Page 20 of The Devil to Pay

“Excuse me, Miss Davenport?” A footman halted their progress, his tone urgent. “Forgive me for the interruption, but Harold wants to know if he should call the vet in for Warrior?”

“Has the swelling not gone down at all?” she asked, frowning.

“Yes, a little, but not as much as he hoped.”

“Tell him to reapply the poultice and give it until midday. If it’s no better, then he had better have Gwillim over to see him.”

“Yes, Miss Davenport.”

They had barely gone three steps when a thundering on the stairway announced the arrival of a sturdy lad of perhaps twelve or thirteen years, closely followed by a breathtaking creature barely out of the schoolroom, with cornflower blue eyes and softly curling guinea gold hair. The boy hung over the rail, his cheeks flushed with anger.

“Lina, Abigail is the most ridiculous creature alive. I’ve told her and told her not to go into my room, and what must she do but come in and then give a blood-curdling shriek just when I was putting Captain Sharp into his cage!”

“There’s a rat loose in the house!” the lovely vision screamed and then swooned, collapsing gracefully upon the stairs and somehow not sliding down them or breaking her pretty neck in the process.

Davenport regarded this performance with a stoical expression. “Abigail, that was a very creditable swoon, but I beg you will not act so foolishly on the stairs. One of these days you will hurt yourself and then you’ll swoon for real.”

Much to Jules’ amusement, Abigail cracked an indignant eyelid and cast an unloving look at Davenport.

“Charlie, catch Captain Sharp and stop wasting time tattling on your sister. If he’s not back in his cage before ten o’clock, you’ll have no dessert for the rest of the week. Get Julia to help you. Abigail, you will help Nurse mind Benjamin and do Charlie’s morning chores too as penance for being such a ninny. Now do go away.”

With this, Davenport continued on her way, apparently confident that all would be just as she had ordered it.

Jules winked at the pretty pea goose as he passed, who blushed and brightened perceptibly.

“Don’t encourage her in her silliness, if you please,” Davenport snapped, giving Jules a jolt of alarm as he wondered if she had eyes in the back of her head or perhaps something more sinister that involved sleeping in coffins. “I saw you in the mirror,” she added dryly, turning to quirk a derisive eyebrow at him and making heat climb the back of his neck for being so fanciful.

He followed her to the west side of the house where she opened a door onto an impressive room with a double height ceiling and beautifully crafted oak shelves that rose to a balustraded walkway and on again to the very top of the walls. Though a fraction of the size of the library at Beverwyck, which was held to be one of the finest in the country, it was nonetheless imposing for a house of this size, and in complete disorder.

“What on earth happened?” he asked, before he could think better of the question, as he gazed upon books in staggering and sometime precariously balanced towers and stacks all over the floor, tables and chairs.

“Jacob happened,” she said with a sigh. She looked back at him and gave a wry smile. “My brother. Cleverest fellow you are ever likely to meet but can’t stick at anything. He had it in mind to reorder the library. I’ll admit it was haphazard and a nightmare to find anything you needed. My mother loved this room, and we spent a lot of time here with her, but she was a chaotic creature. She would read to us all after dinner every night, but she always complained she could never find anything, though she probably put things back in the wrong place half the time. Jacob thought he was doing something nice for her by organising it, to cheer her up, but… I ought to have known better than to let him begin it. I was rather distracted at the time, or I would have realised what would happen,” she added with a shrug.

Jules looked around, noting the dust on the upper most book of the stack beside him.

“How long has it been like this?”

“Three years, give or take,” she said briskly.

Around the time her mother had died. Jules felt a pang of sympathy for her. Her father was a more or less permanent fixture in town and obviously left his family to their own devices, so he imagined her mother must have been a prominent figure in her life. He considered how he might feel if his mother was taken from him and experienced a shaft of pain deep in his chest. The duchess was a formidable woman, a fiercely protective and involved mother, an outspoken advocate of the rights of women, terrifying when roused, and with a heart like a marshmallow.

“Well, where shall we start?” he asked, surprising himself somewhat with his desire to get the job done. It surprised her too, judging by the way her eyes widened, and then he realised he had said we, not I. A foolish mistake.

“Oh,” she said, before he had time to correct himself. “Well, everything needs dusting, of course. I have arranged for the place to have a thorough clean this afternoon, but we could begin by seeing what—if anything—Jacob achieved, and if we can build on it, or if we need to start over.”

Jules nodded, ignoring the dubious realisation that he was pleased she was going to be working beside him. It was only that he did not wish such an onerous task to be his alone, and more importantly, he could keep an eye on her. For if he was to do her justice in his next novel, he needed to observe her at close hand, just as she had told him he needed to do for his secondary characters. Perhaps she could be the harridan older sister turned vampire, now a threat to the innocent heroine, he thought, remembering the pretty child on the stairs.

Jules picked up a book, turning it in his hand and finding a copy of The Iliad in Greek.

“You read Greek, of course?”

“Yes, though poorly,” he said absently, and then stilled, keeping his eyes on the book. Damn her.

“And Latin too,” she suggested.

Jules looked up, and a familiar triumphant glint in her blue eyes told him she knew she’d scored a hit. Only a gentleman would have received a classical education of that nature.

“Touché,” he said mildly.