At least he doesn’t seem genuinely attached to his future wife, Madeleine thought painfully.
“Why don’t you want to elope?” It seemed like a reasonable alternative.
Braddon pulled back, looking indignantly into Madeleine’s unsympathetic brown eyes.
“Won’t you miss me? It will take a week to get to Gretna Green and back, if we don’t get delayed. Why, I could be gone a whole fortnight!”
“I will not miss you,” she retorted. “And you will not be welcome in the stables after you are married.”
“Well, I would miss you,” Braddon said stoutly. “And I don’t believe you. I think you would miss me too. Anyway, I don’t want to get married so soon.” He gave Madeleine a little squeeze and then sank down on a pile of straw, pulling her onto his lap.
She gave a little pooh! of indignation, but relaxed. Braddon pulled her against his chest, enjoying the way Madeleine’s soft curves felt against his legs.
“You’re going to ruin your garments.”
“Practical Maddie,” Braddon whispered into her hair.
Practical Maddie’s heart felt as if it were being squeezed.
“Why don’t you pretend to break your leg?” The minute she said it, she cursed herself. What was she doing, showing interest in his marital plans?
“Break my leg? What d’you mean?”
“If you had a broken leg, you couldn’t climb up a ladder,” she explained brusquely.
Braddon slowly thought it through.
“Damned if you’re not right, Maddie m’girl! I’ll write Lady Sophie a note and tell her I broke my leg, and that will give her time to get over this odd start of hers.”
“Was she really hysterical?”
He frowned. “Close enough.”
“Well, then she probably won’t believe your note,” Madeleine said. “I wouldn’t. I would think that you were just trying to beg off, and that you were too stuffy to elope.”
Appalled, she listened to her own voice. Was there a note of rancor in her tone? She had no right even to think about marrying an Earl of the Realm! For goodness’ sake, it was clear enough that the idea of marrying her, Maddie, had never crossed Braddon’s mind.
“You think Lady Sophie won’t believe my note?”
“She might break off your engagement.”
Madeleine ignored the small voice in her heart that rejoiced at the idea of a broken engagement.
“Break off my engagement?” Braddon was clearly appalled. He clutched Maddie a little closer, thinking of his mother’s wrath. Then he sat up.
“I have it! I need to really break my leg! I’ll fall off a horse. Then all I have to do is get someone to fetch Sophie off that damned ladder and bring her over to my house, and she’ll see the plaster. She can’t blame me once she sees the evidence.”
Madeleine sighed. Truly, her English lord needed someone to take care of him.
“Don’t be such a bumble-brain! You can’t break your leg as easily as all that.”
“Yes, I can,” Braddon retorted. “I broke my left leg when I was a young nipper, and the doctor told me to go easy, because it would break again as easy as look at it. I reckon all I’d have to do is fall off a horse on the left, and keep that leg under me, and I’d be sure to break it again.”
Madeleine’s heart chilled. “It would probably not heal properly, and you’d be left with a permanent limp. Then Lady Sophie wouldn’t want you anyway.”
“You think so?”
“Ladies all like to dance,” Madeleine said with the certainty of someone who had no recollection of ever meeting a true lady. “No lady would ever marry a man who had a limp and couldn’t dance.”
“Oh.”
Madeleine found, to her disgust, that she couldn’t resist the disconsolate note in Braddon’s voice. “I could give you an adhesive plaster,” she stated baldly.
“What on earth do you mean?” Braddon had given up thinking about elopements and was nuzzling Madeleine’s delicate ear with his lips, for all the world like Gracie the horse.
“We have all the materials here … for when a horse needs an ankle splint. I could give you a plaster and everyone would believe that you had broken your leg.”
Braddon whooped and gave her an exuberant squeeze. “That’s my Maddie!”
When Madeleine turned her head to shush him into silence, Braddon captured her mouth, and it was quite a while before they got down to business. But forty minutes later Braddon had suffered the slicing of his best breeches up the side, protesting only a little about Kesgrave’s inevitable reaction, and Madeleine had wound a quite reasonable-looking plaster around his lower left leg.
There was an embarrassing bit, to Maddie’s mind, when Braddon refused to let her see his bare leg and insisted on winding the first layer himself. But then she got revenge by slapping on enough plaster of paris to brace the ankle of an elephant.
In fact, by the time Braddon hopped out of the stables, supporting himself on Madeleine’s shoulder, he felt as if he truly had injured his leg.
“Do you think you used a bit too much plaster?” Braddon looked dubiously at the monstrous bulge of white which covered his leg from knee to ankle.
“Oh no,” Madeleine assured him. “Your leg was very broken. If you were a horse, we’d have had to put you down.”
Braddon tossed two shillings to the boy watching his horse. “You’d better tie it up in the stables and then get me a hackney.”
The boy looked curious. “Got yourself an injury, milord?”
Braddon sighed and threw him another coin. “The hackney.”
“Right you are, milord.” The boy ran off toward the street, leaving the horse tied to a pole.
“I suppose he’ll remember my horse later,” Braddon said doubtfully. He started to hop toward the gate to Vincent’s Horse Emporium, delicately carrying his spare boot in his fingers. Kesgrave would kill him if he got greasy fingerprints on a boot, broken leg or no.
“Don’t worry,” Madeleine said. “I’ll rescue your horse.”
Braddon looked down affectionately at her soft rumpled hair.
“I love you, you know that?”
Madeleine stopped and clutched his arm. “Don’t talk like that! What if Papa heard you? You’re not even whispering.”
Braddon shrugged. “I’m a wounded man. What can he do? And it’s true. I love you, Maddie.”
“Pooh! You are a rake,” Madeleine said rudely. “You love me only because I have not given in to your demands.” They were at the edge of the street now, and the hackney was waiting, its door open.
Madeleine turned about and almost marched off without saying another word. Then suddenly she thought of something. “You’ll have to come back when you want that plaster removed. Unless you tell your man that it’s a fake.”
“No!” Braddon was revolted by the idea. “Kesgrave is a knaggy old gaffer. He’d have no sense of the fun of the thing. I shan’t tell anyone. Madeleine …”
She stopped and looked back at him, a rounded, curvy girl, her brown hair catching gold lights in the dusty sunlight of the horse yard.
“Thank you for helping me.”
Madeleine gave a sudden, sparkling grin. “It behooves a courtesan to ensure that her master doesn’t get married,” she observed. Then she laughed outright at the look of disgust that crossed Braddon’s face.
“You are not just a courtesan!” he protested.
“I’m not a courtesan at all,” Madeleine pointed out, and turned about again, walking quickly into the shadow of the stables.
From there she watched Braddon hop his way into the hackney, swearing fulsomely when the plaster caught and banged loudly against the hackney door. Good thing he hadn’t really broken his leg. That little maneuver would have hurt like the devil, in Madeleine’s opinion.
It was hard not to feel wistful, watching Braddon cram his large frame into the hackney. Life as his mistress would be blissful.
Madeleine shook herself. Poor Gracie! She ha
d quite deserted her in the middle of bandaging her foreleg.
Poor Gracie indeed! Gracie had just licked up the last of the poultice intended for her leg, and when Madeleine’s father appeared he found his daughter scolding the greedy nag in bursts of irritable French.
Chapter 8
Patrick stared at his old friend in utter disbelief and then laughed, a short brutal laugh that had nothing to do with humor.
“She’s your bride—you fetch her.”
Braddon looked at him appealingly. Patrick was the only friend he had who could be trusted to follow through on a scheme in a pinch. Then he gestured at his monstrous plaster propped on a tufted footstool before him.
“Damn it, man, I can’t make my way up a ladder with my leg like this!”
Patrick shrugged. “Then you can’t elope.”
“That’s just it,” Braddon squealed. “I don’t want to elope. If you go up that ladder and bring Lady Sophie over here, she can see the state of my leg. Then she’ll understand that eloping is out of the question. I’m in a cursed hobble, Patrick; you’ve simply got to help me.”
“Send her a note.”
Braddon stuck out his bottom lip in a characteristic pout. “Sophie’ll toss me over. She seems to be the hysterical sort. She told me last night that if I don’t fetch her off that ladder, she won’t marry me at all.
“Hey!” he said suddenly. “I know why you’re acting like a bear with a sore head.” He grinned and looked at Patrick assessingly. “You’re getting married yourself, aren’t you? Miss Boch. Been out sizing wedding rings, have you?”
He almost quailed under the furious glance leveled at him by Patrick.
“Don’t be more of a dunce than I’m used to, Braddon.”
Braddon pouted again. “I hate it when you get that icy tone,” he observed. “You can be more knaggy than your brother, and that’s saying quite a bit. What’s caught you on the raw? The whole room was talking about you strolling out in the moonlight with Miss Boch last night.”
Suddenly Patrick’s eyes flashed to his. “Last night,” he said slowly. “Last night before you left?”
“That’s right,” Braddon confirmed. “You thought m’mother wouldn’t notice when you two wandered off for a bit of a cuddle and didn’t come back?”
“The girl got stung by a bee and started yowling,” Patrick replied almost absently. “When did you hear about my supposed marriage? Before or after Sophie proposed such a rapid conclusion to your engagement?”
“Oh no!” Braddon said. “You can’t get away with that! Sophie proposed an elopement well before you made such a scandal.” He preened a bit. “I told you, Patrick. This may have been the only time I’ve been able to take a woman off the Foakes brothers, but Sophie adores me.”
He paused. “You know, perhaps you shouldn’t be the one to take her down the ladder.” Braddon pulled at his long lower lip meditatively. “Do you think she might take offense at it?”
Patrick looked at him in disgust. Sometimes, for all the bonds of boyhood, he wondered how Braddon managed to get through the day without being murdered.
“Undoubtedly she will,” he said coolly. “So you better just send one of your footmen up the ladder, because I’m not your man.” He tossed off the glass of brandy in his hand.
“I can’t do that,” Braddon protested. “How can I send a footman up the ladder into the bedchamber of a gently bred lady—more, my future wife? No, it has to be you, Patrick, because I sent a message over to Alex and he hasn’t shown up, so he probably didn’t receive it.”
“Alex is in the country,” Patrick said.
“Well, there you are,” Braddon replied. “I’d rather it not be you, given that you have a past with Sophie, but you’re all I’ve got. I can’t ask David to go up the ladder, because he’s a priest, and besides, he didn’t answer my note either. Lord knows Quill is in a worse state than I am. He can’t climb a ladder.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Patrick said moodily.
“I’ll tell you what,” Braddon said, with a brighter note in his voice. “You can wear my mustache and cape, and she’ll never know who you are.”
Patrick poured himself more brandy. “Why should I?”
“What do you mean, why should you? Because we’re friends, that’s why. Because you’re practically my brother. Because you know what my mama’s like, and what she’s liable to do to me if Sophie gives me the bag!”
Patrick stifled a sigh. Braddon’s soulful eyes were fastened on him like those of a retriever that knows you’re holding a bone behind your back.
Well, what the hell. Sophie didn’t want to marry him, so why not act as a procurer for the man she did want to marry?
Braddon was still babbling away. “Look, look right here, Patrick!” He held up a large sack and pulled out a black thing that looked like a stubbly hedgehog.
“What in God’s name is that?”
“A beard,” Braddon said happily. “I bought it from the very best, Henslowe, the man who supplies all the Drury Lane costumes. And there’s a cape too. Look—”
Patrick grimaced and drank some more brandy. So what if Lady Sophie York was suddenly wishful to ruin her reputation by eloping? What was it to him? Nothing. Not a thing. Why shouldn’t he fetch her from the bloody ladder?
Braddon had been looking at him inquiringly and saw the telltale signs. “You’ll do it!” He whooped out loud. “I knew it, Patrick. I knew I could count on you. Damn it, man, but you’re up to the rig on every suit!”
“Insane, more like it,” Patrick said. He cast a nasty glance at Braddon’s leg. “How long do you have to wear that thing anyway?”
“Oh, a couple of weeks,” Braddon said airily.
Patrick leveled him a glance under inky brows. “I thought it took six weeks for a broken limb to heal.”
“You’re probably right,” Braddon agreed. “But you’d better be off, Patrick. Sophie is expecting me up the ladder at midnight—cursed late hour for eloping, if you ask me—and it’s twenty to the hour now.”
Patrick fingered the black hedgehog Braddon threw to him. It fell into two parts, revealing itself to be a beard and a mustache. Braddon then tossed him a small bottle. “There, stick it on with this stuff. You can use the mirror over the fireplace.”
Patrick took off the bottle top and sniffed it. “No.” His voice admitted no argument.
“Well at least wear the cape,” Braddon implored. “It has a hood, so she won’t be able to see who you are, at least until you get her on the ground. I don’t want her to start screeching and wake the whole household. Sophie probably won’t be pleased to realize that you’ve come up the ladder instead of me.”
In Patrick’s estimation, that was a vast understatement of Sophie’s likely feelings about the matter.
But Braddon continued blithely. “What’s more, you need the cape to wrap around her once you’re on the ground. You can’t ruin the reputation of my future wife by being seen with her in the middle of the night!”
Patrick’s eyes flashed with amusement. “You’re asking me to go into your future wife’s bedchamber and fetch her into a solitary carriage, in the middle of the night, without her parents’ knowledge, and you’re worrying about her reputation?” He threw on the cloak and pulled up the hood, catching a glimpse of himself in the fireplace mirror. “My God, I look like a caricature—one of those medieval figures of Death. All I need is a rope belt and a sickle!”
Braddon pulled on his lip. “Sophie’s reputation will be compromised only if someone recognizes the two of you. So you should wrap her in the cloak on the way to the carriage so that no one can see her face. I mean, if someone happens to be walking down the street at that hour.”
Patrick sighed. The situation was ridiculous. The best he could do would be to fetch the chit and dump her at Braddon’s house.
“I suppose you’ve thought about what you’re going to do with her once she’s in your house?”
Braddon nodded. “I’m sending he
r over to my grand-mama’s. The house is just a few streets over, and I already warned the housekeeper. Grandmama is in the country, so in the morning the housekeeper will simply escort Sophie back to her own house with no one the wiser.”
The cloak had about twice the volume of his riding cloak and Patrick had no doubt that he looked absurd. But it wasn’t until he was standing in the pitch-dark gardens of Brandenburg House, looking through his deep hood at a ladder which innocently leaned against a window, that he realized forcefully how absurd the night had become. He almost turned about and headed out of the garden; but just as he started to turn on his heel a soft voice hailed him from above.
“Lord Slaslow!”
Patrick looked up. He could only indistinctly see Sophie’s small head and shoulders peeping out the window through the ladder studs.
“Well, come on down then,” he snarled. “If you want to elope.” Some Romeo I make, he thought savagely.
“Lord Slaslow—Braddon—I can’t!” Sophie’s voice was almost a wail.
Patrick moved a bit closer. “Why not?”
Sophie stared down at the dark form below her. Braddon’s voice sounded surprisingly rough; he usually affected a soft, gentlemanly lisp. He was undoubtedly cross at the unconventional way in which she had forced him to appear in her garden and elope with her.
“Lord Slaslow, will you please come up and talk for a minute before eloping? Please?“
Sophie heard what sounded like a growl escaping through clenched teeth. Then the man below her moved toward the house and she nervously gripped the ladder. What if the ladder swung backward while her betrothed was climbing and he fell to the ground? That would certainly awaken the servants. And what if Braddon hurt himself? He wasn’t exactly a nimble man.
But he seemed to be negotiating the ladder with careless grace. Sophie giggled nervously to herself, wondering if he had practiced during the day. As Braddon neared the windowsill she backed up in a little rush and perched herself on the bed. She had snuffed the candles, so the only light in the room was a very dim glow from the window itself.