"Regardless. No one is to suspect that you're being scattered about England, dressed as young men, employed in the most invisible capacities . . ."
"While you and Miss Dingleby have all the fun of tracking down our father's murderers and slicing their tender white throats from end to end." Stefanie heaved a deep and bloodthirsty sigh.
Miss Dingleby had appeared at her other elbow. "My dear," she'd said quietly, "your sentiments do you credit. But speaking as your governess, and therefore obliged to focus you on the task at hand, I urge you to consider your own throat instead, and the necktie that must, I'm afraid, go around it."
Four weeks later, the neckties had not improved, though Stefanie had become a dab hand at a stylish knot. (Too stylish, Miss Dingleby would sigh, and make her tie it again along more conservative lines.)
If only she could make her silly fingers work.
The door opened with an impatient creak, allowing through Miss Dingleby, who was crackling with impatience. "Stefanie, what on earth is keeping you? Olympia has been downstairs with Sir John this past half hour, and we're running out of sherry."
"Nonsense. There are dozens of bottles in the dungeon."
"It is not a dungeon. It's merely a cellar." Miss Dingleby paused and narrowed her eyes at Stefanie's reflection in the mirror. "You're not nervous, are you, my dear? I might expect it of Emilie and Luisa, straightforward as they are and unaccustomed to subterfuge, but you?"
"Of course I'm not nervous." Stefanie stared sternly at her hands and ordered them to their duty. "Only reluctant. I don't see why I should be the law clerk. I'm by far the shadiest character among the three of us. You should have made me the tutor instead. Emilie will bore her pupil to tears, I'm sure, whereas I would . . ."
Miss Dingleby made an exasperated noise and moved behind her. "Take your hands away," she said, and tied Stefanie's black neckcloth with blinding jerks of her own competent hands, to a constriction so exquisitely snug that Stefanie gasped for breath. "The decision was Olympia's, and I'm quite sure he knew what he was doing. Your Latin is excellent, your mind quick and retentive when you allow it to concentrate . . ."
"Yes, but the law is so very dull, Miss Dingleby . . ."
". . . and what's more," Miss Dingleby said, standing back to admire her handiwork, "we shall all be a great deal reassured by the knowledge that you're lodged with the most reputable, learned, formidable, and upstanding member of the entire English bar."
Stefanie allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led out the door to the great and rather architecturally suspect staircase that swept its crumbling way to the hall below. "That," she said mournfully, "is exactly what I'm afraid of."
Olympia and his guest were waiting in the formal drawing room, which had once been the scene of a dramatic capture and beheading of a Royalist younger son during the Civil War (Stefanie had verified this legend herself with a midnight peek under the threadbare rugs, and though the light was dim, she was quite sure she could make out an impressively large stain on the floorboards, not five feet away from the fireplace), but which now contained only the pedestrian English ritual of a duke taking an indulgent late-morning glass of sherry with a knight.
Or so Stefanie had supposed, but when she marched past the footman (a princess always greeted potential adversaries with aplomb, after all) and into the ancient room, she found herself gazing instead at the most beautiful man in the world.
Stefanie staggered to a halt.
He stood with his sherry glass in one hand, and the other perched atop the giant lion-footed armchair that had been specially made a century ago for the sixth duke, who had grown corpulent with age. Without being extraordinarily tall, nor extraordinarily broad-framed, the man seemed to dwarf this substantial piece of historic furniture, to cast it in his shadow. His radiant shadow, for he had the face of Gabriel: divinely formed, cheekbones presiding over a neat square jaw, blue eyes crinkled in friendly welcome beneath a high and guiltless forehead. He was wearing a uniform of some kind, plain and unadorned, and the single narrow shaft of November sunshine from her uncle's windows had naturally found him, as light clings to day, bathing his bare golden curls like a nimbus.
Stefanie squeaked, "Sir John?"
The room exploded with laughter.
"Ha, ha, my lad. How you joke." The Duke of Olympia stepped forward from the roaring fire, wiping his eyes. "In fact, my friend has the good fortune of traveling with company today. Allow me to present to you the real and genuine Sir John Worthingham, QC, who has so kindly offered to take you into his chambers."
A white-haired figure emerged dimly from the sofa next to the fire and spoke with the booming authority of a Roman senator. "Not nearly so handsome a figure as my nephew, of course, but it saves trouble with the ladies."
With supreme effort, Stefanie detached her attention from the golden apparition before her and fixed it upon the source of that senatorial voice.
Her heart, which had been soaring dizzily about the thick oaken beams holding up the ducal ceiling, sank slowly back to her chest, fluttered, and expired.
* * *
If Stefanie had been a painter of renown, and commissioned to construct an allegorical mural of British law, with a judge occupying the ultimate position in a decorous white wig and black silk robes, bearing the scales of justice in one hand and a carved wooden gavel in the other, she would have chosen exactly this man to model for her and instructed him to wear exactly that expression that greeted her now.
His eyes were small and dark and permanently narrowed, like a pair of suspicious currants. His forehead was broad and steep above a hedgerow brow. His pitted skin spoke of the slings and arrows of a life spent braced between the dregs of humanity and the righteous British public, and his mouth, even when proffering an introductory smile, turned downward at the ends toward some magnetic core of dole within him. Atop his wiry frame was arranged a stiff gray tweed jacket and matching plus fours, with each leg pressed to a crease so acute that Stefanie might have sliced an apple with it.
If Sir John Worthington had ever encountered trouble with the ladies, Stefanie judged, it was not without a significant intake of champagne beforehand. On both sides.
Still, Stefanie was a princess of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, and what was more, she had never yet met the living being she had not been able to charm.
"Good morning, Sir John," she began cheerfully, and tripped over the edge of the rug.
Time was supposed to slow down during accidents of this sort, or so Stefanie had heard, but all she knew was a flying blur and a full-body jolt and a sense of horrified bemusement at the sensation of threadbare carpet beneath her chin. A feminine gasp reached her ears, and she was nearly certain it wasn't her own.
A pair of large and unadorned hands appeared before her, suspended between her face and the forest of chair and sofa legs. "I say. Are you quite all right?" asked a sonorous voice, which in its velvet baritone perfection could only belong to the Archangel.
Was it manly to accept his hand in rising? It was a marvelous hand, less refined than she might have expected, square and strong-boned, with a row of uniform callouses along the palm. The fingers flexed gently in welcome, an image of controlled power.
Stefanie swallowed heavily.
"Quite all right," she said, rather more breathily than she had planned. She gathered herself and jumped to her feet, ignoring the Archangel's splendid hands. "New shoes, you know."
A little giggle floated from the sofa.
Among the sounds that Stefanie could not abide, the female giggle ranked high: well above the drone of a persistent black fly, for example, and only just beneath the musical efforts of a debutante on a badly tuned piano.
She shot the sofa an accusing glance.
A young lady sat there, utterly dainty, perfectly composed, with a smug little smile turning up one corner of her mouth. She was beautiful in exactly the way that Stefanie was not: delicate features, soft dark eyes, curling black hair, rose-petal skin without the hint of a freckle. Though she reclined with languorous grace upon the sofa, one tiny pink silk slipper peeking from beneath her pink silk dress, she was clearly of petite proportions, designed to make the long-shanked Stefanies of the world appear as racetrack colts.
Except that Stefanie herself was no longer a young lady, was she?
"Charlotte, my dear," said Sir John, "it is hardly a matter for amusement."
"Nothing is a matter of amusement for you, Cousin John," said his dear Charlotte, with a sharp laugh.