Follow My Lead (50 page)
Keep reading for a preview of the next historical romance from Kate Noble
IF I FALL
Coming soon from Berkley Sensation!
“B
LOODY hell,” Whigby breathed as their rented hack pulled up to the address that had been written on Lady Forrester’s note. “Are you sure this is it?”
LOODY hell,” Whigby breathed as their rented hack pulled up to the address that had been written on Lady Forrester’s note. “Are you sure this is it?”
The town house on Upper Grosvenor Street was much the same as the others that surrounded it—pristine white, three stories, with columns that lined the doorway and supported the upper level balconies. Wrought iron fencing lined the property along the more public sidewalk, protecting the pansies and tulips that sprung up in wide Grecian urns that sat as centurions guarding the steps up to the heavy front door.
The main difference between this town house and the others that surrounded it was the half dozen gentlemen in their best black coats that bickered with the butler for entrance.
“It’s number sixteen,” Jack said, his eyes flicking automatically to the letter in his hand, checking once again.
“Maybe it was written ill?” Whigby asked, but Jack shook his head. No, there was no mistake, this was the house.
“Maybe someone died and they’re paying respects!” Whigby cried.
Jack shot his friend a look.
“Of course, that would be terrible,” Whigby was quick to amend.
“Well, I suppose we best find out what’s going on,” Jackson said, opening the door to the hack and letting himself down, while the coachman disembarked from his seat and helped unload Jackson’s trunk. Whigby alighted as well.
“Do you want me come with you?” Whigby asked. “You know . . . to pay my respects?”
“No one has died, Mr. Whigby,” Jackson assured his friend (at least, he hoped no one had died). “Go on to your uncle’s. I’ll be fine.”
“You have my direction if you need it.” Whigby extended his hand, and Jack shook it.
Then Whigby, in a show of emotion not uncommon to that larger fellow, pulled Jack into a fairly rib-crushing hug. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Whigby . . .” Jack wheezed. “It’s not a funeral . . . And you’re crushing me.”
“That’s right!” Whigby replied, releasing Jack so quickly that the air rushed back into his lungs. “Keep hope!”
And then, Whigby turned to reenter the hack to convey him to his uncle’s, a few spare blocks away. But perhaps he should not have been so free with his condolences, because the hack had already started to rumble down the block, with Whigby’s trunk still up on the back.
“Oy!” Whigby yelled after the coachman, taking to a run. “Wait for me!”
Jack, shaking his head, turned to front door of number sixteen. And the men there that blocked his path.
They were a variety of ages, from just out of university to those with white hair. But all the men wore their money: Jackson saw at least three gold cravat stick pins and seven watch fobs. They eyed his rumpled Naval uniform with severe distaste.
Jackson narrowed his eyes and stepped into the gauntlet.
“They come fresh off the boats now?” one man murmured to a friend. “I’m amazed they get the gossip sheets out at sea.”
“What’s amazing is that he thinks he stands a chance,” his friend replied, sniggering.
Jackson kept his eyes straight ahead, ignoring these men. Their talk made no sense to him, but their manners did. They didn’t think much of him. Well, the feeling was mutual.
Jackson reached the butler, who stood guard at the door with a hulking figure of a footman. Normally, the door would be opened with the butler standing inside, but here, they had gone so far as to stand outside the door, keeping it barred.
“I’m sorry, sir, but the Forresters are not receiving today,” the supercilious man said, his nose in the air.
“Then why is everyone else here?” Jackson asked before he could think better of it.
He was met by chuckles from the peanut gallery behind him.
“We are staking our place in line!” one of the younger ones cried.
“Making sure people see us here,” one of the others drawled.
“Besides, they have to come home sometime,” another—the sniggering one—said, clamping his hand on Jack’s shoulder, trying to pull him back.
One look from Jack had that man removing his hand forthwith.
“I have an invitation,” Jack said, directing himself only to the butler.
But that sentence elicited raucous laughter from the men behind him.
“Of course he does!”
“And I’ve a recommendation from Prinny himself!”
“We all do!”
Jackson reached into his pocket and produced the letter from Lady Forrester—as he did, the men behind him grew uncommonly quiet.
The butler perused the letter with an unseemly amount of leisure. (Jack felt certain that the old servant took no small amount of pleasure in the power he wielded.) Then, with a curt nod to the burly footman beside him, he handed the missive back.
“If you’ll follow me, sir,” the butler said as the door behind him opened with silent efficiency.
Cries of outrage came from the assembly.
“What?”
“You can’t mean to admit him! I’m a viscount!”
“I’m with him! We came together!”
But of course, these were ignored, and shortly silenced by one flex of the footman’s muscles, as he took up the central position, and Jackson, hauling his own trunk, followed the butler inside.
“Wait here,” the butler intoned, leaving him to go seek out his mistress, Jackson assumed.
Jackson removed his tricorn, shaking out his sandy hair into something resembling neatness. He pulled at his cuffs, straightened his coat, like the nervous schoolboy he used to be.
Alone in the foyer of the Forresters’ London home, he was immediately struck by a sense of déjà vu. He had never been in this house before, but he had been in this position before, long ago.
There is little more frightening to a thirteen-year-old boy than being removed from all you know, he thought, letting himself drift into memory. Even the horrific, tantalizing prospect of thirteen-year-old girls compares little to no longer being in the daily presence of your parents, the paths you know to the village where everyone knows you. Even when one begs their father to let him go to sea, those faces fading away makes a thirteen-year-old boy feel like nothing so much as a thirteen-year-old man, but without any means by which to handle the transition.
Luckily, Jack’s father knew something of being young and alone, and wrote a friend for help.
He tugged nervously his cuffs. They were already beginning to come up short, even though his mother had sewn his Naval College uniform not three months ago. He was already a tall boy, as a first year cadet towering over most of the second years and even some of the thirds . . . and in a career where he was constantly told to stand up straight, he could do little to hide it.
When Jack crossed the entrance of Crawley Manor, the Forresters’ country residence not five miles from Portsmouth, he had been expecting an inspection. Therefore, for the whole week leading up to this moment, he had been very careful with him uniform. His white pantaloons were spotless—a feat in and of itself for any thirteen-year-old boy, let alone one who had grown so increasingly nervous over the course of the week that he had spilled his food not once but twice at mealtimes. But somehow he had managed to keep everything from the top of his hat to the heel of his shoes in good order. Which was of the utmost importance, as he was to meet his possible future patron today.
Jack did not know what a future patron might want to know of him. He only knew that when he finally convinced his parents to allow him to attend the Royal Naval College, Jackson’s father had written to his old school friend Lord Forrester and asked him to look in on the boy every once in a while, as he was unable to do so in Lincolnshire. As Jackson’s father was always writing to great men asking for patronage for anyone of his and Mrs. Fletcher’s charitable causes (for Mr. Fletcher refused to yield to expectation of being a retiring country vicar, instead choosing to involve himself vigorously in the cause of war orphans and widows), Jack thought nothing of it.
He’d expected, at most, a letter from Lord Forrester. Instead, he had received an invitation.
As he was admitted to the hall, he tried very hard not to be awed by the grandeur of the house. But how could he not be? Marble and oak lined the massive room, making even the smallest sound, from his footsteps to a gasp he hadn’t managed to contain, echo across the space. When the butler went to fetch his master, Jackson couldn’t help but poke his head around the corner and peer into an even larger room! Why this one room must have been bigger than his entire house! After a few moments, Jack decided it must be the sitting room for receiving callers. And there were plenty of places to sit, he thought, making sure to keep his mouth from hanging open in a gape. The dozens of sofas and chairs and things looked so fine they would surely break if he touched them. He briefly glanced at the ceiling, two stories above. How did the ceiling stay up in so massive a space? Churches have flying buttresses and the like, reinforced pylons, but this place just seemed to soar high above.
He wondered for the umpteenth time that week just what on earth was expected of him. Surely, people that lived in a house this intimidating would look down at him as nothing more than a . . . charitable annoyance.
He had edged his foot into the sitting room, when he heard it. It sounded like a fork striking a glass, but somehow . . . human. It must have been the echo, he thought, but it almost sounded like a giggle. He immediately straightened to attention. But when no one emerged, his curiosity won out again, and his gaze returned to the sitting room. Where, if he was not mistaken, one of the heavy velvet drapes was twitching.
Unsure if his mind was playing tricks on him, Jackson thought it best to ignore the twitching curtain, and instead remain at attention. Surely, that’s what a man like Lord Forrester would want out of a cadet he sponsored. Someone who obeyed the rules, and stayed where he was told, and . . .
And there was that giggle again!
Finally, he couldn’t help it any longer. Perhaps some ruffian had snuck in and was hiding until he could thieve everything out of this room in the dark of night. Which Jack could not allow.
And so, he went over to the window, and drew back the curtain dramatically, his hand going automatically to his side, where his sword rested . . . which of course was not there, as he had no sword.
Instead of a thief however, Jack found two girls. One far littler than the other.
“Hide-and-seek!” cried the littlest, who could not have been more than three, with dimples and curly blonde hair that bounced when she shrieked with laughter.
“Not yet, Mandy!” the elder girl said in a hushed voice. She looked about nine or ten, and whereas her hair matched the youngster’s in shade, it was straight and plaited down her back. She looked up at Jack with the biggest green eyes, twinkling with mischief. “We’re hiding, don’t tell,” she whispered to Jack.
“Hiding from what?” he asked.
“Will you be quiet?” came a hushed whisper from the other side of the room—a brown, curly head popped up, freckles gone mad upon her nose and cheeks. “Papa will find us without any trouble when he hears you talking. And Mandy, you’re supposed to hide somewhere by yourself!”
But little Mandy just shook her head and inched closer to her sister.
“She couldn’t find any place to hide,” the elder girl whispered back.
“Of course she can, Sarah. You just baby her. Mandy, you’re small enough to fit in the cabinet, go over there.”
But Mandy simply shook her head and burrowed farther.
“Wait, are you playing some sort of game?” Jackson asked, utterly bewildered.
The eldest—Sarah—blinked back in surprise. “Of course we are. Haven’t you ever played hide-and-seek?”
“Well, I . . .” Before Jack could appropriately answer that question, which would have been embarrassingly in the negative (his mother, while a kind woman, did not approve of games where nothing was learned or made useful), footsteps were heard in the hallway beyond.
All three girls went rigid with excitement and popped back into their hiding places.
Just then, a barrel of a man came thudding through the hall, his posture that of an ogre about to attack.
“I know you’re in here!” he cried, a stern expression on his brow. When he saw Jack however, his expression cleared and he straightened.
“Oh! You must be Dickey’s boy!” he cried, his face no longer that of an ogre, but an easy smile on his face. “Forrester. Very pleased to have you in my home.”
“Er . . . yes, sir,” Jackson said—straightening to attention and bowing at the same time, which ended up as merely awkward. “My father is Richard Fletcher. I am Jackson Fletcher, and . . . they told me to wait in the hall, but I—”
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