Dair Devil Read online

  Lord Grasby liked the idea of hiding behind war paint. He whipped off his drawers, snatched the belt with breechcloths attached from the ever-patient Farrier, who had been standing at his side for some little while, and threw it around his waist. Being acutely self-conscious, he secured the belt ends in a rush, and breathed a sigh of relief to have completed the task in record time. Unbeknownst to him, the two breechcloths were not front and back as he thought, but left and right, against his bare flanks.

  Cedric Pleasant could not contain himself. The laughter burst from him; the look of relief on Grasby’s face the final straw. Dair turned away to hide his grin, and the two friends staggered about, hunched over with uncontrolled mirth. Hands on hips, Grasby glared at them, wondering what was amiss. Finally, Cedric turned and, unable to speak because he was laughing so hard, waggled a finger in the direction of Grasby’s groin. His lordship glanced down, gave a start when he saw the source of his friends’ mirth, and was swift to try and set matters to rights, face ablaze.

  “Blast it! It’s all caught up now!”

  “May I be of assistance, my lord?” Farrier asked at his most bland, as his master and Mr. Pleasant continued to fall about, unable or unwilling to control their laughter.

  “Yes. Yes. All right! And be quick about it!”

  Grasby suffered the ministrations of the batman to adjust the sit of the breechcloths with chin in the air, and with all the dignity of a man in his dressing room and not naked in a laneway.

  “If you would just check to see that the knot you tied is still secure, m’lord, then all will be well.”

  “Can’t you do that for me, too, damn you?” Lord Grasby demanded through clenched teeth.

  When the batman remained silent and held up his left arm, Grasby finally looked at him. Where the man’s hand should be, there was only air. Curiosity got the better of him, and he peered into the void of Farrier’s coat sleeve. In response, Farrier thrust his arm up through his sleeve and out popped a stump where his hand should be. It was capped with a small polished silver hook, the fitted silver cap secured by a leather strap buckled about his forearm.

  Grasby leapt into the air.

  Dair and Cedric Pleasant, who had just mastered control of their features, spluttered once more into uncontrolled laughter, and this time so hard they fell back, shaking shoulders against the high stone wall surrounding the garden of George Romney’s townhouse, as if needing its support to remain upright.

  “For king and country, m’lord,” was Farrier’s bland response to Lord Grasby’s reaction to his amputated hand.

  “You scared me half to death! Damn you!”

  The batman bowed, and with a flourish wriggled his arm so that the stump was again hidden, with only the tip of his hook visible within his coat sleeve.

  “Thank you, Mr. Farrier,” Dair said, taking his bare shoulders off the stone wall. “You’ve had your amusement for the evening; ours is yet to begin. Time to fetch paint pot and ash.”

  The batman bowed and retreated, leaving behind him a heavy silence.

  “Nine years in the army and you come out of it with a few knocks and dents, but poor Farrier has the rotten luck to lose a hand,” Cedric Pleasant said into that silence. “Still, you both managed to keep a head on your shoulders, and that’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

  “You could have damn well told me!” Grasby threw at Dair. “I’ll have nightmares for weeks.” He gave a shudder of revulsion. “Damned unpleasant…”

  Dair’s face tightened. He was on the verge of reminding his friend that there were thousands of Farriers out there who had lost limbs, not to mention those who had made the ultimate sacrifice, all in the service of their king and country. And all so gentlemen such as Grasby were at liberty to go about their daily lives undisturbed and unfettered. Instead, he pushed the unspoken diatribe back down his throat and turned away to take the paint pot from his batman.

  “Watch and learn, Grasby,” he said, beckoning his best friend closer.

  Dipping his index finger into the small ceramic pot of white paint, then peering into a hand mirror his batman held up in the soft orange glow of the linkboy’s lantern, Dair painted a continuous stripe from cheekbone to cheekbone across the beak of his nose. Two stripes were added to each cheek and a single stripe from bottom lip down the center of his square heavy chin. Satisfied with his war paint, he exchanged the paint pot for a cloth dusted in charcoal. This he rubbed into his closed eyelids, then blackened under his eyes, extending the blackness out across his temples into his hairline. He then applied soot to the beefy rounded tops of his shoulders. Peering back into the mirror, he grinned. The whites of his eyes were now stark and menacing, and the paint and soot somehow also made his large white teeth brighter and sharper.

  Dair turned this macabre grin on his friends, who opened wide their eyes and smiled their appreciation of his transformation. And when he threw back his head of black hair and howled at the moon Grasby joined in, infected with his friend’s enthusiasm.

  With both gentlemen sufficiently decorated in war paint, soot not only applied to Lord Grasby’s face but dusted through his hair to turn it gray to disguise its blondness, Cedric Pleasant took one last look at his friends and declared they were ready to carry out their mission. Lord Grasby, however, halted proceedings with one last reservation, saying diffidently,

  “You don’t think my breechcloth rather smaller than Dair’s?”

  Dair and Cedric gave a practiced start and looked at each other before solemnly shaking their heads. Both suppressed smiles, but there was a light in their eyes of mischief and anticipation, seen often in schoolboys playing a prank on an unsuspecting chum. Dair had instructed Farrier to trim the length and width of his friend’s breechcloth, so that when Lord Grasby ran about, he could not help but expose himself.

  “Certainly not!” Cedric Pleasant lied. “It’s all in the perspective… You and Dair have the same size tackle, I’m sure of it. Hasn’t he, Dair?”

  “Don’t ask me!”

  “Not that, Cedric! I don’t require your reassurance about the size of my sugar stick! The cloth. It’s the cloth I’m worried about. Its coverage is—”

  “I’d be more concerned about that birthmark,” Dair interrupted with a slow shake of his head. He sucked air through his teeth, and as he let out a slow breath, let his shoulders drop. “If anyone should recognize it, they’ll recognize you, and you don’t want that.”

  “Yes we do!” Cedric Pleasant hissed in his ear.

  Lord Grasby clapped a hand to the left side of his exposed groin to cover a caramel-colored stain the size of a snuffbox. He put his nose in the air. “No one will recognize it except for my dear lady wife.”

  Dair put up his black brows. “Are you certain?”

  “What are you suggesting? That I’m an unfaithful husband?”

  “Is that what I’m suggesting?”

  “I take the sanctity of marriage very seriously.”

  “Good for you!” Dair slapped his friend’s bare back a little too hard. “I admire a man prepared to sacrifice himself for a cause, however lost. Farrier! It’s time, if you please!”

  “Now look here, Dair! I don’t appreciate—”

  But Dair had turned away from Grasby to hide a smile. A wink at Cedric Pleasant, and his friend realized Dair had successfully diverted Grasby from his concern over the size of his breechcloth, and shook his head in admiration of his gift for subtle subterfuge.

  While Farrier and the linkboy gathered up the gentlemen’s belongings, Dair went over the mission plan to raid the painter’s studio one last time, particularly the timing of Cedric Pleasant’s dramatic entrance with sword drawn. When his friends nodded their understanding of how events would unfold, he added,

  “When Cedric threatens to stick me with his sword, that’s our signal to get the hell out of there—”

  “—looking suitably terrified,” Cedric Pleasant added.

  “We’ll be scared stiff, dear chap,” Grasby c
onfirmed.

  “You threaten to stick me and we make our dash for the front door. Understood, Grasby?”

  “Perfectly. Cedric tries to stick you. We look petrified. I stop chasing dancing girls and dash out of the house after you. We make for the carriage across the square.”

  Dair smiled. “Cedric saves the day, and the divine Consulata Baccelli has eyes only for her newfound champion. Couldn’t be easier.” He stuck out his hand. “Gentlemen, let the adventure begin!”

  All three men shook hands, a gleam of mischief in their eyes, and wished each other luck before going their separate ways. Mr. Cedric Pleasant proceeded back down the laneway, a gloved hand to the hilt of his sword and a spring in his step. Major Lord Fitzstuart and Lord Grasby entered the garden of George Romney’s townhouse by stealth and the back gate.

  At the very same moment, Lady Grasby, Mr. William Watkins, and Lord Grasby’s sister Miss Talbot, were being welcomed inside the townhouse by Mr. Romney’s butler.

  TWO

  M R. WILLIAM WATKINS noted the late hour under the light cast by a flambeau, then slipped his engraved timepiece on its silver chain back into his waistcoat pocket. He paused at the base of three shallow stone steps to allow his sister Lady Grasby and Miss Talbot to enter Mr. George Romney’s residence before him.

  “Tell me again why you insist we view your unfinished picture now?” he asked Lady Grasby in a voice of resignation, waving away a footman who had stepped forward to take his cloak, a sure sign the visit was to be of short duration. “We do not have an appointment and Mr. Romney is possibly away from the house, or perhaps he is with a client…?”

  “It will take but a moment, William,” Lady Grasby replied flatly, removing her gloved hands from an oversized mink muff. She shoved this at the butler. “As we had dinner two houses from this door, it would be foolish of me to be in such close proximity and not call. Mr. Romney is unlikely to refuse me. I have had nine sittings to date. Yet, there is something not quite right that has been keeping me up at night. I am so distracted by it I cannot remember any of the dishes at Her Highness’s table. Only that there was a centerpiece, an elaborate sugar confection of sheep grazing—”

  “Cows.”

  “Cows? Were they?” Lady Grasby frowned, momentarily diverted. “Are you certain those sugar lumps were cows, Aurora?”

  Rory (no one but her sister-in-law called her by her birth name) nodded, and pretended to cough, a gloved hand to her mouth to hide a smile at the pained look of tolerance on Mr. Watkins’ long face as he listened to his sister’s prattle.

  “A delightful pastoral scene of bovines,” Mr. Watkins confirmed. “And there was a dairy maid—or were there two, Miss Talbot?”

  “I cannot recall, sir. But it was delightful,” agreed Rory, allowing a footman to take her red wool cloak. “Lady Cavendish says Her Highness has the most talented confectioner in all England, and I believe her.”

  Lady Grasby shrugged. “I am sure it was delightful, and I would have found it so, were I not worried over my portrait. I heard only one word in five of the conversation, though that prattlepate Lady Cavendish had a great deal to say.”

  “As did her corpulent husband.” Mr. Watkins gave a loud sniff of derision. “Which was surprising, given he rarely pauses between mouthfuls to breathe, least of all speak. One day I fear Lord Cavendish will—pop.”

  “Oh dear, I hope I am not the unfortunate sitting beside him when he does,” Rory quipped, amusement in her clear blue eyes. “One trusts Lord Cavendish will have the good manners to pop in privacy…”

  “It is of no interest to me if Lord Cavendish bursts all over the dining room!” Lady Grasby announced, exasperated. “You both have the most extraordinarily tasteless conversations sometimes that I wonder at your good manners.” She glared at her brother. “You do want me to sleep at night, William, do you not?”

  “Nothing is dearer to my heart, nothing more important to me, than your well-being, Silla, but—”

  “Did you catch Lady Cavendish’s prattle over the trifle, Aurora?” Lady Grasby asked as she moved further into the hall, the butler following in her wake, her question to her brother, he realized too late, rhetorical. “Can it be true? Did a merchant’s daughter, a Miss Strang, reject an offer of marriage from Lord Fitzstuart?”

  “That is what Lady Cavendish reported,” Rory replied. She paused in thought. “Though… I am more surprised that an offer was made, rather than one was rejected.”

  “Why say you, Miss Talbot?” Mr. Watkins asked curiously.

  “From my observation of him, Lord Fitzstuart does not seem the sort of gentleman given to flippant marriage proposals.”

  Lady Grasby turned from addressing the butler and frowned in puzzlement at her sister-in-law.

  “Miss Strang is a great heiress, is she not? Worth twenty thousand pounds or more. Her fortune has merchant roots to be sure, but William says Fitzstuart cannot afford to be selective in his choice of bride—the ancestral home is a crumbling pile of ruins and the fortune all but dwindled to dust by the absent Earl…”

  When Rory turned inquiring eyes of surprise on Mr. Watkins, that he would know such intimate details regarding the Fitzstuart finances, and pass them on to his sister, he smiled his embarrassment that his sibling would air in public what he had told her in confidence.

  “Not ruins, my dear,” he diffidently corrected his sister. “The estate in Buckinghamshire is not what it could be. The house is eighty years old and yet it stands incomplete. Understandable, as it has barely been lived in. And as the Earl remains resident on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean…” He sniffed. “There isn’t much the son and heir can do about it while his father is alive and remains an absentee landlord. Yet, I doubt Fitzstuart would, if he could. His peccadilloes mirror those of his father, and thus require what meager resources he has at his disposal.”

  Rory cocked her head in thought. “By which you mean Lord Fitzstuart prefers to direct his munificence on a mistress and his children by her, than on the estate he will one day inherit?”

  Rory’s direct approach never ceased to put William Watkins on the back foot. He gave a halfhearted laugh, blushed and looked to his sister to rescue him, which she promptly did by saying bluntly,

  “Then he certainly needs a fortune! I may not approve of Fitzstuart, but under such circumstances it is understandable why he proposed to this Miss Strang. But why she would reject him is beyond my powers of reasoning.”

  “Perhaps Miss Strang did not wish to marry a man who keeps a mistress and children?” Rory offered. “Regardless that he comes with the guarantee of a title one day, some females are not persuaded that is enough to accept a proposal of marriage.”

  “Far be it from me to continue such a conversation in a painter’s hallway, but Miss Strang’s rejection of Lord Fitzstuart’s offer shows a good deal of sense on her part,” Mr. Watkins replied. He inclined his bewigged head to Rory. “I agree with you, Miss Talbot. His lordship is a reprobate and a womanizing scoundrel. No female in her right mind would accept such a man for a husband.”

  Rory managed to suppress a smile. Leaning lightly on her ivory-handled walking stick, she said steadily, “I have not heard it said Miss Strang is anything but in her right mind. But perhaps that is debatable. She rejected the heir and ran off with the spare, if Lady Cavendish is to be believed.”

  “She has eloped with Fitzstuart’s brother?” Lady Grasby was so astounded she shooed quiet the butler who was giving her the good news Mr. Romney was free to receive her. “Say it is not so! A girl who has the odor of the Covent Garden market about her person has the barefaced cheek to reject the heir to an earldom, in preference for a younger son who has no prospects and even less fortune? The girl must indeed be mad!”

  “Or in love…?”

  “Rot, Aurora!” Lady Grasby stated dismissively. “The children of merchants are raised to believe first and foremost in the value of a thing. Love is an ideal, an emotion of the highest order. As such it cannot b
e measured, so can hold little or no value for such practical people.”

  Rory wondered if her sister-in-law was speaking from the experience of having a grandfather whose vast wealth had been accumulated over a lifetime as a Billingsgate fishmonger. But as she had used the third person, Rory could only hope, for her brother’s sake, that her sister-in-law had quite forgotten her own family’s fishy beginnings.

  “Now let us say no more about this Miss Strang and her mental deficiencies. Nor do I want to hear another word about Lord Fitzstuart,” Lady Grasby continued. She covered her sister-in-law’s gloved hand with her own and said quietly, “Truth be told, it is your brother’s slavish friendship with Fitzstuart that keeps me awake at night. Sometimes I think… Sometimes I think Grasby cares more for that man than he does me! I wish—”

  “Grasby is devoted to you,” Rory interrupted.

  “—Fitzstuart had never returned from the Colonies!”

  Rory gasped. “You do not mean it, Silla!”

  “Unfortunately, he is possessed of the devil’s own luck,” Mr. Watkins said on a sigh, offering his tearful sister his perfectly pressed and folded white linen handkerchief. “The more dangerous the mission, the more daring the cause, the more willing Fitzstuart is to play the hero. And he came out of the army with all four limbs and his head intact!”

  Rory looked from sister to brother, stunned.

  “I cannot believe my ears. Mr. Watkins, you may decry the man for being a reprobate and a womanizer, and you, Silla, may dislike him heartily and be jealous of the time Grasby spends in his company… Indeed, there is not much Lord Fitzstuart can say in his own defense for his want of conduct, but neither of you have the-the right to wish him dead. How-how uncharitable, and his lordship a war hero!”

  “No. No, Miss Talbot. You misconstrue me,” William Watkins apologized. He smiled thinly and looked secretive. “As secretary to the Committee for Colonial Correspondence of Interest, I am privy to certain—communications and-and particulars about the war in America… There have been occasions—dangerous occasions, Miss Talbot—when his lordship was required to involve himself, and did so willingly, at considerable risk, not only to the men under his command but to his person. He is considered reckless in the extreme, so much so that I am not the only one who has wondered aloud if he has made a pact with—” He paused, looked over his shoulder at the butler, who quickly looked away, and pointed a gloved finger to the floor, and whispered, “You-know-who.”