Almost a Gentleman (44 page)

Tilting his hat brim a bit further forward against the chilly wind, he hurried westward to Park Lane.

How terribly unhappy she looks, Kate thought, as her footman ushered Mr. Marston into the salon.

But it's not from lack of physical attention, she thought. She felt her cheeks flush slightly. She wasn't at all sure how she could discern this, but in the past few weeks Kate had learned something about how a woman looked when certain desires had been satisfied.

Phoebe's physical needs had been quite well taken care of. This was something worse.

They chatted about inconsequential things while Lady Kate gave Mr. Marston his tea.

"And now," Kate murmured to her footman, "will you leave us for a while, Matthews? I shall ring when I need you."

The footman bowed and shut the double doors behind him.

Kate's eyes were soft. "The roads are so bad, you know, that the mail coaches cannot get through from the north. It's rumored that one of the coaches turned over on the highway."

Her guest returned a brittle laugh. "I returned just in time then. Lord Crashaw is probably stuck in that dull Lincolnshire backwater until spring. Serves him right."

"If it is indeed he who's been causing all the consternation."

"Of
course
it's Crashaw. By now, Lord Linseley will have gotten him to stop, though. I'm sure I'm not in danger any more."

Lady Kate raised a hand in protest.

"Oh, don't worry, Kate. I've still got Mr. Stokes following me about. Poor man, he's probably freezing."

"No, I told my household staff to let him into the kitchen whenever he comes by—some nonsense about him being related to my childhood nurse."

"You think of everything. Thank you, dear."

"I try to, but I've probably forgotten something terribly important. Still, you must promise not to go out without Mr. Stokes's protection. Not until we hear from Lord Linseley that this business of the hate letters has been entirely laid to rest. Do you promise?"

"I do promise. I don't want to endanger anyone. I worry about you, after all, since you received that note. And of course I worry about poor Mr. Simms. He's so busy reassembling my household staff—I returned without warning, you know."

"You could have stayed here."

"Thank you, no. It's easier to become Marston again where I'm surrounded by talk of seams and piping and the various grades of worsted fabric."

Her facial expression—Marston's veiled eyes and downturned mouth—was severe, discouraging further questions and shunning confidences of any sort.

Perhaps I shouldn't burden her any further, Kate thought. But she found it impossible not to try to offer a few words of encouragement.

"Lord Linsely will certainly contact us soon as he can with the news. Of course it's only the dreadful condition of the roads that has prevented him from doing so already."

"Yes, I'm sure he will," was all that Phoebe seemed able to say. "Well, he's the perfect gentleman, isn't he?"

Kate reached for her friend's hand, but Phoebe shook it off. Her eyebrows rose above cold eyes, and her lips made the curve that Marston would typically affect, before launching into a critique of someone's new overcoat.

She spoke softly, in a passionless monotone.

"He's kind, well-bred, adored by tenants and servants, employees and neighbors alike. Oh yes, and he fucks like an angel. Well, you
were
curious about that, weren't you, though you were too proper to ask about it directly."

She stood up, staring into the middle distance and still speaking in the soft, dead voice that was neither Phizz nor Phoebe.

"I expect that he
will
contact Admiral Wolfe. But you see, I'm not at all sure that he'll ever speak to me again."

She swallowed and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them her face seemed carved of impenetrable marble, and her voice was that of Marston at his gayest and most trivial.

"
So
sorry to have to run away like this, Lady Kate. We shall have to chat again soon, though. Yes, thank you,
do
ring for Matthews to let me out.

"And be assured that I can see how well and happy you are, and although an old cynic like myself isn't good at expressing such a thing… please know that I do feel it. I
do
rejoice for you, with what's left of my heart.

"I know you'll forgive me any liberties I've taken this afternoon. Well, I
will
have my witticisms, you know. Of course, if a lady like you dares befriend a raffish type like myself she must bear the consequences…"

Her voice crescendoed as she made her way toward the door, becoming more resolutely cheerful with every graceful step she took. A smart bow from the hips now, a last wave of a long, elegant hand—and she was gone, leaving Kate to stare sadly after her.

The muck from the streets seemed to have distilled into a nasty, choking fog. Phoebe could hardly bear to breathe it as she traced her way along the walkway to St. James Street, her boots perfectly invisible beneath her. Her stomach churned unpleasantly. Of course, she thought, it might have been her own ill-bred behavior just now that had brought on the queasy fit. I deserve it, she told herself.

She fought off the accompanying vertigo. The important thing was to keep her balance on the wooden plank. She thought suddenly of a tightrope walker, at a traveling circus she'd seen when she was a little girl. After the performance she'd hurried over to the field where the players were encamped, demanding to be taught how to balance on the rope. The lithe young man—Phoebe still remembered the sweat stains on his spangled tights—had laughed, lifted her up onto a practice rope, and had begun to teach her.

She'd loved it; for an instant she'd almost gotten the knack of it, too. But just then her mother had come running, screaming that she'd have the entire circus troupe arrested for kidnapping. Still, Phoebe had never forgotten the young man's instructions.

Choose a spot in front of you and look at that
, she repeated to herself now.
Don't look down and don't look back
. Defiantly she turned her attention away from the horrors that plagued her imagination. On the one hand, there was the constant, gnawing fear that David had given her up entirely, infuriated by the secret she'd kept and by her betrayal of his hopes. And on the other, a still more terrible possibility: one she hadn't even wanted to speak of in Kate's salon. She swayed for a moment before regaining her equilibrium. Suppose he'd tried to follow her to London, and had been injured or even killed somewhere on the treacherous road between there and here?

A vision of a broken body on a lonely country road took shape somewhere beneath her, shimmering balefully in the yellow gaslit haze.

She wouldn't look down at it
. Or
Marston
wouldn't, anyway.

Marston would think instead of the figure he'd cut at White's this evening, resplendent in his new waistcoat. He'd wonder if the oysters would be good; if so, he'd order them for supper, with caviar. Yes, a shining mound of black caviar in a massive silver goblet, served with a very dry iced champagne—the whole meal so expensive that he'd have to win hugely at Vivien's later in the evening not to feel bankrupted.

Marston would maintain his balance—just as Phoebe was regaining hers now—by dancing exquisitely, at the very brink of a bad reputation.

And if, tonight, anyone asked Marston about how he'd happened to be traveling north with his enemy Lord Linseley, his answer would be, "But, my dear, dear chap, don't you know
already
? Ah, but I thought… well, everybody who's anybody
does
know, you see. After all, it's
last
week's scandal.
I'd
sooner dine on stale oysters than chew
that
old story over one more time."

Gossip, style, and gambling, she thought—in the end they were all a matter of standing firm behind a good bluff.

She walked quickly, on light, sure feet, to St. James Street. She gazed straight ahead of her, staring at a fixed point in the distance: the amber glow of White's bow window, where, in her imagination, she'd already regained Marston's seat.

Alec Hervey, the young Viscount Granthorpe, had never understood what his friends found so intriguing about gambling. He supposed that it had something to do with the speed of it—the breathtaking rapidity with which a vast sum of money could leave your pocket, as quickly as you could lay a few bits of pasteboard down upon a green baize table.

Or perhaps it was the dizzying abstractness of the concepts: what
was
five thousand pounds, anyway—and
where
was it?—if it could change hands so quickly, so meaninglessly, so utterly randomly?

But then, Alec found everything rather an abstract concept when he was under the influence of strong drink. The world began to resemble the neat, Newtonian patterns that fascinated him at school—though he knew it wasn't quite gentlemanly to enjoy his books as much as he did. He found it relaxing, nonetheless, to reduce things to mass and energy, velocity and acceleration. More pleasant than some of the human attractions and interactions he'd witnessed lately. Absently, he nodded his thanks as his companion poured more hock into his glass.

Of course, he thought, the motion of money in and out of a gentleman's pocket wasn't always a random matter. The notorious Mr. Marston, seated diagonally across the room from him, evidently had been winning steadily since he'd sat down to play an hour ago.

He looked down at his own hand. Nothing decent at all there; he'd lose the hundred pounds he'd just put down, as certainly as his father had lost ten thousand to Marston, in a game that Alec had been hearing about until he was ruddy sick of it.

What
had
all that been about, anyway? He'd resolved to ask Admiral Wolfe at dinner the other evening but had lost his nerve at the last moment. Of course, Alec could understand how Papa might have been rather desperate for cash after buying back all those enclosed lands. What made it all so strange—and rather embarrassing as well—was the other, whispered story, the one about him turning up at Marston's in the middle of the night and going off with him the next morning. Most people simply discounted it, but the story kept cropping up here and there, like a rank, unkillable weed.

He supposed he might have gone home and asked the old man directly. He'd rather wanted to go anyway, after having concluded that a certain young lady didn't care a fig about him. After a week or two it had become distressingly clear that she'd had her brother bring him home for Christmas simply to make her
real
suitor jealous.