Free How to Master Your Marquis by Juliana Gray Page B

squared the legs of the chair in an exact perpendicular relationship to the worn wooden surface. She inhaled the familiar smell of last night, that particular combination of leather and paper and wood, and her heart ached. A few forgotten bread crumbs lay in one corner. She lifted her hand to brush them to the floor and stopped herself. Hers or Hatherfield’s?
    She brushed them into her palm instead, and from her palm into her pocket.
    In the center of the old blotter sat a stack of clean white paper and a few sheets of crisscrossed scribbles, topped with a plain black marble paperweight. Stefanie removed the fountain pen from the drawer, gave it a little shake, and set to work.
    The pens of the other clerks scratched around her. Someone coughed, a strangled and desperate cough that its owner tried heroically to suppress. Stefanie concentrated on her handwriting, which had never been her strong suit, or even her middling suit, particularly when set next to her sister Emilie’s perfect copperplate or Luisa’s grand strokes. Stefanie was a scribbler, fond of dashes and exclamation points and sentences that had no point at all, just a dotdotdot at the end, an unfinished thought, a suggestion, a wink.
    She frowned now at the phrase before her: Therefore, it is my studied recommendation that the witnesses belong to one of two categories: Firstmost, those who will establish the character of the defendant as one who upholds the highest standards of moral and physical law; and, Secondmost, those who will establish the ability of the defendant to handle matters of bookkeeping and finance in a rigorous and arithmetically adept manner, without regard to his personal interest. So dreadfully dry. How on earth did these legal chaps read all this without falling into a drooling catatonic stupor? Stefanie’s pen hovered over the words bookkeeping and finance . She wondered whether anyone would notice if she changed them to bookmaking and forgery .
    Clearly she wasn’t cut out for this work. Clearly she should have been apprenticed to a newspaperman instead, or perhaps a theater owner, or even . . .
    A shadow cast across the page.
    Stefanie glanced up, expecting to find the beetle face of Mr. Turner sneering down at her, about to inform her that she might gather her hat and coat and find another set of chambers to darken with her slovenly habits and her intolerable cheek.
    But the sight that greeted her was far worse than that.
    Sir John Worthington. Stern, gray-faced, his impartial dark eyes burrowing through her forehead to root out the corruption within. Before Stefanie could so much as leap to her feet and perform a ritual genuflection, he barked out, “Mr. Thomas. In my office, if you please,” and turned away in the obvious expectation of instant obedience.
    Stefanie scrambled after him. On her back, she felt the weight of every clerkly eyeball, heavy with schadenfreude.

SIX

    T he telegram was waiting on Hatherfield’s breakfast tray, after he had bathed and shaved in the private if rather sterile comfort of his bachelor flat in Knightsbridge.
    “Nelson!” he called out. “When did this telegram arrive?”
    His manservant appeared soundlessly and miraculously sober in the bedroom doorway. “While you were bathing, sir. I have taken the liberty of putting out the brown tweed suit, sir, and the blue necktie.”
    “Very good, Nelson.” Hatherfield selected a daggerlike silver letter opener from the secretary in the corner and tore open the thin white envelope with a neat slash across one side.
PERCEPTIVE STOP EXPECTED NOTHING LESS STOP GUARD WITH ALL DUE VIGILANCE STOP RETURN LONDON LATE TONIGHT STOP EXPECT YOU AT NINE SHARP TOMORROW MORNING STOP YOURS OLYMPIA
    Hatherfield tapped the edge of the telegram against the secretary and swore.
    Guard with all due vigilance . What the devil did that mean? Guard the secret of her disguise? Or guard young Thomas herself?
    He pictured her again, her sleek auburn head bowed over her