The Scoundrel and I: A Novella Read Free Page A

repaired the frame. Then she had reset the text of Lady Justice’s latest broadsheet perfectly, down to the exact mistakes recorded on the proof-corrected page she had read to her grandmother.
    Mr. Brittle did not allow her to set type. Of course she knew how to do it. Even before she took the position at Brittle & Sons her grandfather, a pressman in the governor of Virginia’s printing shop for thirty years, had taught her everything he knew. At his knee, her bedtime stories had not been about knights or princesses, but quoins, scrapers, ink-balls, tympans, formes, and platens.
    At Brittle & Sons, it was Charlie’s task to compose the type, and occasionally Jo Junior’s. Despite Elle’s eight years at the shop, Mr. Brittle Senior did not believe that women were intelligent enough for the task. The press was far too valuable, he said.
    Far too valuable
.
    Thirty-nine individual letters, two common words, four spaces, and five punctuation marks were still missing. And the most distressing part: three pieces of type she had recovered were mangled, crushed beneath the hooves of the scoundrel’s horse.
    Fifty-three pieces in all.
    For fifty-three scraps of metal she would lose her position and be sent to prison. She had no doubt Jo Junior would make it so.
    Sitting on her haunches in the deepening shadows, staring at the grate through which the missing pieces had tumbled, as numbness settled in she wondered if Mr. Curtis would take in her grandmother, perhaps into some unused corner of the foundling home attached to the church. He was a kind man. He would not allow Gram to be sent to the poorhouse. Not
now
. Perhaps just until…
    She squeezed her eyes shut.
    Hooves clopped onto the cobbles at the far end of the alley, echoing between the close walls of the buildings to either side. They grew louder as they neared, moving slowly. As the rider passed by a yard away, Elle glanced up. She recognized the horse. And her numb body lit like dry kindling.
    The tight springs of her knees uncoiled.
    “Why couldn’t you have
walked
by two nights ago?” It was more accusation than query.
    The hoof clacks halted, the animal’s tail swished back and forth once, and the rider swiveled his head and looked directly at her.
    Handsomer than she remembered
.
    Of course he was. Handsome men were the most heedless of others.
    Then she saw the uniform: blue and white, medals pinned across his chest, a gold epaulette on one shoulder, a plumed hat, right down to a bejeweled sword on his hip.
    “You are a
sailor
?” She did not know where the words came from. She had never spoken to a man in this manner. Not even Jo Junior. “I might have known.”
    For a moment he stared blankly at her with those violently blue eyes. Then the light in them changed, as though he were bringing her into focus.
    “Beg pardon, miss?” His voice was entirely unlike two nights earlier, not booming or commanding, but deep and pleasing in a warm-basket-of-freshly-baked-muffins sort of way. So pleasing that she blinked in surprise.
    That surprise overcame her for a only moment.
    “Now you beg my pardon?
Now?
When two nights ago, if you had had any consideration for anybody other than yourself, I would not even be here to see you stroll leisurely down this alley
now
.”
    “Miss, are you perfectly—” Abruptly he tilted his head forward and his very finely shaped lips parted. “Good God,” he uttered. “I nearly ran you over two nights ago. Right here. Entirely forgot till this moment.” A furrow creased his handsome brow. “Have you been standing here since then?”
    The woman’s eyes, full of blazing disdain, went round as capstans—soft little brown capstans surmounted by twinkling candles.
    “You—You—You,” she stuttered, her pretty pink lips pursing in an O upon each syllable. “You, sir, are a
scoundrel
.”
    Tony had no doubt of that.
    “Now, it was an honest mistake,” he said nevertheless. “You’re clearly whole and hale