Page 101 of Tremaine's True Love
“Felicitations on your impending nuptials, Mr. Haddonfield. Condole me, however, for I’mnotto be married. You see before you a special license that, alas, Lady Nita has declined to put to its intended use. I’ll keep that one, as a memento. This other paper is a list of properties in the area I thought might suit your sister. Perhaps you and your bride will take up residence in one of them.”
“Bloody benighted perdition,” George said, sliding a drink before his companion. “I’m sorry. Did Nita cry off?”
St. Michael took a dainty sniff of his toddy, as if it were whisky. “We would not have suited. You and Mrs. Nash have my best wishes, and I would like to discuss a business matter with you when you’re recovered from your nuptial joy.”
“Are you truly that coldhearted? We would not suit, best wishes?” And how did St. Michael know to whom George had proposed?
St. Michael had yet to sip his drink when Edward Nash came thumping down the stairs in the middle of a silence just about to turn awkward.
“What in the sodding hell requires that I rise at an indecent hour at your request, Mr. Haddonfield? And what’shedoing here?” Nash asked, blinking at St. Michael.
St. Michael rose. “I’m leaving. Mr. Haddonfield, you may expect further correspondence from me on the subject of serving as my factor in France. Mr. Nash, good day.”
“It ain’t a good day,” Nash said, swiping the drink George had intended for St. Michael. He drank about half the toddy before pausing. “Nita sent you packing, then?”
“Lady Nita, to you,” George said, in unison with St. Michael.
“She’s not anything to you though, is she, St. Michael?” Nash asked with nasty glee.
George could smell the man’s breath from two yards away—rot and ruin blended with poor personal hygiene—which meant St. Michael was getting a blast as well.
“Her ladyship will always have my utmost esteem,” St. Michael said, abruptly sounding significantly more Scottish. “I suggest you guard your tongue, Mr. Nash.”
George had heard that cordial, nearly pleasant tone before, in various gentleman’s clubs, when the hour had grown late and masculine honor was fueled by an excess of spirits.
“Don’t mourn Lady Nita’s rejection too deeply,” Nash said. “My brother Norton said her virginal passions compared unfavorably with Addy Chalmers’s fledgling sorties into sin.”
Before George could act, St. Michael had snatched the drink from Nash and dashed the contents in the idiot’s face.
“Take back those words, sir, on behalf of both women.”
“I must agree, Nash,” George said, rising. “Though your ungentlemanly observation explains why the oldest Chalmers girl looks so familiar.”
A muscle leaped along St. Michael’s jaw.
Bartlow stood halfway down the stairs, and the scullery maid scuttled out from the kitchen, turned around, and scuttled right back the way she’d come. On the stairs, four bleary-eyed fellows held perfectly still.
“It’s the damned truth,” Nash said, swiping at his dripping chin with a wrinkled handkerchief. “Nita Haddonfield is a cold fish, poking her nose where it doesn’t belong, basket of medicinals over her arm, while she puts on airs like some angel of mercy when she’s spread her legs—”
St. Michael clipped Nash on the jaw, a mere tap compared to what he could probably do, and compared to what George wanted to do.
“Apologize for that intemperate speech,” St. Michael said. “Admit the mistake of your words, the lingering influence of last night’s drink, and apologize. When your own household has benefitted from Lady Nita’s generosity and expertise, you are the last who should be allowed to malign her. The lady has rejected my suit, but I have not abdicated the honor of protecting her good name. Apologize, Nash.Now.”
Nash cocked back his fist with all the finesse of a first former and swung at St. Michael’s jaw, then further impugned his gentlemanly credentials by shaking his limp fingers as if he’d plowed them into a stone wall.
“I’ll meet you,” Nash cried, “you jumped-up excuse for a Scottish sheep farmer. I’ll meet you and we’ll see whose apology is in order. Nita Haddonfield has long been a plague on this shire. She has no care for a woman’s proper place, hasn’t an inkling of proper medical science, and the sooner she’s—”
St. Michael set aside the tankard from which Nash had been drinking. “As you wish, Nash. Lady Nita has borne the censure and indifferent thanks of her neighbors for too long.Your disrespect of her ends now.Name your seconds.”
Bartlow lowered himself to sit on the steps. The other guests silently exchanged money.
While George tucked the list of properties into his pocket and passed St. Michael the special license.
* * *
Nita’s throat hurt, her head hurt, her eyes hurt. She sat at the kitchen table sipping a posset that helped with those various pains, but nothing would assuage the ache in her heart.
“I should be drinking pennyroyal tea,” Nita informed a marmalade pantry mouser. “The idea makes me bilious.”
