She planted the cigar between her teeth again, doffed an imaginary hat, and made him an exaggerated bow.
For an instant he forgot where he was, as his mind darted from the present and caught on a memory. Something so familiar, but from long ago. He’d seen this before. Or experienced it.
But the feeling vanished as swiftly as it had come.
“Well done, m’dear,” he said coolly. “Vastly amusing.”
“Not half so amusing as the original,” she answered, boldly eying him up and down.
Ignoring the heat her brazen survey generated, he laughed and, amid scattered applause, strode toward her. As he made his way through the crowd, he saw her beautiful countenance settle into a harder expression, while her evil mouth curled into the smallest fraction of a smile.
He’d seen that coolly mocking look before, but this time he didn’t quite believe it. Perhaps it was the smoke and the sickly light, but he thought what flickered in her eyes was uncertainty.
And there again he discerned the girl within the beautiful monstrosity. And he wanted to pick her up and carry her away from this infernal place, away from these drunken swine with their roving eyes and lecherous thoughts. If she must mock and ridicule him, he thought, let her do it for him only.
…you didn’t want me to hit anyone else but you.
He shook off the memory of her infuriating words along with the absurd sense of foreboding they stirred, as they’d done last night.
“I’ve only one small criticism,” he said, pausing a pace away from her.
She lifted an eyebrow.
About them he heard the low murmur of voices. A cough here. A belch there. Yet he’d no doubt their onlookers listened avidly. They were newsmen, after all.
“The cigar,” he said. He frowned down at the one resting between her long, slightly ink-stained fingers. “The cigar is all wrong.”
“You don’t say!” She frowned down at it as well, mimicking his expression. “But this is a Trichinopoli cheroot.”
From an inner pocket of his coat, he withdrew a slim silver cigar case. He opened it and held it out to her. “As you can see, these are longer and thinner. The tobacco’s color indicates a higher quality. Do take one.”
She shot him a quick glance, then shrugged, tossed her cheroot into the fire, and took one of his. She rolled it between her graceful fingers. She sniffed it.
It was a cool enough performance, but Vere was near enough to see what others couldn’t: the barely discernible pink tinting the curve of her cheekbones, the quickened rise and fall of her bosom.
No, she was not so fully in command of herself as she made others believe. She was not so case-hardened and cynical and impudently self-assured as she seemed.
He was strongly tempted to lean in closer and discover whether the hint of a blush would deepen. The trouble was, he’d already caught her scent, and that, he’d discovered last night, was a mantrap.
He turned away from her and toward the audience, some of whom had found their tongues, which they employed in obligatory ribald witticsms about the cigar.
“I beg your pardon for the interruption, gentlemen,” Vere said. “Do carry on. The drinks are on me.”
Without a backward glance—as though he’d forgotten her already—he sauntered out the way he’d come.
He’d come this way, into this hellhole of a tavern in Fleet Street, intending to erase any wrong impressions she might be entertaining about his appearance at Bridewell this morning.
He’d planned to make a great production of returning her pencil—before an audience of nosy scribblers—while indicating with suitable innuendoes that the writing instrument wasn’t all she’d lost in the hackney last night.
By the time he was done, she’d be convinced beyond any doubt that he was the obnoxious, conceited, conscienceless debauchee everyone—and rightly—believed he was. A few more hints would suffice to convince her that he’d only recently emerged from a bawdy house in the neighborhood when he’d come upon Trent and Miss Price, by which time His Grace had altogether forgotten Mary Bartles existed.
Consequently, it was logically impossible he’d come to obtain her release and send her to his man of business to make whatever arrangements were necessary to get her the hell out of London and settled comfortably so he wouldn’t have to hear about her ever again or think about her and her bedamned sick baby.
If any good deeds had been done, Vere would have made clear, Bertie Trent alone was responsible.
As plans went, it had been a good one, especially considering he’d devised it while in the throes of a near-death experience, thanks to the swill Crockford passed off as champagne and a grand total of about twenty-two minutes’ sleep.
But Vere had forgotten this very good plan the instant he’d paused in the doorway and discerned the girl under the touseled mop of golden hair.
Now, recalling the faint blush and the quickened breathing, he abandoned the plan altogether.
He’d mistaken her. She was not, quite, what she made the world believe she was. She was not, quite, immune to him. The fortress was not impregnable. He’d perceived a chink. And being what he was—obnoxious, conceited, conscienceless, et cetera, et cetera—he was duty bound to get inside, if he had to dismantle her defenses brick by brick.
Or rather, he amended while his mouth curled into a dangerous smile, button by button.
Blakesleigh, Bedfordshire
On the Monday following Lord Ainswood’s encounter with Miss Grenville at the Blue Owl, the Ladies Elizabeth and Emily Mallory, ages seventeen and fifteen respectively, were reading all about it in the pages of the Whisperer.
They were not supposed to be reading the scandal sheet. They were not allowed to peruse even the respectable newspapers that arrived daily at Blakesleigh. Their uncle, Lord Mars, allotted time every day during which he read aloud those portions he deemed fit for innocent ears. His ears, and his eyes as well, were not so innocent, for he’d been a politician all of his adult life. Privately, he read everything, including the scandal sheets.
The paper the young ladies were studying late this night, by the light of the fire in their bedroom, had been liberated from a large stack of periodicals belowstairs, awaiting the rag and bottle collector.
Like others liberated before, this one would be consigned to the flames as soon as they had gleaned as much as they could about their guardian’s doings.
Their guardian was the seventh Duke of Ainswood. They were Charlie’s daughters, Robin’s sisters.
The firelight at present made fiery threads in the pair of auburn heads bent over the paper. When they finished reading the accounts of their guardian’s encounter with Miss Grenville at Crockford’s and the Blue Owl, matching pairs of sea-green eyes met, and both youthful countenances wore the same expression of mingled perplexity and amusement.
“Obviously something interesting happened in the hackney when he ‘escorted’ her from Crockford’s,” said Emily. “I told you Vinegar Yard wasn’t the end of it. She knocked him on his arse. That had to get his attention.”
Elizabeth nodded. “And obviously, she’s pretty. I’m sure he wouldn’t have tried to kiss her if she wasn’t.”
“Clever, too. I wish I had seen how she did that trick. I understand the pretending-to-faint part, and I can picture the uppercut, but I still can’t picture how she dropped him.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Elizabeth said confidently. “We simply have to keep trying.”
“I’m not going to try smoking cigars,” Emily said, making a face. “Not with Uncle John’s cheroots, at any rate. I did it once and thought I should never eat again. I cannot think how she did it without puking all over Cousin Vere.”
“She’s a journalist. Only think of the filthy places she must enter to get her stories. She can smoke cigars because she has a strong stomach. If you had one, you wouldn’t get sick.”
“Will she write about him, do you think?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “We’ll have
to wait and find out. The next Argus comes out the day after tomorrow.”
It wouldn’t arrive at Blakesleigh, however, until Thursday at the earliest. Then it would pass through several hands, including the butler’s, before it joined the stack of discards.
They both knew they must wait at least a week after its arrival. Their Uncle John never read aloud from the Argus, not even the fictional Rose of Thebes. Its hoydenish—and that was putting it mildly—heroine might have an unfortunate effect upon the suggestible minds of young ladies.
He would have been appalled if he had realized how closely the two young daughters of his wife’s brother identified with the fictional Miranda. It was just as well, then, that he didn’t know they considered the wicked Diablo the hero of the story, else Lord Mars would have concluded their minds were disordered by grief, and sent for a physician.
But Elizabeth and Emily had learned very young to live with heartache. They had grieved hard with each loss, and raged, too, because their father had told them it was natural to feel angry.
In time, the rage eased, and the painful grief subsided into quiet sorrow. Now, two years after losing their beloved father and nearly eighteen months after the death of the “baby” brother they’d doted upon, their natural zest for life was returning.
The world was no longer uniformly black. There were dark moments, to be sure, but there was sunshine as well. And one bright beam of sunshine was their guardian, whose doings afforded no end of vicarious excitement in what, at Blakesleigh, was a stultifyingly tame existence.
“I’ll wager anything that half the letters Aunt Dorothea gets from her friends are about him,” Elizabeth said, after a long sigh about the waiting period.
“I doubt the gossips know any more than the Whisperer does. They get everything secondhand. Or third-hand.” Emily looked at her sister. “I’m not sure Papa would approve of our nosing about in Aunt Dorothea’s correspondence box. We should not think of it.”
“I’m not sure he’d approve of no one telling us anything about our own guardian,” said Elizabeth. “It’s dis-respectful of Papa, who named him guardian, isn’t it? Remember how he would read his friends’ letters, and laugh, and say, ‘Only listen to what your Cousin Vere has done this time, the rascal.’”
Emily smiled. “‘A hellion,’ he’d say. ‘A true Mallory hellion, like your grandpa and his brothers.’”
“‘The last of the old, true breed,’” Elizabeth softly quoted her father. “‘Vere, as in veritas.’”
“‘Aylwin—formidable friend.’ He was a friend to Robin, wasn’t he?”
“And formidable.” Elizabeth’s eyes glistened. “They couldn’t stop him. They kept us out when Robin was dying, because they were all afraid. But not Cousin Vere.” She took her sister’s hand. “He was true to Robin.”
“We shall be true to him.”
They smiled at each other.
Elizabeth put the Whisperer into the fire.
“Now, as to those letters,” she said.
“Not so tight, drat you,” Lydia snapped. “The thing’s hard enough to move in. You needn’t make it impossible to breathe in.”
The thing in question was a corsetlike device ingeniously designed to transform a womanly shape into a manly one.
The person Lydia snapped at was Helena Martin.*
In the old days, when she and Lydia had played together in the London slums, Helena had a highly successful career as a thief. Nowadays, she was an even more successful courtesan. The friendship had survived years of separation as well as changes in vocation.
At present they were in the elegantly cluttered dressing room of Helena’s quietly expensive residence in Kensington.
“It must be tight,” Helena answered, “unless you want your manly chest going in one direction while the rest of you goes another.” She gave the lacing knot a final, brutal yank, then stepped away.
Lydia surveyed her reflection in the glass. Thanks to the contraption, she now had a chest like a pigeon’s. The look was ultra-fashionable. Many men padded their chests and shoulders and squeezed their waists with corsets to achieve it. Except Ainswood. The manly form under his garments owed nothing to artifice.
For about the thousandth time in the week since the encounter at the Blue Owl, Lydia pushed his image from her mind.
She stepped away from the mirror and dressed. With the device secured, the rest of the masculine costume she quickly donned fit satisfactorily.
Months ago Helena had worn the ensemble to a masquerade and fooled everyone. Thanks to a few alterations—Helena was smaller—Lydia expected similar success, though she wasn’t going to a masquerade.
Her destination was Jerrimer’s, a gambling hell in a quiet way off St. James’s Street. She had told Macgowan that she wanted to write a story about the place, the kind her female readers hungered for: a woman’s inside view of a world normally forbidden to them—to the respectable ones, at any rate.
This was true. It wasn’t the only reason, though, and it wasn’t the reason Lydia had chosen Jerrimer’s.
She’d heard rumors that the place did a side trade in stolen goods. Since none of her informants had thus far learned anything about Tamsin’s keepsakes from the usual fences, it made sense to try other sources.
Tamsin had not agreed that it made sense. “You’ve already wasted a fortnight looking for my jewelry,” she’d chided Lydia this evening. “You have much more important issues to pursue, on behalf of people who truly need help. When I think about Mary Bartles, I’m thoroughly ashamed of the tears I shed over a lot of stones and metal.”
Lydia had assured her that the main project was getting the gambling hell story. If she happened upon news of the jewelry in the process, so much the better, but she would not actively pursue the matter.
Not that one could “actively pursue” much of anything in a stiff cage of buckram and whalebone, she thought as she turned to inspect the back of her disguise in the glass.
“You’ll be in a good deal of trouble if anyone discovers you’re not a man,” Helena said.
Lydia moved to the dressing table. “It’s merely a gambling club. The customers heed nothing but the cards, dice, or roulette wheel. And the owners and employees will be watching their money.” From the jumbled assortment of cosmetics, scent bottles, and jewelry she unearthed the cigar Ainswood had given her and tucked it into an inside pocket. Looking up, she met Helena’s worried gaze. “I was in more danger interviewing prostitutes in the Ratcliffe Highway, yet you weren’t anxious then.”
“That was before you began behaving so oddly.” Helena moved to the chiffonier, upon which the maid had set a tray bearing a brandy decanter and two glasses. “Until very recently, you controlled your temper better. And used more finesse in handling those who dared disagree with you.” She lifted the decanter and poured. “Your dust-up with Crenshaw, on the other hand, reminds me of the fight you had with a street arab because he called Sarah names and made her cry. You were eight years old at the time.”
Lydia approached to take the glass Helena held out to her. “I overreacted with Crenshaw, perhaps.”
“Thwarted desire can make one overemotional,” Helena said with a small smile. “I’ve been irritable myself these last few weeks. I usually am, between lovers.”
“I’ll admit my desire to do murder to certain persons is thwarted by the present penal codes.”
“I meant sexual desire, as you well know,” Helena said. “The instinct to mate. And reproduce.”
Lydia drank, eyeing her friend over the glass’s rim.
“Ainswood is exceedingly handsome,” Helena went on. “He has brains as well as brawn. Not to mention a smile that could make roses bloom in an Arctic winter. The trouble is, he’s also the kind of libertine who despises women. We females have but one use, and once used, we’re worthless. If he’s awakened any thoughts of straying from virtue’s path, Lyddy, I recommend you stray with a substitute. You might consider Sellowby. He doesn’t hold women in co
ntempt, and you definitely intrigue him. You’ve only to crook your little finger.”
To Lydia’s knowledge, no whore in London commanded a higher price than Helena did, and for very good reason. She could size up a man in an instant and respond accordingly, becoming the woman of his dreams. Her advice was not to be taken lightly.
Lydia couldn’t consider the recommended substitute, however, because she knew why Lord Sellowby was “intrigued” with her.
London’s champion gossip had noticed Lydia among the crowd of journalists camped in front of St. George’s on Dain’s wedding day. Days later, Sellowby had told Helena about glimpsing a female who “might have stepped out of the ancestral portrait gallery at Athcourt.” Athcourt, in Devon, was the home of the Marquess of Dain. Lydia had given Sellowby a very wide berth since then. A close look at her might lead him to make inquiries at Athcourt and dig up what her pride demanded remain buried.
“Sellowby’s out of the question,” Lydia told her friend. “A Society gossip and a journalist are bound to be competitors. In any case, this isn’t a good time for me to get involved with any man. While scandal does sell magazines, whatever small influence I exercise over public opinion would vanish if I were known to be a fallen woman.”
“Then maybe you should find another line of work,” Helena said. “You’re not getting any younger, and it would be a great waste—”
“Yes, love, I know you wish to be helpful, but can we discuss whatever’s wasted and thwarted at another time?” Lydia emptied her glass and set it down. “It’s growing late, and I do need to get back to Town.”
She put on her hat, gave herself a final check in the mirror, picked up her walking stick, and started for the door.
“I’ll be waiting up,” Helena called after her. “So make sure you come back here and not—”
“Of course I’ll come back here.” Lydia opened the door. “Don’t want the neighbors to see a strange man entering my house in the small hours of the morning, do I? Nor do I want to wake Miss Price or the maids to help me out of this beastly corset. That dubious pleasure will be all yours. I’ll expect you to have a nightcap waiting for me.”