Chapter Eleven
W hen they reached the house, Viv tugged him gently toward the basement entry, where in the below-stairs world of Lady Melforth’s servants, they could find a private place. She had noticed the hitch in his stride. He had a way of pretending he felt no hurt, but she suspected that he was covering up whatever injury his attacker had given him.
“You have to let me look at the wound to make sure this mystery attacker of yours did no serious damage.” She gathered her skirts to take the stairs.
“It can wait for my…valet’s attention.” He halted at the top of the stairs.
“Your valet? The man who can’t endure the sight of blood?”
“You don’t fear the growing impropriety of our…pretense?”
She let go of her skirts. “What impropriety? You and I are wholly indifferent to one another. Surely, I can endure another sight of those stitches. I promise to be gentle. I’ve been tending Lady Melforth’s foot for weeks.”
“A lady’s foot and a gentleman’s”—he winced—“ribs are…different.”
“So, you have taken a blow to the ribs! I can see it in your walk.”
“A random hit. I’ll live.”
“Maybe I need reassurance.” She put a hand to his back and gave him a little push. It was the sort of encouragement she might give to one of her sisters, but Mr. Larkin had a lean, hard solidity to him. Just a brief touch, just her palm flattened against the hollow of his back, sent a wave of warmth through her. She dropped her hand and gave it a little shake.
“Feeling guilty over shooting me, Viv?” He watched her over his shoulder with knowing eyes.
She looked away. “Not at all,” she lied. “Why are you permitted to call me Viv while I am calling you ‘Mr. Larkin’? Aren’t you a Ned or an Ed or a Teddy?”
“Teddy?” He laughed, but she caught him wincing. “None of those.”
“What then? Surely your friends don’t address you formally.”
He turned, made a little bow, and with a sweeping arm gesture, invited her to pass before him down the stairs. She searched his face, but he didn’t meet her gaze, his profile aloof, as it had been on the day they met. Her betrothed was not a man who readily gave up the details of his life. She held her breath. A footman in pale blue livery passed on the flagstones trying to control a bounding mastiff headed for the square. The usual clatter of carriages filled the air.
She passed him and headed down the stairs. From behind and above her she heard him speak.
“Lark,” he said. “My friends call me Lark.”
*
Viv strode down the hall past the kitchen and larder and butler’s pantry to a room beyond the servants’ stairs. She opened the door to the shadowy darkness of the stillroom, and pulled two lamps from a shelf, setting them on the long deal table in the center of the room. “Wait here,” she said. “I must find some water and plasters. Can you light the lamps?” She didn’t look at him. “I’ll be a few minutes.”
“I can manage,” he said. She detected some amusement in his voice.
She climbed the servants’ stairs with quick steps. She was not fleeing. She was taking a moment to figure out how his name had so charged the atmosphere between them. She was used to giving names to the people she encountered on her walks. Once she named someone, that person became a character in the grand story of London that she and Lady Melforth were telling in their guide. Now, Lark had reversed the process. He was supposed to be Winkworth , the helpful gentleman she’d met on Babylon Street, but he had insisted on stepping out of the streets and into her life. By giving her his name, he had become someone else, someone who could know her back.
She gathered plasters from the medicine cabinet in Lady Melforth’s dressing room and darted back to the servants’ stairs and down to the kitchen for a basin of fresh water. She had so often collected the same items for dressing Lady Melforth’s injured foot that the servants took no notice of her.
In the stillroom, he had removed his coat. He stood in the lamplight, long and lean and unmoving, the white of his linen aglow, the champagne silk of his waistcoat a paler sheen. She set down her basin and turned to him. He was easily a head taller than she, neatly solid, his shoulders broad. Her person was separated from his by layers of silk and twill and buckram, by yards of fabric that ballooned around her, and yet those things were no barrier to the heady influence of his presence.
She wondered at it. It was commonplace to think that women were susceptible to handsome men, as if all handsome men possessed in equal measure some fatal charm. But the term was so general and so vague as to be nearly meaningless. The term was abstract. It did not explain the effect of a certain timbre in the voice or a particular laugh or the way a man’s eyes lighted when a woman came into view.
At first glance looking at him, all she saw was the perfect gentleman, not like the men of Oxford Street, straining after fashion with their Cossack trousers and lavender gloves. Then she saw in the blue of his eyes a dancing bit of defiance, and in the ever-so-slight wayward curve of his nose a sign that it had once been broken, and in his fine-cut mouth, unexpected sensuality.
“You don’t have to do this.” He released the buttons on his waistcoat, little silk-covered buttons, each no bigger than a pearl, that his long fingers pried free with unhurried motions.
At that slow undoing, her pulse raced, and her stomach did a strange somersault. He was so calm. He must feel nothing, while Viv imagined a tension between them. She should be used to tending to him by now. “Sorry, here I am woolgathering. Can you show me the wound?”
He pulled the shirt free of his trousers, gathering the froth of linen in one hand and holding it up to reveal the plaster on his side. A single streak of red marred the crumpled linen.
She moved one of the lamps to illuminate his side more fully. The point was to see if his assailant had broken open the stitches. A livid red mark, the imprint of a fist, bloomed across the taut flesh where the plaster ended in a thin crust of dried blood.
She couldn’t help a little cry.
“That bad, is it?” he asked.
“Forgive the editorial comment. You’ll have quite a bruise, I think.” She dipped a compress in the water and pressed it to the plaster. As she held the compress in place, the citrusy, woodsy scent of his soap took over her senses. All the other stillroom smells faded. She made herself call them to mind—comfrey, calendula, lavender, barley water, spirits. But it was no use. An odd state of frozen alertness possessed her.
A rivulet of water ran down to the waistband of his trousers. He shivered, and woke Viv from her trance. She lifted the compress, lay it aside, and peeled away the old plaster. He flinched with the first tug, and then stilled again.
“It is not as bad as I feared,” she said, striving for a matter-of-fact tone. “The sutures are tight. The skin around them is puckered but not inflamed. Your ribs are very colorful, a mass of purplish brown, but there’s only a trickle of blood where the fellow must have hit you. Why was he so angry with you? ”
She reached for a towel to dry the area, glad for all the times she had tended Lady Melforth’s injury.
“My attacker had a thick accent, and I didn’t catch all that he said. I think he was insulted to be ignored.”
She looked up at his averted profile. It was a neat explanation, but she knew him well enough now to recognize one of his evasions. It was a reminder to be on her guard. They were pretending to be engaged. They would soon go their separate ways. Whatever odd effect he had on her senses would pass. She applied the new plaster and wrapped a length of gauze around him. “There, done,” she said.
“Where do you go tomorrow?” he asked.
She averted her gaze and tried to close her ears to the sound of cloth rustling as he restored his garments to order. “Oh,” she said. “I’m not doing a walk tomorrow, just taking care of business.”
“Business?”
“A visit to our publisher with some new pages. Then, of course, I really must work on my notes from today.”
She looked up and found him regarding her steadily as he rebuttoned his waistcoat. She lifted her chin to meet that gaze. “Surely the duke has something for you to do?”