Lord Perfect (The Dressmakers 3)

“Mrs. Wingate,” he said. “I was hoping our paths would cross.”

“You would have done better to look rather than simply hope,” she said. “Had I not had the presence of mind to throw myself in your way, you might have missed me altogether.”

His grip tightened. She realized then that she was still holding on, her hand still clutching his forearm. It was like grasping warm marble.

She let go, dragged her gaze from his, and focused on her parcels, strewn about the pavement. A passing vehicle had crushed her basket under its wheels.

“You may release me,” she said. “I should like to collect my purchases before an enterprising street urchin makes off with them.”

He released her and gathered her parcels.

She watched him perform the lowly task with his usual perfect grace. Even his coat did not appear to stretch at the seams when he bent, though it fit him like skin. Weston’s work, very likely. And what his lordship had paid for it would probably keep her and Olivia comfortably for a year, perhaps two or three.

The crowd forming about them watched him, too, with undisguised curiosity. Bathsheba belatedly collected her wits.

“A footman, out of work,” she explained. “One of my late husband’s relatives turned him off, poor fellow.”

“He’s come to the wrong neighborhood, Mrs. W,” said an onlooker. “There ain’t hardly work enough for ordinary folk hereabouts.”

“Pity, ain’t it?” said another. “Big, strong fellow like that. The Quality likes them tall, strapping fellows, I heard. Is it true, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she said. “Tall footmen are de rigeur.”

When he’d retrieved all her parcels, she started away at a brisk pace, leaving the audience to argue about what de rigeur meant.

When they’d turned a corner and the crowd was out of earshot, he said, “I’m a footman?”

“You should not have come to this neighborhood dressed so fine,” she said. “Clearly you have no idea how to travel incognito.”

“I had not thought about it.”

“Obviously not,” she said. “Luckily, one of us comes of a long line of accomplished liars. Your being a footman accounts for both your elegant dress and your air of superiority.”

“My air of—” He broke off. “You are walking in the wrong direction. Is not Bleeding Heart Yard the other way?”

She stopped. “You found out where I live.”

He nodded over the bundles stacked under his jaw. “It is not Popham’s fault. I bullied him. I wish I had not. I despise bullying. But I was . . . exceedingly annoyed.”

“With Popham?”

“With my brother-in-law. Atherton.”

“Then why did you not bully your brother-in-law?”

“He is in Scotland. Did I not tell you that?”

“My lord,” she said.

“Ah, here is a quiet churchyard,” he said, indicating the place with his chin. “Why do we not go in? We shall be private without giving an appearance of impropriety.”

She was not so sanguine about what appeared improper and what didn’t. Still, if he had his hands full of bundles . . .

She went in, and paused at a spot close by the gateway.

He set her purchases down on a gravestone. “I am obliged to take Peregrine to Scotland in a fortnight,” he said. “His father makes anarchy of our neat arrangements. He has had a fit of responsibility and decided to foist his offspring upon Heriot’s School in Edinburgh.”

She suppressed a sigh. Good-bye, shiny coins, she thought. “Is that not a good school?” she said.

“Peregrine will never fit in any of our great British schools,” he said, his voice clipped. “But one cannot explain this to Atherton by letter. One can scarcely explain anything to him at all. He is too impatient, impulsive, and dramatic to reason matters out.”

To Bathsheba’s surprise, Lord Rathbourne began to pace the pathway. He did it gracefully, of course, being perfect, but with a contained energy that seemed to make the air churn about him.

“If he would only view the matter in a rational way,” he went on, “he would see that the methods of the British public school are antithetical to Peregrine’s character. One learns everything by rote. One is expected to do as one is told without question, to memorize without making sense of what one memorizes. When Peregrine insists upon knowing why and wherefore, he is deemed disrespectful at best, blasphemous at worst. Then he is punished. Most boys require only a few beatings to learn to hold their tongues. Peregrine is not most boys. Beatings mean nothing to him. Why can his father not see this, when it is obvious to a mere uncle?” the uncle concluded, shaking his fist.

“Perhaps the father lacks the uncle’s ability to imagine himself in the boy’s place,” she said.

Rathbourne halted abruptly. He looked down at his clenched hand and blinked once. He unclenched it. “Really. Well. I should have thought Atherton had imagination enough for half a dozen men. More than I, certainly.”

“Parents have a peculiar sort of vision,” she said. “They can be blind in some ways. Does your father understand you?”

For a moment he looked shocked, and she was as well, to discern so strong a sign of emotion. She’d seen at the start that his was a tell-nothing countenance.

“I sincerely hope not,” he said.

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. It had lasted but a moment—he was back to looking inscrutable—but for that brief time he had seemed a chagrined schoolboy, and she thought she would have liked to know that boy.

Dangerous thought.

He stood for a time, looking at her and smiling the almost-smile. Then he approached. “Did you really fall in my way on purpose?” he said.

“That was a joke,” she said. “The truth is, I was shocked witless to see you in Charles Street. I wish you would give warning the next time you decide to come looking for me. I had rather not walk into a shop front and black my eye or fall over a curb and break my ankle.”

He had come too near, and his gaze was a magnet, drawing hers. She was caught for but a moment—time enough only for her to breathe in and out—yet it was time enough to lure her in deeper. Looking into those eyes, so dark, was like looking down a long, shadowy corridor. Too intriguing. She wanted to find out what

was at the end of it, who was at the end of it, and how great a distance it was from the man on the outside to the man on the inside.

She looked away. “I did not mean you ought to come looking for me,” she added. “I was not issuing an invitation.”

“I know I ought not to have come,” he said. “I could have written to you. Yet here I am.”

She could not let herself be drawn in again. She focused on the gravestone behind him, where her parcels lay.

“Yes, well, I must be going,” she said. “Olivia returns home from school soon, and if I am not there, she finds things to do. Usually it is something one had rather she didn’t.”

“Ah, yes, how remiss of me.” He moved away, to the gravestone, and started collecting her belongings. “I should not have troubled you in the first place, and I have compounded the offense by trespassing too long upon your time.”

He hadn’t trespassed for long enough. She hadn’t found out a fraction of what she wanted to know.

Think of your daughter, she told herself. Curiosity about this man is a luxury you cannot afford.

“I prefer to carry them now, my lord,” she said. “A footman will be out of place in Bleeding Heart Yard. It would be best if we went our separate ways.”

BENEDICT DID NOT want to go his separate way.

He wanted to stay where he was, talking to her, looking at her, listening to her. She had laughed—at what must have been a comical look of horror on his face when she asked whether his father understood him.

The sound of it wasn’t what he’d expected. It was low, deep in her throat.

Wicked laughter. Bedroom laughter.

The laughter seemed to hang in the air about him as he returned to the hackney. It hung there during the short journey home. It followed him into the house and up to Peregrine’s room.

He found the boy kneeling in the window seat, bent over a colored plate from Belzoni’s book. It illustrated the ceiling of the pharaoh’s tomb, with an assortment of strange figures and symbols in gold on a black background, possibly a representation of the nighttime sky and constellations as the ancient Egyptians saw them.

Benedict refused to puzzle over it. The ancient Egyptians were too aggravating for words.