Dukes Prefer Blondes (The Dressmakers 4)

“I seem to be late,” she said with a glance at the red-­eyed Bridget. “But your message stipulated two o’clock.”

“I wished to speak to Miss Coppy before you arrived,” he said. This would spare his having to listen to two females talking at the same time, which females invariably did. “As I supposed, she’s told me very little more than what you told me, but in thrice as many words, punctuated by tears.”

Lady Clara surveyed the girl, who regained her senses sufficiently to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand.

“It was Toby, your ladyship,” she said. “He come by last night. He was so horrid. It come into my mind when Mr. Radford was asking me questions.”

Toby was still alive. Given this fact, and what Bridget had told him about an encounter with a nasty piece of work known as Chiver, Radford was beginning to formulate a theory, one he didn’t much like.

Meanwhile, he was still trying to detach himself from the news that her ladyship had attacked one of the London underworld’s most feared young cutthroats with her horsewhip.

“Are you sure you want to save him?” he said. “We might be able to retrieve him, but you can’t expect us to undo the corruption of his mind.”

Bridget nodded. “He’s led easy enough, and once I have him home again and back in school—­”

“He’s very likely to be led away again,” Radford said. Had the mother not been an inebriate, he would have had more hope. Not much more, admittedly.

“If he does it again, I’ll wash my hands,” Bridget said. “But I know school’s hard for him, and he isn’t clever. I’ll try to get him a place as an apprentice. But if he won’t stick to it, there’s no more I can do.”

“We’ll help you find a place for him,” Lady Clara said.

“We?” Radford said.

“Yes.” Her ladyship gave him a level look.

He gave her one back, then said to Bridget, “You may return to your duties. I can report to Lady Clara more succinctly as a soloist.”

Bridget looked blank.

“It’s all right, Bridget,” Lady Clara said. “Do go in. But wipe your face properly first. You don’t want Matron wondering what Mr. Radford said to make you cry.”

The girl found her already damp handkerchief, scrubbed her face with it, bobbed several confused curtseys at them, and finally left.

“I did not make her cry,” Radford said. “She wanted no assistance in that regard. The ticklish part was getting her to tell the story in a logical manner.”

Lady Clara gazed at him in the way of a patient teacher encumbered with a student of slow understanding. “She’s fifteen,” she said. “She’s barely educated. She doesn’t know Euclid from Eucharist. Where do you imagine she would have learned logic?”

“One and one makes two,” he said. “She wouldn’t go from Whitechapel to Shoreditch by way of Bloomsbury. It doesn’t require a knowledge of geometry or Aristotle to understand the shortest distance between two points, whether it’s furlongs or words.”

“Judging by the speech your honorable friend made in court yesterday, the concept isn’t clear even to university-­educated gentlemen.”

“Right,” he said. “Why were you in court, by the way?”

“I was trying not to get married,” she said.

He was, momentarily, lost, in an unexpected flurry of emotions too confused for him to sort, let alone name. But he swiftly set aside his bewildered other self, his brain returned to work, and he said, “That would appear to be a brand-­new way to go about it. But if anybody would set the fashion, I reckon it would be Lady Clara Fairfax.”

“You’ve been studying me,” she said.

“You studied me,” he said.

“Due diligence, do you call it?” she said. “You’re interesting. You were an interesting boy, I recollect. I had better walk about. Some of the girls will be watching at the windows, and the dress shows to best advantage in motion. I’m told they like to see me in my finery. It’s good for their morale.”

While he was trying to digest interesting boy—­irritating was the more familiar adjective—­she began a slow circuit of the small courtyard.

In motion, the dress did appear to great advantage, but he saw more than that. She changed the atmosphere.

The effect of beauty, he told himself. ­People experienced strong feelings looking at a fine painting or hearing splendid music. His other self wanted to sit on the bench and drink her in. That, however, wouldn’t produce intelligent or useful results. The opposite, rather.

And so he walked with her.

“The Season is over,” she said. “Most of the other families have gone to their country places. But Parliament still sits, and Papa remains to the bitter end. And Mama needed time to recover from . . . some weddings that weren’t mine.”

He glanced at her. Pink tinted her fine cheekbones.

“Some of the gentlemen lingered, too,” she went on, “and now they’re proposing twice a week. I think it’s become the latest sport, proposing to Lady Clara Fairfax. And I know what you’re thinking.”

“I doubt that,” he said. His other self decided the gentlemen ought all to be pitched out of windows.

“But you don’t care what ­people think of you,” she said, “and so I won’t let myself care what you think of me—­that I’m shallow and vain and capricious—­”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” he said.

“No, you don’t think of me at all, and why should you?” she said.

Gad, was she a simpleton, after all?

“You have important things to do,” she said. “I know. Even Bridget has more important things to do than I. There she is, trying to make something of herself as well as her brother, who’s probably a hopeless cause. Yet she won’t give up. And there are those poor pauper children—­and their parents . . .” She clenched her expensively gloved hands. “It makes me wild to think of the injustice. I don’t know how you bear it. But you try to do something. You even somehow make a victory out of failure. And there am I—­alas, poor me—­running away from my beaux—­”

“Straight into the Old Bailey,” he said. “So it was desperation that drove you there. I was vastly puzzled. Never would I have theorized anything to do with your lovers. Whose name, I understand, is Legion.”

She looked up at him. “That’s why you summoned me today? You were curious why I was in court? It had nothing to do with Bridget? Are you completely insane?”

“I’m less insane than most ­people, if by insane you mean irrational,” he said. “And it did have to do with Bridget, peripherally.”

“But you don’t want my help.”

“With what?” He studied her, his gaze going up to the mad garden on top of her head down to the toes of her pink half-­boots, once, twice, thrice. “As I recollect, you came to me for help. You didn’t set out on your own to find the tiresome boy.”

“And I’m to do what?”

He gave a dismissive wave. “Whatever it is ladies do.” He started away.

She stamped her foot.

He turned back and gazed at the pink-­clad foot. “You stamped your foot,” he said. “Like a spoiled child.”

“I am a spoiled child, you insufferable man,” she said. “I am only trying to be a little less spoiled and to be of use to somebody.”

“You’re of no use to me,” he said, ruthlessly beating back the other, arguing self. “I’m not overly scrupulous about using ­people when necessary, as anybody will tell you. And I should use you if there were any sense to it. But I will not enter Seven Dials or Whitechapel or wherever the wretched brat’s gone to ground, encumbered by a young lady—­and

not merely a young lady, but a peer’s daughter. You’d only be underfoot, and I should have to look out for you as well as myself. If you think I mean to complicate this asinine business needlessly, because you’re bored and too many men love you, then what small brain you might have once possessed has atrophied.”

Clara wanted very much to strike him with her umbrella, but she hadn’t brought one, and Davis, who always did carry one, was inside, where she’d told her to remain.

Furthermore, Clara knew he was right.

She’d only be an encumbrance.

How on earth had she thought she’d be of any use to him?

This wasn’t the scrawny adolescent boy who might have broken his hand when he punched the lumpish bully for speaking offensively in her presence.

Yes, even at not quite nine years old, she’d known what that was about. Trailing after three older brothers, she’d learned things, like what bubbies meant. She’d understood, too—­perhaps not then, but not long thereafter—­that if Harry or Clevedon had been about, they would have done what the Professor did. Probably more successfully, but that made his doing it all the more admirable.

Now he was as big as Harry or Clevedon. And judging by the powerful physique whose contours the well-­tailored black coat and trousers outlined, he’d spent the intervening years exercising his body as much as his brain.

She would not think about his physique. He was intolerably supercilious and conceited. She wished Harry had taught her more about fisticuffs. Fighting worked so well for males, old and young, never mind who was right or wrong. How she would enjoy giving Mr. Radford a Chancery suit on the nob!

“I fail to see what’s thrown you into such a snit,” he said.

“Snit!”

“Do try to use your head,” he said. “What other means had I to talk to you? I don’t circulate among the haut ton. I could hardly appear at your door and hand a footman my card. Then your family would wonder how we’d become acquainted. Your disguises make it clear they don’t know what you’ve been up to.”

She hadn’t dared tell even her sister-­in-­law Sophy, who could have helped her with the disguises. Sophy had married Harry, and Clara didn’t want to ask her to keep secrets from him.