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sensible about your appearance. Go to bed before I become as angry with you as I ought to be!"
Petrina looked at him with a little smile.
"You are not really angry," she said. "And you know as well as I do that it would have been
infuriating to have to pay up."
"Infuriating or not," the Earl said firmly, "in the future, if you have a problem of this sort you
will tell me about it. Is that a promise?"
"I am not . . . certain." Petrina hesitated. "To promise you in such a wholesale way would be ...
a leap in the dark."
"You will stop prevaricating!" the Earl roared at her. "Just because I am letting you off lightly
this time, I have no intention of allowing you to get into any more scrapes or take such risks in
the future."
He thought Petrina intended to argue, but instead she said unexpectedly:
"You have been very kind and helpful and much . . . nicer than I expected. So, if it pleases
you, I will promise."
"Without reservation?" he asked suspiciously.
"Without reservation!" Petrina echoed.
But there was a mischievous smile on her lips which he knew so well.
"After all," she added, "there cannot be many Sir Mortimers in the Beau Monde."
'You will tell me about every sort and type of problem before you try to tackle it yourself,"
the Earl said. "And also, Petrina, let me make it clear that I will not have you dressing up in my
clothes."
Petrina looked down at her pantaloons as if she had forgotten she was wearing them.
"Did you recognise them?"
"I cannot imagine anyone else in the house is likely to have an Eton jacket," the Earl replied.
"It is very comfortable," Petrina said with a smile. "You cannot imagine how constraining
skirts can be."
"That is not going to be an excuse for you to walk about as you are now," the Earl said. "I only
hope to God my grandmother does not see you."
"I wash I could tell her the whole story," Petrina said wistfully. "She would so enjoy it!"
This the Earl had to admit was true, but to retrieve his position of authority he merely said:
"Go to bed, you tiresome brat, and do not forget your promise or it will be Harrogate, or
worse, where you are concerned."
Petrina rose to her feet, still holding Claire's letters.
"Good-night, Guardian," she said. "You have really been very kind and civilised over this,
and I am grateful, even if you have injured my neck while my wrist will be black and blue."
"Did I really hurt you?" the Earl asked quickly.
"Quite a lot, as it happens," she answered, "and I think you ought to make reparation by
taking me riding with you."
"Now I suppose you are blackmailing me!"
"Will you or will you not pay up?"
"All right," he conceded, "but it is not to become a habit. I dislike feminine chatter first thing
in the morning."
"I will be as quiet and meek as a little mouse," Petrina promised.
"That is the last thing you are likely to be!" the Earl remarked. "Go to bed and leave me to
cope with all this mess."
Petrina looked down at the bundles of letters in the cash-box.
"At least," she said, "you will be able to discover if you have received more ardent and more
interesting love-letters yourself than those written to Sir Mortimer."
The Earl looked up at her half-angrily, then realised that once again she was trying to
provoke him.
"Go to bed!" he thundered.
He heard her give a little chuckle as she moved across the room towards the door.
* * *
Upstairs in her bed-room, Petrina put the letters in a safe place, then undressed, and having
hidden on top of her wardrobe the Earl's clothes, which she had found in a cupboard, she got
into bed.
In the darkness she thought over what had happened and decided that on the whole it was a
good thing that he had caught her.
Now he could deal with the other letters while she would not have known what to do with
them.
At the same time, it had been a moment of sheer terror when she felt him gripping the back
of her neck.
Petrina had learnt quite a lot since coming to London and she had known that while she had
been in danger of being arrested as a thief she could also have been in a different sort of danger.
There were, she had learnt, Rakes who pursued women in a way that she knew could be very
frightening.
Things that were said in conversations she had overheard and that she had read in
newspapers had told her a great deal about the world since she had been in London.
She had learnt that there was a great deal of unrest in the country over the restrictions
imposed by the Government, the wide-spread poverty, and, above all, the injustices under the
law.
The papers which the Earl took reported the political situation, which was something that
had never been discussed or even mentioned at Petrina's School.
Now she learnt that petitions for reform bombarded the Regent, in vain.
In Birmingham, she read, a town meeting of at least twenty-five thousand men who had
never had a Member of Parliament, and never would if the Government's line held, had elected a
radical Baronet as their representative.
The anger of the hundreds and thousands suffering from a renewed trade slump had
resulted in penny-a-week Political Clubs. They organised their own reading-rooms and
Sunday-Schools.
Parliament had passed, after four years of frustrating argument, an unenforceable act to limit
children in the cotton-mills to a twelve-hour day!
Petrina also read, in the more outspoken newspapers, the reports of the social conditions in
London and other great cities.
She had a feeling that if the Earl knew how interested she was in what was happening in a
very different sphere from the one in which he lived, he would somehow stop the information
from reaching her.
So she did not ask for the more scurrilous papers and magazines to which he subscribed, but [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
