Chapter Four
It wasn’t the escaping that was difficult. It was climbing through the window that had stumped him.
Bernard Dixon was a false name, to be sure, he ruminated bitterly, but the fact was that he had gained a great deal by utilizing a false name in the past. It had taught him a number of skills and allowed him to come into contact with many others who had taught him similarly interesting skills.
Like climbing down a drainpipe, for example. It was harder than it looked.
Bernard halted halfway down and tried to wipe his brow with a handkerchief.
Then he remembered he didn’t have a handkerchief.
Then he remembered he was fifteen feet up in the air and pausing to remove one hand from the metal bar that was currently propping him up in said air probably wasn’t a good idea.
Good idea. Oh, he’d been full of good ideas last night. Part of him had wanted to stay, to see whether this Lady Lucy Chance would really stick out having what she believed was a convict living in her house.
Her family certainly did not approve, and in a way, that was a comfort to him. Bernard could think of few families who would wish to adopt a criminal, and thank goodness Lucy—Lady Lucy, of course—had some reasonable people around her.
Hopefully, they could prevent her from any more nonsense.
Slowly shimmying down the last few feet of drainpipe, Bernard took a deep lungful of early morning air as he reached the bottom.
It was a beautiful, and small, garden. Someone had clearly taken great pains with it until recently, but it had become overgrown with the sudden coming of spring.
The weeds were starting to push through in the beds, and there was a rose that desperately needed tying back—though the wheelbarrow near the bed suggested someone would be coming soon to hack it back.
Well, he couldn’t worry about that now. He had escaped the house, that was the important thing, and without a single member of this Chance family knowing. All he had to do now was—
“You know, there is an almighty clanging in my bedchamber whenever someone enters or exits the house via drainpipe,” came a conversational voice from a bush to his left. “An almighty one.”
Bernard whirled around, his instincts rushing him to pull out a knife he kept strapped to his ankle to defend himself with.
A figure stepped out from behind the bush. A fine figure, one in a day gown of soft green that perfectly highlighted her eyes.
Lady Lucy Chance.
Bernard swiftly stuffed away the knife and tried to look charming.
Which was a challenge because it was hard to look charming after thrusting a knife in a person’s direction.
“What on earth are you doing?” Lady Lucy asked, curiosity welling in her eyes.
That was an excellent question, and Bernard could think of no way to answer it save with a question of his own. “How on earth did you know about the drainpipe?”
“That? Oh, we’ve been creeping in and out of the house via that drainpipe for years. Decades, I suppose,” said Lady Lucy nonchalantly, as though daughters of earls were frequently familiar with casual housebreaking. “It was Frank who first managed it, and she taught us. She’s always said—”
“‘She’?” interjected Bernard, almost certain he had misheard.
What was it with this family? They appeared to be entirely respectable on the surface, but there’d been a large dog that had bounded up to him yesterday that had been described as ‘Polly, the dragon,’ and a letter had arrived suggesting that a recent addition to the family had almost been called ‘Emperor Chance.’
“Yes, she,” Lady Lucy said, frowning, as though he had been the one to utter the oddity. “What are you doing, Dixon?”
Bernard swallowed.
This was the trouble with being a spy; one could hardly go about admitting to such a thing to anyone who asked.
Besides, he wasn’t that certain what he was supposed to do next. Hovell had not been in touch, but the man couldn’t be in touch if he didn’t know where Bernard was. In truth, Bernard wasn’t quite certain where he was.
Not ideal, for a spy.
And now he was faced with a beauty who asked questions she expected to be answered, and he’d had absolutely no preparation, no instructions from his handler.
And Bernard lived by preparation.
So. He couldn’t lie. It would have to be the truth. “I’m leaving,” he said brightly.
Bernard stepped forward toward a likely looking gate but was prevented in advancing more than two paces by a barrier in his path.
A barrier made of soft, welcoming woman.
“Ouch!” said Lady Lucy in astonishment.
“Well, you did rather walk into me,” Bernard could not help but point out, almost laughing at the indignation on her face.
“But you walked into me!”
“You stepped quite literally into my path,” he indicated sharply.
Lady Lucy did not look very impressed. “But you were the one walking, and you could have stopped—stop!”
He had stepped around her and continued to make for the gate—that was, he had attempted to step around her. Lady Lucy had swiftly made it very clear she was not going to put up with such things and had grabbed him arm most decidedly.
Bernard looked down.
Her hand was smaller than his. Her fingers only just stretched around his arm where she had grabbed him, just above his elbow, and he could feel there was no strength in her. He could wrench himself free if he wanted and would cause very little permanent injury.
But the idea of manhandling this woman, this innocent who had thought she was saving a man from transportation and who had in fact invited not a criminal, but a spy into her home…
Those wide eyes. That trusting mouth.
Bernard swallowed. He ceased struggling to get to the door.
Some of the tension faded from Lady Lucy’s eyes. “You must see that you cannot go.”
‘Cannot’?
The word was unmistakably clear in his face, for she smiled and continued ruefully, “Look, I am the last person to fully understand what happened, but even I can see that Judge Bonner has given you up into my keeping.”
“But your father said—”
“And while I morally oppose the idea of owning a person as property,” the Lady Lucy continued, as though he had not spoken, “I will admit that I have been born into a family that understands duty and respect of one’s people.”
Bernard blinked. “‘One’s…people’?”
“Oh, you know.” Lady Lucy waved a hand as a blackbird started singing in a tree to his right. “Servants, and tenants, and the like. People who depend on us. People who belong to us.”
His stomach lurched at her words.
“People who belong to us.”
It was a strange sort of way to think about it, but he had to admit, he quite liked it. His father had never approached the matter at hand like that. No, people were always there as a means to an end, a way of getting something from them.
The idea that one had a responsibility to them… No, that had been an alien thought to the Viscount Moray.
“So you do see, don’t you? You can’t just leave,” Lady Lucy was continuing, as though Bernard had not become lost in his thoughts. “It’s just not possible.”
Bernard had to admit, being Lady Lucy Chance’s ward—her prisoner, even—compared to lying in a dark cell at Her Majesty’s leisure was quite an improvement.
The view was better, for a start.
“Why—Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Lady Lucy uncertainly. “What do you want?”
He wasn’t quite sure. He did know that the woman hadn’t let go of his arm and was standing incredibly close. It wasn’t a flower in the garden that smelled that good, it was her; a strange concoction of soap and a fragrance he didn’t recognize, along with something that had to have been utterly her.
Lady Lucy.
She was gazing up at him with parted lips, and Bernard half-wished he were still on a mission. That would have permitted him to do more, to transgress more of Society’s rules, to gain what he wanted.
The trouble was, what he wanted in this moment wasn’t news of the French or murmurings from the Glasshand Gang, or even to know which jewelers would be hit next week.
No, it was Lady Lucy.
And he mustn’t take her. He mustn’t. He shouldn’t.
Which didn’t exactly explain why he was leaning close to her, and she appeared—yes, she was leaning close to him, and those lips of hers were still parted, wetted now, and her eyelashes were fluttering—
Bernard half-walked, half-staggered back. “No.”
He had not intended to utter the word, but it was more an instruction to himself than anything else.
No. He was not one of those men—he never would be.
Not with women of Society. Ladies of a certain rank loved when he showed up in court, but that was the extent of it.
Gossip at his rugged initial appearance had created a little club of devotees, that was all.
They never could find him when not on his way in or out of prison.
He could take her, he knew that now; she was intrigued by him, and this nonsensical social parade she was on, helping prisoners and the like, was going to get her into trouble.
In a way, she was fortunate, indeed, it was someone like him she had rescued. The bugger could have been anyone.
“‘No’?” Lady Lucy repeated, the haze disappearing from her eyes and a sharpness returning that was astonishingly piercing. “What do you mean, no? I told you, you can’t go, not yet. I… I need to work out what to do with you first.”
And that was when Bernard’s shoulders relaxed.
Of course. This was all a pet project of hers, wasn’t it? A lady, a child of a nobleman, she must have been bored out of her skull. Bernard certainly had been when he’d been her age.
Yes, all this Prison Reform Society stuff, it was to occupy her time. That time would soon fill with other things, the woman would get bored, and he could slip off into the night—not via the drainpipe, he could see that now—and disappear into the darkness, never to darken her doorway again.
Right. That was easy. A few days living in luxury with an earl and his family, a pretty face about the place, and Bernard could spend that time planning his next move and waiting for Hovell to get in touch.