Page 8 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

Last spring, he hadn’t suspected how soft those curls were. As fine as copper-colored silk.

He hadn’t noted that scattering of freckles before either. The spectacles had disguised them, he supposed. Her eyelashes were fair, but thick enough to cast a wispy shadow over her cheekbones.

Was that a flicker of movement? Or only a trick of the light?

Another rap at the front door distracted him. He opened it to find the now-familiar boy, who thrust a note into his hands with a sharp nod before disappearing into the rapidly thickening gloom. Alistair returned to the study and broke the seal on the letter—his own letter, refolded and resealed. Beneath his query a few lines had been added in Lady Stalbridge’s elegant script.

He sank down onto the crate nearest the settee and read the note twice more. Words leaped out at him. Danger and false and, most alarming of all, capable care. He was practically penniless and alone in an almost empty house.

What had he to offer a damsel in distress?

The phrase brought a little snort of wry laughter to his lips. Miss C., he felt certain, would not appreciate it—neither the label nor his laughter.

Tossing aside the paper, he took her uninjured hand between both of his. The beds of her nails were paint-stained, her fingers roughened by frequent scrubbing. Not the hand of a lady. Absently, he chafed his thumb across her knuckles.

We know nothing of her family.

The young lady may be in some danger.

Had the terrible accident with the carriage been no accident after all?

Had she been running from something? Someone?

Last spring, he had dismissed her as a frowsy spinster who had taken an irrational dislike to him—no, to his appearance. She didn’t know him.

Now, having seen the pictures in her artist’s case, having glimpsed skills far beyond those of Mrs. Goode’s satirical cartoonist, he felt a flicker of regret at the realization he might never know her.

He thought of the portrait hidden in the bottom of her valise. Too old to be her own work. But precious to her, for some reason. Miss C. was a woman with a secret. A woman who guarded even her name. Mrs. Goode believed that the name by which she knew her was a fabrication. But Miss C. . . . surely there was some clue in that?

“Charlotte?” he ventured, searching her slack face for some hint of reaction. “Caroline?” Still nothing. He patted the back of her hand. “Christine?”

Useless, really. He might run through dozens of names without striking on the proper one. And what if it were the first initial of her surname instead? After all, Miles’s bride, the former Miss Burke, had written under the name “Miss Busy B.” Surnames beginning with C were legion indeed.

Still, he felt compelled to try. “Miss Cleves?” he called out in a singsong voice, the sort one used to wake a sleeping child. “Oh, Miss Crawford! Dear Miss Camden.”

Nothing.

What in God’s name was he to do?

Tomorrow, his tenants expected the key to an empty house. He tried to picture their reaction to finding an injured and unconscious young woman sprawled on the settee in the library.

No, he couldn’t leave her, of course. But the alternative—taking her with him to Rylemoor—seemed equally ill-advised. Carting her across the country in a jouncing coach was worse than any hospital—and might just constitute kidnapping.

“Oh, my dear Miss Clara Cartwright,” he exclaimed, increasing the volume of his voice and patting the back of her hand more vigorously, “you simply must wake up.”

Again, that flicker of shadow beneath her eyes, so faint he put it down to his imagination.

Well, at the very least, he could make her more comfortable. She was tall, almost as tall as he, and the angle of her head against the arm of the settee was giving his own neck an empathetic crick.

He stood and peeled away his greatcoat to reveal her slender form. A reticule—it had perhaps been dangling from her injured wrist—lay nestled in her lap. He picked it up to place it with the rest of her things, noting its heft and then recalling for no particular reason how when Harry was a little girl, she had often stuffed hers with rocks.

Miss C.’s practical, almost coarse, woolen dress, he decided as he slid his arms beneath her shoulders and knees, was just one more layer to her disguise, for the figure it hid was, like her hair, softer than he had expected. Standing, he cradled her against his chest. Despite his annoyance with some of her artistic choices, he could not help feeling a surge of protectiveness at her current vulnerable state.

The slightest whimper eased from her lungs as he started toward the stairs, but she gave no other indication of waking. He thought of the physician’s parting words about her injuries; perhaps he ought not to have tried to move her. But surely a bed was the proper place for an invalid.

Two floors above, arms aching and suitably winded, he toed open the door to his own suite of rooms and the last bed in the house that had not been stripped of its linens. It was a spartan chamber, even without the evidence of his imminent departure. But the mattress was soft. He deposited her on the center of the bed, covered her with the quilted counterpane, and turned to light a fire in the hearth.

Its crackle and snap at first muffled the sounds of movement behind him. The more convinced he became that what he heard could be noises of wakefulness, the more reluctant he grew to turn and reveal them once again to be the products of nothing but his own fancy.

“Where—? Who—?” The mumbled questions were quiet, laced with confusion and edged with pain.

He spun on his heel to face her. She was trying to lift her head from the pillow and wincing with the effort it required. “You’re alive!”

Confusion streaked across her face. Then, as the firelight illuminated his features, a flare of what could only be recognition. And finally, her eyes squeezed shut and she slumped against the pillows once more.