Free Barbara Metzger by The Duel Page A

him. He was not sure about hers. Or who had seen her arrive this morning. Or if Carswell had mentioned her to anyone. He started to pray again—but two prayers in an hour was too much to ask.
    No one knew, he assured himself. They could squeak through this with her reputation intact. He’d write to his mother in Bath. And his sister in Richmond. No, he would send carriages for both of them. By the time anyone realized Attie—gads, he had to remember she was Miss Renslow—was here, at a notorious bachelor’s establishment, his female relations would be at hand to lend respectability. Thank goodness.
    Then he recalled his butler’s parting words to her: “Your letters have been delivered, miss.”
    Letters. Which likely informed her friends, her uncle’s staff, and that tutor cum clergyman where she was.
    Nineteen.
    He had stepped in more than dog droppings today.

Chapter Six
    Women are fragile and flighty, like butterflies.
    —Anonymous
    Men are toads.
    —Mrs. Anonymous
    By midmorning of the following day, the seeds of Miss Renslow’s letters brought their first fruit: a bitter lemon.
    “The Reverend Mr. Wiggs, my lord, for Miss Renslow,” Ian’s butler announced, his nose slightly wrinkled as if from an offensive odor. The earl had learned to read a visitor’s character by the flare of Hull’s nostrils. “What shall I tell him?”
    Hull could tell the tutor that the boy was a trifle better, having taken some beef broth this morning, and that Miss Renslow was resting in her own room. Ian had both bits of information from his valet, since he had fled to his own bedchamber early after his dire discovery. Once there, he had penned urgent missives to his mother and sister, then kicked himself nineteen ways to Sunday for being a fool.
    He had not been back to the sickroom since. He made sure his housekeeper and two maids kept Miss Renslow company during her vigil, and a footman stood outside her door, but Ian was not going within nineteen yards of the chit.
    He had slept for a few hours, then woke up with nineteen hammers pounding in his aching, brandy-soaked brain.
    Nineteen. Hell.
    After breakfast and a bath, he was still in a foul enough mood to welcome an interview with Troy’s disapproving tutor, the minion of the miserly Lord Rensdale. He’d have preferred a session at Gentleman Jackson’s boxing parlor, pounding something—a leather bag or a sparring partner—into the ground. Wiggy would do.
    “Show him in.”
    Ian had expected an older man, a saintly graybeard mistakenly entrusted with the job of bearleading two children—no, a boy and a young lady—about London. Instead he saw a man younger than himself, of perhaps twenty-five summers, although one could not tell if the fellow had ever been out in the sun, he was so pale. Wiggs was nearly Ian’s height, but half his weight, it seemed, with angular bones, a long nose, and a jutting Adam’s apple. The man of the cloth was dressed head to toe in severe black, without a sop to style, comfort, or color. His straight mouse-brown hair was parted in the middle, and his mouth seemed permanently tilted downward. He stood stiffly erect, bowing at Ian’s greeting as if his spine were made of steel.
    Ian disliked him on sight. To be honest, he had disliked the man when Athena—Miss Renslow, dash it—had spoken of him. Now his assessment was proven correct as the man waved his bony fingers in the air and said, “This will not do.”
    Ian looked around his library, one of the finest in all of England, he believed, filled as it was with shelves of rare volumes, cases of priceless heirloom treasures, walls of fine art representing centuries of his family’s collecting. It was a warm, inviting place, with soft leather chairs and thick Aubusson rugs. He raised one dark eyebrow. “I thought my library entirely satisfactory.”
    “Not your library, my lord. Your house.”
    “You do not like the architecture? Or perhaps the wall-hangings?”
    “This is no