Carla Kelly by Libby's London Merchant

Author:Libby's London Merchant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2012-10-10T04:11:07+00:00

12

THE PEACE she had expected to find in the quiet of her room was not there.

The hot bath had been welcome. With a sigh of relief, Libby had scrubbed off the grime and mud until her skin glowed pink, and she washed her hair until it squeaked.

“It does wash off, Dr. Cook, just like you said,” she said out loud.

And yet it didn’t, at the same time. As she thoughtfully scrubbed at skin already clean, she knew that the experience would never rub off. In idle moments, when all other subjects had been worked over and exhausted, she and Lydia used to speculate why someone as well-born and wealthy as Anthony Cook had felt the need to soil his cuffs with medical school.

She understood now, and it had changed her. Libby sighed and ran her hands under the water, creating whirlpools and undertows. It was unlikely in the extreme that she would ever have the opportunity to talk to Anthony about her feelings. She had already come to know that he would only blush and stammer and bump into something in his hurry to get away, as he had done after the chocolate merchant had made his startling revelation. Anthony Cook was remarkably efficient in an emergency, heroic even, but he was not a man readily accessible to earnest conversation. A pity, she thought. I would like to have known him better.

She drew up her knees and rested her forehead against them. “As it is, Dr. Cook, I will not joke about you anymore,” she vowed.

Any hopes of further contemplative time deserted her while she still sat in the tub. Lydia, her face animated, her eyes bright and brimming over with good humor, had eased herself into the bedroom, pulled up a hassock next to the tin tub, and waited for her cousin to ask her about Eustace Wiltmore.

That Libby had already taken a high dislike to the balding man with his ever-present quizzing glass, she would never have admitted to her cousin. Libby sat in the cooling water while Lydia, in that breathless way of hers, went through the chance meeting at the Pavilion, the dance when she stood up three times to waltz with Eustace, much to Aunt Ames’ discomfiture.

“Oh, but your mama is a high stickler,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes. “I do not know when I have been so thoroughly wrung out and hung up to dry.”

“You should have heard her with Papa’s lieutenants when they did something she disapproved of,” Libby said, her eyes lighting up at the remembrance of those fearsome dressings-down. “I don’t believe she ever knew—such a conspiracy we had!—but she was known as Tommy’s Little Captain among Papa’s troops.”

“I do not doubt it,” Lydia said. “‘How does it look?’ ‘What do you owe your family name,’” she mimicked. “If I heard it once, I heard it dozens of times.”

She was silent then. Libby stirred the bathwater about with her finger, watching the circles widen. “Did you know he was the Eustace?

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