Chapter Nine
Ginny found another smaller drawing room on the same floor, which was also dusty, musty, cold, and empty apart from a single
settee. The floors were bare.
She hoisted the blinds and parted the curtains to allow in some light, then sat down and waited, numbly contemplating her
choices and listening to the unintelligible murmurs of conversation coming from the next room.
Once again, she was both mortified and fascinated.
Presently, Mr. Marchand found her.
He studied her from the doorway for a moment before approaching.
“It seems Mrs. Parker unfortunately passed away in Italy a few weeks ago. Mrs. Cartwright was her housekeeper and Mr. Benson
was her butler, and they received word of it only a week ago via letter.”
“I see. How sad.” It was sad.
“Mrs. Cartwright was upset, and needed comforting, so, ah, Mr. Benson was cuddling her.”
Ginny stared at him balefully. Judging from the heat, her face was a uniform shade of crimson. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mr. Marchand.”
The corners of his mouth twitched upward. “Do you need smelling salts?”
“Why, have you got any?” she said somewhat bitterly.
“No. I was just curious.”
This made her bark a short laugh. But it tapered into a sigh.
He cleared his throat.
“I imagine it can be a little distressing to witness that sort of, ah, intimacy, when you didn’t expect to. It’s natural to
feel . . .”
She was amused at his caution and almost touched by his attempts at sympathy.
“Disturbed? Inconvenienced? Embarrassed? Deeply regretful?”
“If those are the things you feel, then those are the things you feel.” He looked amused. And not at all uncomfortable.
Imagine being the sort of person who wasn’t even a little nonplussed by happening upon unexpected fornication, complete with
buttock smacks.
“Doubtless it’s more picturesque when you do it.”
He went dead silent and abruptly still.
She knew a surge of deep satisfaction at robbing him of words. He wasn’t the only one who could be unexpected.
“Probably not,” he finally said smoothly. “I’m sure it depends on the angle at which it is all viewed. Or the perceived attractiveness
of the participants.”
She closed her eyes. “Oof,” she muttered, miserably.
She opened them in time to find a fleeting grin vanishing from his face.
“I would have thought your legendary prowess would make a difference to how things looked, regardless of the angle,” she countered.
“My what?”
Ginny was delighted at his astonishment. “Prow. Ess,” she repeated, relentlessly emphasizing each syllable.
Which made him frown darkly.
“Who on earth have you been talking to?” He didn’t add “young lady” at the end of that sentence but his tone implied it and
somehow that was even funnier.
“Lady Tomelty. Your prowess was the on-dit, she claimed. I did a little research on you before I came to London.”
He scowled, which was a fearsome thing to witness.
Then he tipped his head back. “Giddier than a champagne bubble?” he guessed. “Blond? Pretty as a trinket? About thirty years
old?”
“That sounds like her.”
He remained quiet. His scowl hadn’t entirely disappeared. She was reminded of the gargoyles on the roof edge of the Grand
Palace on the Thames.
“She shouldn’t have spoken to you that way. At all. Even I know that,” he said almost reflectively. As if he was realizing
a few things about Ginny’s shambolic upbringing and recent history.
Which was quite ironic, given that he had recently made her an offer that no man should ever make a gently born unmarried
lady.
That no gentleman should make, anyway.
The word that adequately captured whatever Marchand was hadn’t yet been invented.
“No, she shouldn’t have said it. But how else would I learn anything about anything?” she said matter-of-factly.
“I’ve met Lady Tomelty exactly once, at a sort of salon. Her husband is a member of Lucifer’s Fall. She has no firsthand knowledge
of that or anything else about me, and that includes prowess. This I swear on my life. So I’m not certain what precisely you’ve
learned.”
“That such a thing as prowess exists and that some people consider it a good thing.”
He smiled faintly. “Touché. It’s not unimportant information.”
“Rather disappointing to hear that the prowess bit about you is not true and you’re another grunty scrabbler like our friends
in the other room, however,” she said sadly.
He went rigid again. Clearly thunderstruck.
Ginny was enjoying herself now.
And then amazement, hilarity, and a fairly serious warning not to trifle with his dignity mingled in his expression. One got
the sense that Mr. Marchand was seldom truly taken aback, let alone crossed.
She knew the most ridiculously delicious triumph. Startling him might really be her only line of defense against his intimidating
aplomb, even if it was probably unwise to test her luck and his patience.
Though in every way, in every respect, her every action was already well past unwise.
“Prowess usually takes two,” he replied evenly enough. “It’s not a skill you possess that fits every instance. It’s not like
shoeing a horse.”
She was starting to regret the track she’d set them both upon, because she immediately felt warm again.
“Well, that’s a relief. I’m so glad to hear it’s not like ‘shoeing a horse,’ ” she said with the irony it richly deserved.
“It’s more like a dance. If one partner is graceful, but the other routinely treads on or trips over feet or prefers reels
to waltzes or doesn’t move at all . . .”
She’d never met anyone so unafraid of not blinking. She considered it a personal challenge to hold his gaze, but it was like
being handed two shillings plucked out of a fire.
A night in my bed.
He was willing to forgo the four thousand pounds he was owed for that privilege.
And it was probably less to do with her charms than the fact that he had so much money he could do frivolous things with it.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps he knew things about her that she had yet to discover.
His words were smoldering inside her like little coals now, someplace where rational thought could not reach to quench them.
If Mr. Marchand decided to suddenly lunge and ravish her, replicating the scene in the drawing room, there probably wasn’t
much she could do about it. The house would become an orgy house.
Although she was somewhat comforted by the notion that she’d probably already proved that she was more trouble than she was
worth.
“Probably you shouldn’t be saying those sorts of things to me, either,” she said primly. Also wickedly.
He sighed heavily, as if she was exhausting.
“I haven’t yet asked them about the vase. I thought we’d go in and have a chat with them together so we could both hear what
they have to say. They seem like pleasant enough people. Unless you would find it too awkward.”
“All right.” She might as well have yet another mildly excruciating conversation, the only kind she seemed to have lately.
Mr. Marchand brought in chairs from the dining room so they could sit across from Mr. Benson and Mrs. Cartwright. He’d opened
up the blinds, too.
Chatting with a man whose buttocks she’d seen before she’d seen his face was unprecedented for Ginny. His face was broad and
mild and friendly. His hairline began at about the middle of the top of his head; he sported jowls. He wore a neat butler’s
uniform.
She could not help but steal a glance toward Mrs. Cartwright’s shoes. She seemed to have managed to pull up her stockings
snugly. She wore a cap and apron, both white and tidy, and a blandly deferential expression.
Both of their faces were red, and she suspected her own was, too.
Marchand’s wasn’t.
She had never once imagined the Woodville servants making love, and now she wondered why. She would never have figured either of the two people sitting across from her for passionate spankers, and she was doomed to wonder that about everyone she met from now on.
“I hope you’ll forgive our intrusion. It’s just that we were concerned about Mrs. Parker,” Marchand said. “And given the outward
condition of the house, when no one answered the door, it struck me as ominous.”
Ginny had explained that she was a relation of the late earl’s.
“Your cousin, the earl, was a nice man, Miss Woodville. We saw him often. It’s very sad for us to lose both of them. Perhaps
they wanted to be together.” Mrs. Cartwright said this.
“I’m sorry for your loss, too,” Ginny told them.
Mr. Benson reached out and squeezed Mrs. Cartwright’s hand. Perhaps they had been comforting each other, along with the spanking.
“Mrs. Parker passed away whilst she was in Italy,” Mrs. Cartwright told them. “We had the letter a week ago, and we at first
didn’t know what to do or where to go. We’ve been living here, but we haven’t been paid for the past month’s work as usual.”
Judging from the condition of the house, she’d ceased cleaning right about then, too. Perhaps they’d been lovemaking with
abandon all over the furniture instead in the interim.
“Then the landlord learned she’d cocked up her toes and he told us he would pay us to pack up her house and clear out her
belongings as best we could as soon as we could. Mrs. Parker was mad about her knickknacks, wasn’t she, Benson?” The butler
nodded. “They was everywhere. Little porcelain dogs and shepherdesses and vases and dishes. Had to dust each and every one of them every day for fifteen years, all them nooks and crannies, never broke a one of them. Got to know them like they was me own children. And still she didn’t think to leave a will,” Mrs. Cartwright said bitterly.
“And me out of a job. She had no children. We took the lot of the knickknacks to Fleegle’s
Emporium of Wonders on Farwell Street. Got three whole shillings. Sold off her furniture, too.”
Ginny recognized the name of the shop. It was where her sister Felicity’s fiancé, Lord Cambrough, had whimsically purchased
a little china pig for her. Felicity collected them.