The Peculiar Pink Toes of Lady Flora Read online

  Plumm bent his head. He should have known his master would baulk at the idea of writing again without the young lady's encouragement. Pride in the Fairfax-Savoy male was a terrible thing.

  "Your lady mother is here, your grace. She arrived this afternoon."

  "Ah. We thought the house was unusually cold for the time of year," the young man remarked solemnly.

  Even after five years of service, Plumm could not always tell whether his master meant to be amusing or was merely so incidentally. His expression seldom gave anything away.

  "What does she want now?"

  "To be sure you are not indulging a fascination for unsuitable women, I believe, your grace."

  Slowly the duke turned again. "Unsuitable women?"

  "She mentioned something of it," he muttered. "Of Chelmsworth hussies in particular and how their schemes must be prevented for the good of the estate. She is prepared to take measures, it seems."

  After a pause, the duke lifted his gaze from the carpet. "Do you think it possible that the dowager had some hand in the interruption of my correspondence with—"

  "Gracious, no, sir. I would never suggest such a terrible thing. That the dowager would meddle."

  His master stared at the wall for a moment, his countenance one moment enraged and then, quite suddenly, blank. Which was more terrifying than if he had released his fury. Even Plumm, who had lived many years and seen many atrocities, had never felt the like of that gale force wind that blew through his body and drew sharp fingernails down his spine.

  The duke picked up a seal and turned it in his long fingers, over and over, the motion slow, methodical. "She need not be concerned for the estate," he said. "We have it all in hand. We know our duty. It was but a momentary slip. It won't happen again. We do not engage in sport we cannot win."

  "No, sir. But if you were to—"

  "Do not push your luck, Plumm," the duke replied swiftly, "or we shall inform the dowager that you've been telling tales. Believe me, you would not want her as your enemy."

  No, thought poor Plumm, no more than he would want her for a mother.

  "But we do have a communication you might manage for us," his master continued. "It occurred to me that even if his sister is averse to guidance, perhaps the very young Earl Chelmsworth might benefit from our advice. We understand he is soon to return to school for the Michaelmas term. We thought we could correspond with him there. We should like to help the boy, if we can, before the rest of his family manage to run the Chelmsworth estate into the ground."

  Plumm was pleased and heartened by this idea. "Yes, your grace. It is always a good thing to keep a foot in the door."

  "What, pray tell, is that supposed to mean?"

  "I meant nothing untoward by it, sir."

  "We would hope not. This is nothing whatsoever to do with That Chelmsworth Girl."

  "Of course it is not, sir. How could it be when you have put her well out of your mind?"

  "Quite."

  Plumm watched as his master bent over the desk again. "And what of your lady mother, your grace? She expects you to join her for dinner, I believe."

  The shoulders stiffened. "Tell her we're out."

  "But she intends to stay a while." He sighed. "According to the size and heft of the trunk she brought with her."

  "It is fortunate then, is it not, that we possess a very large house and two people can rattle around in it for months— even years— without ever having sight or sound of each other? A task she managed well enough for most of our childhood. Her concerned company now, Plumm, is too little, and twenty-one years too late. We have nothing further to say to the dowager."

  And indeed he did not. Mother and son never spoke again. At least, not face to face and not for a very long time.

  * * * *

  In the following years much was to happen for all these characters with whom you are now introduced, but a large portion of it was very dull and barely worth the mention, as is the case in most lives.

  There was, however, as the duke once promised a certain lady pirate, "Another time." We shall sail speedily forward and let the wind carry us to it.

  Act Two

  Consequences, Conundrums

  and Hot Cockles

  Chapter Eight

  Cambridge, England

  A cold Friday morning, one October.

  She turned off her iPod as she mounted the steps to the museum. The others in her class soon dispersed in chattering groups, suffering the icy glare of a uniformed guard beneath Gainsborough's painting of "Heneage Lloyd and his sister, Lucy."

  But she walked slowly and let them all get ahead of her, while she savored her steps through the past. There was a new exhibition today, one she'd been waiting to see, and that was where her feet took her, passing through several other galleries to follow the signs. Soon the noise of her classmates had melted away. She heard only the creaking wooden floors and soft murmurs of more respectful, reverent and appreciative visitors. Good.

  Her phone tinkled before she could turn it off. She glanced down to read a message.

  Letter came. Interview at King's! Congrats! Smiley face. Dancing monkey. Party hat.

  They couldn't wait for her to get home and open the letter herself. It had probably sat by the toaster for all of ten minutes before they gave in to temptation and ripped it open. Now they already anticipated that she would be accepted at King's College (Congrats! Smiley face. Dancing monkey, etc.), even though she still had to pass the stringent interview process and achieve the necessary 'A' level qualifications next year.

  So many expectations. But in all honesty she did not know if that was the direction she wanted to take. She felt very young, at seventeen, to be plotting her future, to know what she wanted from life and commit herself to it. At the same time she felt very old. Too old to imagine she could predict her own path. Did she want to spend so many years studying? What was the point of it all?

  To be a doctor, of course. Is that not what she had wanted since she was a child?

  Or was it what her parents wanted and so they had, not so subtly, directed her to it?

  Today she would not worry about any of that. Her mind was in the past not the future.

  She turned off her phone and slipped it back into her coat pocket. A strange excitement had taken hold of her body, making her skin tingle and every lock of hair spring new curl.

  Here it was, the exhibition she'd come to see. "Eighteenth Century Lives: Treasures Lost and Found."

  She walked through the archway and into another softly lit gallery. Why were all these things lost, she wondered. Who lost them? Who found them again? Perhaps it was just a title and she shouldn't read too much into it.

  Leaning over the display cases, careful not to mist the glass with her breath, she studied a fan with faded turtle doves, a glove, a comb decorated with four little ebony birds, and an exquisitely embroidered dancing slipper. How lovely they were. So much love and effort put into the decoration. What would it be like to know that no other soul had a pair just like them? She walked on to admire a flute decorated with tiny climbing roses, set beside the velvet lined box in which it was once given. It looked brand new, as if it had never been used— or rarely.

  There was nobody else in the gallery, just her, and she took her time in that tranquil place, moving slowly from case to case, glad to have nobody breathing down her neck, forcing her along, trying to push in.

  One cabinet stood on its own in a corner. Instinctively, she'd saved it for last, worked her way around to it as if she didn't notice it there yet, in her peripheral vision.

  But eventually it was the only thing left to see.

  * * * *

  Once she'd listened to her friends discussing the great heroes of classic English literature, comparing Jane Austen's men with those of the Brontes, Hardy and Gaskill.

  "They don't make men like that anymore," somebody said wistfully.

  "It's all about the clothes. If only they still dressed that way."
r />   "To be harassed on the tube? Beaten up by skinheads? Laughed at in the meat section of Tesco?"

  "Seriously, you have to be a real man to get away with a ruffled shirt and sideburns."

  She smiled to herself, because they had their vision of these heroes formed by period drama on television and in movies. Mr. Darcy, to them, was Colin Firth or Matthew MacFadyen. That was their reference point.

  For some reason she had another picture in mind when it came to Georgian gentlemen.

  "Georgian?" one of her friends had exclaimed. "Pride and Prejudice is set during the Regency. Everybody knows that."

  To which she replied, "Jane Austen wrote the first draft in 1797. The Georgian era. That is when she began it, no matter when it was finally published."

  As usual they all brushed her trivia knowledge aside, too eagerly discussing actors in wet shirts. They did not want to hear how extremely unlikely it would have been for a gentleman like Mr. Darcy ever to be caught outdoors in that state of undress, which is why such a scene was never written by Miss Austen.

  Her friends found her adherence to facts boring and mocked her for it.

  But it was even harder to enjoy the paperback historical romances her friends devoured, because she found herself picking fault with the details. For one thing it was all far too clean and tidy, sanitized for the easily-offended modern palate. A few, well-placed dollops of horse shit in the street did not the eighteenth century make. But not only were the scenery and costumes too clean and romanticized, so were the sensibilities of the characters. They were stripped of all those ideals true to the period, but uncomfortable for the modern reader; their actions and speeches were purified to meet with politically correct thoughts of the twenty-first century— unless, of course, the character was a villain, in which case they were allowed to retain their narrow, but entirely era-appropriate, views.

  "It's only a romance," one of her friends exclaimed once. "Don't be so picky."

  "If we don't acknowledge how far we've changed, how can we learn anything from the past?" she protested.

  They all rolled their eyes and stuck fingers down their throats.

  "But it wasn't like that," she persisted stubbornly. "It just wasn't."

  They all laughed at her. "How would you know? Were you there?"

  Chapter Nine

  Sorrento, Italy

  1782

  For a man who looked as if he might be falling apart, his stuffing oozing out at the seams and his clothing possibly rescued from a house fire in a less elegant part of town, Halfpenny Plumm possessed a remarkably strong sense of self-preservation and a whip-smart cunning. He knew how to work the slyest of contrivances to benefit himself and keep his master contented, all while he seemed— in the eyes of an unfamiliar observer— to be a patient that wandered by accident from the nearest asylum.

  Today, having wound a tilting, meandering discourse through the duke's business, he came to the end of his agenda and the final item, as if he stumbled upon it quite by chance. As if he almost hadn't thought to mention it at all.

  "Oh, and lastly, your grace...," sigh, "Darnley Abbey."

  Maxim had allowed his attention to float away outside, like a seagull on the warm updraft. But now he was forced to lure the wandering bird back again into the cage of his lazily sprawled carcass.

  "What do you intend in that matter, your grace?"

  Although the sun was bright outside, the curtains remained closed, only a whisper of light finding the damask edge, but leaving the room shaded as if by charcoal pencil. When Maxim reached for the brandy bottle, his loose, white sleeve waved like a torn pennant on a dark battlefield. Glass chinked sharply against glass.

  "Darnley Abbey?" he growled. "Burn it to the bloody ground, for all I care." He swigged the brandy. "Now...are we done, Plumm? Surely, by now, my veins have been sucked dry by the ever thirsty Various and Sundry."

  Amongst other matters, they'd already discussed— or rather, his solicitor had discussed, while Maxim offered the occasional bark of dissent or snarl of derision— the following: dreary marriage arrangements for two of his cousins; the increased expenses for his growing son; a curious divorce suit in which the duke had been named as one of the co-respondents, despite the fact that he'd never met the woman involved, nor even been in the country at the time of their alleged affair; and the matter of Cousin Hester's corpse. According to Maxim's mother it had no place in the family crypt at Castle Malgrave chapel, for the unfortunate woman had dispatched herself with a mixture of gin and rat poison following a broken romance with a young man, whose gambling habit had cost her a carriage, two oil paintings and a pair of diamond earrings— not to mention her dignity. They didn't call her Hester the Unhinged for naught. Now the family wanted her erased from their noble history. Maxim possessed no particular fondness for Hester, but anything to annoy his mother was a worthwhile sport, so he had decided that she ought to be buried in the crypt after all.

  It was a pity she was gone, actually, he mused. Hester's antics had always been a bright spot in the news from home. Relations, or the "Various and Sundry" as Maxim referred to them, could always be called upon to amuse and irritate in equal measure.

  Usually all this business was handled via correspondence— dispatches sent almost daily by Plumm from London and answered by the duke promptly. He may be a long way from home, but he had not deserted his duties.

  Today, for a change, their business was conducted in person.

  The only issue nobody had sent the solicitor to put before him today was a birthday greeting. Why would they bother? They all had more important, urgent matters for his attention.

  Yes, it had just occurred to him, somewhere between hearty gulps of Breakfast Recovery Cognac, that today was the anniversary of his birth.

  The rejoicing was noticeable by its absence.

  But this was a day none would celebrate and perhaps only his mother would remember. She certainly had some colorful complaints about the occasion, including the inconvenience that confinement had caused to her social life— not to mention the indignity of the birth process and the ruin in which he, and the forceps for which she held him personally responsible, left her body. As if his own noble nose hadn't suffered from the application of that wretched device. When he ran a finger over the bridge he could feel the bend that had, when he was a boy, got him teased by his peers. Until he learned to stand up for himself and after that they wouldn't dare.

  If the dowager did pause to remember her only surviving son today, it would cross her mind merely as a cautionary birth-chamber tale of horror and dark humor, with which to regale her lady friends over a game of whist. Maxim may not be capable of telling an amusing anecdote himself, but he knew he'd been the subject of many; in childhood to his face, and in adulthood behind his back.

  The cicadas had begun their daily song, the noise rising in waves with the temperature, soaring and simmering across the hillside. It was a sound very different to the haunting cry of a fox, or the pert, busy twitter of English country birdsong. With his curtains closed to keep out the sun it was the only thing that told Maxim how far he was from the land of his birth. Well...that and the rising heat, which added to his sour, impatient mood today.

  "I sense there is more, Plumm. I feel your beady eyes watching me as I would know the presence of a spider lurking unseen under my chair. Out with it, man." His growl rumbled around the room, coinciding with the clatter of horses and a heavy cart passing in the narrow alley below his windows, shaking the crystal prisms of an old chandelier above their head. A thin precipitation of dust spilled drowsily through the air, shining in a sliver of daylight that reached between the curtains and searched for life among the shadows.

  Plumm adjusted his ill-kempt wig and slid his gaze sideways to the light layer of grey snow now coating his shoulder. "Is the villa quite safe, sir? It does seem a trifle...unsteady on its feet."

  "Aren't we all, Plumm? This building has suffered various earthquakes and tremors over the past sev
eral hundred years. What's your excuse?"

  The solicitor swept a finger along a crooked picture frame and examined the resulting grey down coating his fingertip. "We do hire a housekeeper for the villa, do we not?"

  "How should I bloody know?"

  "Perhaps—" As a stronger breeze moved the curtains and let more sunlight into the room, the dour fellow caught sight of the canopy bed, where sheets and pillows cascaded in a puddle to the floor beside two dirty wine glasses. "—Perhaps she is distracted from her duties, your grace?"

  Ah, it dawned upon Maxim, belatedly, that the solicitor must be talking of lusty Lucretia. Handsome, sultry woman, who spoke not a word of English, but liked to be spanked. He hadn't bothered to ask— and she certainly hadn't felt inclined to let him know— what she was supposed to be doing in his rented villa. Under the circumstances, it was a mistake anybody might have made.

  "I had best find another maid for you while I'm here, sir. Somebody...more adept at her job."

  "Hmm? I thought Lucretia was rather good at hers," Maxim muttered wryly. "But as you wish. Makes no difference to me."

  Plumm glanced warily up at the shivering chandelier as another cart passed in the lane outside. Taking out his crumpled handkerchief and wafting it ineffectually across his dusty shoulders, he muttered again, "In regard to Darnley Abbey, your grace."

  "Hellfire! Are we still talking about that pile of old bricks and stone?"

  "I'm afraid so, sir. But I think perhaps you mistook my question before."

  "Then you'd better explain yourself. It's taking long enough. I've aged twenty years just sitting here."

  The solicitor cleared his throat and blew his nose on the handkerchief. "A certain lady recently became quite taken with the place and wrote to inquire whether it might be available for purchase. I suppose she assumed that it was abandoned. It has, after all, been many years since the building was last inhabited."