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They were saved, he thought. With Miss Jessica here, matters would soon be put right. He had taken a great risk in writing to her, but it had to be done, for the good of the family.
Sir Bertram had fallen among Evil Companions. The evilest of companions in all of Christendom, in Withers’ opinion: a pack of wastrel degenerates led by that monster, the fourth Marquess of Dain.
But Miss Jessica would soon put a stop to it, the elderly manservant assured himself as he speedily knotted his master’s neckcloth.
Sir Bertram’s twenty-seven-year-old sister had inherited her widowed grandmother’s alluring looks: the silken hair nearly blue-black in color, almond-shaped silver-grey eyes, alabaster complexion, and graceful figure—all of which, in Lady Pembury’s case, had proved immune to the ravages of time.
More important, in the practical Withers’ view, Miss Jessica had inherited her late father’s brains, physical agility, and courage. She could ride, fence, and shoot with the best of them. Actually, when it came to pistols, she was the best of the whole family, and that was saying something. During two brief marriages, her grandmother had borne four sons by her first husband, Sir Edmund Trent, and two by her second, Viscount Pembury, and daughters and sons alike had bred males in abundance. Yet not a one of those fine fellows could outshoot Miss Jessica. She could pop the cork off a wine bottle at twenty paces—and Withers himself had seen her do it.
He wouldn’t mind seeing her pop Lord Dain’s cork for him. The great brute was an abomination, a disgrace to his country, an idle reprobate with no more conscience than a dung beetle. He had lured Sir Bertram—who, lamentably, was not the cleverest of gentlemen—into his nefarious circle and down the slippery slope to ruin. Another few months of Lord Dain’s company and Sir Bertram would be bankrupt—if the endless round of debauchery didn’t kill him first.
But there wouldn’t be another few months, Withers reflected happily as he nudged his reluctant master to the door. Miss Jessica would fix everything. She always did.
Bertie had managed a show of surprised delight to see his sister and grandmother. The instant the latter had retired to her bedchamber to rest from the journey, however, he yanked Jessica into what seemed to be the drawing room of the narrow—and much too expensive, she reflected irritably—appartement.
“Devil take it, Jess, what’s this about?” he demanded.
Jessica picked up the mass of sporting papers heaped upon an overstuffed chair by the fire, threw them onto the grate, and sank down with a sigh into the cushioned softness.
The carriage ride from Calais had been long, dusty, and bumpy. She had little doubt that, thanks to the abominable condition of French roads, her bottom was black and blue.
She would very much like to bruise her brother’s bottom for him at present. Unfortunately, though two years younger, he was a head taller than she, and several stone heavier. The days of bringing him to his senses via a sturdy birch rod were long past.
“It’s a birthday present,” she said.
His unhealthily pale countenance brightened for a moment, and his familiar, amiably stupid grin appeared. “I say, Jess, that’s awful sweet of—” Then the grin faded and his brow furrowed. “But my birthday ain’t until July. You can’t be meaning to stay until—”
“I meant Genevieve’s birthday,” she said.
One of Lady Pembury’s several eccentricities was her insistence that her children and grandchildren address and refer to her by name. “I am a woman,” she would say to those who protested that such terminology was disrespectful. “I have a name. Mama, Grandmama…” Here she would give a delicate shudder. “So anonymous.”
Bertie’s expression grew wary. “When’s that?”
“Her birthday, as you ought to remember, is the day after tomorrow.” Jessica pulled off her grey kid boots, drew the footstool closer, and put her feet up. “I wanted her to have a treat. She hasn’t been to Paris in ages, and matters haven’t been pleasant at home. Some of the aunts have been muttering about having her locked up in a lunatic asylum. Not that I’m surprised. They’ve never understood her. Did you know, she had three marriage offers last month alone? I believe Number Three was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lord Fangiers is four and thirty years old. The family says it’s embarrassing.”
“Well, it ain’t exactly dignified, at her age.”
“She’s not dead, Bertie. I don’t see why she should behave as though she were. If she wishes to wed a pot boy, that’s her business.” Jessica gave her brother a searching look. “Of course, it would mean that her new husband would have charge of her funds. I daresay that worries everybody.”
Bertie flushed. “No need to look at me that way.”
“Isn’t there? You appear rather worried yourself. Maybe you had an idea she’d bail you out of your difficulties.”
He tugged at his cravat. “Ain’t in difficulties.”
“Oh, then I must be the one. According to your man of business, paying your present debts will leave me with precisely forty-seven pounds, six shillings, threepence for the remainder of the year. Which means I must either move in with aunts and uncles again or work. I spent ten years as unpaid nanny to their brats. I do not intend to spend another ten seconds. That leaves work.”
His pale blue eyes widened. “Work? You mean, earn wages?”
She nodded. “I see no acceptable alternative.”
“Have you gone loony, Jess? You’re a girl. You get shackled. To a chap who’s plump in the pocket. Like Genevieve done. Twice. You got her looks, you know. If you wasn’t so confounded picky—”
“But I am,” she said. “Fortunately, I can afford to be.”
She and Bertie had been orphaned very young, and left to the care of aunts, uncles, and cousins barely able to support their own burgeoning broods. The family might have been comfortably well off if there hadn’t been so very many of them. But Genevieve descended from a line of prolific breeders, especially of males, and her offspring had inherited the talent.
That was one of the reasons Jessica received so many marriage offers—an average of six per annum, even at present, when she ought to be on the shelf, wearing a spinster’s cap. But she’d be hanged before she’d marry and play brood mare to a rich, titled oaf—or before she’d don dowdy caps, for that matter.
She had a talent for unearthing treasures at auctions and secondhand shops, and selling same at a tidy profit. Though she wasn’t making a fortune, for the last five years she had been able to buy her own fashionable clothes and accessories, instead of wearing her relatives’ castoffs. It was a modest form of independence. She wanted more. During the past year, she had been planning how to get more.
She had finally saved enough to lease and begin stocking a shop of her own. It would be elegant and very exclusive, catering to an elite clientele. In her many hours at Society affairs, she’d developed a keen understanding of the idle rich, not only of what they liked but also of the most effective methods of drawing them in.
She meant to start drawing them in once she’d hauled her brother out of the mess he’d got himself into. Then she’d see to it that his mistakes never again disrupted her well-ordered life. Bertie was an irresponsible, unreliable, rattlebrained ninny. She shuddered to imagine what the future held for her if she continued to depend upon him for anything.
“You know very well I don’t need to marry for money,” she told him now. “All I need do is open the shop. I’ve selected the place and I’ve saved enough to—”
“That cork-brained rag-and-bottle-shop scheme?” he cried.
“Not a rag and bottle shop,” she said calmly. “As I’ve explained to you at least a dozen times—”
“I won’t let you set up as a shopkeeper.” Bertie drew himself up. “No sister of mine will go into trade.”
“I should like to see you stop me,” she said.
He screwed up his face into a threatening scowl.
r /> She leaned back in the chair and gazed at him contemplatively. “Lud, Bertie, you look just like a pig, with your eyes all squeezed up like that. In fact, you’ve grown amazingly piglike since last I saw you. You’ve gained two stone at least. Maybe as much as three.” Her gaze dropped. “And all in your belly, by the looks of it. You put me in mind of the king.”
“That whale?” he shrieked. “I do not. Take it back, Jess.”
“Or what? You’ll sit on me?” She laughed.
He stalked away and flung himself onto the sofa.
“If I were you,” she said, “I’d worry less about what my sister said and did, and more about my own future. I can take care of myself, Bertie. But you…Well, I believe you’re the one who ought to be thinking about marrying somebody plump in the pocket.”
“Marriage is for cowards, fools, and women,” he said.
She smiled. “That sounds like the sort of thing some drunken jackass would announce—just before falling into the punch bowl—to a crowd of his fellow drunken jackasses, amid the usual masculine witticisms about fornication and excretory processes.”
She didn’t wait for Bertie to sort through his mind for definitions of the big words. “I know what men find hilarious,” she said. “I’ve lived with you and reared ten male cousins. Drunk or sober, they like jokes about what they do—or want to do—with females, and they are endlessly fascinated with passing wind, water, and—”
“Women don’t have a sense of humor,” Bertie said. “They don’t need one. The Almighty made them as a permanent joke on men. From which one may logically deduce that the Almighty is a female.”
He uttered the words slowly and carefully, as though he’d taken considerable pains to memorize them.
“Whence arises this philosophical profundity, Bertie?” she asked.
“Say again?”
“Who told you that?”
“It wasn’t a drunken jackass, Miss Sneering and Snide,” he said smugly. “I may not have the biggest brain box in the world, but I guess I know a jackass when I see one, and Dain ain’t.”
