The Chaotic Miss Crispino. Kasey Michaels

Allegra with Lord Dugdale and then walking away prompted him to turn his head and look down at the strange young girl.

      “Allegra!” he was startled into saying, for she was gripping the rail with both hands, huge, crystalline tears running down her wind-reddened cheeks. “Why are you crying? Surely you’re not going to miss having the Timoteo dogs barking at your heels?”

      “I shall never see my beloved Italia again, Valerian,” she answered in a small voice, her gaze still intent on the rapidly disappearing shoreline as she gave out with a shuddering sigh. “My madre, my papà they live in that earth. They are lost to me forever; all of what is home to me is now gone, while I sail away to an uncertain future with a grandfather I don’t know. I didn’t know how much it would hurt, Valerian, or how very much frightened I would feel.”

      Before he could think, before he could weigh the right or the wrong of it, Valerian gathered Allegra’s small frame close against his chest, where she remained, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, as, together, they watched the only homeland she had ever known fade from sight.

      CHAPTER THREE

      AGNES KITTREDGE sat in the outdated drawing room she would most happily have given her best Kashmir shawl to redecorate, awaiting the arrival of her children, seventeen-year-old Isobel and her older brother, Gideon, who had reached the age of three and twenty, Agnes was sure, thanks only to his fond mama’s most assiduous nursing of his delicate constitution.

      Mrs. Kittredge’s brother, Baron Dennis Dugdale, was upstairs in his rooms, his gouty right foot swathed in bandages Agnes would much rather see bound tightly about his clearly disordered head.

      She was furious, Agnes Kittredge was, pushed nearly to the brink of distraction by the disquieting thought that her beloved brother, Dennis, could have the nerve to recover his health after he had most solemnly promised that his demise was imminent. Was there no one, who could be trusted to keep his word anymore, not even a brother?

      Not only had her aging sibling once more become the possessor of depressingly good health, but his general demeanor had reverted to one of such high good humor that Agnes, who had never been a tremendous advocate of levity, was lately finding herself hard-pressed to keep a civil tongue in her head whenever the jolly Baron was about.

      Lord Dugdale’s near-constant, jocular remarks alluding to a “change in the wind,” and his oblique hints at a coming “surprise to knock your nose more sideways than it already is, Aggie,” were not only most depressingly annoying, they were beginning to worry her very much.

      Everything had always been so settled, so regulated, in the life they all lived at Number 23 in the Royal Crescent Terrace. Agnes ruled, Isobel preened, Gideon gambled, and dearest Denny paid the bills. It was all so simple, so orderly. Now Lord Dugdale was making noises as if this arrangement no longer could be regarded as the ordinary, and that soon there would come a major readjustment in all their lives.

      Agnes had agreed with this notion in part at first, when the Baron had spoken so earnestly of his imminent demise. There most assuredly would be changes at Number 23 when that unhappy day finally dawned.

      Agnes would still rule, Isobel would still preen, Gideon would still gamble. But forever gone from the scene would be Lord Dugdale and his annoying habit of closely questioning the amount of the bills his family presented to him with every expectation that they be paid at once, and without his first issuing a sermon about the evils of incautious spending.

      Once her brother, rest his soul, was safely underground, Agnes would be free to run the household exactly as she wished, without the wearying necessity to beg for every groat. This sort of “change” Agnes had looked forward to with great expectation, nearly unmixed with sorrow for the soon-to-be-departed brother, who, after all, had led a good long life and deserved his rest.

      It was all that new doctor’s fault, Agnes had decided when her brother, far from sliding conveniently into his grave, began to make a near-miraculous recovery from a violent uproar of the bowels. Who ever heard of such a thing? No bleeding. No leeches. No thin gruel. Just plenty of fresh air, exercise, and good, hearty food. The treatment should have killed the Baron, but it hadn’t.

      Agnes hadn’t allowed the doctor back in the house since the first day Lord Dugdale had sat up and loudly called for his pipe and a full bottle of his favorite cherry ripe.

      “Not that it did me a penny worth of good,” she groused, arranging her shawl more firmly about her bony shoulders as she thought of her brother’s refusal to suffer an immediate relapse. “The man’s body has been restored at the cost of his wits. It had been nearly three months, and still we must hear daily about this surprise of his. It is time and more I consider placing the poor, sainted man in an institution where there are those trained in dealing with delusional lunatics such as Denny.”

      “Talking to yourself, Mama? I must admit I do know of some who do so from time to time, but then I believe those people are usually rather deep in their cups. Have you been nipping while my back was turned, Mama? It isn’t like you; but then this entire household has been rather irregular for weeks on end now, hasn’t it?”

      Agnes Kittredge looked up at the sound of her beloved Gideon’s voice. “Darling!” she exclaimed, patting the space beside her on the settee. “Come sit down and tell me how you feel this morning. You were abroad quite late last night, I believe. The damp night air isn’t good for you, you know. Have you breakfasted? I expressly ordered the eggs be poached this morning, as they are much more suited to your delicate constitution in that form than the hard-cooked variety you persist in eating whenever my back is turned.”

      He sat down dutifully, spreading his coattails neatly as he did so. “I shunned eggs entirely this morning, Mama, in favor of dry toast dipped in watered wine, for I woke with the most shocking headache. Do you think it’s coming on to rain? It couldn’t have been the canary I partook of last night, for you know I never drink to excess.”

      “Indeed no, Gideon. You would never do that, not with your fragile system.” Agnes turned to look adoringly upon her son. Gideon Kittredge was as handsome as his mother and sister were plain—although how this quirk of nature came about no one save Lord Dugdale, who once mentioned the idea of his sister having played her husband false at least the once, had ever been able to understand the phenomenon.

      Gideon had been born scarcely five months after his parents’ marriage, a sickly babe whose small size and poor chances for survival lent at least partial credence to the outrageous fib that he had been born much too soon due to an unfortunate fright his mother had taken at the sight of a tumbling dwarf in the small traveling circus she and her husband had chanced upon the same day Agnes was delivered of her firstborn child.

      When Gideon didn’t expire as expected, Agnes, through guilt over her lie or natural motherly devotion only she knew, threw her entire energies into coddling and protecting the child well past the point of necessity or even common sense.

      Gideon’s sniffles were a sure sign of a lung inflammation, his cough no less than threatening consumption, his sighs a dire portent of some crippling, disabling condition that must be averted at all costs. Isobel was conceived and born almost without Agnes’s notice and shuffled off to a separate nursery so that she could not contaminate her brother’s air.

      When Mister Kittredge had the misfortune to break his neck in a hunting accident, Agnes had little time for grieving, for she was too busy thanking her lucky stars that the man hadn’t instead decided to succumb to some lingering illness that might either be passed on to Gideon or take her away overlong from her main project in life, that of taking care of her son.

      That Gideon had grown from a whining, totally unlovable child into a self-indulgent adult concerned only with his own wants and desires could not be surprising. Even less of a revelation was that he thoroughly disliked his mother, the woman having earned his disgust because of his easy ability to manipulate her.

      Moving closer to her now, Gideon laid his dark head on Agnes’s shoulder and gazed up into her watery blue eyes. “You appear distressed, dearest Mama. Is there anything I can do to help?