The Trouble with His Lordship’s Trousers Read online

  I bowed deeply. "Thank you, sir."

  Moving stiffly with each rigid leg swung round in an arc to engineer the necessary forward progress, he made his way to the door at a glacial pace. "And I think you might have a strong word with the tailor, for his measurements are distinctly off."

  "Yes, sir. I am quite sure the fault lies with the tailor and not with your beloved frangipane tarts. He is, it must be said, a despicably smug fellow and not to be trusted."

  "Did you not recommend his services to me? No doubt for a share of the takings."

  "Indeed not, my lord. I would never participate in such an underhand dealing." Besides which, the tailor had not been forthcoming with the payments promised to me in exchange for my master's patronage. I suspected him of spending my percentage on the new set of teeth he sported about town. Therefore I owed him no loyalty.

  "Then you must find me a new man. Someone who understands and appreciates the splendid male form as I embody it."

  "I will make inquiries in all haste, my lord." Perhaps Hodson the butcher would be a good choice, I mused. He knows a great deal about squeezing too much meat into a thin skin.

  But this, as his lordship would assure me, is what we must suffer for fashion. And on the subject of suffering...

  "Will you be seeing Lady Loose Garters this evening, my lord?"

  "In all probability the merry trollop will hunt me down." He smoothed a hand over his waistcoat as he took one last survey in the tall looking glass. "And I suppose I shall be obliged to let her."

  "I believe I ascertain a certain preference for the lady's company, sir," ventured I.

  This immediately removed the smile from his lips. Alarm glimmered through those blood-shot eyes. "Then you are quite wrong, man. I simply find myself suffering a dearth of more interesting companions of late."

  "I see, sir. Then I shall amass a good stock of cold compresses, head ache powders and soothing balm for my lordship's buttocks."

  As he reached the door handle at last, I thought I heard the pitiful, quiet scream of stitches under duress, but alas there was nothing I could do to help them. Like me, they are prisoners to their duty for his lordship and just as little appreciated.

  * * * *

  Several drips of water had fallen onto Harry's paper, smudging the ink, before he was forced to stop reading and pay attention to the origins of the leak. Irritated, he looked up to the ceiling of his bedchamber and watched another crystal bead appear before it lengthened, released, and made a direct course for his page.

  "Damn and blast."

  He reached for the mallet beside his bath and banged it hard into a small Chinese gong. Eventually his housekeeper's steps approached the door.

  "What now?" came her surly response to his summons. "Brown has already heaved four pails of heated water up those stairs. Haven't you sat in there long enough?"

  Harry tugged on the tasseled rope that led from his bath to the door handle and pulled the door ajar. "Parkes, the leak is back."

  "Of course it is," she exclaimed through the widened crack. "Makeshift fixes never last. What do you expect me to do about it now?"

  "Kindly cease your warbling and find someone to fetch a ladder, Parkes."

  Another splat of rain water dropped to the end of his nose and hung there a moment before it finished its descent to his bath.

  In due course, his handyman Brown arrived, bringing a ladder from the east wing where he'd been fixing a fallen chandelier.

  "Shall I have a look at the leak for you, sir?"

  "No, no! I can manage. Might as well make myself useful. Thank you, Brown."

  The old man set the ladder in place for him and then hobbled off.

  Parkes returned immediately to chide Harry through the half open door, "I don't know why you can't get a new roof. There's money enough."

  "The roof is original to the Abbey, and has sheltered many generations of Thrashers. It is perfectly adequate."

  "Until it rains. It's more patched hole than roof by now. You waste time on those fool inventions and pay no attention to the maintenance of this house."

  "Thank you, Parkes. Surely I'm keeping you from your work elsewhere."

  "Just like that study downstairs, full of papers you refuse to throw out," she went on, ignoring him. "Mice will be nesting in this house, mark my words. Scratching about in the walls, driving me mad."

  "As long as the little blighters leave me to my business, Parkes," he replied, "what right do I have to chase them away from theirs? In all likelihood, their ancestors were here first— long before that jolly scoundrel, King Harry Tudor, chased all the monks out with hot iron pokers up their backsides and handed the place off to my family in exchange for a few unsavory favors."

  She sputtered irritably. "You're turning that study into a safe haven for spiders too, keeping them around to make sure I stay out of your books and papers, I suppose. So worried about folk prying."

  "Spiders perform a service, Parkes. They catch flies. Have you ever studied the construction of a web? It is fascinating! You simply must—"

  "I don't have time for that. Some of us have more to do around here than gaze off into the distance for hours on end, like you."

  "It's called thinking and somber reflection, Parkes. You, being a female, won't be familiar with those activities."

  "Thinking? That's a fine excuse! And nothing ever comes of it but those peculiar inventions of yours."

  "Automatons, Parkes. You need not be afraid of the word."

  "All they do is sit down there in bits and pieces, collecting dust. Watching me."

  "They haven't eyes. How can they watch you?"

  "It feels as if they do. Makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It's unholy, that's what it is. Who wants one of those clockwork beasts watching them from a dark corner?"

  Harry chuckled. "Sounds as if you're afraid they might catch you doing something you oughtn't. What do you get up to behind my back?"

  She gave a gasp of exasperation. "How long have you been sat idle in that bath? You ought to be shriveled to a prune by now. I suppose you forgot the time and where you are, as usual."

  Parkes frequently complained that the hours in his day were lost before he had even remembered to shave or put on a shirt. He was once so caught up in the elaborate, mechanical design of a bird-scarer to keep crows off a vegetable garden, that two days had passed before he remembered to eat.

  "This solitary world of yours, my dear old chap," his cousin Max would say, "is no way for a gentleman to live. You need more household staff to look after you. A valet at the very least."

  Harry, however, preferred as few staff as possible. Somehow he had acquired Parkes, and with her came Brown the odd job man, and then Sulley, who looked after the horses. In his cousin Maxwell Bramley's view, this was inadequate. It was incomprehensible to Max that any gentleman could exist without a valet, probably because he couldn't even tie his own neck cloth.

  "You'll do yourself an injury one of these days, left to your own devices in this shambles of a house," Max had remarked.

  But as far as injuries went, Harry barely gave them a thought. He'd sustained countless wounds in his life, including an encounter with a two-foot oak splinter that almost took him to his maker seven years ago. Since surviving that "fatal" wound and then, a few years later, being declared "lost at sea" and abandoned to his fate on an unchartered island, his life had taken on the rather surreal tenor of one existing on borrowed time.

  When a man's obituary has been printed in the newspaper not once but twice, as he'd remarked to his aunt, one had a tendency, if not a duty, to believe it.

  "Well, I suggest you get out of the bath and do something about that leak," snapped the housekeeper, about to leave again in another one of her huffs.

  "Oh, and by the by, Parkes, I don't like that new soap. It smells like flowers, and I have no desire to attract bees."

  "That soap is very fine and used in the best families now, so they say."

 
; "Which means it was outrageously expensive. The quack who sold it to you must have seen you coming a mile off, woman. Yet you call me the gullible one."

  "Well, excuse me, for trying to polish coal. I ought to know better by now."

  "I'd rather smell like myself, Parkes, than a dandy."

  "A savage, that's what you are," she muttered. "And you, a knight of the realm! Sir Henry Thrasher indeed!"

  "A title I certainly didn't ask for," he bellowed. "You may have noticed, I had to lose half my wits before they granted it, which ought to tell you something about titles in general."

  The door slammed shut.

  Harry blinked as another drop of water hit him in the eye, shaken loose by the tremor of the housekeeper's wrath. He could well imagine her expression as she stormed across the landing and down the stairs.

  Later she'd remind him of how lucky he was to have her around. He would agree and so they'd make their peace again.

  And he was bloody fortunate, wasn't he? Who would remind him to eat, if Parkes left him too? He supposed it was rather touching, really, that she bothered what he might smell like. Not that he ever got close enough to anyone else these days for it to be a genuine concern.

  Well...he only got close by accident, he mused, thinking again of the young lady who recently floored him as violently as a bottle of brandy on an empty stomach. She had a very bright, inquisitive pair of eyes that made it seem as if spring newly flourished each time she looked at him. Life, he mused; she overflowed with it so that he felt her heat warming his own skin. How odd it was that his memory was so unreliable these days and yet he'd recognized her at once as the girl on the stairs at a party some years ago. That event, of course, had ended rather spectacularly, which is probably why he remembered it. She definitely had a knack for chaos.

  This fascination for the inept thief was nothing more than human nature's curiosity for the perverse.

  He glanced over at the door again. Assured that he was alone, Harry folded his paper, dropped it to the floor, and reached for his dressing gown, which hung over a nearby chair back. Hidden there, in the depths of a pocket, he kept the little paper token that had fallen from the owl's mechanical beak just before the dog hauled it away from his assailant at the garden party. A "fortune"— the sort of thing, so he understood, that ladies liked to imagine had some significance.

  And there upon it was a single phrase, framed by curling scrolls and tiny flowers.

  Charm strikes the sight, but merit wins the soul.

  Evidently this warning was meant for her, not him. Such a wide-eyed, fallible creature was bound to be dreaming of pretty young suitors with silk knee breeches and affected manners.

  Well, hopefully the young woman would gain some benefit from his aunt's guidance. Lady Bramley was a formidable adversary, but she could also be a very good ally in a tight spot and Harry had always thought that somebody ought to make use of her munificence. It was energy wasted on him.

  He slipped the paper fortune back into the pocket of his robe, sighed deeply and then heaved his body out of the cold water. For a moment he stood by the bath, scratching his damp chest, surveying the ceiling of carved Tudor roses. Water glistened like dew upon the petals of one darkened bloom.

  Now what could he use to plug the leak? Better get a better look at it.

  As he became absorbed by the problem of that tiny hole in the ceiling, Harry gave no consideration to the ladder being unsteady when he climbed the first rung. His mind already traveling rapidly ahead of his body, he didn't bother looking down, otherwise he might have noticed that when he moved the ladder into position, he set one of the legs on that wet, partially melted cake of soap previously tossed from his bath in contempt.

  The tumble came shortly after. His head hit the gong and summoned the housekeeper, who must also have heard the heavy thud of a body hitting the floorboards.

  Parkes looked down at him with her head shaking, lips struggling to remain firm.

  "You were supposed to be fixing a hole, not making a new one," she muttered. "And you're right— that soap does make you smell like a dandy."

  * * * *

  "I told you so," his cousin Max announced, barging into Harry's study on a warm summer's afternoon. "You're a danger to yourself, living out here in the midst of nowhere, all alone. Look at you! What a sorry state to be in. Each time I come here I dread what I might find."

  With his right wrist badly sprained and his arm tied up in a sling, Harry was at a disadvantage. He couldn't slam or bolt a door as quickly with only one working arm. "As I must constantly remind people, this is Surrey, not the midst of nowhere," he grumbled. "Certainly, it isn't far enough from London to stop you venturing into it."

  The comment was ignored, as usual.

  "I fret about you, old chap, here in this ruin of a house, all alone. Next time it could be more than an arm you break."

  "It's not a break. It's a sprain, and I am not alone. I have staff. Adequate staff for an unsociable bachelor "

  "What you need is a woman, Harry," his cousin declared, promptly pouring and downing an unoffered glass of brandy. "Here you sit, buried in your books and inventions, getting old before your time. What are you? Eight and thirty?"

  Harry sighed. In truth he was only thirty, but he would rather be sixty and then perhaps people would stop asking him impertinent questions, accusing him of hiding like a hermit in the "wilderness" of the Surrey countryside. If only they would leave him to his own business.

  "I am perfectly content," he assured his cousin. "I like it here. I like my life the way it is."

  Max shook his head. Clutching a refilled glass, he strolled around Harry's study, warily examining the array of mechanical body parts littering the shelves. "Still making these clockwork horrors, I see."

  "They are practical devices with many uses."

  Much as Henry Thrasher, Master and Commander, had once been, he thought glumly. Before he lost his mind and left half of himself at sea. Now what was he good for?

  One of the fingers on a disembodied arm suddenly clicked into action, bending and then pointing, as if it had a life of its own. Of course, Harry knew it was merely the delayed movement of a wheel within the device, but Max jumped and almost spilled his brandy. He stumbled backward, fumbling for a chair.

  "It is the future, cousin," Harry continued, hiding his smile. "Machines will one day rule the world. Inventors have created mechanical swans and tigers, an automaton flute-player, even a 'digesting duck'."

  "That's all well and good, Harry. But you cannot pretend these terrible things make good company." Max finally dropped heavily into a chair on the other side of the desk. "You must feel the need for female entertainment. Warm flesh and blood. This," he waved his glass around the cluttered room, "is not normal. You cannot live a chaste dull life just because Amy Milhaven—that unfaithful creature— broke your engagement and married elsewhere the moment your back was turned."

  "A year after I was shipwrecked and presumed lost at sea."

  "Twelve months is no time to wait, cousin. It was remarkably cold-hearted of the hussy to write you off so easily."

  "Are you suggesting that Amy Milhaven, at the tender age of one and twenty, should have donned a widow's cap, resigned herself to bad sherry because she could afford nothing better, and pined for me ever after?"

  "No, but the trollop's eagerness to replace you was unseemly— as my dear mama often says— and her second choice showed a shocking want of taste. You might forgive her for it just to save your pride, but fortunately you will always have me, cousin, to hold a grudge on your behalf."

  Harry laughed and shook his head.

  "And since you came back, there have been no other women?" Max persisted.

  "With good reason, considering the unpredictability of my moods. What woman would put up with me?"

  Since he barely knew what he might do from one day to the next, his mind having sudden, unpredictable spasms and memory losses, Harry had decided to avoid Society as muc
h as possible. After the blow to his head at the Battle of Grand Port in 1810, the Naval doctors could not explain how Harry was still alive. The experts all had different theories, but no solid explanations. Once recovered, he had returned to sea and calmly resumed his career with a new command. But two years later he was shipwrecked. Believed gone for good this time, a memorial stone was raised, his house was shut up, and sailors from Plymouth to Botany Bay raised a toast to "Dead Harry".

  The world was confounded once again, when it turned out that he had survived twenty-eight months on a tropical island. Rescued, shaved and respectably attired once more, it was expected that he could pick things up as he had before, but Harry was changed. A great many things that had not concerned him in the past, now drew his mind and attention away from those matters considered important by others. After so long alone on that island with nothing but his own company, he had grown accustomed to peace and the tranquility of internal musing. He could sit for hours pondering the arrangement of stars in the sky, or the slow burn of a log in his fire. Worst of all— an even stranger development— he suddenly felt no desire to fire a gun or a cannon at anybody.

  So, eight months after his rescue, the Navy suddenly found him more liability than use. He was quietly removed from a once promising career and packed off with the consolation of a knighthood.

  But in Max Bramley's eyes, there was nothing wrong with Harry. Nothing that a simple cure could not change. Max generally viewed life through the distorted glass at the bottom of a crystal goblet, of course, and although folk never went to him for advice, it did not stop the blurry-eyed fellow from giving it freely.

  "A woman could save you from yourself," he said. "You've already got one arm in a sling, old chap. But breaking one's fall is precisely what a woman is for."

  "Then why haven't you acquired one?"

  That caught his cousin off guard, but only briefly. "We are talking of you, dear coz, not of me. You were in the Navy, Harry, for pity's sake! This chaste life is not what I expect from a sailor."

  "Contrary to popular belief, a sailor's life is not all rum and wanton women. I was twelve when I joined the Naval Academy in Portsmouth, fourteen when I became a midshipman and nineteen when I had my first command. How much time do you think I had to spare for the pursuit of entertainment?"