Chapter 1 #2
Nell’s expression tightened. Leave it to a man to reduce a woman’s desire to protect herself to a childish pantomime. “It’s a practical necessity,” she said.
“I see. And do all teachers at Miss Corvus’s Benevolent Academy for the Betterment of Young Ladies employ such arts? Or is it only you who…” His words died away as she pushed back her veil.
Ah. Perhaps he was capable of being surprised after all.
Nell met his gaze, a hint of a challenge in her own.
She wasn’t vain. Neither was she guilty of false modesty.
She knew herself, both her weaknesses and her strengths.
“Feminine ingenuity isn’t limited to the staff room at the Academy,” she informed him.
“Though, I assure you, it’s in no short supply there. ”
Mr. Quincey collected himself in a blink—so quickly Nell wondered if she’d imagined the look of masculine alertness that had flared in his eyes on first seeing her face.
Clearing his throat, he very slowly and very methodically returned his pen to the brass holder on his desk.
“Something else Mrs. Royce failed to mention.”
“What might that be?”
“How young you are.”
Nell stiffened at his tone of disappointment.
She wasn’t used to anyone implying that she was lacking in wisdom or experience.
Quite the reverse. In times of crisis, people generally looked to her for guidance.
During Miss Corvus’s recent illness, Nell had been all but running the school.
“Is my age of importance to your inquiries?”
“Only as it pertains to your tenure,” he said. “You can’t have been in your position long.”
“I have been employed as a teacher for five years, sir.”
He sat back in his chair, frowning at her again with an attitude of impatience.
One would think she had wasted his precious time.
“Mrs. Royce led me to believe you had been present at the Academy’s founding, nearly twenty years ago.
It’s why I consented to meet with you instead of pursuing an interview with Miss Corvus herself.
I had anticipated your providing certain information about the institution’s origins. ”
Nell at once grasped the cause of his irritation. He’d wrongly presumed she would be a much older woman. One who had spent the whole of the past eighteen years teaching at the charity school. “Mrs. Royce did not mislead you.”
“Not only Mrs. Royce,” he replied. “You, as well, Miss Trewlove. Your letters gave me to understand that you had decades of experience at Miss Corvus’s Academy.”
“I do,” she said. “Or nearly that long. I was one of its earliest students.”
Understanding registered on his face. He stared at her with renewed attention. “You were an orphan?”
Nell’s chin ticked up a notch. “That’s correct.”
There was no shame in it. Not as far as she was concerned. It was just as she often told her girls. One wasn’t accountable for the circumstances of one’s birth, only for the choices they made and the actions they took. It was that which defined a person, not pedigree.
“As are all the students at the Academy?” Mr. Quincey asked.
“To a one,” she said. “They come to us from all over the county. I flatter myself that we do our best for them.”
“Your best being…?”
She lifted one shoulder in an artfully casual shrug. “We feed them, house them, and provide them with an education that will best help them meet their potential.”
Mr. Quincey narrowed in on the word with single-minded precision. “Their potential for what, exactly?”
Nell’s mouth curved in a slow smile. She comprehended the unspoken crux of his question.
He believed the Academy was a home for dangerous revolutionaries.
Budding feminists and crusaders for equality, willing to go to any ends to achieve their goals, even if that meant destroying the occasional man who got in their way.
He wasn’t wrong.
· · · · ·
Miles was not amused.
He might have known Miss Trewlove would turn out to be some manner of goddess. It was, after all, Gabriel Royce’s wife who had pointed Miles in her direction. And the newly minted Mrs. Royce was nothing if not trouble personified.
Miles was in no mood for it. Not this morning.
Lawrence Cowgill had been gone for three days straight, leaving nothing behind in his desk but a notebook marked with a series of meaningless dates.
In his absence, Miles had been forced to assign the paper’s famous gossip column to another of his reporters.
A poor salve on a potentially fatal wound, but it was either that or go to press without it.
The latter hadn’t been an option. Like it or not, the majority of the Courant’s dwindling circulation was owing to that cursed column.
They couldn’t afford to lose any more subscribers.
They’d already lost too many as it was. In the aftermath of Miles’s series of articles exposing the treachery of a once-revered politician, Viscount Compton, many in society had closed ranks against the paper, no doubt frightened that they’d be targeted next—exposed and ruined by one of the Courant’s notoriously ruthless exposés.
It was only the gossip column that kept the fashionable public coming back. Without Cowgill to write it, the paper stood to lose a fortune. No one else was in possession of the secret sources that enabled him to deliver such unusually incisive tittle-tattle.
And now this.
Another disappointment, albeit one disguised in a rather beguiling package.
Miles ran a hand over the side of his face, wishing like the devil he’d followed his instincts and gone to Miss Corvus’s Academy himself. Instead, he’d wasted months, engaged in correspondence with a woman he had foolishly assumed was an antiquated spinster.
But she wasn’t.
Antiquated, that is.
With her flaxen blond hair, heart-shaped face, and graceful figure, Miss Trewlove had more in common with an angel than she did with his, admittedly narrow, preconception of a schoolteacher.
A sultry angel, at that.
Her hooded, long-lashed gray eyes had a deceptively sleepy quality to them. Like a tigress drowsing in the sun, as languorous as it was lethal. The effect was intensified by the elegant curve of her high cheekbones, and the voluptuous fullness of her lush Cupid’s-bow lips.
A small jet brooch in the shape of a butterfly sparkled at her throat, the only spot of brilliancy in her dull black mourning ensemble.
“It’s a personal calculation,” she replied to him.
“Every girl has a different set of strengths. A head for mathematics, for example. Or an aptitude for writing, or a skill for sport.”
“Sport,” Miles repeated. “Such as hunting down corrupt lords like Viscount Compton?”
Miss Trewlove lifted her winged brows. They were thick and arched, a shade darker than her hair. “You presume the Academy is connected to his downfall?”
“I more than presume it. Miss Corvus’s name came up often during my investigations. Or rather, the name she went by at the time she was connected to Lord Compton, some two decades ago.”
Miss Trewlove noticeably did not refute that connection. “A man has done wrong and has finally been punished for it. What benefit can there be in violating his victim’s privacy—whomever that victim might be?”
“I don’t mean to publish her story,” Miles said.
He’d promised Gabriel he wouldn’t. He hadn’t, however, promised to forgo further inquiry.
The mystery of Miss Corvus and her charity school was the single loose thread in his investigation into Lord Compton’s crimes.
And Miles couldn’t abide a loose thread.
“Then what does it matter?” Miss Trewlove asked.
“Call it professional curiosity,” he said.
Disapproval darkened her gaze. “At a lady’s expense? That isn’t very gentlemanly.”
Across the office, the fringe on the bottom of the sofa twitched. Shadow poked her gray striped head out to listen to their conversation.
Miles cast an absent glance in the little tabby’s direction.
He had found her only last week here in Fleet Street.
Small and thin, with a battered ear and weeping eye, she had summoned up the bravery to eat from one of the dishes he regularly put out for the other street cats.
He’d really had no choice but to rescue her.
She’d been living in his office ever since, spending most of her time hiding while she healed from her wounds. Miles intended to remove her to his house in St. James’s Square as soon as she was stronger. He had four strays already in residence. Cats were his weakness.
His only weakness.
“Not just any lady,” he said. “The lady who Compton jilted and defrauded. His crimes against her are what ultimately led to his undoing.”
“Elizabeth Wingard,” Miss Trewlove mused. She adjusted her voluminous skirts. “Yes, I read your articles. She was treated abominably, as far as I can tell.”
“She was,” Miles acknowledged. “Rumor has it that she died abroad. Instead, as I discovered, she returned to England, armed with a new identity, and a new purpose.”
“This is all quite fascinating—”
“She founded a charity school for girls. One of those girls—now Mrs. Royce—played a role in bringing about Compton’s political demise. Do you dispute that there was a relationship between her actions and the mission of Miss Corvus’s Academy?”
“I’m sorry, are you implying that Miss Corvus founded a school solely to raise up a generation of girls to settle a score with her former fiancé?
” Miss Trewlove smiled, revealing a startling glimpse of a crooked front tooth.
The unexpected flaw lent a roguish quality to her expression.
“I am not a worldly woman, Mr. Quincey, but that does seem excessive.”
“Not only Compton,” Miles said. “All men who have wronged women.”
“All men? How very ambitious of her.”
“You don’t deny it?”