She passed over the second cane, which was sturdy indeed. “Why must you go about armed even in your own home?”
He used both canes to maneuver to a couch arranged along the inside wall. “You don’t ask about my unsteady balance. Thank you for that. If you wouldn’t mind sliding that hassock—”
Abigail gave the hassock a shove with her boot. The thing would have been hard to move for a man using two canes.
“How often do you fall?” An impolite question, but then, Lord Stephen was not a polite man, and he’d already reported falling “regularly.” He was mannerly when it suited him, and Abigail suspected he was kind to those he cared for. He would never tolerate a slight, and never leave a debt unpaid.
That he occasionally went sprawling offended her on his behalf. He wasn’t nice, but in his way, he was honorable, a far more worthy virtue in Abigail’s opinion.
“In my youth, I toppled over constantly. Boys do not carry canes, and I hated that I was different. I’d forget where I put my canes, leave my room without them. For my Bath chair, I spewed maledictions too vile to blight a lady’s ears. I was not reconciled to my fate, and thus everybody around me had to suffer as well.”
He rubbed his knee as he spoke, which required that he bend forward rather than rest against the cushions.
“Shall I remove your boots?” Abigail asked.
“You’d play footman for me?”
“I will remove your boots so you don’t get dirt on the hassock.”
He left off rubbing his knee. “Do your worst. My boots aren’t as snug as some. They can’t be or I’d never endure their removal.”
His boot in fact slipped off easily. It wasn’t much larger than one of Abigail’s men’s boots, though the calf was longer. The second boot was a trifle more closely fitted. She set them both within his reach and took the place beside him.
“Does massage help?”
“Yes, but Miss Abbott, I must forbid—damn it, Abigail. That’s not fair.”
She’d wrapped both hands around his knee and made the same smooth, slow circles he’d used. “That you have a bad knee isn’t fair, and if the knee has become unreliable, the ankle and hip are likely in pain as well. Am I pressing firmly enough?”
He flopped back against the cushions, gaze on the ceiling. “My dragon’s name is Abigail. I’ve been waiting for inspiration to name her, and lo, the appellation fits.”
“You are trying to make me blush. Flattery is pointless, my lord. The joint isn’t quite as it should be, is it?” Not that she was well acquainted with the particulars of a man’s knee bones.
“You have a gift for understatement, Miss Abbott. Allow me to offer a reciprocally understated observation: Ladies do not apply their hands to the persons of ailing gentlemen. Desist, if you please.”
He was protesting for form’s sake, bless him. “You are not ailing. You were injured, long ago. How did it happen?”
He gave her a peevish look. “My father decided in a drunken rage that a boy with a bad leg would be a more effective beggar than one who could scramble out of range of Papa’s fists. He later intimated that stomping the hell out of me was an accident. I was the accident, and his violence toward me was quite intentional.”
Abigail kept her hands moving in slow, steady strokes, though Lord Stephen’s recitation upset her. “I try not to take cases involving children. Such matters can provoke me to an unseemly temper.”
“Abigail, please stop. You need not exercise your temper on my behalf. I had my revenge.”
She ceased massaging his knee but remained on the sofa beside him. “Good. A man such as your father deserves a thorough serving of retribution. That he spent coin on gin instead of providing for his children was his shame, not yours, and that he’d do violence against his own small son…”
Would that she was merely blushing. Instead Abigail felt tears welling. They were not for Lord Stephen, or not exclusively for him. They were for fatigue, and homesickness, old lost love, and all of the children who could not be protected from horrid fates.
“I miss Malcolm.” The stupidest words ever to escape from a woman’s mouth.
“Miss Abbott…Abigail, please don’t cry.” A linen handkerchief so fine as to be translucent dangled before Abigail’s eyes. “You must not cry. I had my revenge. I killed the old devil, so nobody need ever cry for me again.”
She took the handkerchief, which was redolent of his exquisite scent. “You don’t fool me, my lord. Your father needed killing—my Quaker family would disown me for that sentiment—but I killed my mother, and I know taking the life of a parent is a difficult wound for a child to heal regardless of how it happens.”
Chapter Four
As a youth, Stephen had occupied himself with deciding which day had been the worst of his life. The day he’d killed his father had not made the list. The day his father had smashed his knee hadn’t either. At the time, a very young Stephen had shrugged it off as just another beating from old Jack Wentworth. Slower to heal and more painful than others, but all in a day’s suffering.
The day he’d fallen face-first into the grass of Berkeley Square while trying to manage two canes and deliver an ice to a viscount’s blushing daughter was on that list. So was the day Quinn had been marched to the scaffold for a murder he hadn’t committed. What had been Abigail Abbott’s worst day, and why did she weep for the company of an ill-mannered terrier she didn’t even own?
“Did you slip some rat poison into your mother’s gin?” Stephen asked, surely the least genteel question a gentleman had ever asked a lady.
She looked up from his handkerchief. “You laid your father low with rat poison? Very enterprising of you, my lord.”
Nobody had ever referred to Stephen as enterprising in quite those admiring tones. “I was lame, eight years
