“Be off with you,” Stapleton said, “and Godspeed.”
Fleming stalked out, his gait uneven, and only Hercules looked sorry to see him go.
“He’ll need a stout walking stick,” Stephen said. “I really must commend Miss Abbott on her aim.”
The tea tray arrived, and nobody made a move to pour out. When the butler had withdrawn, Stephen let the silence stretch. Quinn and Duncan, clearly enjoying themselves, did likewise.
“All right!” Stapleton expostulated. “Tell me how much, and I’ll write out the bank draft now. The damned woman has caused me nothing but misfortune and I’m sure my son regretted falling into her snares.”
“The damned woman?” Stephen repeated softly. “Falling into her snares?”
“Careful, Stapleton,” Quinn said. “Lord Stephen’s temper is rare and magnificent.”
“Deadly,” Duncan added, “when provoked. That stout walking stick is a sword cane, he has at least two knives on his person at all times, and there is not a witness in this room who will support your version of events should injury occur—to you. And by the by, that mastiff looks hungry to me.”
“Your son,” Stephen said, leaning across the desk, “failed to disclose to Miss Abbott that he already had a wife. He abused her trust sorely and led her to believe they’d share a castle of marital accord in Spain. When the inevitable occurred, he admitted his calumny and sent her a bank draft. She sent it back, and then nature denied her the infamy and heartache of raising his bastard. Do you still think the damned woman will be content with a bank draft?”
The marquess was old and small, but Stephen longed to land even a single blow anywhere on his person. A single, hard blow.
Stapleton sat back in his armchair. “Champlain would never…that is, he wasn’t any different from…” The marquess tipped his chin up and looked from Quinn, to Duncan, to Stephen. “She enticed him. Women of a certain class think nothing of tempting—”
“A humble Quaker shopkeeper’s daughter,” Stephen said, “not a breath of scandal attached to her name before or since, and your philandering, fucking, wastrel of a prick of a son couldn’t keep his filthy hands off her. And you—my lord—did nothing to stop him or hold him accountable. He broke Harmonia’s heart, he all but broke Miss Abbott’s spirit, and who knows how many other women suffered because you would not curb his excesses. Write out a big, fat bank draft to be sure, the fatter the better, but you are about to change your legislative priorities too.”
Stapleton’s hand shook as he tugged at his cravat. “Or else what?”
“Or else I will kill you.” The threat was, alas, all too sincere. Quinn and Duncan did Stephen the courtesy of allowing the words to hang in the air, or about Stapleton’s scrawny neck, without any polite retrenchments. Abigail frowned on violence, true enough, but Stephen frowned on nasty little men who raised their sons to be nasty, if charming, philanderers.
“He’d do it too,” Quinn said, sounding almost cheerful as he took the place at Stephen’s right and tugged Hercules’s leash from Stephen’s hand. “On the off chance that my brother required assistance, I’d happily serve. I frown on abusing the privileges of the peerage, but just the once, my duchess might overlook it. Duncan?”
“Pounding one aging windbag flat will hardly take three of us,” Duncan said from Stephen’s left, “but of course, I am ever available to my family when the law itself can’t be relied upon to keep the wheels of justice turning smoothly and in the correct direction.”
Marriage had agreed with Duncan, marriage to Matilda, anyway.
“His Grace of Walden,” Stephen said, “is sponsoring a bill to reform the use of child labor in the mines. You will vociferously support that measure and any other that His Grace tells you to support. A man who can look at his six-year-old grandson and commend children of the same age to twelve-hour shifts at hard labor is sorely in need of guidance.”
And a job crawling on his hands and knees through endless darkness in the mines.
Stapleton nodded. “What of you?” he asked, gaze narrowing at Stephen. “I’ll support Walden’s damned bills and offer Miss Abbott handsome reparation. Tell me what I must do to ensure you leave me and mine in peace, and let’s be done with it.”
“From you, I want nothing. I act only as the agent of those I care about. Keep them happy, and you have nothing to fear from me. I’m off to find Miss Abbott.” He bowed, such as he was able to bow, and left Stapleton to Quinn, Duncan, and Hercules’s tender mercies.
“I loved him,” Lady Champlain said, as she led Abigail down a carpeted corridor. “I was an idiot. Were you an idiot too?”
Abigail did not want to exchange feminine confidences with the widow of the man who’d betrayed her. Her ladyship seemed so wan and weary, though, that to snap out some acerbic rejoinder would have been churlish.
Champlain had been Harmonia’s husband, and she had loved him. Both facts had doubtless caused her ladyship sadness. With some relief, Abigail realized that she had not loved Champlain. She’d been infatuated, smitten, enthralled, swept off her feet by the attentions of a dashing, worldly charmer who had made her feel feminine and desired.
She had not loved Champlain, but she did love Stephen Wentworth.
“I was easy to infatuate,” Abigail said. “I knew nothing of men, I was lonely, and my father had long since stopped expecting me to get up to any mischief. I had become invisible, and at nearly six feet tall.”
“While I am invisible at little over five.” Lady Champlain stopped outside a door on the third floor. “I love that sound.”
A child laughed merrily in the next room, and a man’s softer tones sounded patiently amused.
“The letters, if you please,” Abigail said, as a vast emptiness welled in the region of her heart. “I am here only to retrieve the letters.”
Her ladyship pushed open the door and stopped a few steps into the room. A large oval rug covered most of the floor, and upon the rug sat a small dark-haired boy and a handsome man of about thirty years.
“My two favorite fellows,” her ladyship said, “and you are up to mischief, I see.”
The man got to his feet easily. “A lad is never too young to try his hand at painting. We were making birds. Canaries, because they are yellow,” he said with mock gravity, “and bluebirds, because they are blue.”
“I made a green bird,” the boy said. “When you swirl the paints together they make a new color.” He cocked his head and turned a blue-eyed gaze on Abigail. “You are very tall, miss. Are you the queen?”
“Manners, child,” the man murmured, taking the boy’s hand and pulling him to his feet. “Lady Champlain, might you introduce us?”
Abigail endured the introductions, too drained by the events of the day to muster much curiosity even about the gorgeous Mr. Endymion de Beauharnais.
“If you’ll wait here,” Lady Champlain said, disappearing through an open door near the windows.
“Would you care to paint with us?” the boy asked. “I like making new colors. I could paint a kite to look like birds, and the other birds might try to make friends with it. I want to make a kite that’s big enough to lift me into the air. Don’t tell Mama. She would worry. She worries if I merely climb a tree, so I forget to tell her when I’ve been climbing trees in the garden.”