“Absolutely certain.”
“But what if I meet someone who knows me? Someone who tells him about my past before I can?”
“As the wife of a simple country gentleman — for a gentleman he must be since his advertisement is very well worded — you are unlikely to come into contact with any members of the ton. No one will know who you are, so you will be able to tell your husband in your own time, when you feel the moment is right. Say six or seven years from now.”
Plum looked down the dusty road to the green at the center of the village. Ram’s Bottom had been a haven for her, but it had also been a prison. She had hidden herself and Thom away from the prying eyes of gossips, but the years were slipping by, and Thom deserved to have a better life than the poverty Plum could offer. “Very well. I will call later for the recommendation.”
“It will be waiting for you,” Cordelia said, waving as Plum turned and resolutely started toward the green, her mind full of the letter she would send to Mr. T. Harris. Along the way she noticed that several women were clustered together on the green in small clumps talking intensely, but she thought nothing of that. The ladies of Ram’s Bottom were notorious gossips, happy to spend hours in the analysis and dissection of each others’ character, antecedents, and offspring.
“No doubt they’re tearing some poor lady’s reputation to shreds,” she said to herself as she skirted the green and headed for the smithy.
A few minutes later Plum regretted her complacent attitude.
“I want ye,” Mr. Snaffle said, leaning in and spraying Plum with the odor of unwashed body, onions, and horse sweat. It was, she found, not a scent conducive to romance. Large arms and thick curly hair he might have, but Mr. Snaffle was definitely not going to suit her. “I want ye bad. Feel how bad my cods want ye.”
Before she knew what he was doing, a massive hand descended on hers and slapped it over the bulge in his tight breeches.
“Mr. Snaffle!” she gasped, and snatched her hand away as she tried to sidle out from under the brawny arm holding her pinned to the rough planking of the blacksmith’s shed. “You forget yourself! I have no interest in you or your cods, so please allow me to pass.”
The fetid smell increased as the blacksmith laughed in her face. Plum turned her head, wishing she’d sent Thom to have the pot mended — the convenient ploy she used to meet and consider the blacksmith as husband material — then immediately regretted such a cowardly thought.
“Ye play coy with me, Missus, but I know how much ye want me too. Give us a kiss.”
Plum tightened her fingers around the handle of the pot and gritted her teeth. Her life, one moment only mildly horrible, had turned into full-fledged, raging nightmare. “Mr. Snaffle, if you do not let me pass this instant, I shall be forced to take action against you.”
He leaned up against her, flattening her against the wall with his broad, sweaty chest. She shifted the pot, relieved he was just leaning his upper parts against her.
“No one cares iff’n ye scream, Missus. They all know ye for the trollop ye are, pretendin’ yer all high and mighty by marryin’ a man what was already married. Miss Stone says that yer own family won’t have nothin’ to do with ye. Give us a kiss,” he demanded again, spittle collecting in the corners of his fleshy lips.
“I am not a trollop,” Plum said softly, moving the pot slightly, so as to give her a longer backswing. “I have no idea how this Miss Stone — whoever she might be — found out about my marriage, but I can assure you that I am innocent of her charges. Now please release me, or I shall do you a bodily injury.”
He rubbed his chest against hers, his hands on her upper arms, holding her in place. “Everyone knows that ye’ll spread yer legs for any man what gives ye a taste of his manflesh.” He slid one hand up, grabbing a handful of her hair, jerking her head back. “I told ye to give us a kiss. I’m not of a mind to tell ye again!”
“Mr. Snaffle?” Plum swung the pot as far back as she could.
“Aye?” His repulsive lips were descending on hers.
“This is for your cods.” She brought the pot forward as hard as she could, striking him right at the junction of his legs. He screamed and fell backward, clutching at himself, spitting curses and profanities as he rolled over into a ball. Plum took a deep breath of relatively clean air, and stepped forward to stand over the writhing man.
“Henceforth I shall take my smithy business elsewhere,” she said, and gave him a swift kick in the kidneys just because she felt like it. “You’re lucky I’m a lady and not given to spite!”
With her head held high she left the smithy, a stubborn, brittle smile on her face, the eyes of what felt like the entire village scoring her flesh as she hurried home, clinging to the hope that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as Mr. Snaffle made out, but knowing it was much, much worse. She would have to move again, leave Ram’s Bottom, and how was she to accomplish that with only five shillings and no friends but Cordelia?
“Blessed St. Genevieve,” Plum all but sobbed as she stumbled into the tiny cottage she shared with Thom. “I’m going to have to marry Mr. T. Harris, no matter what sort of man he is. With luck, no one in Raving will know about me until I can marry him.”
“Marry who?” a low, disinterested voice asked.
Plum clutched the wall and fought to regain her breath as well as swallow her tears of self-pity. “Oh, Thom, I didn’t see you. What are you doing down there by the coal scuttle?”
Thom’s golden brown eyes considered her aunt for a moment before her head dipped below the roughplanked table in front of her, returning a moment later when she stood up, a tiny kitten cupped in her hand. “Maple has had her litter. Only three, but one was born dead. I was just making sure the two kittens were all right. Who do you have to marry?”
“Whom,” Plum corrected absently, her heart still pounding from the scene in the blacksmith’s. “I am going to marry — hope to marry — a Mr. T. Harris. If he’ll have me, that is.”
“Oh,” Thom said, and bent down to return the kitten to the nest she had made for Maple and her babies.
“Oh? Is that it? You’re not going to ask me who Mr. T. Harris is, nor why I am going to marry him?”
Thom rose and dusted her sooty hands off on her lavender gown, Plum noted with a mental sigh. It wasn’t the soiling of the gown she regretted, it was the tomboy nature of her niece. Thom was twenty years old, a young woman of intelligence and high spirits, of a good, if impoverished, family, and if she wasn’t the loveliest woman on the face of the earth, she was very pretty, with cropped chestnut curls, large dark gray eyes, and a very sweet smile. When she smiled, which Plum had to admit wasn’t often, Thom being a serious, takes-everything-literally sort who would rather spend time with the various animals she had collected than with the two-legged variety most young women preferred.
“Although how you are to catch a husband with no dowry, and a notorious aunt, is beyond me.” Plum sighed again, this time aloud.
Thom cocked her head and watched as Plum plucked her bonnet off and sank down into the rickety chair next to the fire. “I thought it was you who were planning to marry? I’ve told you before that I have no desire to marry. Men are so”—she wrinkled her nose as if she smelled cabbage cooking—“silly. Stupid. Mindless. I have yet to meet one who makes any sort of sense. To tell you the truth, I don’t think there are any. I will do quite well without one of my own, thank you.”
“Oh, Thom,” Plum said, on the verge of tears, but unable to keep from smiling at her niece’s dismissal of men as a whole. “What would I do without you?”
“Well, I imagine just what you are doing now,” Thom replied. “You do seem to have the habit of talking to yourself, Aunt Plum, so if I weren’t here, you’d probably be right where you are, telling the room that you’re going to marry Mr. Harris. Who is Mr. Harris?”
Plum blessed the day Thom came to her. If anyone could make her laugh at herself, it was her niece. “Mr. T. Harris is a man in search of a wife, and as I am a woman in search of a husband, I am hoping that we will suit one another. You wouldn’t mind me marrying, would you Thom? You know I wouldn’t marry a man who couldn’t keep you, as well.”
Thom shrugged and filled a small cracked saucer with the last of the milk, setting it down next to the new mother. “If it will make you happy, I don’t mind in the least, as long as Mr. Harris won’t mind me bringing my animals. I couldn’t leave them behind.”
“No, of course not,” Plum said, trying to envision just how she was going to tell her prospective husband that not only was he gaining a wife and a niece but three cats, six dogs, two goats, four tame mice, and a pheasant that thought it was a rooster. Her mind boggled at that thought. She shook her head, clearing it of the morose thought that she was doomed, and rose to find a relatively clean scrap of paper before settling down at the table to write a letter so dazzling, it would be sure to capture Mr. Harris’s attention. “I pray he is an honest, likeable man with no secrets that will come back to haunt me. I just don’t think I could stand another husband with secrets.”
“How many applicants remain, Temple?” Harry asked, wearily pushing up his spectacles as he leaned back in the private room bespoken at the local inn for the purpose of conducting interviews.
Temple consulted his list. “Let me see, applicant number fourteen was reported too ill to travel…”
“Strike her from the list. If she is of frail health, she won’t be able to stand up to the strain of the children. It takes a strong woman, in full possession of her faculties — both mental and physical — to deal with my brood.”
“…and number twenty-three changed her mind at the door…”
“Shy. Shy won’t do either. My wife has to have a firm sense of purpose. Determination, too. Grit wouldn’t hurt, either.”
“…and numbers thirty and thirty-one appear to have run off together…”
Harry raised both eyebrows and forbore to comment.
“…and number thirty-three, the last applicant, appears to have decided not to meet with you.” Temple looked up. “There are no more, sir.”
Harry stood and stretched, rubbing the back of his neck and collecting his hat. “Well, that was six hours wasted. I hope to God I never have to meet so many women again.”
Temple trotted alongside Harry as he strode out of the inn, pausing to pass a few coins to the innkeeper before heading for the small stable block. “Were there none that meet with your specifications, my lord?”
“Shhh!” Harry waved Temple’s words away as he waited for Thor to be brought out. “No my lording, Temple. The fewer people who know my true identity, the better. At least until I find a wife.”
“My apologies, sir. Were there no women—”