“I thought so,” she said. But she did not argue further, and a couple of minutes later they were outside the house and she was taking his offered arm, also without argument.
“Are you still . . . bored with me?” he asked after they had walked in silence out of Hanover Square.
She evaded the question. “Did you really save that man’s life?” she asked him.
Ah, she was referring to Uxbury.
“It is really quite extraordinary that he remembers the incident that way,” he said. “As I recall it, I almost took his life.”
Her head whipped about so that she could gaze into his face. She was wearing a pale green walking dress that was totally unadorned, though it had clearly been made by an expert hand. It emphasized her slender curves, and it struck him in surprise that she was just as sexually appealing as any of the more bountifully endowed females he had always favored. Her straw bonnet, tied beneath her chin with a ribbon of the same color, was surely the plainest hat he had ever seen, but there was something about the shape of it that made it unexpectedly alluring. The curls and wispy ringlets that had adorned her head at the theater two evenings ago had disappeared today, and every last strand of hair had been ruthlessly confined within the knot at her neck. He had not been quite serious when he had suggested that half the ladies of the ton would soon be imitating the simplicity of her style, but really he would not be at all surprised if it happened. Of course, they would need her figure and beauty of face to carry it off.
“I suppose you will not explain,” she said, “unless I ask.”
“Are you sure,” he asked her, “that you wish to hear about the violence I visited upon the person of another gentleman?”
She tutted. “Yes,” she said. “I have the feeling, however, that you are about to say something absurd.”
“I clipped him behind the knees with one foot and set three fingertips against a spot just below his ribs,” he told her, “and down he went, gasping for air. Or not gasping, in fact. There has to be some air moving into the body if one is to gasp, does there not? He turned quite purple in the face, as well he might when he had shattered a costly crystal decanter and probably a table too on his way down. But he had plenty of help surrounding him before I took my leave.”
“Oh,” she said, exasperated, “you have outdone yourself in absurdity. Three fingertips, indeed. He is twice your size.”
“Ah,” he said after nodding to a couple who passed them on the street, “but everyone is twice my size, Anna. Though my fingers are probably as long as most men’s.”
“Three fingertips,” she said again with the utmost scorn. She frowned at him, clearly not sure if he was teasing her or telling the truth.
“One’s fingertips can be powerful weapons, Anna,” he said, “if one knows just how and where to use them.”
“Oh, goodness,” she said. “I do believe you are serious. But why did you do it—if indeed you did? Why did you almost kill him?”
“I was tired of his conversation,” he said, and smiled at her.
She stiffened and moved a few inches farther from him, then turned her head to face forward again. “It was tedious?”
“Excruciatingly.”
He became aware then of footsteps pitter-pattering up behind them at great speed and stopped and turned to see a young girl approaching. She was wearing a stiff new dress, which she was holding above her ankles, and a new bonnet and new shoes, and it took no genius to guess who she was.
“Bertha, I assume?” he asked as she came to an abrupt and breathless halt in the middle of the pavement a short distance behind them.
“Yes, sir, my lordship, your worship,” she said. “Oh, which is it, Miss Snow? I have forgotten if I ever knew.”
“Your Grace,” Anna said. “There was no need to hasten out after me, Bertha. You ought to have stayed a little longer to enjoy yourself.”
“I had already eaten two scones and didn’t need the third,” the girl said. “I’ll be getting fat. You ought to have come and got me, Miss Snow. I am not supposed to let you out without me, am I? Not when you are alone, anyway.”
“But I am not alone,” Anna pointed out. “The Duke of Netherby is escorting me home, and he is a cousin by marriage.”
“However,” Avery said with a sigh, “dukes have been known to devour ladies on the streets of London when they do not have their maids with them to defend them. You did well to follow, Bertha.”
She astonished him by laughing with abandoned glee. “Oh, you!” she exclaimed. “He’s a funny one, Miss Snow.”
“You may follow from that distance,” Avery told her. “Close enough to attack me should I take it into my head to pounce upon your mistress, but far enough not to overhear or—heaven forbid!—participate in our conversation.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” She grinned cheerfully at him as though they were involved in some mutual conspiracy.
“Thank you, Bertha,” Anna said.
“I suppose,” he said as they resumed walking, “you walked arm in arm together on your way to Archer House, talking incessantly and laughing a good deal.”
“Not arm in arm,” she said. “The first time I did that was with you on the way to Hyde Park. There is not much physical touching at the orphanage. Perhaps because we are all crowded together there, we respect what space there is to set us apart.”