Neither Linnet nor her father dared to answer.
Which was fine, because she had only paused for effect. “I ask you again, what does this desperately unhappy family need? They need . . . an heir!”
“Don’t we all,” the viscount said, sighing.
Linnet reached out and patted her father’s hand. It was one of the rather unkind facts of life that her mama had been extremely free with her favors, and yet she had given her husband only one child, a daughter, who could not inherit the major part of her father’s estate.
“They need,” Zenobia said, raising her voice so as to regain her audience, “they need a prince!”
After a minute or so, Linnet ventured to say, “A prince, Aunt Zenobia?”
That gained her the beatific smile of an actress receiving accolades, if not armfuls of roses, from her audience. “A prince, my dear. And you, lucky girl, have exactly what he needs. He’s looking for a heir, and you have that heir, and what’s more, you’re offering royal bloodlines.”
“I see what you mean,” the viscount said slowly. “It’s not a terrible idea, Zenobia.”
She got a little pink in the face. “None of my ideas are terrible. Ever.”
“But I don’t have a prince,” Linnet said. “If I understand you correctly, the Duke of Windebank is looking for a pregnant woman—”
Her father growled and she amended her statement. “That is, the duke would perhaps acquiesce to a woman in my unfortunate situation because that way his son would have a son—”
“Not just a son,” Zenobia said, her voice still triumphant. “A prince. Windebank isn’t going to take just any lightskirt into his family. He’s frightfully haughty, you know. He’d rather die. But a prince’s son? He’ll fall for that.”
“But—”
“You’re right about that, Zenobia. Be gad, you’re a canny old woman!” her father roared.
Zenobia’s back snapped straight. “What did you say to me, Cornelius?”
He waved his hand. “Didn’t mean it that way, didn’t mean it that way. Pure admiration. Pure unmitigated admiration. Pure—”
“I agree,” she said in a conciliatory tone, patting her hair. “It’s a perfect plan. You’d better go to him this afternoon, though. You have to get her all the way to Wales for the marriage. Marchant lives up there.”
“Marriage,” Linnet said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
They both looked at her and said simultaneously, “What?”
“I’m not carrying a prince!” she shouted. “I never slept with Augustus. Inside my belly I have nothing but a chewed-up crumpet.”
“That is a disgusting comment,” her aunt said with a shudder.
“I agree,” her father chimed in. “Quite distasteful. You sound like a city wife, talking of food in that manner.”
“Distasteful is the fact that you are planning to sell off my unborn child to a duke with a penchant for royalty—when I don’t even have an unborn child!”
“I said this would all have to happen quite quickly,” her aunt said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let’s say that your father goes to Windebank’s house this very afternoon, and let’s say that Windebank takes the bait, because he will. As I said, the man is desperate, and besides, he would love to meld his line with royal blood.”
“That doesn’t solve the problem,” Linnet said.
“Well, of course not,” Zenobia said, giving her a kindly smile. “We can’t do everything for you. The next part is up to you.”
“What do you mean?”
Her father got up, obviously not listening. “I’ll put on my Jean de Bry coat and Hessians,” he said to himself.
“Not the de Bry,” Zenobia called after him.
He paused at the door. “Why not?”
“The shoulders are a trifle anxious. You mustn’t seem anxious. You’re offering to save the man’s line, after all.”
“Sage-green court coat with a scalloped edge,” her father said, nodding, and disappeared through the door.
“Aunt Zenobia,” Linnet said, showing infinite patience, to her mind. “Just how am I supposed to get a child of royal blood to offer to the husband I’ve never met?”
Zenobia smiled. “My dear, you aren’t a woman of my family if you have to ask that.”
Linnet’s mouth fell open. “You don’t mean—”
“Of course, darling. As soon as your father signs those papers, you have . . . oh . . . twelve hours before you really should leave for Wales.”
“Twelve hours,” Linnet echoed, hoping she was mistaken in what she was thinking. “You can’t possibly mean—”
“Augustus has been following you about like a child with a string toy,” her aunt said. “Shouldn’t take more than a come-hither glance and a cheerful smile. Goodness’ sake, dear, didn’t you learn anything from your mother?”
“No,” Linnet said flatly.
“Actually, with your bosom you don’t even need to smile,” Zenobia said.
“So you really mean—” Linnet stopped. “I—I—”
“You. Augustus. Seduction. Bed,” her aunt said helpfully. “Twelve hours and only one prince . . . should be quite easy.”
“I—”
“You are Rosalyn’s daughter,” her aunt said. “And my niece. Seduction, especially when it comes to royalty, is bred in your bones. In your very bloodline.”
“I don’t know how,” Linnet said flatly. “I may look naughty, but I’m not.”
“Yes, you are,” her aunt said brightly. She rose. “Just get yourself a child, Linnet. Think how many young women manage to do it and they haven’t nearly your advantages, to wit, your body, your face, your smile.”
“My entire education has been directed at chastity,” Linnet pointed out. “I had a governess a good five years longer than other girls, just so I wouldn’t learn such things.”
“Your father’s fault. He was frightened by Rosalyn’s indiscretions.”
There must have been something about Linnet’s face, because Zenobia sighed with the air of a woman supporting the weight of the world. “I suppose I could find you a willing man if you really can’t bring yourself to approach the prince. It’s most unconventional, but of course one knows, one cannot help but know, of establishments that might help.”
“What sort of establishments?”
“Brothels catering to women, of course,” Zenobia said. “I do believe there’s one near Covent Garden that I was just told about . . . men of substance, that’s what I heard. They come for the sport of it, I suppose.”
“Aunt, you can’t possibly mean—”
“If you can’t seduce the prince, we’ll have to approach the problem from another angle,” she said, coming over and patting Linnet’s arm. “I’ll take you to the brothel. As I understand it, a lady can stand behind a curtain and pick out the man she wants. We’d better choose one with a resemblance to Augustus. I wonder if we could just send a message to that effect and have the man delivered in a carriage?”
Linnet groaned.
“I don’t want you to think that I would ever desert you in your hour of need,” her aunt said. “I feel all the burden of a mother’s love, now that darling Rosalyn is gone.”
It was amazing how her aunt had managed to ignore that burden during the season and indeed for years before that, but Linnet couldn’t bring herself to point it out. “I am not going to a brothel,” she stated.
“In that case,” Zenobia said cheerily, “I suggest you sit down and write that naughty prince a little note. You’re wise to choose him over the brothel, truly. One hates to start marriage with a fib involving babies. Marriage leads one into fibs by the very nature of it: all those temptations. One always orders too many gowns, and overspends one’s allowance. Not to mention men.” She kissed the tips of her fingers.
“But I wanted—”
“I am so pleased not to be married at the moment,” Zenobia said. “Not that I’m happy Etheridge d
ied, of course. Ah well . . .”
Zenobia was gone.
And what Linnet wanted from marriage was clearly no longer a question worth discussion.
Chapter Four
You must be joking,” Piers said to Prufrock. “I sent my father a list of requirements for a wife that was a page long.”
“It made fascinating reading,” Prufrock said. “I especially appreciated the part where you admitted your incapability in bed. And the tear stain just there on the page—”
“It wasn’t a tear,” Piers said irritably. “It was brandy, you fool.”
“Oh good,” Prufrock said. “Because I hate to think that you were weeping all over the letter. Not when you could be wailing in your lonely bed.”
“Why wouldn’t I wail?” Piers said, wondering whether to have another glass. Better not. “You show me the man with an injury like mine who isn’t brokenhearted over the dark future that lies before him.”
“Dark and dire future,” Prufrock amended. “Don’t lose your alliterative touch now, right at the climactic moment.”
“The despair of never having a good woman at his side, the bitterness of knowing a sticky little hand will never curl around his thumb, the—”
“Or to get to what really matters, years without shagging,” Prufrock said.
“Is that an attempt to make me feel better?”
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said, with an unmistakable lack of conviction.
“Where did you go to school?” Piers inquired. “You’re altogether too literate for a butler. Most butlers I know say things like As you wish, my lord, and leave it at that. Our conversation should be along these lines: Prufrock, bring me a wench. And then you would say, As you wish.”
“What would be the good of that?” Prufrock inquired. “Under the circumstances?”
“Good point,” Piers muttered. “Well, I think I’ll go for a swim. Tide’s in.”
He left the castle by the west door, still puzzling over his butler. As he’d thought since he hired Prufrock a year ago, the man must be in service to his father, to wit: a spy. That went without saying.
But where on earth had the old man managed to find a butler like that, a Prufrock-like butler, with a sense of humor and a sharper tongue than Piers himself? In short, probably the only butler in the world whom Piers would keep in the castle even knowing that he was a bloody spy?
The only possibility was that his father actually knew or understood something about him, and since that was impossible, he dismissed the thought.
The bathing pool was carved straight out of rock on the edge of the sea, and was filled by the high tide but protected from the worst of the waves. It was a magnificent sight, a rock basin gleaming sapphire blue as the light began to fade. The sea had calmed the way it often did just at twilight, and he stood for a moment looking past the pool at the way the sea rippled on and on, following a dim gold trail of light.
Then he shook himself and pulled off his clothes. If he’d learned anything about his leg in the past years, it was that if he didn’t exercise every day it hurt like the devil. He’d skipped the swim yesterday, and he was suffering the consequences today. Not that it didn’t ache as a matter of course, but without swimming, he found himself in the kind of pain that he couldn’t bear without thinking about opiates.
Not good, those moments, nor opiates either.
He dove off a rock, deep into the water, feeling his hair pull free—damn, forgot to take out the ribbon again—and his body rejoice as his leg kicked free without carrying the weight of his body. Without thinking, he began to propel himself forward, shooting through the water in the way he couldn’t on land.
Hand over hand he went, ten lengths, twenty . . . at fifty he was tired, but he forced himself through another ten, and then pulled himself onto the rocks in one smooth gesture, water sluicing off his shoulders and arms. Before the injury, he never paid much attention to his body. Now he found himself pleased with the strength in his shoulders and chest. Though the doctor in him knew that was nothing but rubbishing vanity.
“My lord,” a young footman said, stepping forward and handing him a large piece of toweling.
Piers looked up at him. “You’re new. What’s your name?”
“Neythen, my lord.”
“Sounds like a terrible illness. No, more like a bowel problem. I’m sorry, Lord Sandys, your son has contracted neythen and won’t live a month. No, no, there’s nothing I can do. Sandys would have preferred hearing that to syphilis.”
Neythen looked perplexed. “My mum always said I’m named after a saint, not an illness.”
“Which one?”
“Well, he had his head chopped off, see? And then he picked it up and carried it down the road a time. All the way back home, I think.”
“Messy,” Piers said. “Not to mention unlikely, though one has to think of chickens and their post-mortal abilities. Did she think that you would inherit the same gift?”
Neythen blinked. “No, my lord.”
“Perhaps she was just hopeful. It behooves mothers to look ahead to this sort of possibility, after all. I’m tempted to behead you just to see if she was right. Sometimes the most unlikely superstitions turn out to have a basis in fact.”
The footman stepped back.
“God, you are young, aren’t you? Now why did Prufrock send you down here? Not that I don’t appreciate the towel.”
“Mr. Prufrock told me to tell you, my lord, that there’s a patient waiting.”
“There’s always a patient or two around the place,” Piers said, drying his hair. “I need to have a bath first. I’m covered with salt.”
“The sign isn’t up, so Mr. Prufrock said to inform you.”
“No, bath before patient. My life is enough of a shambles without my butler telling me what to do.”
“This one’s come all the way from London,” Neythen said. “And he’s a big lord.”
“Big, is he? Probably too fat for his heart. Pick up my cane and give it to me, if you would.”
Neythen did so. “He’s not fat,” he said. “I saw him coming in. I mean that he’s important-looking. He’s dressed all in velvet and thin as a rail. And he’s wearing a wig.”
“Another dying man,” Piers said, starting up the path. “Just what we need around here. Pretty soon we’re going to have to put in our own cemetery out back.”
Neythen didn’t seem to have anything to say to this.
“ ’Course you won’t be there,” Piers assured him, “since you can carry your head back home and be buried in your own village churchyard. But I’m starting to feel like a dark version of the Pied Piper. They come to Wales to find me, they die. The next day, more of the same arrive.”
“You cure some of them, don’t you?” Neythen asked.
“A few,” Piers said. “Mostly not. For one thing, I’m an anatomical pathologist, which means that I’m really better with dead bodies. They don’t twitch, and they don’t get infections. As for the live ones, all I can do is observe them. Sometimes I don’t know anything until after they’re dead, and then it’s too late. Sometimes I cut the cadavers open and I still don’t have the faintest idea what went wrong.”
Neythen shuddered.
“You’re doing the right thing to become a footman and not a physician,” Piers told him, making his way up the rocky path to the castle. “We surgeons are always cutting up people, dead or alive. It’s the only way to learn what’s inside, you know.”
“That’s revolting!”
“Don’t worry,” Piers said. “If you manage to walk your decapitated body home, then I can’t cut it open and find out what happened to you, can I?”
Neythen kept quiet.
“Don’t even think of quitting,” Piers added, pushing himself over the last rock and onto the flat path. “Prufrock will have my head if more of his staff leaves because of my ill-considered remarks.”
Neythen’s silence seemed to indicate that he wasn’t q
uitting yet.
Piers reached the house. “I suppose I’ll have a look at that patient before I bathe.”
“Like that, my lord?” Neythen asked.
Piers looked down at himself. He’d wrapped the towel around his waist. “You said there’s a patient waiting, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“There’s nothing I like more than meeting velvet-clad peers while wrapped in a towel,” he said. “They’re going to lie to me anyway, but it keeps them alert.”
“Lie?” Neythen asked, sounding shocked.
“It comes with the peerage. Really. It’s only the poor who bother with honesty, these days.”
Chapter Five
Linnet left the drawing room and walked straight to her mother’s chamber, the one place where she was sure not to be disturbed.
Not much had changed since her mother died. It was still the same flowery boudoir that it had been when Rosalyn was alive, minus the most important thing: the sparkling, charming person who had made it her own.
Who had made her husband love her, no matter how unfaithful she was. Who had made all those other men love her too.
Who had loved Linnet for more than her beauty.
Linnet sat down at the dressing table just as she had when she was a mere fourteen, devastated by her mother’s sudden death. There was dust on the silver brushes; she had to remind Tinkle to make sure the maids cleaned the rooms properly.
She touched each one, remembering how her mother used to sit on the stool, brushing her hair and roaring with laughter at whatever Linnet told her. No one ever laughed at her jokes the way her mother had. Rosalyn had the gift of making you feel like the wittiest person in the world.
Linnet sighed. Her mother would have loved the joke about the light frigate docking at the pier.
And then she would have dabbed on scent and rushed away to meet some darling, delicious man, her eyes still twinkling.
Finally Linnet took her finger off the silver brush and raised her head. Rosalyn’s portrait dimpled from the wall. Linnet smiled, and without even glancing at the mirror before her, knew that precisely the same dimple had appeared in her cheek. Precisely the same curls, like pale primroses. The same wide blue eyes, the same naughty cherry mouth, the same . . .