Marie-Louise Hall - Rake's Reform

“But you do…you do lots of things. You hunt and fish, and you’re damned good company at the club—”

“Amusements, Perry, that’s all,” Jonathan said gloomily. “Amusements of which I am beginning to tire.”

Lord Derwent’s brow furrowed. “Well, you’re a Member of Parliament. That’s useful, ain’t it?”

“Parliament! I rarely visit the place and I’ve made one speech in five years—and that was for a wager to see if I could make old Beaufort’s face go as purple as that young Jewish fellow’s waistcoat.”

“Caused more of a stir than most, though.” Derwent laughed. “When I read it in The Times, I thought you’d become a raving revolutionary. If every landowner gave land to his labourers for their use, we’d all be penniless and I doubt they’d bother to work for us at all!”

“One can hardly blame them,” Lindsay answered drily. “The price of bread is up, wages are down, and the common land has been fenced in for sheep. Their work is being taken by machines in the name of profit and the poor relief has been cut to subsistence.”

“Well, at least they’re spared all that nasty dusty work—and the farmers do well out of it,” Lord Derwent said lightly. “All the clever chaps tell me that the health of the nation is dependent upon the creation of wealth—”

“And also, it would seem, upon the creation of paupers,” Jonathan said glancing towards the pinched face of the child as they passed him.

“The lower orders have always gone without when times are hard, they’re used to it. A bit of hunger toughens ’em up and keeps ’em grateful for what they do get. They’re not like us, Jono, they don’t have the finer feelings—look out!”

But Lindsay had already reined back the bays almost to their haunches as they rounded another bend, made blind by the gable end of a cottage built into the wall, and almost collided with a pony trap slewed across its width.

There was no sign of its driver. The reins were looped loosely about the post of a small gate to one side of the cottage, and the skewbald pony was nibbling at a weed growing in a crack in the wall.

“Damned silly place to leave it!” Derwent announced loudly. “All Curzon Street to ninepence that it’s driven by a woman.”

“The Rector’s wife or daughter, I’d wager,” Jonathan agreed wryly, glancing at the weathered straw hat with a plain ribbon trim that lay discarded upon the seat of the trap. “Calling upon the downtrodden and irreligious with some tract, no doubt. Jump down and move it, would you, Perry? Or we’ll be here all day. There’s a field gate a bit further on—put it in there while I pass—”

“Must I?” Lord Derwent looked down doubtfully at the chalky mud of the lane. “It took my man hours to get this finish on my boots.” His face brightened as he noticed that the tiny downstairs window of the cottage was open and leant across to pick up the whip. “No need, watch!”

He stretched out the whip and rapped upon the window sill. “I say, you there, would you like to earn a shilling—?”

“Go away! Go away!” A woman’s voice, choked with sobs, replied. “You’re murderers! All of you!”

“Murderers! I assure you, we are no such thing!” Perry shouted back cheerfully. “All we want is for someone to move this trap—surely you have a good strong lad—”

The woman’s sobs became a low keening wail.

There was a bang as a door was thrown open. A moment later, Janey was at the gate. Tall and slender in her grey gown and white apron, she glowered up at them, as she settled a grubby-looking infant more firmly upon her hip.

“Can you not just go away?” The voice was low, educated and furiously angry with the faintest of accents, which puzzled Lindsay for a moment. He had heard that accent before, but where? His brows furrowed for a moment. And then he remembered. Jack de Lancey, the young American officer who had served on Wellington’s staff at Waterloo before being mortally wounded.

“Whatever is the clergy coming to? She sounds like a colonial,” Perry hissed in an all-too-audible whisper at the same moment.

“Perhaps that is because I was born in America and spent the first sixteen years of my life there,” Janey snapped. She was in no mood for condescension from a pair of aristocratic dandies who were probably incapable of tying their own cravats. “Now, if your curiosity is satisfied, will you please go away!”

“With pleasure,” Lord Derwent moaned, “but this—” he wrinkled his nose distastefully as he gestured to the trap “—this vehicle is in our way.”

“You have my permission to move it!” she retorted, brushing back a strand of dishevelled fair hair from her face with her free hand. “Unless you would prefer to hold the child? I thought not!” she said scathingly as her hazel eyes blazed across Derwent’s horrified face. “It might spoil your gloves!”

“But surely there is a lad—” Derwent said.

“Not any longer! You hear that woman weeping—she has just heard that ‘her fine lad’ is to be hanged for the firing of a rick, which he was not even near—”

“Hanged! Bigod!” Lord Derwent’s fair brows lifted. “Damned inconvenient timing, but I suppose he deserves it.”

“Deserves—” Her voice came out of her throat as a hiss of contempt. “Do you think anyone deserves to die for the price of a hayrick, when his employer is a mean-minded cheat who will let men, women and children starve to death? Is hanging a just punishment for such a crime?”

“Should have thought of that before he set fire to the rick. Common knowledge that arson’s a capital offence,” Lord Derwent drawled.

“He did not fire the rick!” Janey found herself almost choked with rage. If they did not go soon, arson would not be the only capital offence to be committed of late. She could easily murder the pair of them. “I do not know how you can be so complacent! So arrogant!” she said fiercely.

“Quite easily, really. Someone has to support the rule of law, you know.”

“The trap, Perry?” Jonathan interposed quietly, speaking for the first time when he saw Janey’s free hand clench upon the crossbar of the gate as if she were intending to rip it off and hurl it at Derwent like a spear. “Now, if you would not mind?”

“Must I?” His companion’s answer was one sharp glance that sent Lord Derwent down from the box in a moment.

The hazel eyes followed Derwent, and the soft rose lips silently framed an epithet that the Honourable Jonathan Lindsay had never heard from a lady, and certainly not from a Rector’s wife. His cool blue gaze flicked to the hand she had put up to push away another stray strand of hair from her eyes, leaving a smudge of soot upon her slanting cheekbone. No ring upon the slender fingers—the daughter, then?

A pity, he thought. With her great angry dark eyes, slanted dark brows and wide, soft mouth, she was all passion and fire, a veritable Amazon. Quite unlike the insipid blue-eyed misses who were English society’s current ideal, but put her in Paris and she’d have ’em falling at her feet. If she had been married, country life might have proved more entertaining than he had expected, but he had a rule of never seducing unmarried girls. There were some depths to which one could not sink, even to relieve boredom.

And then, with a start, he realised that those extraordinary hazel eyes were fixed upon his face, regarding him with a coolness that he found distinctly disconcerting. He was not accustomed to women looking at him as if he had just crawled from beneath a stone. Possessed of a large fortune, and good looks since the age of sixteen or so, he had always been the recipient of frank admiration, dewy-eyed adoration or thinly veiled invitations from females of all ages.