My Favorite Marquess. Alexandra BassettЧитать онлайн книгу.
over their heads did seem rather threatening.
“Perhaps the best thing to do would be to retreat,” he suggested as he laid a very neat tea tray on the wobbly table next to her. He had evidently found time during the traumatic night to unpack the Limoges. “Back to Yorkshire, I mean.”
“Or to Bath!” Hennie said, apparently still eager to join up with her friend Imogene Philbrick and start indulging in an orgy of tea drinking and tatting. “I am sure they have no difficulty with smugglers in Bath. Or if they have, my friend Imogene has never mentioned it.”
“How could we leave when we’ve only just arrived?” Violet leaned back against the dusty velvet pillows of the sofa and tried to think. But it was impossible to consider how she would deal with the house. Other things weighed rather heavily on her mind.
Taking in Violet’s worn expression, Peabody poured the tea himself. “I am sure after the horses have rested for another day, they would be ready for the journey.”
“A day!” Hennie blew her nose noisily. “Who knows what could befall us in another day here! What with Robert the Brute still out and about!”
At the name, Violet stiffened.
“He might still be searching for you, Violet! He might come murder us all in our beds!”
Violet had told them that she had run away from Robert the Brute and spent the night in a cave—alone. Having evaded her captor made her a sort of heroine in their eyes, so she could not set their minds at ease and tell them that the Brute’s parting words were that he was well rid of her.
A curious sinking feeling nagged her. She would probably never see him again. For all she knew, he was in a boat bound for France as they spoke.
Her eyes suddenly focused on a mound in a corner. She hadn’t paid attention to it before, but she had assumed it was a pile of blankets such as what must have been covering the furniture before they arrived. Then the pile moved.
Violet screamed.
Hennie followed her lead and actually jumped out of her chair, shrieking. “What is the matter?”
Violet pointed. “That mass of filth!” she cried. “What is it?”
Peabody followed her gaze and some of the tension went out of his body. “That’s Barnabas’s sheepdog, Rufus.”
Violet sank back again, her heart still drumming hard. A dog. That was all they needed—and not even a self-respecting dog that would have rid them of all these cats, but a mangy, ineffective creature. Much like Barnabas himself, she thought.
“What are you going to do?” Hennie asked.
“What can I do?” Violet said.
Hennie scooted to the edge of her chair. “I spent the whole night wondering about this myself.” She shook her head and admitted, “Well, in those few moments when I wasn’t wondering what could become of you at the hands of Robert the Brute, and what would become of us if something ill befell you. It would have been too awful.”
“Yes, you would have suffered greatly,” Violet said, biting her lip.
Hennie nodded. “And so soon after Aunt Matilda’s tragedy, too! How should I have mourned for you both at once?”
This was indeed a puzzle, Violet had to allow. Once you had donned black underwear, as Hennie had, one would assume you had reached mourning’s limits.
“But then I remembered—actually, Peabody reminded me—that the Marquess of St. Just had offered you money for the house. Isn’t that right?”
The Marquess! The horror of the house’s interior had knocked all thought of that person from her mind. But now…
Now her mind seized on his name like a lifeline. Yes! He had offered her money for the house. A very generous sum, too. Laughably generous, now that she saw the place with her own eyes. Oh, why hadn’t she accepted his offer?
Vague dreams of fixing up Trembledown and selling it for an outrageous amount came back to her. As did her foolish aspirations for making enough money off the sale to return to society in a blaze of glory. Now she wanted to weep at how foolish she had been. If she could just hear from the Marquess of St. Just again, she would beg him to give her even a quarter of what he had originally offered her for this pile of rubble. She would grovel, if she had to.
Why not start groveling now?
“Quick, Peabody,” she said, sitting up. “My writing paper.”
Peabody gasped. “Are you going to write to the marquess, ma’am?”
“Just so,” she said.
Peabody clapped his hands together. “But I have not unpacked all your things,” he said. “I’m not sure where your stationery is.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “Any paper and quill will do.”
Although he looked as if he would argue with that statement, nevertheless Peabody hopped eagerly to follow her instructions, nearly crushing a cat in his hurry. The scraggly animal released an outraged yowl but gave no ground. At the door, Peabody pivoted back to Violet. “I knew you would deliver us from this place,” he said worshipfully, as if she were Moses about to lead his people out of Egypt.
As Peabody was scuttling to find paper and pen, there came a loud knock at the door that made Hennie jump ten feet.
Violet scolded her. “Really, Hen—smugglers will not come knocking, you know.”
“Nothing would surprise me in this strange place!” Hennie exclaimed.
It wasn’t a smuggler, however, but the constable whom Peabody had sent Barnabas into Widgelyn Cross to fetch earlier that morning. Constable Farkas stomped into the room in his muddy boots, and after brief introductions were made and an offer of tea was refused, he swatted two cats out of the way and sank down onto the couch with Violet.
Violet tensed at such an ill-mannered intrusion. Also, at the prospect of questions the man was certain to ask her. She had lied to Hennie and Peabody, but could she lie to the law?
“Now you say you were abducted by one Robert the Brute.”
Hennie gasped. “But Constable, it was undoubtedly he. I saw him with my own eyes!”
The constable, who was unfashionably furry of face, turned his attention to Hennie. “And had you seen the man before?”
“No—but the proprietor of the Frog and Cock Inn told me all about him!”
Constable Farkas laughed. “Did he, now? So you’re an expert.”
Hennie preened modestly. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that…”
With a roll of his eyes with which Violet was in complete sympathy, the man turned back to Violet. “He was wearing a mask, you say?”
“Oh yes! He’s never without it.”
Throughout Hennie’s reply, the man kept his eyes trained on Violet. “And you, Mrs. Treacher?”
“I never saw him without it.” Though she had to steel herself not to blush at remembering that, though she had not seen his face, she had seen quite a bit of the rest of him. His chest, for instance, which had been so hard and lightly dusted with hair.
Percy had certainly not been so fine a specimen as the Brute…
“Mrs. Treacher?”
Her chin snapped up. Had she really been daydreaming about the chest of a villain? “Yes?”
“I asked did you meet any of his accomplices?”
“Oh, no.” Violet proceeded to tell the man the whole story of her ordeal…up to the point of making a run for the cave. “After that, I have no idea what happened to him. I never saw him again. Indeed, I was in fear for my life because the