Once Upon a Marquess (The Worth Saga 1)

Chapter One

London, England, 1866

If it could have spoken, the tea table would have groaned. Biscuits, oranges, cordial, and two sorts of preserves were only the beginning of the burdens that Judith had forced the poor furniture to carry. Sandwiches and scones were still to come. The sugar bowl was filled; the teakettle stood ready to do justice to the small quantity of Darjeeling that she had purchased at far too high a price. The paper in the front parlor had been scrubbed clean, and a cheery bouquet of violets, obtained from the girl down by the market, decorated the side table.

It had been three months since Judith Worth had last seen her younger brother, and nothing—nothing—would stand in the way of his homecoming. Everything was finally turning out right. Almost everything, that was. But so long as she figured out that last unfortunate bit of business with her sisters, it would be everything in truth.

“There.” Judith scooped the orange cat off the table.

Caramel had jumped up to investigate this strange and no doubt interesting collection of things to push onto the floor, and she meowed in protest at having her purpose frustrated. Judith set the sandwiches in her place. That left only…

“Theresa,” Judith called, “where did you put the scones?”

No answer. Judith peered down the hall; nobody looked back at her except Squid, another one of Theresa’s cats. He licked a paw and regarded Judith with suspicion and a swishing tail.

“Theresa!” she called.

“What?” Her youngest sister was not in the kitchen plating pastries. She stood at the window in the front room, her willowy figure half-hidden by the curtains that Judith had so painstakingly sent out for washing.

Judith sighed. “Ladies don’t say ‘what.’ They say ‘your pardon,’ or ‘yes, Judith.’”

“But I said ‘what.’” Theresa puzzled this over with a frown. “So either ladies do say what, in which case you stand corrected, or I am not a lady, and I don’t need to say ‘your pardon.’”

Someone else would think her sister was sassing her. But no; that was just Theresa. And there were more pressing matters.

“What did you do with the scones?” Judith asked.

“Your pardon?”

“What did you do with the scones?” Judith repeated.

“Your pardon,” Theresa shot back.

“For the love of mallards.” Judith inhaled and made herself count. One mallard. Two mallards. Three… “I did not mean that you were only allowed to say ‘your pardon.’” Her patience felt like an act of heroism. “Simply that it was a preferable response to shouting ‘what?’ like a common scullion. Please answer my question.”

“Oh, I understood what you meant,” Theresa said. “But you said ‘what,’ and I know you consider yourself a lady. I was just correcting you.”

“I said ‘what’? No, I didn’t.”

“What did you do with the scones,” Theresa repeated. “Although I have to admit that ‘your pardon did you do with the scones’ sounds extremely strange. It can’t be proper English.”

One mallard. Two—no. Never mind the mallards. No amount of mallard-counting was going to help. She’d given her sister one solitary task the entire morning: Take care of the scones. How hard could it be?

She took a deep breath. “Theresa. Where are the scones?”

Theresa frowned and looked around, as if trying to figure out where she’d set them. The small front parlor wasn’t what their family had once had. Once, Judith wouldn’t have had to make the sandwiches herself, nor even place them on the table. Once, the dishes would have been porcelain and her younger brother would have been escorted by a pair of footmen in a coach instead of making his way home from the station on foot.

But there was no point counting once-upon-a-times. Once was not now. Now there were sandwiches and there was a table, and while Judith still had breath in her body, there would always be a welcome home.

Assuming, of course, that she ever found the scones.

Despite Judith’s haphazard efforts to teach her sister deportment, Theresa always seemed to need something in her hands. Her fingers, seemingly of their own accord, pulled a bit of hair loose from the coronet of blond braids arranged on her head.

“Scones.” Judith tapped the single empty spot on the table with her finger.

“Right.” Theresa slowly nibbled that strand of hair. “Those. I got distracted.”

Some people thought Theresa stupid. She wasn’t, not remotely. She was just the kind of clever that cared so little for what others thought that it was often mistaken for stupidity. When she could make herself sit still long enough to read, she understood everything. But she was always distracted—or, at least, she was always distracting herself. She’d been difficult from the moment she was born.

“Concentrate,” Judith said. “Start from the beginning. You took the scones from the oven. Then what happened?”

“No, before that,” Theresa corrected. “I got distracted by the body on the front stoop.”

Judith winced. “Drat. Not another dead rat. At least tell me it’s in one piece. Or did Squid get at this one, too?”

Theresa turned back to the window. “I don’t think we should blame Squid for this body. It looks human; that sort of prey is rather out of his league.”

Judith’s mind went blank. Slowly—because someone had to do something—she crept forward and looked through the curtains. “Oh,” she heard herself say, as if from a very great distance. “You’re right. I don’t think Squid is at fault…”

“Of course not,” Theresa said. “He is really an excellent cat.”

Judith’s eyes didn’t seem capable of focusing. Once upon a time, there had never been bodies, not anywhere on the family properties.

She had, in fact, believed that time included the present. The neighborhood they lived in was cramped and crowded, b

ut it was at least safe. Or so she’d thought. It—she found it easier to think of the thing before her front door as an it—lay, limbs splayed at odd angles, all awkward turns and disjointed twists. Ragged hair—possibly blond beneath the cap—obscured the face. A scarf in a fluttering greenish-blue wound around the neck.

Eton blue. Her heart came to a standstill. But this…thing was too small to be her brother. Her pulse started again with a painful thud as she recognized one last detail: A knife handle protruded from the chest.

“Wait here,” she said sharply.

Once upon a time, she might have screamed, but she was beyond an attack of the vapors. Lady Judith Worth—that poor specimen of belabored femininity who might once have collapsed in a swoon—had been through too much to hesitate now. She turned the key in the front lock and thrust the door open.

A breeze, scented with smoke from the factory three streets down, wafted in. The street was mostly empty, the day uncharacteristically gray and cold for summer. Little curls of fog greeted her, flirting with bits of rubbish that had collected in the gutter. Thirty yards down, almost hidden by the mist, Old Mother Lamprey stirred a common pot by the side of the street. A man passed by her, clutching a coat around him and looking warily from side to side. Alas, nobody looked as if they’d just left a corpse behind.

Speaking of corpses. Judith took a step forward, squinted at the thing, and let out a sigh of relief. No wonder the limbs had seemed so unnatural. It wasn’t a body—at least, this thing had never been living. It was a set of clothes stuffed with hay, the sort of straw guy that might be burned in a glorious bonfire in early November.

But it was July. Guy Fawkes Day was a distant memory. And this was not just any set of clothes; it was the blue-fabric uniform that an Eton boy would wear, complete with insignia. Whoever had left this grotesque thing here had thrust a knife through what would have been the heart of the corpse, spearing it to the top post of the railing. It was a rusted blade with a splintering handle, but a knife didn’t have to be sharp to cut to the point.

Judith had seen the same tableau before. It had been in the caricatures of her father that had hung in all the gossip-shop windows: stabbed through the heart and buried at the crossroads, as all suicides had once been.

There was a reason she had no use for once-upon-a-times.

She walked up to the body and took hold of the knife. If she gripped it hard enough, her hands would stop shaking—just like that. She gave the handle a hard yank.

It resisted for a moment, sending splinters through her gloves. Then it came free of the wooden post with a jolt, one that sent her staggering back a pace.

A piece of paper, fashioned into a square and folded small enough that she’d not noticed it at first, remained speared on the blade. She slid it off and opened the missive.

To Benedict WorthLESS, the note read, traitor’s son and useless rat. We look forward to the next Half. Come prepared. Better yet, crawl away like the cowardly scum you are and don’t come at all.

It was signed simply: You know who.

Anger flooded her vision with red. Her little brother. This was her little brother they were talking about, her sweet twelve-year-old boy. She’d practically raised him herself. She’d fought for him. She’d scrimped and saved, and when even money hadn’t opened doors, she had argued. She hadn’t let up, not until the trustees had reluctantly agreed to let her brother come to Eton for the summer Half as a start. She’d worked for years so he could have a chance to take the place that should have been his.

And you know who had stuck a knife through his heart in effigy. They’d called him Benedict Worthless.

After the scandal with their father and their elder brother, she hadn’t imagined that Benedict would be popular. Not at first. But she’d hoped that if only she managed to get Benedict off to school, his warm smile and his wry sense of humor would eventually win over the other boys.

Stupid. That was what came of once-upon-a-time thinking. Those wistful if onlys never happened, not to their family.

But it didn’t matter. Eight years ago, Judith had promised that her brother and sister would have something like the life they had been born to, no matter what she had to do to see it through. She hadn’t ground her way through impossible odds just so some bullying schoolboys could ruin Benedict’s chances.

“It’s not a very good body,” Theresa said behind her. “The legs are too short in proportion to the torso. Don’t you think?”

“Theresa,” Judith said. “Do you think it’s good manners to criticize bodies?”

“Probably not.” Theresa shrugged. “But it is good fun.”

Judith changed the subject. “I thought I told you to stay in the house.”

“But I wanted to see.”

Judith sighed. “A lady does as she’s told.”

Theresa shrugged this off. “That’s a useless rule. What is the point in even articulating it? If I’m a lady, I shall simply tell myself to do as I please. That way, I can satisfy everyone.”

Judith cast a glance at her sister, but there was no time to chop logic. First things first: She had to get rid of this thing before Benedict arrived home. If this was what greeted him upon his arrival, he’d likely suffered enough indignities the last few months. She would spare him this last one. She knelt in front of the makeshift corpse, gathered its limbs, and lifted.

The thing’s behind slipped, sliding down her gown, spitting straw across the steps to the house.

Judith gritted her teeth, shifted her weight, and regathered the straw man in her arms. It was unwieldy and she couldn’t see her footing, but she held on as best as she could. One step down. A second. She found the third with her toe, but as she moved forward, her shoe slipped on loose hay. She grabbed for the rail. As she did, one of the arms worked loose, smacking her with a cuff that spattered straw in her face.

She dropped the body and swiped at her stinging eyes. Either she’d have to take it in pieces—and there was no time for that—or…

The man who had passed by Mother Lamprey a few minutes back hadn’t taken any soup from her. Instead, he’d continued down the street, headed toward Judith. He frowned at the house two doors down from her and took a piece of paper from his pocket, peering at it suspiciously.

Judith made a snap decision. She straightened her spine and marched toward him.

“Ahoy there,” she called. “My good man.”

The man straightened and half-turned his head to her.

“Yes,” she said, a little more loudly. “You there. I have a task for you, if you care to earn a shilling. It won’t take but five minutes.”

He turned all the way toward her, and in that moment, Judith realized her mistake. She knew this man, and he didn’t need her shilling. In her mind, she’d thought of him as an unpleasant person. She’d let her feelings alter her memory, stooping his straight back, narrowing those wide, laughing eyes.

The reality of him was all too different. Little curls of black hair peeked out from under his hat. His trousers were crisply ironed and clean; his coat was tailored to the precise fit of his shoulders. Beneath the new mud he’d acquired on this street, his boots were the deep, glossy black that only the most dedicated valet could achieve. His eyes met hers. Dark, thick eyebrows shielded mobile eyes of a lighter brown. They were smiling eyes, mischievous eyes, eyes that said that this man knew a good joke, and if you leaned in, he’d tell you the punch line.

Those eyes lied. She knew them all too well.

He took a step toward her. “There you are, Judith. Of course I’ll help.” His lip quirked. “And there’s no need to pay me. We’re old friends, are we not?”

It had been eight years since she’d last seen him in the flesh. The sight of him froze her in place, robbing her momentarily of speech. Speak of once-upon-a-times gone awry. Once upon a time, there had been a marquess, and Lady Judith Worth had thought that he would conquer the world.

He had. She just hadn’t realized at the time that he

meant to take it from her.

“Well.” She swallowed. “Lord Ashford. I didn’t expect to see you here, but I suppose you’ll have to do.”

For a moment, that eternal smile of his faltered. He looked into her eyes, and she felt a cold wind sweep over her.

“Yes,” he finally said. “I suppose I will.”

Chapter Two

A military strategist had once told Christian Trent, the fifth Marquess of Ashford, that no battle plan survived contact with the enemy.

He had not, he reflected, truly understood what the man had meant until the moment he saw Lady Judith marching up to him for the first time in eight years. Her chin was raised a good two inches; her eyes snapped a brilliant, vivid brown. She was bristling with anger, and she was everything he remembered—vibrant, lovely, and stubborn. All the plans and lists that Christian had made in advance of this meeting drained right out of his head.

She gave him a cutting look from head to toe.

She had asked him to render assistance, he reminded himself. She needed him, for some reason. She was the one who had treated him as if he were a pariah and a monster these past eight years. Yet when he saw her for the first time, his heart still gave a glad, traitorous skip of recognition.

Here, it whispered. You’ve finally come home.

“I suppose you will have to do,” she said.

The things he had done because he was supposed to do them. No doubt she still thought him the villain in her life.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I will.”

She gave her head a little shake, as if she could slough off the sight of him. “What are you doing here? I said—no, never mind what I said. There’s no time for argument. We have a body to dispose of.”

He’d considered a number of possibilities when Judith sent a note requesting his assistance. Help me hide a corpse had not been on that list.