Page 7 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“My dear.” Her ladyship’s lips curled into a delighted smile. “I meant he should askyou.”
The sensations inside would suggest Leda’s heart was clambering into her throat, a place it had no business being. “I am already employed.”
“I would be willing to loan you to family, for a time. I have the highest faith in your intelligence as well as discretion. And we all know there isn’t the least touch of madness about you.”
Her ladyshipdidn’tknow. Leda intended for it to say that way.
“I’m afraid my skills aren’t the least suited to governessing. I am incompatible with small children, as my time teaching at Miss Gregoire’s Academy for Girls will attest. If you will excuse me. I have letters to write.”
“You’ll join us at the Pump Room, I hope? Brancaster has to take the waters and write his name in the book.”
Good sense pressed her to say no. To avoid this man who unsettled her, though he sat doing nothing but methodically scooping eggs. He’d known madness in a woman; he might sense something in her. She already felt a bit daft, the way her thoughts cleared as she watched his jaw flexing as he chewed. Noting his hands, solid, strong, and as well-shaped as the rest of him.
“I have errands to attend.” Like hiding from Lord Brancaster until he went away.
He met her gaze, and a strange thickness clung in her throat. It felt like despair.
Nothis,certainly. What did a comely, well-heeled lord of the realm have to despair of?
Yet she could read his expression, the slight flattening of the lip, the twitch of one dark brow. He expected her to run from him. He was resigned to it. His reputation had taught him to expect nothing more.
He came to her for help, or at least came to his aunt, and Leda went skittering off like a bedbug seeking cover.
“You might at least give him some introductions. Your acquaintance is broader than mine,” Lady Plume said.
That was true, for while Lady Plume had lived in Bath far longer, she tended to swim in the shallow pool of the upper class, while Leda, like a chameleon, had forged friendships across many ranks. And was that reproach in her employer’s voice? Her ladyship had scooped Leda from the doorway in which she found her barely holding body and soul together and had set her upon the plump cushion of No. 14 Crescent Place like a favored house cat, where she was petted and well-fed and allowed to preen at her own cleverness. And she could not now turn around and help another in need?
Yet drawing near this man would be dangerous to her hard-won peace. Leda knew it by instinct. She would approach, thinking herself on solid ground, and fall through into a pit of—she knew not what. Something overwhelming, she was certain.
She reached for her remaining piece of toast, meaning to take it to her room while she wrote. Gibbs, his nose in the air, removed the plate and carried it to the sideboard.
Whatever small gain she had made in Gibbs’ estimation, Leda had promptly lost by denying Lady Plume this simple request.
“Ring for me when you wish to leave. Of course I shall accompany you.” Leda ignored the strange kick in her errant heart as it made its way back to the proper locale in her chest. She would spend more time with him. Long stretches.
For the purpose of turning his attention from herself and sending another woman home with him to Norfolk.
As it should be. She had known near a decade ago, when she stood in a stone church saying vows that banged as heavy as a bell clapper in her mouth, that a future of love and happiness was not for her. Yet, as Leda refilled her cup and removed herself to the library to complete her correspondence, she found the dregs of her coffee very bitter.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was generally Leda’s ambition to be no more than sufficiently smart in her attire, as she wished to be found unobjectionable and in no way setting herself up as an example to be emulated. Yet she felt overly self-conscious of her fashion choices that morning as she walked down Milsom Street beside Lord Brancaster, with Lady Plume, who found the prospect of a walk over half a mile fatiguing, carried alongside in a sedan chair.
Leda had grown accustomed, in the years of her employment, to the different ways that tradesmen, peers, and passersby regarded a lady as compared to a common miss or mistress. Lady Plume’s way was smoothed considerably by the aura of wealth and consequence she imparted. But that was nothing to the eminence by which a lord swept all before him.
Gentlemen who would have merely tipped their hats in a perfunctory greeting met Brancaster’s eye and smiled with the shared, secret knowledge of men. Ladies bobbed their heads, dispensing smiles coy or serene. Misses colored and whispered behind their bonnets. Merchants came to their door to hover with inviting smiles. Boys tagged behind in the street, remarkingon his riding whip, his spurs, the precise roll to the brim of his top hat.
And this was Bath, where, during the season, it was not uncommon to come across a duke, an earl or two, and any host of officers in uniform. In Norfolk, in what she supposed must be quite remote country, he would be worshipped as a lesser god.
He bore it well, nodding in return, touching the brim of his hat, answering the occasional “good day” and “how do.” Leda was glad she had worn her spencer of buttercup cloth and, for her head, the capote with the wild poppies along the small brim, though she worried how much dust kicked up from the road would coat her muslin frock by the time they returned home.
She was glad also that Brancaster was courteous. It would go far in procuring him a wife.
“Bath is rather new,” he remarked as they passed the Palladian edifices of Queen Square.
“Wood rebuilt Bath the way Augustus turned Rome from mud into marble,” Lady Plume replied.
“In Bath stone, which is easier to cut than marble, and has that distinctive honey color,” Brancaster said. “Found only in Somerset. Our carrstone is red, though it’s also a limestone. There’s a great chalk shelf running under Britain from here to Norfolk, some believe.”
