkerchief.
“Major Ripton-Jones! It is Mrs. Mont, your new housekeeper. Please open the
door so we may become acquainted.”
The string of muffled words coming from behind the door did not shock her,
though as a child, her governess would have forbidden them. Anne had said
them anyway for maximum shock value, as often as possible, and actually just a
few minutes ago. Stepping back, she lifted her chin and awaited her employer’s
displeasure at being torn from his inebriated slumber.
The door was wrenched open by a towering scarecrow of a man, bearded,
shaggy-haired, disreputably dressed, indubitably drunk.
And one-armed. His dirty linen shirtsleeve hung empty, flapping a bit as he
had listed toward the doorframe.
He wasn’t old. Not old at all. There was a little gray in his beard—though that
could very well be dust—but he could not have been much above thirty years
old.
“Good afternoon,” Anne had said briskly, masking her surprise and keeping
her chin high. She was bound to get a crick in her neck if she had to address him