False Angel (3 page)

Leonora had been delighted, for from the moment she clapped eyes upon Annabelle, she had decided that the poor child’s fate had been placed in her hands.

It was not only because of Annabelle’s tale, told in a bleak monotone, of the loss of her widowed mother after years of living in grinding poverty when her ne’er-do-well father had deserted them, though that had sent shudders through her. Nor was it only guilt because that father had been her own distant relative. Neither was it solely because she hung on every sorrowful word of Annabelle’s harrowing narrative about the other distant relatives in Ireland who had first succored her, then misused her and thrown her out when she had refused the advances of their boorish son.

Nor was it even that everything about Annabelle so very strongly recalled to mind the legions of imperiled heroines whose adventures had been related to Leonora during those unguarded, impressionable hours as she lay at the brink of sleep through all her childhood years. For hadn’t her favorite, Cinderella, a similar history of deprivation and abuse? This might have worked against Annabelle’s best interests, for most young women would have resented sharing their lives with a bonified heroine, and one, moreover, who was classically fated to snabble up Prince Charming the moment he showed his nose. But here Annabelle’s luck at last surfaced, for since Leonora had given up all expectations for herself, it made no matter to her, it only made Annabelle’s tale more poignant.

It was true that all these factors weighed upon Leonora. But although she had a strongly developed conscience and was a very good sort of young woman, she was leagues away from being a saint and would have been the first to admit it. But then saints are in notoriously short supply, so it is as well that their work upon the planet is carried out by those with other, more worldly ambitions. In fact, as in the case of most lesser mortals who will never have shrines built to them, Leonora’s true reason for assisting Annabelle was not only very distanced from anything remotely heavenly, it was also one which she did not fully understand or admit to herself. Which was as well, since it was really quite a selfish one. It was because in Annabelle she at last found a cause, a reason to be, and some surcease from her own life of desperate, unending tedium.

Because with all she had, the Lady Leonora had nothing of her own. Oh, she had her horses, and her dogs, and the run of the countryside, but the house was her mama’s to run, and even it would in time belong to her younger brother. It was that younger brother, her dearest Bertie, at home on sick leave from school, who’d been the closest thing to her own in the lonely years since her aborted Season. But his constitution improved and he’d been sent back to be properly educated. And though she had awaited his return by carefully counted hours, when he at last came home for vacations it soon became clear to her that he had matured enough to become completely his own creature. She could not regret his growing up. She may have been selfish, but she was never a monster. But he left a great vacancy in her life.

Her sister had two children, but they had been reared in London, so she hardly knew them. Even so, she could not care for them, poor things, because they reminded her so forcibly of her brother-in-law. And that she could not like, even if they had been the first living things she spied after dwelling in solitary state in a hole in the ground for the past five years. So serving Annabelle’s interests served her well.

She was honest enough to admit this to herself, but human enough to believe it had all been some fortuitous accident. She certainly couldn’t have known how well things would work out, nor could she have guessed, Leonora thought, as she smoothed down her hair and prepared to go out upon the streets of the town that she had vowed never to grace again, that she would be so glad to be where she was, thrilled to be back in London again, and so very grateful to Annabelle for putting her precisely where she now stood.

She never would have had the courage or the excuse to return alone, she’d made such a thoroughgoing botch of it, just as she’d intended to, when she last had been in Town. But if she hadn’t done it up to the nines then, she thought now, facing her own level, accusing stare in the glass, she’d have had to stay on in Town that entire Season with her parents, and that, she could never have borne. But here she was in London, only five years after the debacle she’d made of her first Season, in the same house with both of her parents, and yet having the best time she’d had in years.

Life was so comfortable now not only because she had no schemes or dreams or plans for herself, she realized. It was also because she had no reason to chat with her father, and he had no expectations for her either. So neither of them could fail the other this time. Mama might be ecstatic, thinking that her prickly, wayward daughter had finally seen the light and bowed to all those years of nagging, hinting, and downright threatening, and had condescended to come to London at last to seek a husband.

So much as she disliked deceiving her mama, there was not a grain of truth in that lady’s happy fancies. This visit, Leonora knew, was all for poor Annabelle, so that the child could secure a husband and a respectable future for herself, even without a dowry or a family to give her countenance. Unfortunately, however, this visit would have been impossible if she hadn’t allowed her mama to indulge in those glad fantasies.

But it would all be worth it, for in one way or another, Leonora did plan to heed some of her mama’s cautions. She would, she decided, finally make provisions for her future. Perhaps when it was all over and she had danced at Annabelle’s wedding, she would stay on in London, stay on where there was all the art and music and conversation that she had been starved for, for all this time. Because very much like the self-made fellow who can sit back full and contented after a feast and happily regale all his company with tales of how wretched and hungry he had been in his youth, now that Leonora was out of her self-induced seclusion and back in Town, and surprised to be enjoying every moment of it, she could at last afford to remember how wonderful it had been. Or at least how wonderful it had been up until that moment when it had all come crashing down about her ears.

It had been those keen ears, perhaps sharpened by years growing up in the relative quietude of the countryside, that had been the instruments of her enlightenment and the destruction of her innocent pleasure. It was entirely possible that some London-bred miss might not have heard that voice above all the others, or have been able to pick it out and identify it above the music and babble and laughter that night in the Vauxhall Gardens.

And at the thought, and at the remembrance, Leonora, sitting at her dressing table as she awaited the girl she was hoping to marry off this Season, forgot the girl and the present, as she always did when she revisited that night in that other vanished Season. That last Season, when she had made her decision and vowed to never wed.

She oughtn’t to have been where she was at all that night, and she’d known it, Leonora thought, frowning now as she had then, at the uncomfortable thought that she had strayed far from the paths a proper young female ought to tread.

But then, she had never been a sheep and a wee bit of wildness, a very little taste of wickedness, was expected of a spirited young female, and that, yes that, she had always been. So it hadn’t been too unthinkable to go to Vauxhall that night five years ago, even though it wasn’t the night she’d planned to grace that pleasure garden. And then, too, Charles Dearborne was a rackety young dog, and everyone knew it, so perhaps that’s why she’d been willing to accompany him.

But she wasn’t lost to reason. She wasn’t even alone in her folly, since two of her other young friends were there with their young gentlemen to squire them. And that is probably what her chaperone, Miss Thicke, had whispered to the other young ladies’ chaperones as they sat and fanned themselves and kept a sharp eye on their young charges in the warm torchlit evening. Because the young people were supposed to be at Lady Clayton’s musical evening, and it was that charming young rogue Dearborne’s earnest entreaty that dissuaded them, and his less earnest but merrier cajolery that persuaded them to listen to the music of Mr. Handel at Vauxhall Gardens instead.

But then it was a small naughtiness, Miss Thicke had thought complacently, the sort of foolish escapade that her charge could smile back upon when she was safely wed. At the most, there might be a stolen cuddle and a sweetly furtive kiss achieved before a chaperone could locate a truant couple in the crush of pleasure-seeking patrons of the fabulous gardens. Still, it was the sort of liberty that perfectly suited a knowing chaperone to grant, since it gave the illusion of forbidden pleasures, while in actuality it was safe as houses. But Miss Thicke would have lost both her smile and her position if she had been able to foresee the events engendered by this night’s work. For though she may have been an excellent companion, she was a disastrously poor oracle.

She was a fatally bad judge of just what might transpire at night at the gardens as well. But that was a fault that she couldn’t, in all fairness, be blamed for. Being a maiden lady of very good ton, she could hardly have been expected to understand the workings of the other, darker world of London, the one she had never seen or acknowledged. Yet then again, had she known of the doings of the demi-monde that made up that underside of social life, she could scarcely have been a proper sort of companion for a noble young woman in the first place.

But she was very proper, and she had excellent commendations from previous employers, and though they all of them were up in years, yet she was still the senior of the three chaperones present that night. So if she did not know that this particular night her charge would have been better off at Ranelagh Gardens, or even the Pantheon in Oxford Street, since there were certain infamous areas at Vauxhall solely for the use of gentlemen entertaining their Cyprians or seeking new ones, then none of the other chaperones could have been expected to know that truth either. Thus the three elderly females sat placidly in a notorious section of the Gardens, as oblivious to what was going on about them as the trio they so curiously resembled might have been, since those three legendary monkeys also had some difficulty in recognizing evil. Lord Dearborne knew the whole of it, of course, as did his friends, but they were all such high-born, hell-bent, care-for-nothings that they thought it all a lark.

It might have been no more than that if Lady Leonora hadn’t possessed such sharp ears. She and her friends had been discreetly seated at tables in a remote section, a bit apart from the center of the attractions. They sat in the moving shadows of the torchlit, gaslit darkness beneath the flowering trees and spooned ices and watched fireworks and listened to the music and the increasingly florid compliments of the young gentlemen, even as the three chaperones at their separate table were slowly becoming aware of just what sort of creatures the majority of the other females present were. In fact, had Leonora coughed at that precise moment, or had Charles given out one of his infectious laughs at one of his own naughty sallies, as he so often did, the moment might have passed and her future might have shaped itself in an entirely different fashion.

For Miss Thicke and her counterparts were already in huddled, agitated conversation, and within a few moments they were fated to rise and order the young people to leave at once. They had finally noted the general level of communication between the sexes that was going on all about them as well as the fact that an increasing amount of it was being held in what appeared to be mime, since so little of it was verbal. They had also discovered both the wealth of cosmetics covering the faces and the dearth of material covering the forms of the other females present

But at that exact moment, Charles turned around to see how his friend Georgie was faring in his attempts to get Lady Ann up and away from the others. The moment Georgie and his Ann arose, Charles intended to ask Nell to go for a stroll with him to some darker place, so he at last could have a taste of those promisingly plushy lips, and with luck, some more intimate knowledge of some other soft and yielding parts of her as well.

So at that precise moment, Leonora, all unaware of Charles’s plans for her future entertainment, was left alone to entertain herself by watching a young female that she spied a few feet away from her. The young woman stood beneath the direct light of a Japanese lantern that swung from a willow tree, and such was her colorful aspect that she caught Leonora’s astonished eye. She stood in front of one of the many decorative pavilions, those curtained recesses euphemistically termed “supper booths” that the proprietors of the garden had erected for patrons who required more privacy. And in her red and gold and black finery, she looked as though she had stepped off a stage where she had been enacting “Vice” in some strange morality play.

Her hair was gold as brass doubloons, her skin was as white as a lie in the dark of night, though her cheeks and lips were red as flame. Her figure was even more lavish than Leonora’s, but instead of being uneasy with such bounty, as Leonora so often was, the unknown young female had a gown so tight as to be a redundant skin and so low in front as to place her high, firm, pear-shaped breasts almost entirely on display.

It was a gentleman’s strong white hand suddenly appearing from behind the young female, encompassing one of those bare mounds so completely as to hide it from view as the frock had not, that caused Leonora to take in her breath and avert her eyes at once. And she would not have looked back, she was so distracted and dismayed with her twin emotions of embarrassment and arousal, had she not heard that one word, spoken by that one voice, in that one moment when there was no other thing to divert her from it.