Page 4 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

Chapter 2

Roused by the commotion outside his library window, Alistair Haythorne, Earl of Ryland, glanced down in surprise at the book in his hand, as if Observations on the different breeds of sheep, and the state of sheep farming in some of the principal counties of England had been responsible for the noise.

Long ago, he had claimed the room as his sole preserve from a household otherwise overrun with women. The housekeeper, Mrs. Swetley; a cook; maidservants who came and went with the seasons; and his sisters. So many sisters. Seven of them, to be exact. Not that they all resided at Haythorne House anymore. The two eldest were married with households of their own, and some portion of the younger five were sometimes with one of them, or with Aunt Josephine in the West Country.

Still, it was a great deal of . . . femaleness for one house to contain, and a man occasionally needed a reprieve from it. A space to which he could retreat for some much-needed peace and quiet.

Peace and quiet which were evidently to be in short supply today.

Another shriek rose from the street, followed by a shouted exchange between two deeper voices. With a sigh, Alistair closed the book on sheep farming and heaved himself from the chair, threading his way across the room to peer through the window. “Let’s see what all the ruckus is about,” he said aloud, though he was alone in the house.

It wasn’t madness to talk to oneself, he reasoned. Only madness to expect an answer. And people rarely listened to him anyway—even if he was the earl.

Below, a woman lay sprawled on the cobblestones, struck evidently by the carriage that now lodged across the road, stopping traffic. Nearby, two men argued—the coachman, by his livery, and a passerby. Beneath his window, a fashionably dressed lady slumped in the arms of her maid, packages strewn about them on the pavement. One of them, he surmised, had shrieked. And a brave lad had taken it upon himself to catch the team of horses by the tack. Still skittish from the accident, they pranced and pawed a good deal too close to the fallen woman.

Then again, perhaps she was already dead.

“What a senseless tragedy.” With a grimace, he let the curtain drop and turned away from the window. Half a dozen crates lay scattered about the floor. He was meant to be sorting through the last of his personal books and papers, determining which would accompany him, which ought to stay with the house or with his solicitor, and which could be disposed of.

As he strode from the room, he tossed The State of Sheep Farming onto the nearest pile, entirely indifferent as to whether it landed in a crate bound for Devonshire or the scrap heap. Downstairs, he snatched his greatcoat from a rack near the door. But he did not don it, though the November air had teeth. From the top step, he once more surveyed the scene on the street. Nothing much had changed in the intervening moments, beyond a slight increase in the size of the gawking crowd.

“Has no one thought to summon a physician?” he called out. Whatever Marylebone’s comparative deficiencies to Mayfair in other respects, it was positively crawling with medical men. Two onlookers accepted the charge and hurried off.

Passing the defensive coachman and the wilted lady, he walked up to the boy, whose arms strained with the effort of containing the skittish team. “You there,” he said to a pair of young bucks standing a row or two back in the semicircle of bystanders. “Help him. Unhook the horses and walk them. Shoulder the carriage out of the way.”

Those orders roused the coachman to his duty and he came to assist, still protesting his innocence. “Came out of nowhere, she did. Darted right under the horses’ noses. Naught to be done—no way I could have stopped them.”

Indifferent to the man’s excuses, Alistair knelt beside the fallen woman, who lay against the cold stone, breathing shallowly. He sent up a silent prayer. Her body was twisted, her right arm tucked beneath her at an awkward angle, her face half-hidden by a tangle of golden-red hair. Her bonnet was nowhere to be seen. A delicate brush of his fingertips revealed a bruise already beginning to form on her temple, a gash along the cheekbone below, skin pale, eyes closed. Her clothes were of modest quality without suggesting poverty. Difficult to determine her age in her current state, but certainly not yet thirty, he thought.

A shadow fell across her face, and he looked up to find the lady’s maid standing over them, a vinaigrette in her outstretched hand. “Will she be all right, sir?”

A hopeful question, and one he could not honestly answer in the affirmative. With a tight smile, he thanked her for the smelling salts, sparing a glance for her employer, who was now slumped weakly against the area railing in front of his house. “You’d best go back. Take your mistress inside to warm herself, if she can climb the steps.” He gave a nod toward Haythorne House, the door of which still stood open.

“You’re very good, sir.”

Once, twice, he passed the small silver vial of hartshorn beneath the young woman’s nose, which was sprinkled whimsically with freckles, their ginger color stark against her pallor. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open. She showed no other signs of rousing. He did not think he dared to do more until the physician arrived.

Carefully he spread his greatcoat over her body, murmuring a string of soothing nonsense, the sort of patter one perfected with five younger sisters who often demanded comfort over one thing or another.

Something familiar about her delicate profile niggled at the edges of his memory. He tried to imagine her face with color in her cheeks and animation in her expression. Had he nodded to her on the street? Or perhaps even met her once?

The arrival of two physicians, from opposite directions, put an end to his speculations over her identity. A quick, assessing scan of the two men decided him in favor of the one more humbly dressed, whose ungloved hands were clean but showed signs of having done actual work. “Do what you can for her,” he demanded.

Then, taking the other physician by the elbow, he led him—older, portlier, almost certainly costlier—up the steps and into his foyer, where the fainting lady sat in the nearer of two Chippendale chairs. The chairs were positioned on either side of a demilune table, over which hung a pier glass already draped in holland cloth in preparation for his departure. The cloth also thankfully disguised a bit of the faded wallpaper behind. The chairs, too, had been covered; one still was. He supposed the lady’s maid had swept the dust cover aside for her mistress’s comfort.

“This lady witnessed the accident and was taken ill from the shock,” he explained to the doctor.

She had recovered enough to be eyeing Alistair with speculative curiosity, making him suddenly aware that crouching over the injured young woman in the street had left scuffs on his boots and mud on one knee of his pantaloons. Doubtless such a sight would have given his valet palpitations.

Fortunate, then, that he employed no such person.

“I rang for tea,” the maid explained. “But no one answered the bell.”

“You’ve caught us in the midst of closing up the house for the winter,” he said. “I suppose, amidst all the bustle, none of the servants heard. Allow me.”

He strode to the back of the house and downstairs to the kitchen, which was empty. The servants had left that morning, the housekeeper and one maid for Devonshire, the rest to other posts in Town. He was meant to follow the next day, with the last of his books and personal things.

But first, he would surrender the key to his solicitor, who had found a tenant for Haythorne House for the winter. And the spring. For as long as they would take it, in fact; Alistair could no longer bear the expense of a London residence.