The Trouble With Harry n-3 Page 15

  Plum never had time to complete her threat. As she and Burt cleared the trees, a sight to chill any mother’s blood met her eyes. The boat had capsized, its bow pointing upward, the stern submerged. Digger had one child — Anne or Andrew, she couldn’t tell which — under his arm, and was swimming through the algae and slime to the shore. Another child — McTavish — clung to the side of the sinking rowboat, shrieking like a banshee. The water beyond McTavish rippled, and the top of a tow-head emerged for a moment before it sank again.

  Plum didn’t waste any breath on exclamations — she kicked off her slippers and ran for the edge of the pond, instinctively taking a deep breath before diving into the foul water. Dimly she heard Burt beside her, and set off for whichever child was drowning beyond the boat.

  She gasped as her head cleared the water — the pond was so foul, it tainted the air sucked into her lungs, searing them as if she was breathing in smoke fumes, making her choke and gasp. Digger yelled from shore that he had Anne, which meant it was Andrew who had gone under. Plum took a deep breath, and dived. The water stung her eyes, and was so murky and filled with matter churned up by Andrew’s flailing body that she could not see. It was only by luck that her outstretched hands felt the whisper of fabric. She lunged forward, both hands trying to follow the elusive material until an arm came into her grasp, an arm that snaked itself around her in an iron grip. She grabbed a handful of jacket, and kicked upward, her lungs burning, her eyes an agony.

  “I’ve got him,” she yelled as soon as she surfaced. Andrew coughed and sputtered with her, his arms and legs thrashing as she tried to keep his face out of the water. “Stop fighting me, Andrew, or you’ll drown us both.”

  “Can’t swim,” he gasped, and wrapped both arms around her neck, cutting off her air.

  “Just…ow! Stop choking me, we’re only a few yards from shore…relax. You’re safe now.”

  Slowly, hindered by Andrew attempting to climb her as if she was a ladder, Plum got them to shore. Digger was bent over a retching McTavish, Anne lying in a moaning heap next to him. Burt waded back into the pond to pry Andrew off her body.

  “All right,” Plum said just as soon as she spat up some of the foul water she’d swallowed. She wiped her green slime-covered hair out of her eyes and glared at the four children lying on the grass before her. “You are all in so much trouble, you cannot possibly begin to fathom the depth of it. Did I not just tell you two days ago that you were not to go out on the pond?”

  Digger groaned and picked gelatinous ropes of algae off his front. “Lord, she’s going to lecture us now.”

  Plum gasped. “Digger! Language!”

  He rolled his eyes, an act that had Plum seeing red — despite being covered in stinking green. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young man!”

  “I’m an earl,” Digger said, pulling himself up to his full height. “I can do whatever I like.”

  “You’re a young man perilously close to having his breeches down to receive a thrashing,” Plum snarled. Burt, sensing that all was well — at least health-wise — slunk off to change his clothes. Anne and Andrew snickered.

  Plum glared them into silence before turning back to her oldest stepson. “Of all the stupid, inconsiderate acts — you could have drowned yourself and your brothers and sister with your foolishness! Do you have any idea how annoyed your father would have been if I had to tell him you all drowned?”

  Digger shrugged. Plum, stinking to high heaven and scared more than half out of her wits by the near-drowning of four children who had become — despite their tendencies to drive her insane — very dear to her, shoved him toward the house, turning to help Anne to her feet as the other children slowly got to theirs.

  “Digger’s going to get a whipping,” McTavish said with great complacency as he took Plum’s hand in his. “Papa will be mad at Digger, won’t he Mama?”

  Digger’s shoulders twitched.

  “Don’t you ‘Mama’ me in that endearing, adorable tone, you little rapscallion,” Plum said, shaking with the aftereffects of terror as the blissful numbness of anger wore off. “Your father is going to be very angry with all of you. I wouldn’t be surprised if he takes each of you out to meet his razor strop.”

  Anne’s eyes opened wide. “He wouldn’t whip me, I’m a girl!”

  Plum, who knew full well that Harry had never lifted a hand in punishment toward his children, wholeheartedly supported his policy of instilling in them the belief that they were just a heartbeat away from a well-deserved beating. “You think not? I’m not so sure of that.”

  Anne’s brow puckered worriedly. Plum, who wanted to clutch the children to her with one hand, while shaking them with another, decided that it wouldn’t hurt to let them stew over their punishment. When she thought of how near they had been to real tragedy…“I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes now, I certainly wouldn’t.”

  McTavish’s hand tightened around hers. He looked down at his feet. “You wouldn’t?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Wasn’t it just yesterday your father lined you all up in the library and lectured you for twenty minutes about disregarding orders he and I give you?”

  Digger snorted. Anne looked more worried. Andrew scowled. McTavish released Plum’s hand and tried to run off after a pretty butterfly. She grabbed the back of his shirt and marched him toward the house. “Yes, indeed, I would be very, very worried had I been one to disregard your father’s strictures.”

  “What’s a stricture?” McTavish asked as Plum gently pushed him up the steps to the verandah.

  “Order.”

  “Papa won’t whip me, he says I’m too young,” he replied, and scampered up the last of the steps. “Race you to the kitchen!”

  “Nursery!” Plum bellowed as the children turned left at the top of the stairs and ran off down the length of the verandah. “Change your clothes before you do anything else, and don’t you think you’ve escaped so lightly! I have not finished talking to you about ignoring — don’t you give me that look, you are in enough trouble already, you do not want to be pushing me any further!”

  Plum sighed her third sigh of the day as the children raced away, wondering for the hundredth time how she was to prove her excellent mothering skills to Harry when his children defied her attempts to mold them into well-behaved examples of manners and decorum rather than the wild heathens they were. She sniffed back a tear of self-pity, and immediately wrinkled her nose. The sun warming her wet shoulders heightened the horrible stench to the point where it could drop a horse at fifty paces. “Bath first, then Edna can burn this gown,” she said to herself as she squelched wetly through the French doors into her sitting room. She would just run upstairs before anyone saw her…

  That thought died as she realized the sitting room was already in use.

  Plum blinked in surprise as Harry rose from the rose damask settee, a cup of tea in one hand, a small plate of biscuits in the other. “Ah, there she is. Plum, my dear, may I introduce mister…mister…Good Lord, woman! What have you done to yourself?”

  The vicar! She’d forgotten about the vicar paying a call! Plum’s eyes closed in horror for a moment as she tried to blot from her mind the sight of the vicar’s and his wife’s appalled faces turned to gape open-mouthed at her. A third woman clutched a handkerchief to her nose as she surveyed Plum from slimy head to weedencrusted foot.

  Thom, seated beyond Harry and playing mother as she poured tea, stared at her in equal surprise. “Been swimming, Aunt Plum?”

  Harry took a step near her, then quickly retreated once he got a whiff of the eau du pond. “What the devil…sorry Vicar…what’s going on?”

  “I…er…” Plum glanced to the side. The vicar, a pleasant-looking, mild little man gazed at her with real concern. His wife fanned herself vigorously while discretely extracting a small vial of perfume from her reticule. The other woman, dressed in puce with a bonnet that resembled a warped saddle, wore a look of pure, malicious delight. Plum dragged her gaze from her
to Harry. “There was a little accident at the pond. No one was harmed, but I…er…fell in. If you will excuse me, I will change into something a little more suitable.”

  “Suitable?” the woman with the saddle on her head snorted. Plum paused at the door, unsure if she should apologize for her untoward appearance, or just gracefully sail out of the room and act as if she was above such petty concerns as smelling like a bog. “Anyone less suitable to be the Marchioness Rosse than Charles de Spenser’s whore you would have a long way to find.”

  The vicar’s wife gasped and dropped her vial. Harry turned slowly to look at the woman. Thom, with calm deliberation, removed the cup and plate clenched in Harry’s hands, then rose and stood by her aunt.

  Plum lifted her chin and gazed as coolly as possible — not an easy feat when one was dripping with pond slime — at the woman. “You must be Miss Stone.”

  “I am,” the woman said in a loud aggressive tone. “I know who you are, as well.”

  “Yes, of course you do, you would be a fool not to know,” Harry said suavely, but Plum could see the tiny muscle in his jaw twitch. He was angry, very angry, and although she knew he wasn’t angry at her, it was her fault he should be exposed to the scorn of such a vile woman. She felt sick, nauseated that what she had dreaded would happen, had. “She is my wife, the stepmother of my children. She is my marchioness.”

  “She is also the mistress of Charles de Spenser, youngest son of Viscount Morley,” Miss Stone crowed.

  The vicar’s wife swooned backward, drooping in the approved manner on her husband. The vicar’s eyes were wide with astonishment as he waved his wife’s vial under her nose.

  “Was the mistress of Charles de Spenser,” Harry said calmly, the tension in his hands belying his placid tone.

  Miss Stone’s vicious smirk of triumph dimmed a bit in the face of Harry’s complacency. “You know of her shame?”

  “I know of her marriage to Charles de Spenser, yes. And although I don’t believe my wife’s past is the concern of anyone present but her and myself, I will this once make an exception to my natural distaste in discussing such a private subject with persons not related to us.”

  Plum blinked back a few tears of adoration for Harry. She’d never heard him speak in such an aristocratic, cold voice, but she knew he did it for her sake. She was torn between a desire to kiss her darling avenging angel, and the need to shield him from the contempt she knew he would face.

  “A bigamous marriage,” Miss Stone spat. “He was married already when she went to his bed.”

  “I had no idea Charles was already married—” Plum started to say, but ceased when Harry took her hand in his, stroking his thumb over the pulse in her wrist.

  “You don’t have to defend yourself to these good people,” he said, never once taking his eyes off the evil Miss Stone. “Although obviously they have heard only the basest lies, no doubt being good Christians they will be delighted to learn the truth, not to mention being filled with joy to learn that you were innocent of any wrongdoing other than having a too loving heart. They will be shocked when they are told of the cruelty practiced upon you by a disgusting cur of a man who thought nothing of using and abandoning you, and I’m sure they will do their utmost to remedy any false impression created by the slanders that other foolish and stupid people have spread in the misguided belief they were speaking the truth. Surely, everyone here knows how I worship the very ground you walk on, and that I would never, under any circumstances, allow anyone to say ill of you without exacting the most heinous and exhaustive of retributions.”

  Plum held her breath, her eyes on Harry’s as they glittered meaningfully behind his spectacles. Miss Stone was no match for him. Before his threatening gaze, her eyes wavered, then fell as she slumped back into the chair, deflated of the spite and venom that had puffed her up like a balloon.

  Harry turned to the vicar and his wife, both of whom immediately swore their wholehearted devotion to clearing any misconception regarding Plum’s past.

  Plum herself stood in silent misery-laden bemusement, watching Harry carefully. He turned to her, pulling her hands to his mouth as he winked before kissing her fingers. “My dear, I’m sure you wish to change into something a little less reminiscent of a cesspool.”

  “Yes.” Plum blinked at him, her mind more than a little numb. Had he just winked at her? Had he taken the wind so effectively out of Miss Stone’s sails? Had he with just a few words, erased the shame of her past?

  “Now, perhaps, would be a good time?” His eyes twinkled at her. She goggled at that. He could twinkle after what just happened? Twinkle?

  “I’m sure you will all excuse my wife. Thom?”

  “I’m right here. Come along, Aunt Plum. What you need is a bath to wash all that pond off you.”

  Thom’s arm was warm on her damp sleeve, but Plum couldn’t stop staring at Harry. He winked and twinkled? Was he mad?

  “It was a pleasure meeting you, Lady Rosse,” the vicar said, standing and giving her a little bow.

  Was she mad?

  His wife hurried to add her niceties. “Oh, yes, it was, it was very nice, and I hope we see you on Sunday.”

  Mayhap they were all mad, and none of them knew it?

  “A pleasure,” Miss Stone said in a begrudging, surly tone. Her face was dull red with anger, but Plum found little sympathy for her.

  “Plum?”

  Her name was soft on Harry’s lips. She turned to him. “Hmm?”

  Harry made shooing motions with his hand.

  She blinked, then suddenly reason, blessed reason was returned to her, and she realized that he had done the impossible just as he said he would. She wanted to kiss him, but felt she’d shocked the vicar enough for the day, so contented herself with allowing her love to shine in her eyes. Harry mouthed, “I told you so,” at her as she let Thom escort her from the room.

  “What a nasty, vile old cat that Miss Stone is,” Thom said as they walked up the stairs.

  “And what a wonderful, adorable, marvelous man Harry is,” Plum replied, her mind full of her husband. She sighed happily. “Could any man be more perfect?”

  She was married to a raving lunatic.

  “We’re what?” Plum cried ten days later.

  “Leaving for London in three days.” Harry stuffed another handful of papers into a leather satchel. “Gertie assures me the children’s things can be packed by then — you won’t have any difficulty, will you?”

  “No, of course not — that is, yes! Yes, I will! I couldn’t possibly pack everything by then. London? All of us? Why?” Plum was well aware that last word was pronounced desperately close to a wail, but she was too distraught to worry over such trivialities. He wanted to go to London? Now? Wasn’t the shameful scene they’d recently survived — admittedly due to his ability to forcibly erase her past — enough for him? He had to be scorned and ridiculed in London as well? Why now, when she was just starting to feel comfortable with her role as his wife? Why couldn’t he wait, oh say, ten or twelve years, just until she felt like she really had a firm grasp on the job of being his wife?

  Harry stopped satchel-stuffing long enough to make a face. “I have to go to London to meet with the head of the Home Office. It’s nothing I want to do, Plum, but it is my duty to go when it concerns a past investigation of mine.”

  “Investigation? What sort of an investigation?”

  He set down the satchel. “I told you that I did some work for the government, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, although you didn’t say what sort of work, exactly.” And at that moment, Plum didn’t care what he had done in his past, except in terms of it necessitating his return to London.

  “The nature of the work is neither here nor there, the fact is that I have to present the results of my findings to the new head of the HO, and discuss with him the possible repercussions. As it is my preference not to leave my new wife alone for who knows how long, and since I know you won’t wish to leave the children, I hav
e decided that we will all go to London. Granted the city may never be the same after the children get through with it, but we’ll just have to take that chance.”

  Plum wrung her hands and tried to convince her husband to leave the children and her at home, but he would have none of it. “Plum, I don’t want to leave the children behind because…well, I left them earlier this year to check out this property when it had been left to me, and during my absence there was a fire. An entire wing burned down, the wing housing the nursery. It was only by the quick thinking of Gertie and George that the children were saved. You know that the girls’ governess died?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “She died in that fire. The children were upset about it for months.” His thumb stroked a line down her jaw. “I know it’s silly of me, but I don’t want to leave them again. I almost lost them once — I don’t wish to tempt fate again.”

  Her heart melted under the look in his eyes. “Harry…the scandal—”

  “What scandal?” he asked, nuzzling her neck.

  She gave up. She knew there was no way she could stand against neck nuzzling, so she didn’t even try. Instead she gave the (reluctant, and with much misgiving) orders for their things to be packed, and three days later they set out in numerous carriages.

  “You’re making too much of it,” Thom told her two days after they had started their journey, as they were about to leave the inn at which they’d spent the night. “Probably no one will recognize you — it’s been twenty years, Aunt! And how long has it been since that man you married died? A year?”

  “Six months. Even if no one remembers the scandal itself, I will be recognized, and then everything will come out,” Plum said glumly, one eye on the younger children as they romped around the inn yard chasing geese. “The whole dreadful thing will be aired once again, and everyone will mock me, shame Harry, ruin the children’s and your lives, and then he will regret marrying me, probably going so far as to hate me, no doubt ending with him going to the Lords asking for a divorce, at which point I shall die homeless and friendless living in a ditch with an earthworm named Fred as my sole companion. I just hope Harry will be happy then.”