Chapter 30
However well placed Michael Granville’s faith in her ingenuity may have been, it took none at all for Merry to escape Teasel Hill well before the hour she had appointed to meet Raven.
Devon had been closeted since midmorning with his long-suffering man of business, who had been waiting with breathless impatience since Devon’s homecoming to pounce on his elusive master and begin the formidable task of bringing the young duke up-to-date on the many details of his vast estates that required his attention.
Aunt April and Devon’s mother had remained late in their beds, recruiting their energies after the late hours of last night’s ball.
With some inner trepidation Merry asked Mr. Stanmore, Devon’s steward, if he would order the carriage prepared for her, because she had some business to attend to in London.
Without even waiting to hear her carefully rehearsed amplification he had excused himself with a smile and a promise that it would be done directly.
Heady stuff that, for a girl whose servants in Virginia had known her from the cradle and were more likely to kindly direct her activities than the opposite.
Merry’s success with Mr. Stanmore almost emboldened her to ask for the key to the gun room because, though the weapons there were mostly of the sporting variety, Aline had mentioned once that it held also a small collection of pistols that Devon’s father had acquired on his travels.
But though there was nothing pleasant about the possibility of going unarmed to a confrontation with Granville, she was afraid that a sudden desire to examine the guns might draw some notice.
Someone might even mention it to Devon as soon as he emerged from his meeting, which under the circumstances would be disastrous.
So, a little feebly, and not without a blush, she slid a knife from her breakfast tray into her garter, mindful of how Morgan’s men often produced weapons from unlikely parts of their raiment.
A careful perusal of the London map in the library had led Merry to pick out an address at random that seemed in convenient circumstances to her destination, since this was not the sort of adventure it would be possible to undertake under the patronage of Devon’s solicitous if obedient servants.
She was somewhat daunted when the carriage drew to a polite halt on the cobbles in front of the appointed address, which bore a wooden sign with painted letters that read Dealer in Foreign Spiritous Liquors.
The groom in blue ducal livery who let down the steps for her was too well trained to look at her askance, but she could see he looked doubtful, and as she swept onto the pavement she could only be grateful that she hadn’t chosen the building next door, whose brass sign read Drain Pipe Lay Down Undertaken Here.
She remained inside for a few minutes, pretending an interest in the port wines and unsuccessfully trying to fend off the attempts of the obsequious proprietor to make her sample his merchandise.
She narrowly avoided inebriation by ordering a round dozen bottles of the port to be delivered to Teasel Hill and took her leave of the beaming proprietor.
Standing a little dizzily on the flagged pavement outside, Merry told the coachman that she had chanced to meet one of her particular friends inside who would escort her on the remainder of her errands and see her home afterward.
The one virtue (in Merry’s mind at least) of the shop had been its very dirty front window, as a result of which Mr. Bibbins, the coachman, could not see within; he proved that British and American family retainers weren’t so different by asking respectfully who he might tell His Grace was escorting her, should he happen to inquire.
Pushed into a corner, Merry named Lord Cathcart and had the felicity of watching Mr. Bibbins’s look of mild concern relax into approval.
She could only hope Mr. Bibbins wouldn’t by accident encounter that much respected peer on his way back out of the city.
Having rid herself of her kindly escort, Merry set off to meet Raven.
Her spirits were low enough to give the bustling, impersonal cacophony of street noise a certain poignance.
The high, white sun was dissolving at the edges into a gray-blue heaven flecked with huge clouds moving quickly in the wind.
The air had more than a nip in it and was filled with city scents and the clatter of traffic.
Shoppers jostled one another on the pavement of broad stones; apprentices with ink on their trousers wended through a maze of spruce clerks and assistants.
The smoke-blackened dome of St. Paul’s loomed like a mountain over the three- and four-story edifices below, and she gazed at it as she walked before dropping her eyes to the scenes around her, capturing passing images in vignettes: bright-cheeked schoolboys with their satchels, gazing at pastry in a baker’s window; a crossing sweep whistling a lively air as he took a broom to the street, where wheels had worn it down; and before a bookseller’s, with windows displaying many volumes laid open for inspection, a small dog hooked by his lead to a hitching post was worrying a black felt hat, blown, no doubt, from the head of some passerby.
The changing complexion of the surrounding facades told her that she had entered the city’s high financial district, and by the time Merry reached St. Mary Abchurch, a pleasantly venerable red-brick edifice in a yard of patterned cobbles, she began to understand why Raven had made this his choice.
This was an area given over to commerce, the staunch bastion of the middle class, and none of the haughty nobility who had made her acquaintance at the dowager’s ball was likely to meet her here.
At the same time this was no slum, and though Merry had encountered her share of stares, it was an area where an unattended lady could walk without molestation.
The church interior was dim and intimate.
Toneless light sprinkled from oval windows in the somberly frescoed domed ceiling, glooming on the dark wood surfaces, leaving the corners in shadow.
Only two persons inhabited the room: a gray-haired lady in a black bonnet hesitantly trying to coax a hymn of the forty-seventh Psalm out of the organ; and a woman swaddled in shawls who was grimly applying beeswax to the Communion table.
Merry was taking a seat in a paneled pew near the door when Raven entered, and the shawled woman took one look at his charmingly formed but obviously disreputable countenance and dropped her tin of beeswax.
Raven, stopped mid-stride under the heat of her gaze, made some exclamation under his breath that was better left unheard in a church, walked lithely backward to the alms box, and then, in an expression of startling piety, deposited a guinea within.
The woman seemed to content herself with being partially mollified; she returned to her waxing, though tightening the voluminous shawls virtuously around her plump bosom and casting periodic suspicious glares at Raven.
Sliding into the seat beside Merry, Raven said, “You’re late, m’darling.
I’ve been watching for you this quarter hour in the chophouse down the block.
” He tucked a shining jet-black curl back into his bandanna and cast a quick, dispassionate glance toward the Communion table.
“Devilish place, ain’t it? It’s more than you can imagine, why people think they’re doing God such a service by building him a parcel of dismal houses.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes the architects sit on hard wood benches for all eternity. ”
Merry returned him a smile, though a wan one, and he pinched her chin and said kindly, “There you go! That’s better. Where’ve you left your carriage? Let me take you back there, and you can go home and be comfortable.”
“If you think I can be comfortable until I’ve heard everything you found out last night, you’re mistaken!” she retorted in a whisper. “Besides, I don’t have my carriage. I was set down some distance from here and I’ve sent the coachman home, so don’t think you can get rid of me so easily.”
“You walked?” The words were spoken in the same tone he might have used if she’d announced that she’d ridden into the sacristy on a goat.
He gazed from her pelisse of crimson velvet bordered in sable to the matching close hat with its wealth of short nodding plumes, to her soft kid gloves, her copious sable muff, and her velvet half boots in the same shade as the pelisse.
With something near to a groan he said, “Merry, you innocent.”
“Innocent!”
“Aye. And there’s no use to be looking daggers at me, lass.
There’s a lot worse things a body can be than innocent.
The fact is, females of your station don’t go out on their own in London unless they’ve a desire to be taken for the love light of some highborn rakehell.
You might at least have brought your maid. ”
There were some, probably, who would object to lectures on propriety from a member of a notorious pirate crew, but Merry only said, “I’d like to know what I’d do with a maid on a chase after Michael Granville?”
“Nothing. Because there ain’t going to be any chase after Michael Granville. Leastwise, not for you, lovey.”
“You haven’t told anyone about last night!” Quiet as it was, her voice betrayed her alarm.