Society's Most Disreputable Gentleman Read Online Free Page A

pooled on the floor beneath the windows.
    Morning sun, judging by the hue, he thought, trying to get his bearings. Brighter than light through a porthole.
    About the moment Greville realised he was in a proper bedchamber—a vast, elegant bedchamber—in Lord Bronning’s home at Ashton Grove, Devonshire, praise-the-Lord-England, he heard a discreet cough. Turning towards the sound, he spied a young man in footman’s livery standing inside the doorway, bearing a laden tray.
    â€˜Morning, sir,’ the lad said, bowing. ‘Sands sent me up withsomething from the kitchen, thinking you’d likely be right sharp-set after so many hours.’
    â€˜Have I been asleep long?’ Greville asked, still trying to recapture a sense of place and time.
    â€˜Aye,’ the young man replied. ‘All the first night, the next day and now ’tis almost noon of the next. Some of the staff was worried you was about to stick your spoon in the wall. But Mrs Pepys—that’s the housekeeper, sir—she’s done some nursing and she said as long as you was breathing deep and regular, there weren’t no danger of you dying and that you’d feel much the better for the rest.’
    He did feel much better, Greville thought. Moreover, he realised suddenly, for the first time since his wounding over a month ago, he hadn’t awakened to the slow, strength-sapping burn of fever.
    He was also, he discovered, truly starving. Contemplating what might lie beneath the plate cover on the tray, his mouth began to water.
    â€˜You are right, I am very hungry,’ he told the footman.
    â€˜Shall I put the tray on the bed here for you, sir?’
    â€˜Yes, that would be fine. Thank you…’ He hesitated.
    â€˜Luke, sir,’ the footman supplied. ‘Sands says I’m to assist you with dressing and such, if’n you need any help.’
    â€˜I’d like a bath after I’ve eaten, if you would arrange that. I’ll be better able to ascertain how much assistance I’ll require then. Oh—and if you please, ask that housekeeper for some linen bandages. I’ve a wound I’ll have to rebind.’
    â€˜Very good, sir,’ the footman said, depositing the tray in front of him. ‘I’ll go see about your bath. By the by, there’s a chest by the fireplace and a note sent by your sister, Lady Greaves.’
    Greaves? He did not even know which of his sisters had married into that name.
    After being gone so long from England, his time spent athard labour in a job for which he’d had no preparation or training, the idea that he was part of a family beyond the wooden walls of the Illustrious seemed disorienting. Not that he’d paid a good deal of attention to his closest kin before his involuntary removal from British soil. A frisson of guilt passed through him. Truth be told, he’d seldom troubled himself to think at all about the family that had pampered and sheltered him for the first sixteen years of his life, before his father and sisters departed for India, leaving him at Cambridge. He’d contacted Papa only when he needed him to call upon his Army contacts to arrange Greville’s service with the commissariat during the Waterloo campaign. And afterwards, wanting for some sort of position to support himself, he’d solicited his cousin the marquess’s help in providing one.
    He shifted uncomfortably. He still had much to atone for in rectifying how that latter situation had turned out.
    â€˜Let me have the letter before you go,’ he told the footman. ‘I’ll deal with the trunk later.’
    After passing him the folded missive, the footman bowed himself out of the room. Greville’s growling stomach reminded him it had been many hours since he’d last eaten—he had only a dim memory of wolfing down some sort of stew sent up the night of his arrival. He put the letter aside, content to wait to discover which