Chapter 4
It was settled. The Duke of Rutley was a madman.
“Miss Knightley!”
He was following her! She was walking down the street, and he was following her! Calling her name!
She was sorely tempted to ignore him, to just keep walking.
But having an aristocrat shouting after her was not the kind of attention she wanted to garner.
She might not be a fine lady, but a governess’s livelihood lived and died on her reputation just as much as did any high society marriage potential.
“What?” she asked through gritted teeth, which she hoped resembled a smile. It wasn’t a polite response, but she could either appear polite or actually be polite, and she was choosing the former.
The duke’s smile looked as though it came a great deal more easily, though he could not have been nearly at ease as he seemed, not if he was pursuing her down a Mayfair street without even a hat on his head.
“Miss Knightley,” he said conversationally, as if this was entirely normal. “Might I offer you a ride back to your lodgings?”
He was mad. He was actually, legitimately, one hundred percent mad. Should she write to the Duchess of Godwin? Surely she deserved to know about the lunatic in the family.
“No,” she said slowly, as if explaining herself to a child in the middle of a particularly ridiculous tantrum. “You cannot. I might not be a lady by birth, Your Grace, but I am a woman. And I am not under your employ. Doing so would be highly improper.”
He paused to consider this, then nodded. She was too sensible to hope that this meant that he would go away. Indeed, any such hopes would have been disappointed, because then he said, “In that case, I shall offer you an escort to your hack.”
And then he extended his arm as if she were a lady, after all.
She looked at it the way she might have looked at someone offering her a live snake. He shook her arm. Encouragingly. Cajolingly.
There was an old man nearby walking an extremely small dog. Both man and dog were watching this interaction with interest.
With a sigh, Letty took his arm, if only to stop making a public spectacle.
“Splendid,” the duke said, as though this was something he did every day.
Letty harrumphed.
“The best place to catch a cab in this neighborhood is over that way, a few blocks,” the duke said amiably, guiding her down the street. He was considerably taller than she, but he modulated his strides to match hers, so he wasn’t tugging her along. His arm was very warm where it was laced in hers.
“How would you know?” she asked irritably. She’d tried politely extricating herself. She’d tried walking away. Maybe downright rudeness would work. “Don’t you have your own fancy carriage to squire you about?”
Instead of looking annoyed, the duke looked intrigued by her attitude. Drat.
“I do,” he said. “But, as you noted, I was not always a duke. Before I inherited, I did not keep my own carriage.”
“What a wretched inconvenience,” she said dryly. “I simply could not get by without three carriages at my beck and call.”
This time, he grinned. It was a nice grin.
What was the world coming to, she thought crossly, that you could not even count on annoying men to look properly villainous? This one looked as though he were having a delightful afternoon stroll with a friend, the wretch.
“One perseveres,” he said with a great deal of put-upon bravery, pressing his hand to his heart.
Despite herself, Letitia felt her lips twitch.
“Truth be told, it wasn’t worth the expense when I was the marquess.
But now—lest this be the thing holding you back—rest assured that I am well-funded, indeed. ”
He paused meaningfully. “Well-funded enough, that is,” he continued, “to offer quite a sizeable wage to a governess who found herself able to get through the defenses of a certain little girl.”
Letitia would have liked to say that honesty was what made her pause. Or even the flash of uncertainty in his eye when he spoke about Iris and her defenses.
It wasn’t. It was the money.
A sizeable wage wasn’t an amount that she could calculate. But there was no world in which the wage at the Bassetts could be called sizeable. Which meant that the duke was offering more.
And with more, she could…
But no. She shook herself, pulling her arm free from his to raise it, hailing the hackney that was rumbling up the road.
“Thank you,” she said as the carriage came to a stop in front of her. “But no. Good day, Your Grace.”
Best to keep things short. That way, he could not twist her words around. Besides, she didn’t like the look in his eye as she pulled the carriage door shut. It wasn’t the look of a man who planned to give up.
And the thing that made her the most nervous about that was that it did not frighten her nearly as much as it ought to have done.
* * *
Ezra followed her.
This was probably the point where his behavior shifted from questionable to outright nefarious, but he could not resist. He was already hailing another cab before he even questioned his decision, then offering the driver about five times the usual fare for a trip if he discreetly followed the hack in front of them.
The driver, grinning at the handful of coins he’d been presented with, didn’t seem overly troubled by things like morals or decorum, so Ezra decided that he wouldn’t be, either.
He considered Miss Knightley as the carriage moved from the smooth cobblestones of Mayfair into the rutted, jolting streets of less fashionable neighborhoods.
“She is intriguing,” he muttered to himself, his fingers tapping a meandering rhythm against his knee as he thought.
She had hesitated when he had offered her more money, but it had not been enough to change her mind.
That was interesting in itself. He knew that governesses didn’t make much, as the included room and board of their positions was considered an added incentive to the role.
So it wasn’t inherently strange that she should want more money.
It could just be pure avarice, he told himself. More money was more money, and that wasn’t a bad thing to have. But he didn’t think so, and Ezra had long since learned the merits of trusting his instincts.
“What do you need money for, you curious little thing?” he asked the dark air of the carriage.
They were moving close enough to the docks now that he could smell the stink of the Thames.
This was no place for a young woman alone, not even temporarily while she sought a new position.
Why had she not gone to one of the respectable boarding houses?
It had to be about the money. Did she have debts? She had spent the past year or more living in the country with Xander and Helen. What debts could she possibly have? Somehow, she didn’t strike him as a gambler.
He was still weighing the possibilities when the carriage in front of him came to a stop.
Ezra’s driver had the good sense to idle a little way away, so that Miss Knightley didn’t note her pursuer.
Unfortunately, this meant that Ezra had a poor vantage as he watched Miss Knightley go up to the door of a ramshackle little building that looked as though it had needed a new roof half a decade ago.
A candle was already burning inside, casting light through the sheer curtain of one of the windows. Miss Knightley didn’t seem like the kind of person to leave a candle burning recklessly—nor could anyone living in this neighborhood afford to do so.
“Curious,” he muttered to himself.
A shadow moved past the window, even though Miss Knightley was still on the doorstep.
So, little Miss Knightley did not live alone. Did she have a lover? A governess would hide that.
The idea tugged unpleasantly at him, though that was ridiculous. The woman was welcome to do whatever she wanted, even something as stupid and reckless as hiding a man in her home. Besides, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. She had not accepted his offer of employment.
He knocked on the roof of the carriage after she went inside, then directed the coachman back toward his home.
Miss Knightley had not accepted his offer of employment.
Not yet, anyway.