Page 5 of To Tame the Wild Rake
Aldridge was drunk, but not so much that he didn’t know he was in dangerous territory. He should not be trespassing on the wrong side of the pond that marked the boundary of the estate he was visiting. He should not be alone in this quiet folly with a girl who was both younger and better born than he had at first assumed. He should not be listening, enraptured, to her explanation about why she was beguiling her convalescence from an embarrassing childhood illness by solving puzzles.
Richport’s house was hidden from their sight by a small tree-covered hill that rose on the other side of the pond. It was filled, as Richport’s houses tended to be, with lustful women, good liquor, wagers of all kinds, and countless inducements to forget the sins, follies and betrayals that haunted him.
Yet he had been here for nearly an hour, in peaceful conversation—intellectual conversation—with a chit not yet out of the schoolroom, and he was already planning to return tomorrow.
“You know my name, my lady. May I know yours?”
She blushed, then, and cast her eyes around as if a suggestion might be written up in the rafters of the folly. “I am called Charrie.”
He looked up to the tree that shaded the little building and then down at the basket that held cherry pits, all that was left of the fruit they had been sharing, and raised one eyebrow.
“Not Cherry,” she told him. “Charrie.”
“Cherry suits you better,” he told her, though he was by no means drunk enough to explain why. An errant memory surfaced. Didn’t Elfingham refer to his twin sisters as Charrie and Sarrie? And didn’t Elfingham’s grandfather have an estate somewhere in this area?
She was Lady Charlotte Winderfield, then, and the granddaughter of the Duke of Winshire. Highly eligible. Still too young, but she would be marriageable in a year or two.
And if he was thinking such foolish thoughts, it was high time he found another drink. He had not been sober for more than a month, and he had no intention of starting now. He stood.
“I must take my leave, Cherry, but I will visit tomorrow, if you will admit me. I shall present my card at the door.” He gestured to the open side of the structure.
She giggled at his fooling, but said, “If we are to be friends, and if you are to call me Cherry”—the blush deepened—“then I shall call you Anthony. That is your name, is it not?”
Hardly. It was one of a string of names that had been bestowed on him at baptism, but no one had ever addressed him by anything but his title. He was Aldridge even to his closest relatives, and would remain so until his father died and he became Haverford. If she called him Anthony, he would look around to see who was being addressed.
Still, fair was fair. If he insisted on calling her by a name he had selected, she had every right to choose what to call him.
“Then we shall be Anthony and Cherry. Friend.”
3
November, 1814, London
The Winshire townhouse was unusually quiet, with most of the family gone from London. Even Sarah had left, though just for two weeks to attend a house party. At twenty-two, Sarah had decided it was time to take a husband, and was hoping that two weeks under the same roof as three of her suitors, in the more relaxed environment of a country house, might help her to further her plan.
The small army of servants and retainers were scattered across England with the particular family members they served. Only Charlotte and her own personal attendants remained, and that only because she had obligations to fulfil.
The disappointing mathematics lesson at the ragged school had been nearly the last of them. Tomorrow, she had a meeting to attend, and then she would join Sarah in the country.
For tonight, she was eating dinner alone in the small dining room, at a table that, even with all the leaves removed, could seat ten. The room was laughably named when Charlotte thought of some of the dwellings she entered in the service of her students, but still just a fraction of the size of the banquet room, where one hundred and fifty could sit comfortably at the long tables, and two hundred could be squeezed in at need.
This evening, Charlotte had sent away the maid who was playing chaperone, the footman who had served the dinner, and Yahzak, the guard on duty, and was indulging in the forbidden pleasure of reading at the table, but she leapt to her feet when the door crashed open.
“My lady.” Yahzak’s calm tone showed no strain, though his arms confined a twisting, wriggling, fighting figure. “This urchin begs a moment of your time. A clean tongue, boy!”
The steady stream of imprecations, or rather the voice in which they were uttered, identified the intruder before Yahzak released him to fall to the floor a few feet from Charlotte. Yahzak followed in two swift paces. “Your pupil, I think?”
“Tony! What are you doing here?”
Tony gathered himself from his sprawl and glared up at Yahzak. “Ain’t no call to be so rough, guv.”
“The boy had no call to kick me and attempt to flee,” Yahzak observed. “I recognised him from the school, my lady, and thought you might like to ask him why he was attempting to sneak into the house before I slit his throat and bury him in the garden.”
Tony turned an alarmed face to Charlotte.
“He is joking, Tony. Sit down and tell me what the problem is. I take it you came to see me about something? Yahzak, you sit, too.” No point in telling the warrior to leave them; he wouldn’t until he was certain that the boy was no threat. Yahzak was one of the retainers the new duke had brought from his kingdom in the mountains north of Persia, his personal guard.
Tony took the indicated chair, keeping a wary eye on Yahzak.
