Page 28 of What's an Earl Gotta Do?
“Oh, it was mostly of the theme of, look at this silly woman, who fancies she understands economics.”
“And who was doing this mocking?”
“A lengthy question to answer, as it was said behind my back, to my face, in the press—”
“Why did your husband not put a stop to it?” Michael snapped. “He should have called out the first man who said such a thing.”
“He—” Anne broke off, looking down at her hands.
The suspense was killing him. “He what?” She murmured something he couldn’t make out in response. “What was that?”
“He didn’t read it,” Anne said, her voice tremulous.
“He didn’t what?”
“I was trying to arrange meetings with businessmen, with factory owners and the like, to see if I could convince anyone to try out my plan. It wasn’t going well. At all. And I thought I might have more luck if Lord Wynters helped broker a meeting with someone of his acquaintance. But…” She looked away.
“But?” Michael asked, making an effort to gentle his voice. It wasn’t Anne he wanted to throttle, after all.
“But when I asked for his help, he revealed that he hadn’t read my pamphlet. And when I asked him to read it, he…” She swallowed thickly, steeling herself. “He refused. He said he had ‘matters of importance’ to attend to.”
Michael could read Anne’s face well enough to see just how deeply this refusal had wounded her.
That settled it. Michael was definitely going to desecrate Wynters’s grave.
With a sledgehammer.
He felt rather than saw Anne lay a hand on his arm. “Michael, calm down.” She chuckled nervously. “There’s a painting in the gallery at Ravenswell depicting your ancestor, the Third Marquess of Redditch, at the Battle of Agincourt, in which he’s about to put a battle-axe through someone’s head. You are making precisely the same expression.”
Michael gave her a sideways glare. She was closer to the truth than she realized. “He upset you,” he grumbled.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
Anne closed her eyes, tilting her head toward his shoulder. “Thank you, Michael. But there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“Not so. What about the author of this cartoon? We’ve any number of battle-axes moldering around Ravenswell. There’s even one at Cranfield House, now that I think on it—”
“Michael!” She poked him in the shoulder. “No battle-axes.”
“It’s above the mantelpiece in the first-floor parlor—”
“Absolutely not! You need to take the right fork up ahead, by the by.”
“Humph,” he huffed as he complied with her instruction. “May I at least maim whoever it was?”
“No!”
“I could do so very lightly—”
“There will be no maiming, lightly or otherwise.” Anne managed to keep her features stern for about four seconds, before the corner of her mouth twitched, then curled upwards. “But thank you, all the same.”
They emerged from a copse of trees. One of her grooms, who was waiting by the banks of the Serpentine, stepped forward and waved. “Ah,” Anne said, “here we are. Stop the carriage anywhere.”
Chapter 9
Michael reined the horses in. Beside him, Anne asked the groom, “Is everything in readiness, Harold?”
