Guilty Series (37 page)

Isabel looked at the list. “Why do we need a fishing net?”

“I thought we could go to Hyde Park and fish some of the tiny insects out of the ponds. If we got a microscope, we could look at them very closely.”

“Why would we want to?”

Biology was not very appealing to Isabel, Grace could see. She changed tactics. “Going to parks is necessary so one can enjoy the fresh air.”

“I've been to parks all my life. They all look the same.”

Grace looked at the child. “Do they?” she asked, noticing that Isabel seemed very forlorn all of a sudden.

“I'd rather go to Papa's estate in the country. There are ponies there. Molly told me.”

“Molly?”

“Third housemaid. She said Papa's estate is called Nightingale's Gate, and it has orchards. Apples, pears, plums. And the house is right on the sea. I've never even seen the sea, well, except to cross the Channel.”

“The sea is wonderful,” Grace told her. “I grew up in Land's End.”

“Land's End? That is at the very, very tip of England, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is. You could look out over the ocean from my parents' house.” Grace was overcome by an unexpected wave of homesickness, and she pushed it away. Showing Isabel the list, she asked, “Can you think of anything else we need?”

Isabel read through the list again and shook her head. “No. There's an awful lot to buy already, isn't there? We shall be shopping for days.”

“It puzzles me that there is nothing up here. I know you have had quite a few governesses, so why is the nursery empty? Had you been sent up to school?”

“No, I have always had governesses, until the nuns anyway.”

“Nuns? Is your family Catholic?”

“Mama was, I think, but she never went to mass or anything. Papa is English, so I don't think he is a Catholic. In fact,” she added, looking up at Grace with a thoughtful frown, “I can't see Papa being anything. Can you?”

Not unless being a hedonist is a religion.
“So, if you have had governesses, why is there nothing up here?”

Isabel's eyes widened in surprise. “Didn't my father tell you? I only got here three days ago. I was born in France, at Metz. My mama died three months ago. Scarlet fever, and I had to go to the convent. Sister Agnes brought me here to live with Papa, and I like it much better. I don't think my father was expecting me.”

“You have only been with your father three days? He did not tell me any of this.”

“I had never met him before I got here, but I knew a lot about him. The newspapers are always writing stories about things he's done. Did you know he won a prostitute in a card game? She was his mistress before you.”

“Isabel!”

“He smokes hashish, too. I saw him, the other night. He has a glass pipe in his room. It's blue.”

How did the child even recognize hashish? Grace wondered how to respond to comments like this from a little girl. She thought of what her own childhood governess would have done, but that was no help, for she doubted Mrs. Filbert had ever needed to deal with a child like Isabel or a man like Moore. “That will be enough, Isabel.”

The child looked at her with deceptive innocence. “Does it bother you?”

Grace guessed that getting under her skin was the child's objective, and she lied. “No, but it should bother you. I thought you didn't want your father to have mistresses, yet you talk so freely about them.”

Isabel frowned at her, obviously unhappy that her governess wasn't responding in the expected way.

“Besides,” Grace went on pleasantly, “these are not appropriate topics for a young lady to be discussing with anyone, and it grieves me to think that when you are in society, you will be shunned for saying such outrageous things.”

“Papa says outrageous things, and he isn't shunned.”

That was true, but Grace wasn't about to discuss the details. She turned toward the wall, flattened out the paper, and added draperies and carpets to her list. “Your father is an artist. Artists are…different.”

“I am an artist, too!”

“Perhaps, but you are a girl, and it is different.” Grace paused, her hand tightening around the pencil, staring at the wall. “It is a horrible thing for a girl to be shunned by society. If you knew what it meant, you would cease this sort of talk.”

She thrust the pencil behind her ear again and turned to the child, adding, “I have read about your father, too. I know as much about his reputation as you do. But it has nothing to do with either of us.”

Isabel frowned, staring up at her. After a moment, she said, “Why did you really come here?”

“I needed work.”

“Because you are poor. I can tell by your dresses. They are awful.”

Grace smiled. “Thank you.”

Isabel bit her lip and was silent for a moment, then she exhaled a sharp sigh, looked away, and said, “That was rude. I'm sorry.”

“I accept your apology.”

“You're far too nice, you know,” Isabel told her, taking refuge in the offering of sage advice. “It doesn't do for a governess to be so nice.”

“Thinking you shall walk all over me, are you?”

“Yes.” Unexpectedly, Isabel smiled at her. It was devilish and beguiling, and at that moment, she looked so much like her father that Grace was startled. “That is exactly what I was thinking.”

“You should give in now, then,” Grace countered, laughing. “Since I can tell what you are thinking, you don't have a chance.”

Isabel's smile faded, and she looked at Grace thoughtfully. “I don't understand you. You aren't anything like my other governesses.”

“And you are not like any child I've ever met before. In many ways, you are a great deal like your father.”

Isabel looked pleased. “You really think so?”

“Yes. What was your mother like?”

The little girl turned away with a shrug. “I hardly ever saw her, unless she was giving me a present or taking me somewhere in the carriage. She did that sometimes, if she wasn't sleeping in the afternoon.”

Isabel walked to the window to look out, as if uninterested in the subject of her other parent, but it had only been three months since the woman's death, and Grace was not fooled. “You must miss her.”

Isabel turned sharply at the question. “No, I don't. I hardly even remember what she looks like. I never saw her. Why would I miss her?”

The vehemence of the reply told its own story. She missed her mother. Badly.

Grace walked over to the window. “Why don't we go into the other rooms and see what we need to buy to furnish those, hmm?”

Before the child could reply, a footman entered the room.

“A note for you from the master, Mrs. Cheval,” the young man said as he crossed the room. He held out the folded sheet of parchment to her with a bow. “He asked me to wait for a reply.”

“What does it say?” Isabel asked, moving to stand beside Grace as she broke the seal and unfolded the note.

“A young lady does not inquire about the private correspondence of others,” Grace said gently and lifted the letter higher to keep it away from the child's curious gaze. She scanned the few lines written there, lines that were scrawled across the page as if a drunken spider had gotten into the inkwell.

It seemed that yesterday's meeting was to be a daily occurrence, and though she was not surprised, she did not welcome it. Too many ghosts, she thought. Too many expectations.

Too much seductive charm.

Hush,
Moore had said, touching her face.
Don't ruin it.
What on earth had he meant? Ruin what? It was as if all he wanted to do was sit there with her in the quiet and listen, as if there would be music. And then he'd kissed her.

She touched her cheek where he had touched it and felt herself getting warm. What was it about him that affected her so? She'd met other powerful, brilliant men. Was it Moore's tortured creativity that fascinated her, that drew her to him like a moth to a flame? If so, she needed to give herself a dunk in cold water before she got scorched by the fire.

“Why do you keep rubbing your cheek like that?” Isabel asked.

Grace jerked her hand away from her face and looked up to find Isabel right beside her. “Am I?” she asked, discomfited to hear her voice come out in a breathless little rush.

“Yes.” Isabel looked up into her face, staring, frowning. “You don't have a pimple,” she assured her. “No spider bite or anything.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Grace answered and doused any notion that Moore was charming. He was a shameless man, wild and unprincipled. Hadn't she learned by now? Artists cared for their art more than they could ever care for any person. Even for a brief amour, even if he heated her blood and made her ache, she did not want a man like him, not any more. Not ever again.

She had been alone so long, and when he had touched her and kissed her, it had seemed as if he had never felt skin so soft or tasted lips so sweet, but it was not real. He might treat her as if she were the only woman in the world, but he was still Dylan Moore, and she knew enough about him to know that on some other night, some other woman would be the only woman in the world.

Grace turned to the wall, laid the note out flat against the plaster, and retrieved her pencil. Directly beneath his words, she wrote her response.

She refolded the sheet and handed it to the footman. He took it and departed with another bow, and she put Moore out of her mind. She returned her attention to her shopping list, discussing the furnishings with Isabel.

“Are we going to have any games?” Isabel asked.

“We are.”

“Smashing! Like what?”

“I thought perhaps battledore and shuttlecock, hide and go seek, and blindman's bluff would be fun.”

Isabel's nose wrinkled with obvious contempt. “Those are for little girls.”

Grace pressed her lips together, trying to hide a smile. “What games would you like?”

“Cap-verses. Crambo. Backgammon. Chess.”

Isabel was probably better at those evening games for adults than most adults were. “We shall do them all,” she said and added a chess set and a backgammon board to her list. “Now, let's talk about furnishings for your room.”

She started toward the largest of the four bedrooms in the nursery, but Isabel's voice stopped her.

“I like my bedroom downstairs.”

“It is a very nice room, but since it is not in the nursery, it won't do.”

Isabel began trying to argue that she was old enough for a proper bedroom and wanted to stay where she was, but before Grace could remind Isabel that her father's orders matched Grace's own, the footman returned.

He carried a silver tray, and on it was a note from Moore, a few sheets of blank paper, and an elaborate desk set, complete with ink, quill, and other letter-writing materials. She pulled Moore's reply from the tray and read it.

Her reply to him was quick and scrupulously polite.

She sent the footman off again, and before Isabel resumed pleading her case, Grace said, “I appreciate your reasons, Isabel, but it is customary for young girls to sleep in the nursery until the age of fourteen, and you are eight. Therefore, you shall sleep here. You father has instructed me to hire a nanny—”

Isabel's groan only interrupted her for a moment. “—and after I do so,” Grace went on, “the nanny will sleep up here as well. Until you are fourteen, the nursery is the only appropriate room for you. Your father said the same.”

Children were so persistent. Isabel began arguing the point again. She wanted a big girl's room, and she was not concerned with how things should be done.

Neither, it seemed, was her parent.

Grace stuffed the letter in her pocket and looked at the footman, who was standing by the door, waiting for her reply. She gave in to the inevitable. “Tell Mr. Moore I shall meet with him as he has requested.”

The footman once again departed. Grace returned her attention to Isabel and bedroom furnishings, trying to put Moore out of her mind. But she felt the warmth of his touch on her cheek all day long, and told herself sternly that she wouldn't let him get away with anything like that again.

 

When she entered the music room that afternoon, Moore was already there. He rose from the piano bench as she came in, and the moment he saw her, he shook his head, frowning. “Grace, that gown is a horror. Send it to the dustbin, I pray you.”