Page 43 of Miss Dignified
She pretended to catch it and laid her palm against her cheek. Utter nonsense, of course, but it was the best she could do when her heart was hammering like a war drum.
As Dylan disappeared from view, Lydia closed the door and retreated to the kitchen, where she found a vase and, with shaking hands, arranged the flowers and gave them water. While the kittens looked on like disapproving godmothers, she tossed the note onto the coals in the kitchen hearth.
Marcus had written in Latin and added a little sketch of a tree on a hill, lest Lydia mistake the identity of the note’s author. The name Tremont meant something likeacross the hillorover the mountain.
As a little boy, Marcus had devised the tree and mountain sketch as his “secret” signature to Lydia when playing his brave-explorer and fierce-pirate games. For a time, he’d also sketched a glove—more complicated than a tree or a hill—to signify the family name rather than the title.
The message translated easily:Bene sum. Ite in domum suam.
I am well. Go home, and the verbgohad been rendered as a command.
Lydia set the flowers on the windowsill and considered two very different men. Dylan had told her in several ways that he would not presume on her person or her time, thatshedetermined the manner in which their dealings proceeded, if at all. That her dignity mattered to him.
Marcus, after a protracted and unexplained silence, gave her six words, no explanations, and a direct order.Go home.A command given to collies by shepherds and drovers.
That he was alive should have been cause for undiluted joy. Should have been. What Lydia felt mostly was relief—and annoyance.
“Marcus is the earl,” she informed the kittens as the note curled and blackened into ash, “but he’s also my baby brother and a complete gudgeon if he thinks I will allow him to behave like this. I’m supposed to scuttle back to Tremont, thrilled to know he’s alive—and I am thrilled, after a fashion—and await his pleasure.”
The bouquet had flowers going every which way. Lydia got out a knife and evened up the stems, which resulted in some improvement.
“I am owed an explanation,” she said, not a conclusion she would have reached before coming to London and earning a wage in the captain’s household. “I am owed the courtesy of an explanation, as is Mama. We deserve some idea of what to expect from Marcus going forward.”
One thing was clear. Marcus had not suffered one of those blows to the head that obliterated memory. Mama had presented that somewhat fanciful explanation whenever the subject of Marcus’s absence had been raised.
Lydia moved the flowers to Bowen’s office, where she would not have to see them much, and still, they troubled her. She was polishing the mirror in the captain’s bedroom before she admitted the basis for her upset.
For this particular upset.
The flowers, and their imperious little note, made Lydia’s deception of the captain more real. He sought intimacies with her—intimacies she longed to grant him—but she was not who he thought her to be. She was an earl’s sister and, more significantly, the sibling of a man whom Dylan despised.
Lydia took a final pass over the mirror’s glass and beheld the reflection of a woman who had many reasons to rejoice and just as many reasons to despair.
“Why would a man hide from his own kin?” Dylan asked as he pretended to study the chessboard.
Lydia sat across from him, candlelight finding garnet, bronze, and gold highlights in her hair. Despite her plain gray dress, she looked of a piece with the library’s learned tomes and landscapes.
She touched a pawn, then withdrew her hand. “I beg your pardon?”
“I poked about St. Giles for much of the day, and though I knew precisely where I was at all times, on three occasions I asked former soldiers for directions.”
“To strike up a conversation?”
“To test a theory.”
Bowen Brook was ostensibly reading an agricultural pamphlet in a chair by the fire. Gentle snoring suggested the mysteries of contour plowing were less riveting than the temptations of Morpheus.
Lydia moved the pawn, which was puzzling. One game had been enough to show that her chess was shrewd—shrewd enough to best Dylan’s cautious strategies—but that move was either a sophisticated feint or a mistake.
“What theory did you test, Captain?”
“Yesterday, I somehow got turned around, more than once. I have studied maps of London generally, and in the usual case, that is enough to orient me. St. Giles isn’t that large an area, and I’ve walked the surrounding neighborhoods often enough.”
“And?”
“And on all three occasions today, I was given inaccurate directions from men who’ve spent considerable time on London’s streets.” The first time, Dylan had been surprised. The second, puzzled, and the third, disappointed.
And the third fellow, Andrew Bean, owed Dylan his life.
