Chapter Five
L ord Ashart’s wolf fur cloak was as good as a warning hung around a villain’s neck, she decided.
She didn’t for one moment think his previous visit had been coincidence.
Dash, after all, was too close to Ash. He doubtless used the name for rakish assignations—assignations that led to embarrassments like a baby.
What frightened her was the way she was responding. She did have a weakness for a certain sort of man. A bold, virile man who fired her body and challenged her wits.
There’d been an Italian called Casanova, reputed to be fatally attractive to women, and she’d felt that power in him. She’d enjoyed a flirtation, but been in no danger of going further than that.
More strangely, she’d reacted to the bearded leader of some Barbary pirates. An alarming comparison.
Especially as she’d shot him.
She couldn’t shoot this one, but she did have a weapon. She could tell his doting great-aunts that he was Mr. Dash, cruel abandoner of innocents. That would scuttle him.
She paused at the upstairs parlor door, suddenly realizing that he might not have expected to meet her in Lady Calliope’s room. He’d tricked her in one inn parlor, then been taken to another. Oh, she wished she had that encounter at Lady Calliope’s door to live through again and relish.
Genova entered Lady Thalia’s parlor to find it empty, so she continued into the bedroom. The Irish maid was still in the bath in front of the fire, alone except for the baby, sleeping on the bed. Regeanne must be eating in the servants’ area.
The bathwater would be cool, but the fire roared and towels hung ready. The maid would leave the bath when it grew too cold for comfort, or when the baby awoke.
Genova pulled a chair over by the tub and put the food there.
Sheena smiled and presumably thanked her, looking sweetly trusting and surprisingly young. Of course, young women could become mothers, but it was still a shock. She looked as innocent and vulnerable as the baby.
“Everything will be all right,” Genova promised, but she added, “if will and strength can make it so.” She valued a promise, and what could she do to force a marquess to bend to her will?
She returned downstairs to find that the inn servants had been dismissed.
The marquess and the Trayce ladies had almost finished their soup, so she sat to hers, listening to chat about fashionable circles.
The marquess was sharing risqué stories but his great-aunts didn’t appear to mind.
In fact they hung on his every word like elderly houris in a harem.
When Genova had finished, she collected the soup plates, put them on the sideboard, then brought the other dishes across.
“So,” she heard Ashart say, “time to tell me what you’re about, my dears. Where are you jaunting off to in late December?”
She shook her head, remembered Lady Calliope’s reaction when Genova had said how kind the marquess was to provide for their journey so well.
“No need to credit him with kindness. Doubtless tossed the letter to his secretary and went back to his wenches and wild living.”
How right she had been.
“Why, to Rothgar Abbey, of course!” Thalia exclaimed. “We’re going to dear Beowulf’s Christmas gathering.”
“What?”
Genova was watching the marquess, so got to enjoy his shock. She placed dishes on the table, trying not to smirk.
“There could be no question,” Lady Calliope said. “Not with Sophia issuing orders.”
Three weeks ago, the Trayce ladies had received a startling invitation to spend Christmas at Rothgar Abbey, the country home of their other great-nephew, the Marquess of Rothgar.
In the subsequent flurry, Genova had learned that they’d not seen him for over thirty years because of some unspecified family disagreement.
She’d not been living with the Trayce ladies, but she’d often escaped her stepmother’s house by visiting them, so she’d been part of the long, wandering discussions about whether they should accept or not.
There was another Trayce sister, Lady Urania, but she was a widow and always spent Christmas at the home of her oldest son.
She, however, thought the other two should go if they were up to the journey.
Lady Calliope thought it would be madness.
Thalia fluttered between longings and vague murmurs about “poor Augusta.”
Genova had longed to know more about “poor Augusta” but felt unable to ask.
In the end, the sisters had decided to decline, but then their sister-in-law, the Dowager Marchioness of Ashart, had written forbidding them to go.
That had changed everything. In naval parlance, the Trayce ladies hated the woman’s putrefying guts.
Presumably the marquess was in agreement with the dowager, but if he tried to enforce her orders, Genova would make sure he failed. She placed a pie in the center of the table, and a ham directly in front of him.
“I do so look forward to seeing dear Beowulf again,” Thalia was saying. “Whatever happened in the past, those involved are long dead. Genova pointed that out.”
Genova placed two more dishes on the table, prickling under the marquess’s grim gaze. She remembered making that comment, but it had been casual.
As she sat down, Lord Ashart said, “A forgiving nature, Miss Smith?”
“That is the Christian way, is it not, my lord? Pie?”
He ignored the offer. “Forgive so that we shall be forgiven?”
She cut into it and placed a piece on Thalia’s raised plate. “I hope not to be so self-serving, my lord. It is possible to forgive simply because it is right.”
“But. I’m sure you have sins that require forgiveness.”
She served Lady Calliope. “None of us are without sin, my lord.” Silently, she added, Especially you.
“Anyone who is not a total bore, certainly.”
Genova cut pie for herself and accepted potatoes from Thalia. “You think virtue dull, my lord?”
“You don’t? Ah, but then, you admitted to requiring forgiveness. All that…er…pricking.”
Genova almost dropped her plate. “That is not—!”
She bit off her reaction, which he was surely goading for. She glanced at the others to find Thalia watching, bright-eyed, as if at an amusing play, and Lady Calliope stolidly eating. Genova put a slice of pie on the marquess’s empty plate, whether he wanted it or not.
“Ah, pigeon. You have a taste for it, Miss Smith?”
Since pigeon was slang for dupe, it was another insult.
Addressing no one in particular, Genova said, “I hope the weather will be warmer tomorrow. The poor men suffered so today, and it slowed us.”
“Weather,” the marquess murmured. “Refuge of the dull…or the nervous.”
She knew she shouldn’t, but she looked straight at him. “I am not nervous of you, Lord Ashart.”
“But you should be, Miss Smith. You definitely should be.”
Genova raised her plate. “May I have some ham, my lord?”
He served her. “You think I act? Don’t.”
Genova felt the danger, as if a storm raged or enemy guns blasted, and her blood sang. “I don’t question that you are a marquess, my lord, a character of great power and influence.”
“Character? And what are you in this play?”
She cut into her meat. “Merely the poor companion, my lord.”
“Then you need acting lessons.”
Genova felt a very real temptation to jab her fork into his elegant hand, which lay on the tablecloth so close to her, displaying an emerald that could support little Charles for life.
“My lord, you must be very bored to be amusing yourself with me. I’m merely a naval officer’s daughter, and companion to two elderly ladies.”
“I can vouch for that,” Lady Calliope said, seeming amused. “Turn your agile mind to the problem of Mr. and Mrs. Dash’s misbegotten babe, Ashart. What are we to do with him, eh?”
“Put him on the parish.” He finally began to eat.
“The baby needs the wet nurse,” Genova pointed out.
“Then put both of them on the parish.”
The heartless wretch! “And what do you think would happen to them?”
He gave her a bored look that did finally remind her of that portrait. “They would be fed and housed while the errant Mrs. Dash is tracked down.”
“To the meanest degree. No parish wants the poor and desperate from elsewhere. And who will fund that search? You?”
“Why the devil should I?”
“Language, sir!”
“No one else minds.”
“And Genova, dear,” interrupted Thalia, “you said that you’d heard everything when on board ship.”
Lord Ashart gave her a look as if he’d scored a winning point. Genova seethed as she forced herself to eat the excessive amount of food she seemed to have acquired. Pistol point it would have to be.
As she ate and the others gossiped, she regretfully concluded that even gunpoint wouldn’t work.
She recognized stiff-necked pride when she saw it, and she doubted the marquess would back down at death’s door.
Would persuasion do any good? Surely there must be a scrap of Christian charity in him. He was kind to his great-aunts.
At a gap in the conversation, she returned to the subject. “What are we to do about the baby? To be put on the parish would likely be death for him.”
Ashart sighed. “I’ll leave funds, Miss Smith. Will that suffice?”
“And when the money runs out?”
“If this Mrs. Dash isn’t found by then, she likely never will be. I can hardly be expected to provide for the child for life.”
Why not? she silently demanded.
He met her eyes, daring her to insist.
So be it.
Genova turned to the two old ladies. “The marquess is the man who came here as ‘Mr. Dash.’ He is the baby’s father.”