“Are you always so absurd?” she asked him.
He regarded her for a few silent moments while he curled one hand about the handle of his quizzing glass. If he raised it, she would probably laugh with incredulous scorn. He cocked his elbow again instead.
“This is really quite an easy lesson,” he said. “It will not stretch your intellect to the breaking point. Give me your hand. No, the right.”
He took it in his right hand, drew it through his arm, and set her hand, palm down, on the cuff of his coat. If it were possible for her arm to stretch out of its socket, she would have remained standing where she was, he was sure, a safe distance away. But it was not, and she was compelled to come a few steps closer. Every muscle in her arm and hand stiffened.
Something was absurd, but he kept the observation to himself.
“We now proceed to walk,” he said. “It is the gentleman’s job to match his pace and his step to the lady’s. Men do not have all the power in this world, you see, despite what women often believe.”
Her muscles remained stiff for a while and she looked more than ever like someone’s governess or even someone’s maid dressed in her Sunday best. She would not be mistaken for either today, however. Not when she was seen on his arm. News in London traveled faster than wildfire or the wind. It traveled by the servant underground and the gossip circuit aboveground, and the Westcott story was sensational indeed.
Avery was an admirer of women and a connoisseur of all things feminine. He admired beauty and elegance and charm in ladies and flirted with them and even bedded a few of them when appropriate. He admired beauty and voluptuous curves and sensuality and sexual skills in women of a different class and flirted with them and entertained and bedded them as he desired—though with some discrimination. He liked women enormously. Becoming acquainted with them, escorting them about, flattering them, bedding them were among life’s more enjoyable experiences. He could not recall, however, admiring many women for qualities of character. It amused him to discover that there were such qualities about Lady Anastasia Westcott.
I am lower even than that, ma’am, she had said in answer to her grandmother’s remark about resembling a lowly governess. Or higher, depending upon one’s perspective. I have the great privilege of being teacher to a school of orphans, whose minds are inferior to no one’s.
He had had to turn to the window to hide his amusement, for she had not spoken in either anger or defiance. She had spoken what to her was the simple truth. She and her fellow orphans were every bit as good as the ton, she had been saying—the whole lot of it, himself included. He admired such poise and conviction. It would be a vast shame if her relatives had their way and she were made to change beyond recognition. He doubted, though, that she would allow it to happen except upon her own terms. It would be interesting to see what sort of person would emerge from the education of Lady Anastasia Westcott. He hoped she would remain interesting.
They passed two people on South Audley Street, a maid carrying a heavy bag and a gentleman Avery vaguely recognized. The maid kept her eyes lowered as she hurried past. The gentleman looked startled, recovered himself, touched the brim of his hat, and did not even wait to be fully past them before his head swiveled for a longer, closer look. He would have a tale to tell when he got wherever he was going.
“I am concerned about my half brother,” Anna said as they turned toward Hyde Park Corner, speaking for the first time since they had started walking. “Are you concerned? He could be anywhere by now. He could be in grave danger or just very, very unhappy. I know he is no blood relative of yours, but he is your ward. Is it not irresponsible to say you will leave him be until he stops laughing?”
“I always know where Harry is likely to be found,” he told her. “This occasion is no exception.” It had not taken him long last night to locate the boy, deep in his cups and sprawled in a low armchair in the scarlet visitors’ parlor of a rather seedy brothel, surrounded by cronies as inebriated as he and painted whores with improbably colored hair. Avery had not shown himself. One glance had assured him that Harry was in no condition to avail himself of the main services the whores were there to provide and thus was safe from the pox.
“Are you so all-seeing, then?” she asked him. “And so all-powerful that you can rescue him from whatever depths he may have sunk to?”
Avery thought about it. “I am,” he said.
He had made himself all-powerful. It had not been easy. He had had an exceedingly unpromising start to life when he had been born resembling his mother rather than his father. His father had been a robust, imposing, manly figure, who had stalked and frowned and barked his way through life, commanding terror in inferiors and respect in his peers. His mother had been a tiny, blue-eyed, dainty, sweet-natured, golden-haired beauty. Avery did not remember that she feared his father, or that his father had ever barked at her or been displeased with her. Indeed, it was altogether probable that theirs had been a love match. She had died when Avery was nine of some feminine complaint that had never been explained to him, though it was not pregnancy. By that time it was obvious that he had inherited most of his mother’s traits and virtually none of his father’s. His father had always treated him with casual affection, but Avery had once overheard him remarking that he would have been well enough if he had been a girl but was not what any red-blooded man would desire of his heir.
Avery had been sent away to school at the age of eleven and might as well have been consigned to purgatory. He had been horribly bullied. He had been small, puny, golden haired, blue eyed, meek, gentle, cringing, and terrified. And he had known nothing would change, for his nurse had once explained feet to him—the sort of feet that were attached to the ends of one’s legs and had five toes apiece. The size of a boy’s feet, she had said, was a sure predictor of the size of his person when one grew up. Avery’s feet had been small, dainty, and slender.