Elmwood
Winthrop stood in the doorway, somehow resplendent in salmon velvet despite having spent three days in a carriage.
The young woman behind him was clearly of means.
Her traveling suit was in the latest fashion, with more tiny ruffles than a production of The Dance of the Fire Orchids. The older woman must be her chaperone.
She enveloped him in a cloud of ruffles, rose-scented perfume, and three-days-in-a-carriage-from-Neck underarm funk.
“Darling Erol!” she cried. He took in her enraptured face in complete bafflement. It was very close to his, and seemed oddly familiar, though he could not seem to figure out why.
“ ‘Darling Erol’?” he said, confused. No one called him Erol.
“Isobel, propriety,” shrilled the chaperone.
“I feared I’d never hold you in my arms again!” said the young woman. Her eyes were dewy with moisture, and she caressed Elmwood’s cheek with her gloved hand.
What did she mean by again? And why was she calling him by his given name?
He pulled back, clasping her hands in his to put some distance between them. She really was a beautiful creature, with lustrous fawn-brown hair, full lips, and a bosom that could only be described as heaving.
But why had Winthrop brought her and her heaving bosom to his doorstep?
“Erol, won’t you greet me properly?” she said, her bottom lip trembling.
“Of course…” he stammered, looking frantically at Winthrop.
“May I present Lady Isobel Warrit and her aunt, Miss Floret,” said Winthrop with a despicable smirk. “Of course, you already know Lady Isobel, Elmwood.”
“Yes…of course.” He tried to smile at her reassuringly. “It is perfectly lovely to see you again,” he managed to squeeze out.
“Elmwood,” said Winthrop, inclining his head toward Lady Croft, “you must introduce me to your…friend.”
“This is my neighbor, Lady Croft,” he said quickly, glancing at her. To his amazement, Lady Croft was glaring at the young woman in his arms. Or possibly at him? Perhaps both.
“Your Ladyship,” said Winthrop, giving a little bow. “Gideon Winthrop, at your service.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Winthrop,” said Lady Croft. “As a matter of fact, I do indeed have need of your services. Lord Elmwood and I were just discussing a business matter that I believe you might…”
“Now, now,” said Elmwood, deeply aware that it sounded as if he were panicking.
“I mean to say, let us not get ahead of ourselves!” He was seized by the strong conviction that he must somehow get Lady Croft away from this situation immediately, before she said anything more to Winthrop, or he said anything to her, or the young lady in his arms said anything to anyone.
“Lady Croft, you and I can resume our, um, business another day, as I have no doubt that Winthrop and Lady Isabeau and her chaperone are tired and must desire…”
“Isabeau?” said the young lady. He realized her eyes were now downright moist and struggled to find something comforting to say but came up quite empty-headed.
“Have you truly forgotten the name of your betrothed?” she said, a single fat tear rolling down her cheek.
“Oh, my darling Erol, what did they do to you in Relance?”
“Betrothed?” he said, the word baffling him.
“Betrothed?” said Lady Croft, sounding every bit as confused as he felt.
“Betrothed!” cried Winthrop, clearly delighted.
“Betrothed,” said Lady Croft again, and this time, the word sounded like a dagger she wanted to skewer him with.
“I’m not betrothed!” he said to her, shoving the young lady away from him as if she were on fire.
With that, the young lady fully burst into tears.
There followed a kerfuffle. Miss Floret loudly declared that Lady Isobel was overcome and required an immediate tisane and a cool cloth for her head. Lady Isobel sobbed loudly. Winthrop grasped Elmwood’s collar and pulled him close, whispering, “We must speak.”
All Elmwood cared about was the look of disgust that was writ across Lady Croft’s face.
Then she turned away from him and toward Lady Isobel, who was still wailing, and her expression softened.
“You have had a long, uncomfortable journey,” she said, her voice cutting through all the noise. Lady Isobel sniffed loudly. “Why don’t I take the ladies to warm themselves by the kitchen fire and give them some refreshment?”
That sounded like a terrible idea. Elmwood opened his mouth to put a stop to it, but he was too late.
“Excellent, thank you, Lady Croft, that’s very kind,” said Winthrop, who still had a tight grip on Elmwood. He used it to pull Elmwood off down the corridor before he had a chance to object.
“Will you please unhand me?” Elmwood muttered, trying to get away, but Winthrop fenced in his spare time, as evidenced by the strength of his grip.
“I will not, and you’d better start constructing some truly spectacular excuses for why I’ve arrived to find you cozied up with your neighbor’s wife. None of your usual, garden-variety lushitude will suffice, I’m afraid.”
“Stop manhandling me! I met Lady Croft by chance, and she’s been quite neighborly, that’s all. There’s been no cozying.” It was surprisingly difficult lying to Winthrop, but it couldn’t be helped.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t having it. “You’re a terrible liar, Elmwood, and you should know better than to attempt to deceive your closest friend.”
“What about my lawyer?”
“Even worse!”
Winthrop practically tossed him into the study, slammed the door shut, then threw himself into a chair with his legs dangling over one arm. The very chair Lady Croft had sat in mere minutes earlier, before she’d pressed herself against him and…
“Very well, Elmwood,” said Winthrop, “let’s have it. How did you get up into your neighbor’s wife’s skirts, and am I going to have to deal with her irate husband?”
“Well, as a matter of fact…”
“Elmwood! I have enough to deal with! And here I am, bearing such good news for you.”
Elmwood slumped into his desk chair.
“What good news? And who, pray tell, is that deranged girl calling herself my betrothed, and why have you brought her here?”
“I don’t know why I hoped for better.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Winthrop shook his head.
“Do you truly not remember her? I suppose you were quite drunk.”
Elmwood experienced a sudden sinking sensation.
Lady Isobel and her impressive bosom. He had admired that bosom before, he realized with a creeping sense of dread.
It had been framed not by sea-green ruffles, but by the violet lace of a funeral gown.
Sometime after that…he thought that perhaps he had seen that bosom without the lace or the funeral gown.
A vision of pearly pink nipples was coming back to him in a haze of gin-soaked memory.
Lady Isobel Warrit. If she’d been wearing a funeral gown, and he’d been filthy, forget-it-all drunk, then…Then the incident with the bosom must have been…at his father’s funeral?
“Oh no. Oh no, no, no.”
“Oh yes. You may not remember, but I distinctly recall you and Lady Isobel Warrit having quite a little chat at your father’s funeral.
As a matter of fact, I believe at some point, the two of you vanished, and then later you stumbled back into the reception with your shirt untucked and a rather impressive bite mark on your… ”
“Why, Winthrop? Why have you brought a woman I drunkenly debauched at my father’s funeral to the place where I am currently hiding from the law? Why does she think we’re betrothed?”
“As for your second question, you must have asked her to marry you. You are entirely too friendly and obliging when you’re drunk.”
“It was a special occasion,” said Elmwood plaintively. He closed his eyes and propped his bad leg up on a little stool. His hip was aching again.
He had not been in the habit of drinking to excess when he was younger, and had generally been inclined to it only on calculated occasions to annoy his father.
Winthrop was right about the effect it had on him.
Indeed, he blamed that bottle in his father’s desk for what had transpired with Lady Croft less than an hour ago, which had also been a disastrous mistake.
Clearly the time had come to stop drinking to excess entirely, even if it did dull the pain of living with himself day after day. It wasn’t worth the consequences.
“Elmwood, are you paying attention? You should be. The least you can do is pretend to care about your future when I’ve been dragging myself back and forth across the countryside to secure it for you.”
“Yes, I’m paying attention! What about my first question? What wretched fate have you concocted for me now, and what does it have to do with Lady Isobel? It’s bad enough that I’ve been demoted from earl to steward for Lord Rollo Badgerhound.”
Winthrop tensed and glanced around. “Wait, you haven’t lost the dog, have you? I swear, Elmwood, if you’ve…”
“He’s fine. He spends his time sleeping in my bedclothes and filling them up with dog farts. Now, tell me what terrible scheme you’ve come up with.”
Winthrop relaxed again and leaned back. Whatever he was about to tell Elmwood, it pleased him greatly.
“You’ve accidentally solved your own problem,” said Winthrop.
“I have?”
Winthrop steepled his fingers. “You solved it three years ago when you proposed to Lady Isobel Warrit at your father’s funeral. Though I don’t think we can give you credit, seeing as it was more of a blunder than a plan, and it would have done you no good at all if I wasn’t so horribly clever.”
“Horrible being the operative word. Stop gloating, man, and tell me what’s going on.”
“Well, as you know, with the Rollo solution already in play to restore your property, our next most pressing challenge was to find some way to keep your banishment at bay. Do you follow me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s a famous case. Froubisher versus the Crown.”
“Froubisher? Wasn’t he the fellow who was supposed to be banished for treason, back when we were boys?”