Nicola Cornick - Scandals of an Innocent

“My lord!” Mrs. Lister was making up in effusiveness for everything that Alice was failing to say. “What a very great pleasure to see you again! You will take refreshment? A pot of tea?”

“Lord Vickery will not be staying, Mama,” Alice said quickly, forestalling any answer that Miles might otherwise have given. She turned back to Miles with a quick swish of her skirts and met the look of quizzical amusement on his face. Many men of rank would have been horribly affronted by her ungracious words, she knew. It was one of the disconcerting things about Miles that it seemed almost impossible to offend him.

“You did not receive my letter, Lord Vickery?” she said coldly.

A delicious smile crept into Miles’s hazel eyes. Alice could feel the color rising in her cheeks. It sprang from sheer annoyance, or so she assured herself. Annoyance was a very heated emotion.

“I did,” he said, his lazy, masculine drawl very much in evidence.

“Then it seems unaccountable bad manners that you would approach me again when I had expressly asked you not to!” Alice snapped. “I never wanted to set eyes on you again.”

“Oh, but you were angry with Lord Vickery when he was only a baron,” Mrs. Lister interposed helpfully. “Now that he is a marquis all is forgiven.”

“Now he is a marquis I daresay he is no more a gentleman than he was before,” Alice said crossly. “Please, Mama, leave this to me. Lord Vickery—”

“I came to bring you this,” Miles said, holding out the wedding gown, “and to beg a few words in private, if I may.”

“That is out of the question,” Alice began, but in the same moment her mother, that most compliant of chaperones, beamed and hurried toward the door.

“Of course!” Mrs. Lister said. “I am sure you have something very particular to say to Alice. I shall be in the parlor if you wish to speak with me afterward, Lord Vickery. A marchioness!” Alice heard her add, as she whisked out of the room. “Eight strawberry leaves in the coronet!”

“It is four strawberry leaves for a marquis, Mama!” Alice called after her. “Eight for a duke.”

She saw Miles laughing and despite herself could not prevent a small, embarrassed smile in return. “Oh, dear. I do apologize. Mama seems to exist on a different plane where every titled gentleman is embraced as the perfect prospective son-in-law.”

“She is very anxious to see you wed,” Miles said. “Why would that be?”

Alice moved away, avoiding his surprisingly perspicacious gaze. “She imagines that marriage into the aristocracy would provide security for all of us,” she said carefully. Some of Mrs. Lister’s aspirations were based on snobbery, but at their core was an unshakable fear that she and Alice might once again be plunged into penury.

“I suppose she wants you to have the type of security that your family has never had before,” Miles hazarded. “Based on inherited rights and privileges—”

“Rather than the endless need to work one’s fingers to the bone for a pittance on a farm, or in domestic service,” Alice finished for him. “Precisely. Poor Mama, she so longs to be accepted in society and cannot understand why we are not. She thinks that marriage to a man of rank will solve all problems.”

“You must have had many offers,” Miles said. “Why have you not taken one?”

“I do not care to be wed for my money by a man who otherwise deplores having a one-time housemaid as a wife,” Alice said coldly. She took a seat, realizing a second too late, as Miles sat down, as well, that by her actions she had tacitly encouraged him to stay. “But that cannot be of any interest to you, Lord Vickery,” she said. She looked at the wedding gown, which was now drooping rather forlornly over the arm of Miles’s chair. “I thank you for returning the gown to me. Now you may go.”

Miles sat back in the chair and stretched out his legs, showing every sign of settling in for a long chat in direct contradiction of her words. “Not so fast, Miss Lister,” he murmured. A rather disquieting smile curved his lips. “I am not at all sure that as an officer of the law I should be returning stolen property to you.”

Alice felt ruffled. It was not a sensation she was accustomed to feeling. As the elder child, she had always been the sensible one. She never got into trouble.

“The gown was bought and paid for,” she said defiantly. She knew she was blushing.

“It may well have been,” Miles said, “but then it was removed from the shop by theft.”

“The shop had gone out of business without honoring its customers’ purchases! Madame Claudine is the one who has cheated her customers!”

“Your case would not hold water for a moment in a court of law, I fear,” Miles drawled. “Would you like me to be a character witness for you, Miss Lister, and protest that you were suffering from a moment of madness?”

“No, thank you,” Alice said crossly. “All I require is for you to hand it over, promise to keep quiet and go away.”

“You ask a great deal,” Miles said. “The very least you owe me is an explanation. Is the wedding gown for Miss Cole?”

Alice was startled. “For Lydia? No, of course not! How could it be when Tom Fortune is in prison?” She sighed. “It is Mary Wheeler’s wedding gown. If you must know, Mary was inconsolable when Madame Claudine’s business closed, and she took it as an omen that her marriage was doomed from the start.”

“It probably is,” Miles murmured. “Stephen Armitage is a scoundrel.”

“Well,” Alice said, “Lizzie and I tried to make her see that he is a blackguard but it did no good, for the foolish girl is in love with him. So what could we do—” She stopped, realizing that she had somehow managed to implicate Lady Elizabeth Scarlet in the conspiracy as well now.

“It’s all right,” Miles said reassuringly. “I know Lady Elizabeth was party to your housebreaking last night. I heard you address her. I hope that you both arrived home safely?”

“Perfectly, I thank you.” Alice shifted in her seat. This conversation was not going in the direction she had intended and she appeared to have no control over it at all. The clock chimed the quarter hour, reminding her of the fact that Miles had been there quite a while already. She really had to be rid of him soon. Even her mother, with her rather idiosyncratic views on chaperonage, would not tolerate a prolonged private interview. Everyone would be imagining that they were consummating a marriage in here, never mind arranging one.

“I wish you would not call it housebreaking and…and theft!” she said, knowing she sounded guilty. “We were merely trying to help Mary.”

“And very laudable, too,” Miles approved. “But still illegal.”

“Then pray give the gown back,” Alice said, “and I will undertake never to come up with such a foolish plan ever again.”

“I don’t suppose you did come up with it,” Miles said, once again showing a flash of perception that disturbed Alice. “This has all the hallmarks of Lady Elizabeth’s rather wayward planning. She never was one to think matters through. Where is she this morning? I understand that she is staying here at Spring House with you?”

“She has gone riding with Lord Waterhouse,” Alice said. “Now that Tom is imprisoned and she has fallen out with Sir Montague, Lizzie says the earl is the closest thing to a brother that she has.”

She saw Miles’s firm mouth twitch into a cynical smile. “One hopes that she will wake up to the falseness of that notion before too long,” he said. “It is plain to everyone that she is in love with him.”

There was an awkward pause. The sun had crept around the room now and was falling directly on Alice’s chair. The fire crackled and hissed in the grate. Alice felt very hot and bothered. She could not for the life of her see why Miles’s casual reference to Lizzie being in love with Nat Waterhouse should make her feel so uncomfortable. Nor could she see why it should remind her of Miles holding her fast against the wall the previous night with the shocking, intimate press of his lower body against hers. A sensation that was sweet and warm pooled deep inside her, making her want to squirm in her chair. The sweat prickled at her hair. She knew her face would be all red and shiny. It really should not be this hot in February. There was something quite disturbingly unseasonable about it.