“You will not,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “You will remain here.”
“Please, your grace,” she said. “I can serve no function here while you have company.”
She looked, he thought, almost frightened. Did she expect that he and his friends were going to indulge in a collective orgy with her? He would probably have dismissed her himself, he supposed, if she had not announced that she would leave. Now, out of sheer stubbornness, he could not let her go.
“Perhaps,” he said, “all the excitement will bring on a fit of the vapors and I will need the ministrations of my nurse, Miss Ingleby.”
She would doubtless have argued further if the door had not opened to admit his visitors. As it was, she scurried for the farthest corner of the room, where she was still standing when it occurred to him to look a few minutes later. She was doing an admirable job of blending into the furniture. Her cap was adorning her head again and covering every last strand of her hair.
They had come in a collective body, all his closest friends—Conan Brougham, Pottier, Kimble, Thomas Garrick, Boris Tuttleford—bringing hearty good cheer with them. There was a great deal of noise as they greeted him, asked rhetorically after his health, jeered over his dressing gown and slippers, admired his bandage, and found themselves seats.
“Where is your claret, Tresham?” Garrick asked, looking about him.
“Miss Ingleby will fetch it,” Jocelyn said. That was when he looked and noticed her in the far corner. “My nurse, gentlemen, who runs and fetches for me since I am unable to reach the bell rope from where I recline. And who scolds and worries me into and out of the dismals. Miss Ingleby, ask Hawkins for the claret and the brandy, and have a footman bring a tray of glasses. Please.”
“Please, Tresh?” Kimble chuckled. “A new word in your vocabulary?”
“She makes me say it,” Jocelyn said meekly, watching Jane walk out of the room, her face averted. “She scolds me when I forget.”
There was a raucous guffaw from his gathered friends.
“Oh, I say,” Tuttleford said when his mirth had subsided a little, “isn’t she the one who squawked out, Tresham, just when you were unnerving Oliver with your pistol trained at the bridge of his nose?”
“He has employed her as his nurse,” Conan replied, grinning. “And has threatened to make her sorry she was born or something like that.Isshe sorry, Tresham? Or are you?”
Jocelyn played with the handle of his quizzing glass and pursed his lips. “You see,” he said, “she has a damnably annoying habit of answering back, and I have a damnable need for mental stimulation, penned and cribbed and incarcerated as I am and as I am likely to be for a couple of weeks or so longer.”
“Mental stimulation, ho!” Pottier slapped his thigh and roared with merriment, and everyone else followed his example. “Since when have you needed a female for mental stimulation, Tresham?”
“By Jove!” Kimble swung his quizzing glass on its ribbon. “One cannot quite picture it, can one? How else does she stimulate you, Tresh? That is the question. Come, come, it is confession time.”
“He has one immobilized leg.” Tuttleford laughed again. “But I’ll wager that does not slow you down one whit, does it, Tresham? Not in thestimulationbusiness. Does she come astride? And do all the bucking so that you can lie still?”
The laughter this time was decidedly bawdy. They were all in fine fettle—and getting finer by the minute. Jocelyn raised his quizzing glass all the way to his eye.
“One might casually mention,” he said quietly, “that the female in question is in my employ and beneath my own roof, Tuttleford. Even I have some standards.”
“My guess is, fellows,” Conan Brougham said, more perceptive than the others, “that the notorious duke is not amused.”
Which was a mistake on his part, Jocelyn thought a moment later as the door opened and Jane came back into the room, carrying two decanters on a tray. A footman came behind her with the glasses. She was, of course, the instant focus of everyone’s curious attention, a fact that should have amused him as it would surely disconcert her. But he felt only annoyance that any of his friends would for one moment think him capable of the execrable taste of dallying with his own servant.
She might have tried to escape with the footman, but she did not do so. She retired to her corner with lowered eyes. Her cap was pulled lower than ever over her brow.
Viscount Kimble whistled softly. “A beauty in hiding, Tresh?” he murmured, too low for her to overhear.
Trust Kimble’s eyes to penetrate her disguise. Kimble, with his blond god’s good looks, was very much a ladies’ man, of course. A connoisseur to equal Jocelyn himself.
“But a servant,” Jocelyn replied, “under the protection of my own roof, Kimble.”
His friend understood him. He grinned and winked. But he would not make any improper advances to Jane Ingleby. Jocelyn did wonder fleetingly why he cared.
The conversation quickly moved off into other topics since they could hardly discuss Jane in her presence. But no one seemed to consider it improper to discuss in her hearing Lady Oliver’s apparent enjoyment of her notoriety as she had played court to a host of admirers at the theater last evening; the presence of three of her brothers with her and Oliver in their box; the avowed determination of the brothers to call the Duke of Tresham to account for debauching their sister as soon as he was on his feet again; the ridiculous lengths to which Hailsham was going to prove that his eldest son, now nine years old and reputed to be mentally deficient, was a bastard so that he could promote the claims of his second and favorite son; the latest sensational details of the Cornish scandal.
“It is being said now that Jardine is dead,” Brougham said on that last topic. “That he never did recover consciousness after the attack.”
“It must have been one devil of a bash on the head,” Kimble added. “The more sensational accounts insist that his brains were fully visible through hair and blood. London drawing rooms are filled with swooning females these days. Which makes life interesting for those of us who can be close enough to some of them when it happens. Too bad you are incapacitated, Tresh.” He chuckled.
“As I remember it,” Pottier said, “Jardine did nothavea great deal of hair. Not too many brains either.”
