Page 1 of The Boxing Baroness

Chapter 1

Whitechapel, London

Farnham’s Fantastical Female Fayre

1815

The first punch in the one-two combination slammed into Marianne’s stomach, quickly followed by an uppercut to the jaw that sent her staggering backward into the ropes.

Predictably, the bloodthirsty, all-male crowd went wild, their cheering and jeering reminding Marianne that she should be paying attention to the woman across from her, rather than gawking at a distracting stranger out in the crowd. She stumbled but recovered her footing, hastily bringing up her guard.

Unfortunately, finding her breath was not nearly so easy.

After boxing for two years, Marianne knew to ignore the all-too-familiar sensation of having the wind knocked from her lungs. But knowing it and doing it were two separate things. It took all the strength she possessed to remain upright and moving while her lungs fought to resume their natural rhythm. Her vision blurred and incipient hysteria, rather than air, expanded her chest.

Marianne shook the spangles from her head and struggled for breath again and again and again before a thin, miserly stream of air trickled into her lungs. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to clear her vision in time to evade the poorly conceived cross from Lizzy Lowry’s large—but generally sluggish—fist.

Marianne had never lost to Lizzy before, and that had made her complacent, which led to her lowering her guard—both literally and figuratively. And why would she do such a stupid thing?

To steal a glance at the startling sight of the Duke of Staunton standing in the front row of her uncle’s theater.

The gorgeous but notoriously starchy peer stood out like a beacon amid the throng of screaming men, his very stillness setting him apart.

Not that his stillness was the only thing different about Staunton.

There was his height—he was taller than most of his fellows—and his shockingly pale ash-blond hair. He was garbed austerely in evening blacks but something had glittered when he’d crossed his arms over his chest. A ring, and the stone must be prodigious if Marianne could see the sparkle from such a distance. The ring was on the little finger of his left hand, which meant it was a signet, not a statement of fashion.

Although it was the glimmering stone that had caught her eye, it was his intense gaze that had seized her attention as masterfully as a highwayman commandeering a carriage. The cold, almost aggressive set of his handsome features stripped her bare, and not in the same way the other men in the crowd were doing.

Jack’s voice rang in her head: Take yer mind in ’and or you’ll be facedown on the floor.

The sound advice came none too soon as Lizzy threw a flailing roundhouse. It was a poor decision and one she was notorious for making when she began to lose her wind. Marianne dodged the graceless punch, came up under Lizzy’s sloppy guard and delivered a proper muzzler that sent Lizzy flailing backward, her stout torso slamming against the thick ropes before sliding bonelessly to the floor.

Lizzy’s knee man—who was also her husband and trainer—rushed to her aid, but the other woman wasn’t getting up again anytime soon.

Marianne’s uncle Barnabas, the proprietor of Farnham’s Fantastical Female Fayre, climbed over the velvet ropes, grabbed her wrist, and raised her arm in victory. The screaming crowd sounded less like men and more like the mad cacophony of gulls down at the London docks.

When Marianne glanced toward the spot where the stern-faced peer had been standing—front and center in what used to be the theater pit—the Duke of Staunton was gone.

Backstage was hectic as men and women scurried to change the props for the next act, and it took a few minutes for her to push through the crush of bodies and get to the dressing room.

Cecile Tremblay, who was up next, was the only other person in the cramped, cluttered dressing room when Marianne entered.

The beautiful brunette was applying the heavy face paint Barnabas required all his female entertainers to wear when they worked.

Cecile wasn’t just another of her uncle’s employees, she was also Marianne’s closest friend and housemate. The Frenchwoman had moved into a spare room in her uncle’s house at the same time she’d taken the job in the Fayre. Marianne had immediately liked the outspoken older woman and they’d become as close as sisters over the past three years.

“I saw you looking at him,” Cecile said in her charming French-accented English, her eyes not moving from her reflection as she smoothed a glossy carmine color on her generous lips. “That’s twice the Duke of Flawless has come to see you.”

Marianne smiled at Staunton’s nickname—or one of them; there was also Lord Flawless, His Grace of Flawless, and just plain Flawless—and held out her wrists so Cecile could untie the tapes that held on her mufflers, the wool-stuffed mittens that Barnabas insisted all his boxers wear.

“Yes, I saw him,” she admitted.

“I know you did; I saw you seeing him. I think you have a new admirer.”

“He’s come to your shows, too, hasn’t he?”

Cecile gave a very Gallic shrug, as if to say, What man doesn’t come to my shows? “Just once—last Tuesday.”