The Improper Bride (Sisters of Scandal) Read online

  Mary had the sleeve of her dress raised, which revealed a dark bruise near her elbow.

  “I just went in to tidy up, like Mrs. Davis asked me to,” Mary said with a sniff.

  “Oh dear,” Kitty commiserated. “You’ll want to put salve on that, I think. Perhaps the surgeon will take a look?”

  Mary lifted a shoulder. “If he stops groveling around Lord Riverton long enough to notice.”

  Cassandra stepped forward. “What’s going on?”

  “I went in there to clean and start the fire, and his lordship threw a book at me,” Mary said indignantly. “Scared me half to death.”

  Cassandra blinked. Lord Riverton had never shown violence toward any of his employees before. But he was injured. Sometimes pain caused people to act out in ways they wouldn’t normally. She eyed the bruise and felt a shock of anger. She was in charge of these girls, and she wasn’t going to tolerate any abuse, no matter what the marquess had suffered.

  “I’m going upstairs,” she told the maids. “When I return, I hope to find you cleaning the blue sitting room. The rugs are due for a beating.”

  “If you return,” Mary said ominously.

  Cassandra glared at the girl, who meekly looked down. The two maids turned, and she waited for them to disappear down the corridor before she went on her own way. She noticed Kitty appeared subdued—usually the maid darted from place to place like a happy sparrow. The girl had been ill after the fire, but in all the chaos, Cassandra hadn’t had time to check in on her. She hoped the maid wasn’t still sick.

  Cassandra sighed and lifted her gaze to the ceiling. She had more immediate problems to occupy her.

  Like a marquess who’d taken to throwing books at his servants.

  She shook off her anxiety at seeing the marquess again and resolutely climbed the stairs.

  There was no answer when Cassandra scratched on the bedchamber door. “Lord Riverton?” she called through the wood. “It’s Mrs. Davis.” This time she knocked.

  Silence.

  Eerie silence.

  She battled her unease, squared her shoulders, and pushed open the door. The hinges creaked loudly in the quiet of the room, boldly announcing her presence.

  Thick curtains were drawn over the window, casting the room in deep shadows. Was Riverton sitting in the dark? Was he asleep?

  If he was sleeping, perhaps she should just tiptoe quietly out—

  “What do you want?” A voice came from the corner. Not a polite voice, but deep and threatening and hoarse, more of a snarl than speech.

  Her hand tightened on the doorknob for an instant before she let go and stepped inside. There was no reason to falter—Lord Riverton had never hurt her.

  Hopefully, book-throwing was not his new favorite pastime.

  Cautiously, she moved closer, coming to stop at the side of the bed. With no fire lit, the room was freezing, a dark and quiet cavern. She saw him in the dim light. He lay on his back with his arm stretched out in a splint over the top of the blanket that covered his body. As it had the last time she’d been here, cotton bandaging covered the side of his face.

  The shadow on his jaw had grown darker, and she remembered the scratch of his stubble on the pads of her fingers like a forbidden caress. Her hand twitched with something like longing, and she balled it into a fist. Even if she was mad enough to want to reach for him, in his current state, he looked as if he’d be liable to bite off her fingers.

  She straightened, pushing away the tantalizing whisper of memory. He would never know she’d caressed his face while he was asleep, and she was grateful for it—she couldn’t fathom what his reaction would be if he found out. “Mary informed me of a troubling event, my lord.”

  He eyed her balefully from his prone position. He reminded her of a disgruntled cat. “Which one is that?”

  “Which one?”

  “Mary. Is she the dark-haired one?”

  Her hands clenched. He didn’t even know the name of the servant he’d thrown a book at? Did he know hers, or was she simply Mrs. Davis, the housekeeper? It shouldn’t matter. Really, there were plenty of lords who probably didn’t know all of their servants’ names. Or even any of them.

  But for some reason, the knowledge upset her.

  Of course, she refrained from voicing her displeasure—she doubted he would care. And that wasn’t why she was here, anyway. “You threw a book at her and bruised her arm. I won’t tolerate such behavior.”

  “You won’t tolerate it?” he growled silkily. “What will you do to stop me?”

  “I…”

  Well, that was a good question. There truly wasn’t much she could do to oppose the marquess, except leave her position, and she didn’t know if that was a smart thing to threaten. She took pride in her work as his housekeeper. But there were other good housekeepers out there. She wasn’t irreplaceable.

  “I’ll be very displeased,” she settled for. She wanted to groan in the silence that followed. She sounded like a complete ninny.

  He suddenly barked a laugh. “Your displeasure is the least of my concerns, madam.”

  She faltered and gazed down at him. His vulnerability distressed her more than it should. For a moment it pushed away her annoyance. “Are you…are you in much pain?”

  He hesitated, then said, “The laudanum helps, but I can’t sleep spread out like a paper doll.”

  “Why—”

  “The surgeon tells me that if I don’t keep the muscles in my arm flexed, I may lose use of them altogether.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh,” he mocked. “Go away, Mrs. Davis.”

  She knew from having five younger brothers that men were typically the worst bed patients, so she tried not to let his sharpness bother her. “Do you need anything? It’s so cold in this room. Should I—”

  “Touch that kindling and I’ll throw a book at you, too.”

  Ah. Suddenly, she understood.

  Still… “You need to apologize to Mary,” she said stiffly. He would become a tyrant if someone didn’t keep him in line, and that unfortunate job fell to her at the moment.

  “I don’t give a fuck for Mary,” he snarled.

  Cassandra stiffened in bewildered shock. She’d heard that word once in her life, when she’d overhead her brothers speaking and they hadn’t known she was listening. Her own husband, who’d been a sailor, had never even used such words in front of her.

  “That was uncalled for,” she said calmly, hiding her anger behind a wall of coolness.

  He didn’t reply. She couldn’t recall Lord Riverton ever apologizing for anything. It was probably too much to hope he’d start now.

  She turned to leave, but his voice stopped her. “Have you heard the Myth of Er?”

  Was he going to mock her now for not being educated in the classics? Bitterness rose in her throat. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come here. He’d been a decent employer while she’d been quiet and gone about her duties, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t turn into a bully now that she’d stood up to him.

  She pressed her hand to the doorframe. The word was drawn reluctantly from her lips, “No.”

  “The story is in Plato’s Republic. A soldier named Er dies in battle. When he’s on his funeral pyre, he revives and tells the account of his journey in the afterlife. He talks about all the other souls who were with him and how judges decided which path each soul would follow—the good went into the sky and the bad into the earth. Er was told to remain, and he watched souls coming down from the sky, telling of their beautiful experience. The souls that came up from the earth told of the horror they’d witnessed.”

  The marquess sighed heavily. “It’s really quite heavy-handed after that. The souls have to choose their next lives, and the ones who were in the underground choose to better themselves while the ones who went into the sky choose their next lives poorly. But at least there was…something.”

  Cassandra didn’t move. He sounded like he was speaking more to himself than to her now, but she
was still reluctantly interested.

  “The surgeon told me I was dead. He said my heart had stopped beating. Do you know what I saw?”

  “What?” she asked quietly, though she had an awful feeling that she knew.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I was aware, but I was blind. It felt as if I was in the depths of a black sea.”

  An unwanted flash of sympathy seized her. Her hand tightened on the doorframe, and suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to make him feel better. Nothing more than to comfort a man she doubted had ever accepted comfort from anyone. “Purgatory for your sins, perhaps?”

  There was a beat of silence, but when he spoke, his voice was a little lighter. “Blasphemy, Mrs. Davis. You’re not secretly Catholic, are you?”

  The note of half-teasing in the question surprised her and captivated her at the same time. He’d never spoken like this before in all the years they’d known each other. With a jolt of trepidation, she realized it would be all too easy to grow used to it. “No,” she answered.

  “But you think I can get to heaven after I’ve been cleansed?”

  “No,” she said with a slight smile. “I told you, Lord Riverton, I’m not Catholic.”

  She heard a huff of soft laughter as she quietly shut the door behind her.

  And thought he might not turn into a tyrant, after all.

  Chapter Four

  Henry suffered through the surgeon’s poking and prodding silently. Well, mostly silently. He may have snapped a few times. He dutifully took his spoonful of laudanum, the sickly sweet liquid easing down his throat. He didn’t particularly like the taste, but he could see how one could get addicted to the stuff—it brought about a rather pleasant numbness. It made the world fade and seem conquerable, and at the moment he desperately needed its effect.

  Otherwise, he’d just sink into outrage at his impotence against this latest indignity. And that was a never ending cycle—impotence, outrage, more impotence and more outrage.

  He watched as Mr. Faulkner gathered up his bandages and poultices, and then forced himself to ask the question that weighed so heavily on his mind.

  “Will I be scarred?” Henry asked, barely managing to hide his fear.

  Mr. Faulkner turned and shot him a look he’d grown to hate—mildly sympathetic, borderline pity. He would throw something at this man, too, if he weren’t so dependent on him. Henry had felt like throwing things a lot recently…until his dose of laudanum kicked in.

  “Most likely, my lord,” Mr. Faulkner answered.

  “Where?”

  “Your arm was burnt the worst. That will surely turn to deep scar tissue. There may be milder scarring on the other affected areas.”

  Henry closed his eyes. He’d expected this. He shouldn’t feel anguish over it. Anyone would tell him he was lucky to be alive.

  But he’d much rather live as an undamaged creature, healthy and whole. Would his arm ever work properly again? Would women shudder away from him if they saw his scars? He drew in a deep breath. The worst would be covered by clothes…but any scarring on his face would clearly be visible. He wouldn’t be able to hide that disfigurement from the prying eyes of the ton.

  He would be vulnerable before them. And he was quite certain there were enough people who envied his status to flock toward any vulnerability they found, like carrion crows huddling around a dying animal.

  But he would have to go back out in society once he was healed. Now that he knew firsthand how quickly life could be snuffed out, finding a suitable bride and carrying on the Eldridge line seemed like a more pressing matter. He was thirty-five. He’d been delaying the inevitable for too long, and while his parents, who knew he wouldn’t neglect his duties to the family name, hadn’t pressed him, they had become more impatient.

  This was the legacy he’d been bred for, whether he had scars or not.

  “What about the risk of infection?” he asked. “Are we through the worst of it?”

  “There’s always a possibility of infection until the wounds are completely healed.”

  “So, I still might die,” Henry said flatly.

  He couldn’t figure out how he felt about that. He didn’t particularly want to die, didn’t particularly want to experience that blackness again. But at the same time, he couldn’t work up much fear at the notion.

  There was one thing he hadn’t told Mrs. Davis, because he’d known it would make him sound like an idiot. But sometime during that strange, bleak interlude, he’d thought he felt someone touch his face—a cool, soothing caress that had drawn him up, away from the abyss.

  But that was fanciful, and he wasn’t a fanciful man. Who would dare to touch him? Most likely it was just some feverish imagining. Because what else could it have been? An angel pulling him back to life? No, the darkness was infinitely more real than some illusion of light.

  Mr. Faulkner broke into his musings. “I could amputate the arm,” he said. “The only reason I didn’t before was because I didn’t think you would survive the combined shock. But now…” The man sounded almost eager.

  Henry scowled at him. Even laudanum didn’t make the idea of Mr. Faulkner gleefully sawing through his arm any less disturbing. “If I so much as see one of those hacksaws, I’ll cut off your head with it.” An empty threat—Henry didn’t even know if he had the strength to hold a hacksaw, much less cut off a man’s head with it.

  But Mr. Faulkner looked properly subdued. “Do you have family I might send word to? Or friends? Surely being surrounded by—”

  “No.” His heart surged anxiously—there was no one in the world he wanted to see him like this, to witness this weak creature.

  “No?” The surgeon shot him that damn pitying look again.

  Henry’s good hand clenched and he longed for a very heavy novel. He wasn’t a complete invalid. “Did you not hear me?” he snarled.

  “Forgive me, my lord.” Mr. Faulkner bowed and swiftly ducked out of the room.

  Henry was left alone, staring up at the ceiling. The only visit he’d had that hadn’t left him feeling as if he might strangle someone had been from his housekeeper. He entertained the notion of ringing for her—and quickly dismissed it. Even low as he was feeling, he wouldn’t resort to keeping company with a servant.

  Anyway, she’d probably just insist he apologize to that foolish maid. He wasn’t going to apologize. He hadn’t even caused her injury. At least not directly. He’d warned the chit to leave, and she’d kept on striking the flint to set the fire as though she hadn’t even heard him.

  Lord Riverton did not give an order twice. Was there something about being bedridden that made one so easily ignored?

  Seeing those sparks from the flint had sent icy fear down his spine. So he’d acted on impulse and thrown a book from his bedside table. Perhaps not the best plan. But he’d only aimed the volume at the wall beside her to scare her off, to show her that he wasn’t entirely helpless. And it would have worked perfectly, if she weren’t so clumsy. At the thud of the book, the girl had startled and fallen against the grate, her arm banging into the metal spokes rather roughly.

  He certainly wasn’t proud of the fact that he’d resorted to book-throwing to scare his employees, but really, if she’d been hurt it was partially her own fault. He hadn’t flung the volume at the girl’s head.

  Maybe if he had, he would have knocked some sense into her.

  Of course, he wouldn’t make the mistake of mentioning that to Mrs. Davis. She was a formidable woman when it came to protecting the underlings. No…she was a formidable woman altogether. She probably always had been, and he simply hadn’t noticed before.

  He didn’t pay much attention to the servants, which made him wonder why he was marking something about Mrs. Davis now. He didn’t think he liked it—this…noticing. An upper servant she might be, but Mrs. Davis was still a servant.

  And he wouldn’t ring for her, even if she was a far sight better to talk to than Mr. Faulkner.

  God forbid he notice something else.<
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  Chapter Five

  Mr. Faulkner stared at Cassandra sorrowfully from his spot on the small settee in the housekeeper’s room. He seemed to be blissfully unaware that he’d interrupted her survey of the household budget.

  “Does he have no family you can write to, Mrs. Davis? I spoke to Mr. Taylor, but alas, he was not forthcoming. I thought you, being the gentler sex, might be more sympathetic.”

  She took a bit of umbrage at being called the gentler sex. Women could be just as fierce as men, and she assumed Mr. Taylor’s reluctance had more to do with displeasing the marquess than with a lack of sympathy.

  “If Lord Riverton wanted his family at his sickbed, he would have requested someone write to them,” she told the surgeon calmly.

  He frowned. “His lordship needs something to do,” he insisted. “I’ve seen this before. All he does is sit in the dark hour after hour. He barely answers my questions, or speaks to me at all. He’ll sink into melancholy if nothing is done.”

  She sighed and laid down her quill pen, refraining from pointing out that perhaps the marquess simply found the surgeon tiresome. At the moment she couldn’t say she disagreed, but the surgeon in question appeared to have no plans to budge from her settee until he’d gotten his point across. “What would you suggest I do?”

  “Give him a purpose. A task to focus on. Small things can work wonders in cases like this.”

  “A task,” she muttered. She leaned back in her unembellished wooden chair, trying to keep her face smooth. No one ever had to know something jangled inside her at the idea of seeing Lord Riverton again. “This doesn’t sound like part of my job description.”

  “I suggested to Lord Riverton that he hire a nurse to care for him when I can’t be here…” Mr. Faulkner said apologetically.

  “What did he say?”

  “Something about not being an invalid. I cannot repeat the exact words.”

  Her lips quirked, and she was glad to know she wasn’t the only one who’d been subjected to Lord Riverton’s lashing tongue.

  “We cannot let a man as great as his lordship succumb to—”