Page 3 of A November to Remember

Before Lady Pembroke could ask for an explanation for this bizarre linguistic panic, the door of the boudoir exploded inward.

Martha, her trusted maid—a woman whose customary manner was one of silent discretion—burst into the room, her cap askew, her face the colour of a boiled lobster, and her chest heaving as though she had just run the Derby in petticoats.

“My lady!” she gasped, clutching her side. “The Pembroke carriage! It drew up outside not two minutes ago!”

Lady Pembroke blanched. “The carriage? What do you mean, the carriage? Lord Pembroke is in Leicestershire! He is engaged in the systematic slaughter of pheasants!”

“Then he must have run out of birds, my lady!” Martha wailed, wringing her apron. “For he is downstairs at this very moment, shouting for his boot-jack and demanding to know why the entry hall smells of hair pomade!”

What followed was not a scene of aristocratic dignity.

“My boots!” Robert bellowed, tumbling off the Grecian couch with all the grace of a sack of coal dropped from a hayloft. “Where in the name of the Prince Regent’s corset are my boots?”

“Under the table!” Lady Pembroke shrieked. “Martha, hide the cushions! There is a dent in the velvet that has the precise shape of a viscount’s backside!”

“I cannot get my foot in!” Robert hissed, hopping on one leg while trying to force a heel into his left riding boot. The leather was not behaving as footwear but as a trap designed to preserve his ankle in a state of eternal mid-shove. “The friction is immense, Lady Pembroke! We require grease! We require lard!”

“We do not have lard; we have jasmine water!” she cried out, throwing a pair of pink embroidered slippers at him in her confusion. “Go! Out of the window! The trellis!” She ran to throw up the sash.

“The trellis?” Robert eyed the open window, beyond which lay a two-storey drop onto a muddy garden path. “That trellis is constructed of decorative wicker and hope! It was designed to support clematis, not twelve stone of a well-dressed gentleman!”

“He is on the stairs!” Martha hissed from the doorway. “I hear his gouty foot on the third step!”

In the midst of this sartorial ruin, with his waistcoat unbuttoned, his neckcloth trailing behind him like a shredded sail, and his left boot only half-on, Robert stopped. He was, after all, Keathley. And Viscount Keathley did not exit a stage without at least one grand gesture to justify the price of the ticket.

He seized Lady Pembroke by her waist, pulled her flush against his ruined waistcoat, and delivered a kiss of such profound intensity that it defied every law of gravity, decorum, and marital fidelity. It was a kiss that belonged in the most extravagant melodrama, a kiss that quite literally caused her eyes to glaze over as though she were viewing a sky filled with tiny, spinning, rose-coloured hearts.

“Until the next frost, my love,” he whispered, his voice returning to its rakish purr for one glorious second.

Then, he seized his woollen coat, caught its buttons between his teeth, turned, and threw himself out of the window and onto the ornamental trellis.

The trellis did not welcome him. It groaned, it splintered, and it gave way with a series of wooden cracks. Robert’s descent was not a graceful escape. He caught his shirt on a climbing rose, tearing it from shoulder to waist, lost his half-fastened boot to the trellis and his stocking to an iron hook, and finally hit the ground below with a wet thud.

“Superb workmanship,” he muttered into the dirt, coughing up a leaf.

He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the bite of the gravel at his bare left foot, and bolted down the alleyway.

At the corner of the street, parked discreetly under the dripping boughs of a chestnut tree, waited the sleek Keathley carriage. Leaning against the door, holding an umbrella in one hand and a clothes brush in the other, Boodles waited. The valet’s nose was tilted upwards at an angle of such disdain that he appeared to be analysing the composition of the London fog and finding it vulgar to the senses.

Robert hurled himself towards the carriage, panting like a winded pointer, his hair a bird’s nest that had survived a gale, and his torn shirt exposing his chest beneath his flapping waistcoat.

Boodles did not blink, nor did he gasp. He merely adjusted the umbrella to ensure that not a single drop of rainwater should soil his own cuffs. He tucked the clothes brush under one arm, opened the carriage door with a precise sweep of his hand, waited for his master to scramble inside in a heap of torn linen and bruised dignity, his woollen coat now clutched in one hand, and then leaned in.

With a dispassionate gaze, Boodles surveyed the ruin of the “Gordian Knot”.

“The cravat, I see, has suffered, sir,” Boodles observed, his voice as dry as a ship’s stale biscuit.

Robert, lying face-down on the carriage seat, trying to catch his breath while gripping his bare, mud-splattered ankle, could only groan. “Do not speak to me of starch, Boodles. I have faced the abyss. I have gazed on the face of terror, and its name is Pembroke.”

Boodles closed the umbrella, climbed into the carriage, closed the door, took up the cane resting beside the seat, and tapped the roof with it.

“Changing first or straight to White’s, sir?”

Chapter One: The Scene of the Crime

October 22nd, 1811

Had Darcy been prone to Gothic metaphors, he might have considered White’s a crypt in which the damned were condemned to dine eternally with their relations. As it was, he merely felt an extreme appreciation for the door.