Plum clung to the door frame, her knees weak at the thought, but she made one more attempt to reason with him. “The scandal—”
Harry set down the papers and walked over to the door, gently pushing her through it. “The scandal is no more. I swear that to you.”
“But—”
“But nothing. There is nothing to but. I defy you to but me again.” He pried both of her hands off the door frame, kissed each finger, then started to close the door. “Thank you for warning me, but now I must get back to work, else I won’t have time to demonstrate my improved hummingbird technique.”
“Harry—”
“Leave. Begone. Avaunt. Off wit’ ye. Bye-bye.”
The door clicked quietly as it was closed in her face. Plum stared at the door for a moment, thought about using the second of her three daily allowed sighs, and decided the moment wasn’t sigh-worthy enough. “Pooh,” she said, instead.
“Just so,” Temple agreed as he rose and handed her a salver full of letters.
“What’s this?”
“His lordship asked me to give them to you.”
“Oh.” A sudden thought brightened her. “Is it something to do with his project?”
“I’m afraid not. They are invitations and letters of congratulations from the local gentry.”
Plum blanched and backed away from the salver as if it contained a poisonous asp seated atop a large pile of offal. “I don’t want them. Take them away. Tear them up. Burn them. Bury them deep in the compost heap.”
Temple watched her back up toward the door, pursing his lips as she fumbled for the doorknob. “I sense you have a reticence with regards to correspondence of a social nature. I do not wish to pry, but would I be permitted to ask the reason you wish me to destroy invitations issued to his lordship and you from polite persons of an upstanding nature and general good reputation?”
“No, you may not,” Plum said, then made her escape through the door, closing it quickly behind her and standing with her back to it as she tried to calm her wildly beating heart. Harry might be convinced that his name alone could keep people from gossiping about her, but she had no such conviction. Until she was sure that he really did have that sort of power, she’d spurn all invitations that might bring her face-to-face with someone who knew of her past.
Coward, the mocking voice in her head whispered.
“About this I’m simply being cautious,” she said aloud and went off to see what sort of deviltry the children had gotten into.
Ten
It was the sheerest fluke that Plum happened to be strolling through the lowest levels of the garden when she heard the scream. She was supposed to be receiving the local vicar, but she left Thom to do those honors and went out with Burt the head gardener to look at reclaiming the last bit of wilderness in what was once a grand tiered garden.
“I believe this was an herbaceous border at one time,” she said to Burt. “If you were to clean it up and plant some—good heavens, what are the children doing now?”
Plum and Burt turned to look at the crescent of willow trees that lined a small pond filled with stagnant, odiferous water. She frowned and started toward the pond, her chin set. Burt trotted behind her. “Drat those children, I told them just two days ago they weren’t allowed to hunt frogs on that pond anymore. The last time they did, Anne pushed Andrew out of the boat, and he came in reeking to high heaven.”
“Pond gets the runoff from the compost heap, it does,” Burt said.
“That would explain the stench. If I find that they’re out in that boat again, I’m going to—”
Plum never had time to complete her threat. As she and Burt cleared the trees, a sight to chill any mother’s blood met her eyes. The boat had capsized, its bow pointing upward, the stern submerged. Digger had one child—Anne or Andrew, she couldn’t tell which—under his arm, and was swimming through the algae and slime to the shore. Another child—McTavish—clung to the side of the sinking rowboat, shrieking like a banshee. The water beyond McTavish rippled, and the top of a towhead emerged for a moment before it sank again.
Plum didn’t waste any breath on exclamations—she kicked off her slippers and ran for the edge of the pond, instinctively taking a deep breath before diving into the foul water. Dimly she heard Burt beside her, and set off for whichever child was drowning beyond the boat.
She gasped as her head cleared the water—the pond was so foul, it tainted the air sucked into her lungs, searing them as if she was breathing in smoke fumes, making her choke and gasp. Digger yelled from shore that he had Anne, which meant it was Andrew who had gone under. Plum took a deep breath and dived. The water stung her eyes, and was so murky and filled with matter churned up by Andrew’s flailing body that she could not see. It was only by luck that her outstretched hands felt the whisper of fabric. She lunged forward, both hands trying to follow the elusive material until an arm came into her grasp, an arm that snaked itself around her in an iron grip. She grabbed a handful of jacket and kicked upward, her lungs burning, her eyes an agony.
“I’ve got him,” she yelled as soon as she surfaced. Andrew coughed and sputtered with her, his arms and legs thrashing as she tried to keep his face out of the water. “Stop fighting me, Andrew, or you’ll drown us both.”
“Can’t swim,” he gasped and wrapped both arms around her neck, cutting off her air.
“Just…ow! Stop choking me, we’re only a few yards from shore…relax. You’re safe now.”
Slowly, hindered by Andrew attempting to climb her as if she was a ladder, Plum got them to shore. Digger was bent over a retching McTavish, Anne lying in a moaning heap next to him. Burt waded back into the pond to pry Andrew off her body.
“All right,” Plum said just as soon as she spat up some of the foul water she’d swallowed. She wiped her green slime-covered hair out of her eyes and glared at the four children lying on the grass before her. “You are all in so much trouble, you cannot possibly begin to fathom the depth of it. Did I not just tell you two days ago that you were not to go out on the pond?”
Digger groaned and picked gelatinous ropes of algae off his front. “Lord, she’s going to lecture us now.”
Plum gasped. “Digger! Language!”
He rolled his eyes, an act that had Plum seeing red—despite being covered in stinking green. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young man!”
“I’m an earl,” Digger said, pulling himself up to his full height. “I can do whatever I like.”
“You’re a young man perilously close to having his breeches down to receive a thrashing,” Plum snarled. Burt, sensing that all was well—at least health-wise—slunk off to change his clothes. Anne and Andrew snickered.
Plum glared them into silence before turning back to her oldest stepson. “Of all the stupid, inconsiderate acts—you could have drowned yourself and your brothers and sister with your foolishness! Do you have any idea how annoyed your father would have been if I had to tell him you all had drowned?”
Digger shrugged. Plum, stinking to high heaven and scared more than half out of her wits by the near-drowning of four children who had become—despite their tendencies to drive her insane—very dear to her, shoved him toward the house, turning to help Anne to her feet as the other children slowly got to theirs.
“Digger’s going to get a whipping,” McTavish said with great complacency as he took Plum’s hand in his. “Papa will be mad at Digger, won’t he, Mama?”
Digger’s shoulders twitched.
“Don’t you ‘Mama’ me in that endearing, adorable tone, you little rapscallion,” Plum said, shaking with the aftereffects of terror as the blissful numbness of anger wore off. “Your father is going to be very angry with all of you. I wouldn’t be surprised if he takes each of you out to meet his razor strop.”
Anne’s eyes opened wide. “He wouldn’t whip me, I’m a girl!”
/> Plum, who knew full well that Harry had never lifted a hand in punishment toward his children, wholeheartedly supported his policy of instilling in them the belief that they were just a heartbeat away from a well-deserved beating. “You think not? I’m not so sure of that.”
Anne’s brow puckered worriedly. Plum, who wanted to clutch the children to her with one hand while shaking them with another, decided that it wouldn’t hurt to let them stew over their punishment. When she thought of how near they had been to real tragedy… “I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes now, I certainly wouldn’t.”
McTavish’s hand tightened around hers. He looked down at his feet. “You wouldn’t?”
“No, I wouldn’t. Wasn’t it just yesterday your father lined you all up in the library and lectured you for twenty minutes about disregarding orders he and I give you?”
Digger snorted. Anne looked more worried. Andrew scowled. McTavish released Plum’s hand and tried to run off after a pretty butterfly. She grabbed the back of his shirt and marched him toward the house. “Yes, indeed, I would be very, very worried had I been one to disregard your father’s strictures.”
“What’s a stricture?” McTavish asked as Plum gently pushed him up the steps to the veranda.
“Order.”
“Papa won’t whip me, he says I’m too young,” he replied and scampered up the last of the steps. “Race you to the kitchen!”
“Nursery!” Plum bellowed as the children turned left at the top of the stairs and ran off down the length of the veranda. “Change your clothes before you do anything else, and don’t you think you’ve escaped so lightly! I have not finished talking to you about ignoring—don’t you give me that look, you are in enough trouble already, you do not want to be pushing me any further!”
Plum sighed her third sigh of the day as the children raced away, wondering for the hundredth time how she was to prove her excellent mothering skills to Harry when his children defied her attempts to mold them into well-behaved examples of manners and decorum rather than the wild heathens they were. She sniffed back a tear of self-pity and immediately wrinkled her nose. The sun warming her wet shoulders had heightened the horrible stench to the point where it could drop a horse at fifty paces. “Bath first, then Edna can burn this gown,” she said to herself as she squelched wetly through the French doors into her sitting room. She would just run upstairs before anyone saw her…
That thought died as she realized the sitting room was already in use.
Plum blinked in surprise as Harry rose from the rose damask settee, a cup of tea in one hand, a small plate of biscuits in the other. “Ah, there she is. Plum, my dear, may I introduce mister…mister… Good Lord, woman! What have you done to yourself?”
The vicar! She’d forgotten about the vicar paying a call! Plum’s eyes closed in horror for a moment as she tried to blot from her mind the sight of the appalled faces of the vicar and his wife turned to gape openmouthed at her. A third woman clutched a handkerchief to her nose as she surveyed Plum from slimy head to weed-encrusted foot.
Thom, seated beyond Harry and playing mother as she poured tea, stared at her in equal surprise. “Been swimming, Aunt Plum?”
Harry took a step near her, then quickly retreated once he got a whiff of the eau du pond. “What the devil…sorry, Vicar…what’s going on?”
“I…er…” Plum glanced to the side. The vicar, a pleasant-looking, mild little man, gazed at her with real concern. His wife fanned herself vigorously while discreetly extracting a small vial of perfume from her reticule. The other woman, dressed in puce with a bonnet that resembled a warped saddle, wore a look of pure, malicious delight. Plum dragged her gaze from her to Harry. “There was a little accident at the pond. No one was harmed, but I…er…fell in. If you will excuse me, I will change into something a little more suitable.”
“Suitable?” the woman with the saddle on her head snorted. Plum paused at the door, unsure if she should apologize for her untoward appearance, or just gracefully sail out of the room and act as if she was above such petty concerns as smelling like a bog. “Anyone less suitable to be the Marchioness Rosse than Charles de Spenser’s whore you would have a long way to find.”
The vicar’s wife gasped and dropped her vial. Harry turned slowly to look at the woman. Thom, with calm deliberation, removed the cup and plate clenched in Harry’s hands, then rose and stood by her aunt.
Plum lifted her chin and gazed as coolly as possible—not an easy feat when one was dripping with pond slime—at the woman. “You must be Miss Stone.”
“I am,” the woman said in a loud aggressive tone. “I know who you are, as well.”
“Yes, of course you do, you would be a fool not to know,” Harry said suavely, but Plum could see the tiny muscle in his jaw twitch. He was angry, very angry, and although she knew he wasn’t angry at her, it was her fault he should be exposed to the scorn of such a vile woman. She felt sick, nauseated that what she had dreaded would happen, had. “She is my wife, the stepmother of my children. She is my marchioness.”
“She is also the mistress of Charles de Spenser, youngest son of Viscount Morley,” Miss Stone crowed.
The vicar’s wife swooned backward, drooping in the approved manner on her husband. The vicar’s eyes were wide with astonishment as he waved his wife’s vial under her nose.
“Was the mistress of Charles de Spenser,” Harry said calmly, the tension in his hands belying his placid tone.
Miss Stone’s vicious smirk of triumph dimmed a bit in the face of Harry’s complacency. “You know of her shame?”
“I know of her marriage to Charles de Spenser, yes. And although I don’t believe my wife’s past is the concern of anyone present but her and myself, I will this once make an exception to my natural distaste in discussing such a private subject with persons not related to us.”
Plum blinked back a few tears of adoration for Harry. She’d never heard him speak in such an aristocratic, cold voice, but she knew he did it for her sake. She was torn between a desire to kiss her darling avenging angel and the need to shield him from the contempt she knew he would face.
“A bigamous marriage,” Miss Stone spat. “He was married already when she went to his bed.”
“I had no idea Charles was already married—” Plum started to say, but ceased when Harry took her hand in his, stroking his thumb over the pulse in her wrist.
“You don’t have to defend yourself to these good people,” he said, never once taking his eyes off the evil Miss Stone. “Although obviously they have heard only the basest lies, no doubt being good Christians they will be delighted to learn the truth, not to mention being filled with joy to learn that you were innocent of any wrongdoing other than having a too loving heart. They will be shocked when they are told of the cruelty practiced upon you by a disgusting cur of a man who thought nothing of using and abandoning you, and I’m sure they will do their utmost to remedy any false impression created by the slanders that other foolish and stupid people have spread in the misguided belief they were speaking the truth. Surely, everyone here knows how I worship the very ground you walk on, and that I would never, under any circumstances, allow anyone to say ill of you without exacting the most heinous and exhaustive of retributions.”
Plum held her breath, her eyes on Harry’s as they glittered meaningfully behind his spectacles. Miss Stone was no match for him. Before his threatening gaze, her eyes wavered, then fell as she slumped back into the chair, deflated of the spite and venom that had puffed her up like a balloon.
Harry turned to the vicar and his wife, both of whom immediately swore their wholehearted devotion to clearing any misconception regarding Plum’s past.
Plum herself stood in silent misery-laden bemusement, watching Harry carefully. He turned to her, pulling her hands to his mouth as he winked before kissing her fingers. “My dear, I’m sure you wish to change into something a
little less reminiscent of a cesspool.”
“Yes.” Plum blinked at him, her mind more than a little numb. Had he just winked at her? Had he taken the wind so effectively out of Miss Stone’s sails? Had he, with just a few words, erased the shame of her past?
“Now, perhaps, would be a good time?” His eyes twinkled at her. She goggled at that. He could twinkle after what just happened? Twinkle?
“I’m sure you will all excuse my wife. Thom?”
“I’m right here. Come along, Aunt Plum. What you need is a bath to wash all that pond off you.”
Thom’s arm was warm on her damp sleeve, but Plum couldn’t stop staring at Harry. He winked and twinkled? Was he mad?
“It was a pleasure meeting you, Lady Rosse,” the vicar said, standing and giving her a little bow.
Was she mad?
His wife hurried to add her niceties. “Oh, yes, it was, it was very nice, and I hope we see you on Sunday.”
Mayhap they were all mad, and none of them knew it?
“A pleasure,” Miss Stone said in a begrudging, surly tone. Her face was dull red with anger, but Plum found little sympathy for her.
“Plum?”
Her name was soft on Harry’s lips. She turned to him. “Hmm?”
Harry made shooing motions with his hand.
She blinked, then suddenly reason, blessed reason was returned to her, and she realized that he had done the impossible just as he said he would. She wanted to kiss him, but felt she’d shocked the vicar enough for one day, so contented herself with allowing her love to shine in her eyes. Harry mouthed, “I told you so,” at her as she let Thom escort her from the room.
“What a nasty, vile old cat that Miss Stone is,” Thom said as they walked up the stairs.
“And what a wonderful, adorable, marvelous man Harry is,” Plum replied, her mind full of her husband. She sighed happily. “Could any man be more perfect?”