The Last Hellion (Scoundrels 4)

It wouldn’t. Instead, the chaotically uncontrollable world of her childhood flooded her mind. The tide of images ebbed and flowed, to settle at last upon the scene most deeply etched in her memory: the time when her world and sense of who she was had changed irrevocably.

She saw herself as she had been then, a little girl sitting upon a battered stool, reading her mother’s diary.

Though Lydia never would, she could have written the tale much in the same style she used for The Rose of Thebes.

London, 1810

It was early evening, several hours after Anne Grenville had been laid to rest in the parish burial ground, when her eldest daughter, ten-year-old Lydia, found the journal. It lay hidden under a shabby collection of fabric scraps intended for patches, at the bottom of her mother’s sewing basket.

Lydia’s younger sister, Sarah, had long since cried herself to sleep, and their father, John Grenville, had gone out to seek solace in the arms of one of his trollops or in a bottle—or both, most likely.

Unlike her sister, Lydia was awake and her blue eyes were dry. She had not been able to cry all day. She was too angry with God, who had taken the wrong parent.

But then, what would God want with Papa? Lydia asked herself as she pushed away a stray lock of golden hair and searched for a patch for Sarah’s pinafore. That was when she found the little book, its pages filled with her mother’s tiny, precise penmanship.

The mending forgotten, she sat huddled by the smoky hearth and read on through the night the vastly puzzling story. The diary was small, and her mama had not made entries faithfully. Consequently, Lydia reached the end before her father staggered home sometime after dawn.

She waited until midafternoon, however, when he was sober and the worst of his ill temper was abating, and Sarah was in the alley playing with a neighbor’s child.

“I found something Mama wrote,” Lydia told him. “Is it true she was a lady once upon a time? And you acted upon the stage once? Or was Mama only making believe?”

He had started hunting in the clothespress for something, but paused and gave her a faintly amused look. “What does it matter what she was?” he returned. “It never did us any good, did it? Do you think we should be living in this hovel if she’d come with a dowry? What does it matter to you, Miss High and Mighty? Fancy yourself a great lady, do you?”

“Is it true that I take after Mama’s ancestors?” Lydia asked, ignoring her father’s sarcasm. She had learned not to let it upset her.

“Ancestors?” He opened a cupboard, shrugged at the meager contents, then slammed it shut. “That’s a grand way of putting it. Is that how your mama explained it?

“She wrote it in a book—a diary, it seems to be,” Lydia persisted, “that she was a lady from an old, noble family. And one of her cousins was a lord—the Marquess of Dain. She wrote that she ran away with you to Scotland,” Lydia continued. “And her family was very angry and cut her off as though she was ‘a diseased branch of the Ballister tree.’ I only want to know whether it’s true. Mama was…fanciful.”

“So she was.” Papa got a crafty look in his eyes, much worse than the mockery and even the dislike he sometimes forgot to conceal.

Then, too late, Lydia realized that she shouldn’t have mentioned the diary.

Then all she could do was want to kick herself. But she hid her feelings—as usual—when he said, “Bring me the book, Lydia.”

She brought it and never saw it again, as she’d expected would happen. It vanished as so many of their belongings had vanished before and continued to do in the following months. Lydia had no trouble figuring out that he’d pawned her mother’s journal and would never reclaim it, or had sold it outright. That was how he got money. Sometime he lost it gambling, and sometimes he won, but Lydia and Sarah seldom saw much of it.

Neither did the people John Grenville owed.

Two years later, despite numerous changes of name and residence, his creditors caught up with him. He was arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark. After he’d lived there for a year with his daughters, he was declared an insolvent debtor and released.

Freedom came too late for Sarah, though. She’d already contracted consumption, and died not long thereafter.

What John Grenville learned from the experience was that England’s climate was unhealthy for him. Leaving thirteen-year-old Lydia with his uncle and aunt, Ste and Effie, and promising to send for the girl “in a few months,” he set sail for America.

On the night of her father’s departure, Lydia began her own journal. The first sadly misspelt entry began: “Papa has gonne—for ever, I fervantly hope—and good riddents.”

Normally, Vere would have fobbed off Trent’s offer of a drink as easily as he shrugged off the fellow’s thanks.

But Vere was not feeling like his normal self.

It had started with the ferret-faced Jaynes’s preaching about carrying on the line—when it was obvious to any moron that the Mallory line was cursed and destined for extinction. Vere had no intention of getting sons, only to stand by helplessly a few years later and watch them die.

Second, the virago of the century had to come rampaging across his path. Then, when Her Brimstone Majesty was done with him, his so-called friends had to debate who she was and where she came from and the technique she’d used to fell him. As though they actually considered her—a female—his adversary. At fisticuffs!

Trent, in contrast, offered a courteous and calm “much obliged” and the sporting reward of a drink.

This was why Vere let Trent follow him home. Then, after a bath and change of clothes—with a sour-faced but mercifully silent Jaynes in attendance—Vere set out to give the younger man a taste of nightlife in London.

This taste couldn’t include entering the abodes of Polite Society, where hordes of marriage-hungry misses pounced upon any male with money and a pulse. The Mallorys’ last hellion would rather be disemboweled with a rusty blade than spend three minutes with a lot of simpering virgins.

The tour included instead establishments where drink and female companionship cost only coins. If this evening His Grace happened to choose places London’s scribblers were known to frequent, and if Vere spent most of his time listening not to Trent but to the other customers, and if the duke came to taut attention on the two occasions he heard a certain woman’s name mentioned, these matters easily escaped Sir Bertram Trent’s notice.

They wouldn’t have escaped Jaynes, but he was an annoyingly sharp fellow, while Trent…was not.

“The greatest nitwit in the Northern Hemisphere” was how Lord Dain had described his brother-in-law.

It didn’t take Vere long to perceive that Beelzebub had put the case mildly, to say the least. In addition to getting himself into sentences the Almighty with the aid of all His angels would never find a way out of, Trent demonstrated a rare talent for getting under horses’ hooves or directly beneath falling objects, for colliding with obstacles both human and inanimate, and for toppling from whatever he happened to be standing, sitting, or lying upon.

Initially, all Vere felt toward him—in the brief intervals when his mind took a breather from fretting and fuming about blue-eyed

dragons—was amazement, mingled with amusement. Furthering their acquaintance was the farthest thing from his mind.

He changed his mind later in the evening.

Not long after exiting the Westminster Pit—where they’d watched Billy the Terrier perform the astounding feat of killing a hundred rats in ten minutes, as advertised—they met up with Lord Sellowby.

He had formed part of Dain’s circle in Paris and was well acquainted with Trent. But then, Sellowby was acquainted with everybody and every single thing they did. He was one of England’s foremost collectors and disseminators of gossip.

After they’d exchanged greetings, he sympathetically enquired whether “Your Grace had sustained any permanent injuries as a result of today’s historic encounter with Lady Grendel? In glancing over the betting book at White’s, I counted fourteen separate wagers regarding the number of teeth you had lost in the—er—altercation.”

At that moment, Sellowby was in imminent danger of losing all of his teeth, along with the jawbone they were attached to.

But before Vere could initiate hostilities a red-faced Trent burst into an indignant rebuttal. “Broke his teeth?” he cried. “Why, it were only a tap on the chin, and anyone could see he were only playactin’—tryin’ to make a joke and turn the crowd good-tempered. If you’d been there, Sellowby, you’d’ve seen what a mob of ugly-lookin’ customers come rushin’ in from everywhere, primed for head-breakin.’ Not to mention you seen for yourself what my sister done in Paris, which shows how females are when they get worked up—and this one almost as tall as I am with the biggest mastiff bitch you ever seen….”

Trent went on in this vein for several minutes, without letting Sellowby get a word in edgeways. When the baronet finally stopped to refill his lungs, His Lordship hastily took his leave.

For a moment—and the first time in years—Vere was rendered speechless himself.