Free A Perfect Gentleman by Bárbara Metzger Page A

corrected him.
    Timms looked at her over the rims of his spectacles. “You don’t fear she met her maker, then? That Bow Street fellow, he seemed convinced of it.”
    “I refuse to believe that. We shall get her back, wherever she is. You must have faith too, Timmy.”
    “Oh, I do. And I get down on my knees and pray for Miss Isabelle every night, and most mornings when my old knees aren’t too stiff.”
    Ellianne reached out and touched his age-spotted hand. “Thank you, Timmy. I do not know what I would do without you.”
    Neither did Timms, and he was afraid to find out. He wanted Miss Ellianne and her sister provided for before that time came. Oh, they had enough blunt between them to be merry as grigs, but that did not suit the butler’s opinion of the proper futures for young ladies. Hadn’t the Lord commanded His children to go forth and multiply? For all Miss Ellianne’s ability to add and subtract, to manage an entire bank as well as other women balanced their household accounts, she knew nothing about the world. She needed a man to teach her, and hadn’t the Savior provided the perfect one? Unlike Mrs. Goudge, who was firmly entrenched in the merchant class, Timms had a romantic fondness for misalliances, for marriages made for love. Stranger things had happened than a handsome lord falling in love with a beautiful heiress. He’d wager it could happen again, if he got these youngsters together.
    Well, he would not wager. He’d given his word to Miss Ellianne. Right after he’d had to confess losing his entire pension at the races. She’d reinstate it, the darling promised, as soon as he proved he was cured of the gambling disease. With the good Lord’s help—and fear of the poorhouse—he was. Now the sooner they found Miss Isabelle and got both girls hitched, the sooner he could retire to that little cottage he’d found, right near Epsom Downs. To that end, he tried to puff up the viscount’s virtues.
    He pointed to her charts and said, “My old memory is no help to you with those, but Viscount Wellstone is bound to know everyone on your lists. In addition, he has been squiring ladies about town for three or four years now, and no one ever knew it, he was that circumspect.”
    “You knew it.”
    “I am a butler, missy. It is my job to know everything.”
    She smiled, as Timms knew she would. “But everyone knows it now, you told me. All of London knows Viscount Wellstone was taking money to act as escort to young ladies so their fathers and brothers did not have to.”
    “A very unfortunate affair indeed,” Timms said, needing another swallow of wine to rid himself of the bad taste of such a social debacle. “Orchestrated entirely by that scheming Pattendale female and her mother, I’d lay odds—that is, I would lay my soul in the hands of the Almighty. Then with that officer friend of his shabbing off, Lord Wellstone’s own reputation was blown to bits. He was frequently lampooned in the scandal sheets, where they said his services went far beyond dancing with the ladies. A Fancy Fred, they were calling him.”
    “Why Fred?”
    “They say it came from a farmer’s hog what got hired out to service the sows. The farmer had Fred all washed and combed, fancified, as it were, as if the pigs cared one whit.” Timms recalled he was not at his local pub, from which he was exiled, along with the racetracks, by his vow to his young mistress. “Pardon the indelicacy, Miss Ellianne.”
    She brushed that aside. “I am no green girl, you know. Go on. Tell me more about Lord Wellstone and his situation.”
    “It got worse. One cartoonist even portrayed his poor lordship as Othello, the Moor of Venice. Except the newspaper captioned his likeness, ‘the M’whore of London.’ A male whore, you know. It was despicable, and not true, on my word as a true believer.”
    “The poor man,” Ellianne said, sympathetic to the viscount’s plight, as Timms had intended. Then she thought about it, and