How to Master Your Marquis Read Free Page B

enormously, entering into Sir John’s chambers like this. I daresay you charm snakes in your spare time?”
    “Oh, I gave that up long ago,” said Stefanie. “I kept tripping over the basket and losing the snake.”
    Hatherfield blinked at her once, twice. Then he threw back his head and howled with laughter. “Oh, Thomas,” he said, wiping his eyes, “you’re a dashed good sport. I like you already. You’ve got to take good care of this one, Sir John. Don’t let him near the cyanide tablets like the last poor clerk.”
    “Really, Hatherfield,” said Sir John, in a grumbly voice.
    “Well, well. This is charming,” said Lady Charlotte, looking anything but charmed. “I look forward to hearing Mr. Thomas’s witticisms all the way back to London. How lucky we are.”
    The Duke of Olympia, who had been standing silently at the mantel throughout the exchange, spoke up at last. “Indeed, Lady Charlotte. I do believe that you will profit enormously from Mr. Thomas’s company, both on the journey to London and, indeed”—he examined the remains of his sherry, polished it off, set the empty glass on the mantel, and smiled his beneficent ducal smile—“in your own home.”
    Lady Charlotte’s already pale skin lost another layer of transparent rose. “In our home?” she asked, incredulous, turning to Sir John. “Our home? ” she repeated, as she might say in my morning bath?
    Sir John, impervious Sir John, iron instrument of British justice, passed a nervous hand over the bristling gray thicket of his brow. “Did I not mention it before, my dear?”
    “You did not.” She pronounced each word discretely: You. Did. Not.
    “Well, well,” said Hatherfield. “Jolly splendid news. I shall look very much forward to seeing you, Mr. Thomas, when Sir John can spare you. You will spare him from time to time, won’t you, Sir John?”
    “I will try,” said Sir John, rather more faintly than Stefanie might have expected.
    She was not, however, paying all that much attention to Sir John and his ward. Hatherfield had fixed her with his glorious blue-eyed gaze in that last sentence, and she was swimming somewhere in the middle of him, stroking with abandon, sending up a joyful spray of . . .
    “Nonsense,” said Lady Charlotte. “Clerks are meant to work, aren’t they, Sir John? It costs a great deal to educate a young man in the practice of the law, and it must be paid somehow .”
    “Why, dear Lady Charlotte,” said Hatherfield, without so much as a flicker of a glance in her direction, still gazing smilingly into Stefanie’s transfixed face, “you speak as if you’ve ever done a moment’s useful work in your life.”
    A strangled noise came from the throat of the Duke of Olympia. He covered it quickly, with a brusque, “In any case, my friends, I see by the clock that you will miss your train if you delay another moment. I believe young Mr. Thomas’s trunk has already been loaded on the chaise. I suggest we bid one another the customary tearful farewell and part our affectionate ways.”
    Hustle and bustle ensued, as it always did when Olympia issued a ducal decree. Stefanie’s hand was shaken, her overcoat found, her steps urged out the front hall and into the chill November noontide, where the Duke of Olympia’s elegant country chaise sat waiting with pawing steeds. To the left, the landscape dropped away into jagged slate cliffs, awash with foam, roaring with the distant crash of the angry sea.
    “Cheerful prospect, what?” said Hatherfield.
    “Barbaric,” said Lady Charlotte. She reached the open door of the chaise and stood expectantly.
    Stefanie, feeling lighthearted and therefore (as her sisters well knew) rather mischievous, grasped Lady Charlotte’s fingers to assist her into the chaise.
    A little gasp escaped her ladyship, an entirely different sort of gasp from the one that had greeted Stefanie’s arrival on the threadbare rug of Olympia’s Devon drawing room. She jerked her hand