Read Online The Adventuress by Carole Nelson Douglas - Free Book Online

nodded to the closet. Godfrey pulled away the chair. The door exploded open as a wet, disheveled creature shot into the room, then halted to blink at each of us in turn.
    The sopping and tangled hair, the wild eyes, the raging energy so uncontained—I had seen them before. A tantrum carried to such extremes becomes dangerous.
    Without thinking, I stepped forward to confront this overwrought, overgrown child, my French crudely accented perhaps, but every syllable imbued with a language I spoke much more fluently: discipline.
    I heard my own commanding tones snap out like a ringmaster’s whip; I spoke as a parent, as a governess.
    “You will take charge of yourself,” I ordered. “You will attend to the disorder in your dress, and then we will address the disorder in your thoughts. Enough of this screaming and kicking. You are not a child. You will behave as an adult. Now, to the fire, for soon you will be shaking with chills. I am Miss Huxleigh. Mrs. Norton and I will see to you. We mean you no harm, which is more than you can say for yourself. What is your name, child? Speak up, we heard you well enough moments ago.”
    She muttered, “Louise.”
    “Ah, Louise, a most suitable name. Come then, there is not a moment to be wasted, child. You must be very tired.”
    Irene was waiting to drape Godfrey’s cast-off blanket over the girl’s shoulders, which began to heave with cold and the icy backwash of excessive emotion. She began sobbing and wailing, rather than kicking and flailing. Irene and I eyed each other over her bent head and nodded our mutual relief.
    Irene spoke then, her French as fluid as the Seine, her tone musically coaxing, all solicitude and sympathy where I had been all iron and starch.
    Godfrey observed us with almost comical amazement before drawing me aside. “The girl was absolutely incorrigible with me. When I insisted that she calm down, she called me a brute. When I soothed her, she accused me of being a seducer. Yet you and Irene play the same old tunes in quick succession and she gentles like a lamb.”
    “It is a matter of delicate timing and decisiveness, Godfrey,” I said with some satisfaction as Irene crooned a French lullaby of little nothings in the girl’s ear.
    Once certified as reasonably dry, Godfrey was sent below to wait with the coachman. Irene and I remained above to extract the distraught girl from her wet clothes.
    Irene repeatedly asked for her family’s name.
    “Non, non!" the waif wailed, shaking her damp hair until rattails whipped at our hovering faces.
    Even when we had lured her to the privacy of the screen, she balked at removing her clothing. “Ruine,” she moaned over and over. “Je suis ruine!"
    I am ruined. Even a sheltered spinster such as myself well knew what that meant. Obviously, a gently bred girl lay beneath the raw despair and hysteria. Some unprincipled man had lured her into a compromising situation. I thought of the angelic plaster face we had seen at the morgue. That poor girl’s story had been sealed by death. No wonder the one before us had fought Godfrey so savagely for saving her life.
    Irene unclasped the cameo pinned to the girl’s soggy collar and handed it to me with a significant glance. Even I, with my dull appreciation of fine jewels, recognized an exquisite carving that surely dated to the last century.
    A gold bangle of good quality circled her right wrist; she fought briefly as I unclasped it. On her left hand, a gash across one knuckle mirrored the scratches Godfrey had suffered.
    Once we began to undo her clothing, she began to struggle again. In vain did Irene urge my freshly laundered skirt and shirtwaist upon her. Louise’s agonized charcoal-hued eyes darkened further and she shook her head, her arms crossed protectively over her chest.
    “Child, you cannot go out into the night in these wet things,” Irene said.
    Her appeals succeeded by degrees; we managed to obtain Louise’s wet petticoats and skirt in exchange for