Almost a Gentleman (14 page)

Yesterday's violent activity had left her mind to its own devices. It was a good technique for coming to a decision; today her head was clear and her mind made up.

She stretched her arms high above her shoulders, savoring the well-earned stiffness of her muscles. She'd fought with rare energy yesterday, her body fueled by the new passion burning in her center. And she'd won, proving to herself that she could win any battle that presented itself. Her fencing moves had been precise, impeccable; no reason to fear that she'd become soft or careless. She could still have her freedom, still be Marston. Her encounters with the earl would simply make the masquerade that much more exciting.

The day seemed to conspire with her mood. The daylight that streamed through the windows was hard and bright, almost glaring. Good. She welcomed harsh textures, strong sensations: the coffee at her bedside was unusually bracing, almost bitter; the bath water scalding; the towels roughened by having been hung to dry in the cold air. She dried herself briskly before winding herself in the muslin bonds that secured her female body from prying eyes.

And yet he'd guessed at the body below the costume.

She armored herself in her padded male garments like a knight preparing for battle. Shirt and trousers. Waistcoat, jacket, boots. She paused, cravat in hand, staring at her slender neck in the mirror. Impossible to masquerade as a man without the indispensable yard of snowy linen wound about her throat. Deftly, she twirled it about her neck, obscuring its delicate female hollows from view.

He looked down at me from the top of the hill, when I was wearing a pink dress and white turban. With my neck bare. Naked to his gaze. Vulnerable.

She'd enjoyed hiding behind a tall cravat these past years, reveling in the freedom not to display her neck and chest to the city's thousand prying eyes. And yet she'd strode through the London streets with the outlines of her long legs entirely visible to all observers.

She shrugged. The laws of fashion were crude, barbarous: irrational and inescapable as the incessant struggles among the
Beau Monde
for social priority. All dress was masquerade, all manners a game of hide and seek. During the years of her marriage she'd labored to present herself as an elegant, expensive object, proof of Henry's wealth and position, graceful and empty as the Chinese vase she'd broken so carelessly.

And she'd succeeded. Men had wanted her and envied Henry; a nimbus of cold scrutiny and casual lust had poisoned the air she'd breathed. The lust, of course, was all the nastier for being unconsummated. Society's laws made sure of that, and she'd been a decent, law-abiding Englishwoman, promising at the altar that no man would touch her except the one with legal title to do so. The law was a pimp, she thought, a procurer like Mr. Talbot. Things were doubtless more decent and rational in Fiji or Brazil.

For an instant she imagined herself dressed in nothing but a few strips of bright cloth, a wreath of flowers around her head. No, such an innocent costume would overwhelm her. She was too tall and pale, a creature of northern chill and slanted light, of icy wit and febrile, over-civilized energy. Best to hide behind severe, tailored black and white. Best to allow Lord Linseley to find his own way to her. She was ready for him.

She stared at herself in the pier glass, watching Phoebe Vaughan's eyes burn in Phizz Marston's impassive face. She wanted to feel Lord Linseley's gaze upon her again. And not merely his gaze. Not if she could influence the course of this afternoon's encounter.

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Marston," Lord Linseley murmured. "I believe I will have some champagne this afternoon."

She looks different today
, he thought.
She's pale and seems as exhausted as I am
. He yearned to kiss the dark, delicate skin below her eyes even as he sought to understand the change her looks had undergone.

Her motions were controlled, less flamboyant than those of the day before, but still proud and angular.
She looks fearless
, he thought,
resolute
. A thrill passed through him.
She's come to a decision
. And her resolve to take the consequences had clearly eradicated all of yesterday's fears.

She led him into a small, book-lined study. There was a sandal-wood box and a pile of papers on a graceful oval table at the room's center. She motioned him to one of the chairs alongside the table and then slid into the other. He picked up the first letter and began to read, trying not to be distracted by her proximity, her clean sharp smell of cucumber soap and freshly ironed linen.

He became more grateful for those smells as he read on. For reading the letters she'd received was like wallowing through mud and offal.

"Filth," he concluded half an hour later. Unconsciously, he'd balled up his fists, outraged by the fury Marston seemed to provoke.

"It's all nasty, horrible stuff," he said, "but on second thought it seems to me that there's a quite different quality about these last three." He spread the sheets of paper, their messages assembled of cut newspaper, on the polished walnut table.

"So you feel it as well," she said. "The… malevolence of them?"

The second letter proclaimed that: YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE COME BACK FROM D.

And the third spat out a series of furious appellations, like curses marching crazily down the page:

HARPY

HARRIDAN

CIRCE

SHREW

"This one just arrived just a few hours ago," she said in a toneless voice. "All names for a monstrous, unnatural woman," she added, "but of course you see that."

He murmured assent.

"And does the
D
, in fact, stand for Devonshire?" he asked.

She nodded. "You're not the only person who knows where my journeys end, you see."

"It was only a lucky guess on my part."

She sighed. "It's odd, though, isn't it, that after three years of success I should be unmasked by two parties all at once. You…"

"Because I care for you."

"Yes well, you
want
me, in any case. Perhaps it's just as well that you don't know me well enough to care for me. And it should be clear by now that I want you as well. But we'll deal with all that in due time."

He stared at her, not quite sure what to make of the directness with which she'd addressed him. He corrected himself: his
mind
wasn't sure; his body seemed to have no problems whatsoever with her mode of address.

"But this letter-writer," she continued, "if writer he can be called… this
other
person hates me. I can feel it. Absolute, implacable hatred, instead of the simple pique and humiliation in the other letters, which is, on the whole, more amusing than troublesome."

"You're brave to find them amusing rather than vicious and insulting. What
have
you been doing to create such general consternation?"

She shrugged. "Beaten them at gambling. Gotten them blackballed from White's. In one way or another, I've made it clear just how cheap, petty, and ridiculous these posturing fools really are. It's not difficult and it's all quite trivial. Not at all like challenging them in Parliament as you do."

He shook his head. "It may be more trivial, but to me it seems a great deal more dangerous. Because it's still a man's game you're playing. And even if they don't suspect…"

His voice trailed off. Without being told, he'd grasped the unspoken decorum of her home: one might say quite erotic and provocative things to her, but one didn't ever refer to the facts of her disguise, at least in the rooms downstairs. And he wouldn't let himself think about the rooms upstairs where she dressed. Where she undressed. Where she bathed…

"You were saying, my lord?"

"Oh. Yes. Right. I was saying that these adversaries of yours, petty and ridiculous as they are, do sense something rather out of the ordinary. Perhaps it's simply the perfection of your masculine masquerade. You're more perfect than any real man, even the most mannered of dandies, and they sense it; they're put off balance by it even as they're humiliated by how absolutely you've captured their attention. They rather
enjoy
their humiliation, you see, and they write these letters to exaggerate the sense of titillation they feel. After all, Mr. Marston, you're a very attractive young man."

She essayed not to smile.

"You have something… ah,
unusual
about you. A quality. A little something extra."

"Actually, it's rather something less."

"It's not something less. At least that's not how I've ever thought about it."

"Then you're a most unusual man as well."

"Someday I hope to demonstrate that to you, Mr. Marston, at close range. But to return to the matter at hand…"

They must compile a list, he told her, of the gentlemen most likely to respond to Marston's having exposed their weaknesses and inadequacies to society.

This, however, turned out to be a more difficult task than he'd expected, for she seemed to have made social mincemeat of most of Polite London at one time or another.
Why
? he wondered.
Why this unceasing need to strike out at snobbery, hypocrisy, and complacency
?

Still, he had to admire the
brio
with which she'd gone about it. The energy and the sly wit. He laughed as she told him how she'd managed to blackball her victims. Clever to choose such tiny, telling details, he thought: Smythe-Cochrane's affected dinner-table manners; Raike's idolization of Smythe-Cochrane; Crashaw's unfortunate boots.

"Drumblestone's Bargain Blacking? I shall have to ask my valet if he's ever heard of it."

"He doesn't use it, my lord. At least not on
your
boots, I can assure you of that."

"And how…" he'd been going to ask her how she knew what kind of blacking Crashaw's valet used. But the question faded while he became distracted by the way she'd swept her eyes down over his boots and up over his legs in imitation of his glance at her yesterday. He allowed himself a rueful shiver of appreciation: women didn't use their eyes that way. Even prostitutes were less direct, less at ease with the art of erotic scrutiny.

"You're a formidable adversary, Mr. Marston," he observed. "I must remember never to expose my own petty weaknesses and economies to you."

Whatever else
, he thought, moving his chair a few inches farther away from her,
I might desire to expose
.

Her mouth had settled into the maddening curve that might or might not be a smile.

He cleared his throat. "Yes, well then. I think we can narrow the list down to three besides Bunbury."

She nodded. "Raikes and Smythe-Cochrane, certainly."

"And our mutual favorite, Lord Crashaw. Whose character is as black as his boots are not."

He frowned.

"But that brings up a serious problem. For my plan was to speak to these gentlemen directly, to see what ill will they harbor you. And whereas I can certainly approach Raikes and Smythe-Cochrane, Crashaw absolutely won't receive me. Won't even acknowledge me in a public venue."

He told her, with some pride, about the lands he'd bought up at auction, snatching them from Crashaw's greedy grasp. She listened so eagerly that he told her more than he'd intended, confiding that he was actually a bit strapped for cash these days. Not so much that he'd have to skimp on boot-blacking, but he might in fact have to practice some economies while he was in London. Still it had been worth it, to know that there would be fewer expulsions from the land in his part of the world.

"Your part of the world?"

"I suppose that's a stupid way to express it, but it's how I think of it."

"Very lordly of you."

"I rarely see it that way. Mostly I think of myself as a steward of the land. I'll be all right if the next harvest is as good as this last—but spending this winter in London is deuced expensive."

"Then why are you here?"

"You know why I'm here."

She looked down at his large hands spread out upon her table.

"I'm quite extraordinarily grateful."

"Yes, well…"

She reached out to begin refolding the letters. He covered her hand with one of his own. A jolt of electricity shot from his fingertips to his body's center.

"Wait," she whispered, "for just for a moment."

He lifted his hand from hers and stared as she opened the room's double doors. He could hear her talking to a servant in the foyer.

She reentered the room, closing and locking the doors behind her.

"I told Mr. Simms that we were not to be disturbed for the next half hour."

"And after that?"

She smiled. "After that I told him that we had best be disturbed."

The doors were adorned in the French style of the preceding century, with gaily colored scrolls of fruit and flowers. They looked lighthearted, lascivious. Like the golden sparks that danced in her eyes.

"I know we still have a great deal to discuss," she said while she loosened the knot of her cravat.