Her Master's Touch (10 page)

“I don’t know about that.” Elizabeth
repositioned the small crown on her head. “I thought tiaras were
not to be worn except in the presence of royalty.”

“You
will
be in the presence of
royalty,” Cora said. “Your father has invited a prince from the
Punjab in India, Prince Rao Singh. The prince is anxious to meet
you.”

Elizabeth looked in the mirror, catching her
step-mother’s eye. “
That man!
Why on earth did father invite
him
?”

Cora held her gaze. “Because the prince is
looking for a wife.”

Elizabeth laughed lightly. “Then he’s looking
in the wrong place. Besides, I’m only going through all of this
coming out humbug to please Father. I do so want him to be proud of
me,” she said, wistfully. Although her father had been good to her
since she returned from India, their relationship was tenuous.

After fleeing
Shanti Bhavan
, she’d
telegraphed him, and he'd arranged passage for her to England. When
she arrived he’d been overjoyed to have her back. But then their
relationship became strained. Years before, he had sold
Shanti
Bhavan
to return to England to search for her, believing she’d
been kidnapped. But when he learned she ran away from school and
made her way to India to join her mother, not sending word of her
whereabouts because she was angry, he'd been furious. Still, he
refused to divulge anything about her mother, so she surmised that
he was hiding something. Just as she was.

London society was still abuzz with
speculation as to who, exactly, Elizabeth Sheffield was. So far,
none pinned her to the fourteen-year-old girl who went missing
years before, because at the time, her father was living in India.
But if it was learned
exactly
how she'd survived while
living in India, it would be
the
scandal of the season, and
her father would have no chance making a match. So all she’d told
him was that after her mother died, she worked for a British family
for her keep.

Perhaps in time she'd return to
Shanti
Bhavan
where buried memories had begun to surface and try to
find her answers. But it was an unattainable dream as long as she
was wanted for a murder she didn't commit. Nor would she tell her
father about the opal. But she felt no remorse over taking a gem
from a man who'd killed his brother to gain an inheritance. For
now, she was resolved to remaining in England and marrying a man of
her father's choosing. She only hoped that during the upcoming ball
she'd make him proud, that being the woman he wanted her to be
would help close the rift between them.

“Your father is proud of you, Elizabeth,”
Cora said, “but you have to understand that running away like you
did and sending no word of your whereabouts for years... well, it
will take time for him to come to terms with that. But now that you
are ready to take a husband and start a family, your father will be
eager to be a part of all that. He missed seeing you grow up, so he
won’t want to miss being a part of the next generation.”

Elizabeth tucked a vagrant curl into the
upsweep of hair. “I’m not ready to marry yet. I’ve only just
finished school,” she said, catching her step-mother’s eye in the
mirror. “Having to mollify a husband sounds most unappealing at the
moment.”

“Then you must find a man who doesn’t need
mollifying,” Cora said, while straightening a flounce on
Elizabeth’s dress, ”one who worships the ground you walk on and
wants to spend his life treating you like a princess, in fact
making you his princess.”

Elizabeth laughed heartily. “Like Prince Rao
Singh, you mean. I’ve heard all about the man. Every eligible woman
in London is talking about him. In fact, he’s subject for gossip
with half the married women as well, though what I’ve heard they
are saying about him would make a sailor blush. Why Father invited
him here is beyond me.”

Cora stopped what she was doing and stared at
Elizabeth's reflection in the mirror. “Whatever have you heard, and
from whom?” she asked, eyes eager with interest.

Elizabeth felt heat creep up her face. “I
can't repeat it. It's too embarrassing. Besides, what I heard came
from my friend Nell, whose lady’s maid heard it from her friend,
who was the lady’s maid for a certain countess, who had a tryst
with the prince while aboard the ship crossing from India and raved
to a certain baroness aboard—whose name I won’t mention—that the
prince had—" Elizabeth stopped short.

“Go on. The prince had what? If the man is a
potential suitor and husband for you, I’d like to know what’s being
said about him... To tell your father, of course. So do tell.”

Elizabeth looked more closely at her
step-mother and saw her face color, and knew Cora wanted the
information on her own behalf. She loved a tidbit of gossip to pass
on, if only to hear the collective gasps of shock from her lady
friends. “Well, the countess said that the prince was very much a
man—" she stopped short again, her face feeling as if on fire.

“Go on,” Cora urged, leaning toward the
mirror, her lips parted in prurient interest. “Very much a man in
what way?”

Elizabeth’s eyelids fluttered as she said,
“Well, in the way that… men are men. You know, the way that they
are different from women.” Fire burned like two embers in her
cheeks and her hands came up to press the fire out.

Cora laughed. “Innocent lamb. Your father
would be pleased to know you blush as any respectable lady should.
As for the prince, I presume we're talking about his prowess in
bed?”

Elizabeth’s hands fluttered away from her
face like two restless butterflies. She reached for a silver hand
mirror to still their nervous trembling. Although she had been bold
beyond reason while in India, finishing school had curbed those
ways. Her only goal now was to be the proper young lady her father
hoped she had become. Catching Cora’s gaze in the mirror, she
nodded vaguely, and replied, “Well, yes.”

“I think I know exactly the countess in
question,” she said, lips quivering with excitement. “She’s been
known to rave about certain conquests outside of marriage, men with
robust appetites for lovemaking, who are well-endowed... whose...
anatomies make up for her husband’s physical... umm...
short
comings.”

Elizabeth plunked the mirror down, agitated
with the focus of the conversation. “Why would any decent woman
want a man like that? It’s disgusting even thinking about it.” She
busied herself arranging a flounce on her skirt while hoping the
heightened color in her cheeks would fade. Discussing the prince’s
maleness was having a decidedly unnerving effect on her. She
remembered all too well the heated kisses she’d shared with a
certain lord, and the other things she’d allowed him to do,
hedonistic things that were as shameless as they were immoral.
Forcing from her mind her disgraceful behavior with the man,
behavior brought on by the object of his maleness, she said, “In
any event, returning to India with some prince from the Punjab is
the least appealing of any offer I might get.”

“Don’t discard Prince Singh too quickly,”
Cora said. “I met him a few days ago. He’s an extraordinary looking
man. Gracious, intelligent, and speaks flawless English.”

Elizabeth glanced at herself in the long
mirror. With the tiny clusters of pearls and delicate sprays of
sequins worked into the bodice of her gown, and the small diamonds
glittering from the tiara encircling her head, she
did
look
like a princess. For an instant she considered allowing Prince Rao
Singh to find his way among prospective suitors, then dismissed
that notion. India held too many uncertainties for her, even if she
were to return there as the wife of a prince. “No thank you," she
emphasized. "I’ve had my fill of India."

“The prince also has an estate in England,”
Cora continued, seeming determined to hold to the subject of the
prince, “so you would not always live in India if you were to marry
him. In fact, he has plans to return to England in the near
future.”

“Well, I have no desire to form a marital
alliance with Prince Rao Singh,” Elizabeth clipped, irritated with
her step mother's doggedness. “I’ll set my sights on an Englishman,
express my wishes to Father, and hope my intended turns out to be
either well over ninety years old, or won’t want to marry for at
least twenty years.”

Cora laughed. “I doubt any man betrothed to
you would want to wait at all. Not only has your father promised a
sizable dowry, but your beauty is celebrated in London. But maybe
you’ll find your ideal man at the ball and be eager to form a
marital alliance."

Elizabeth was certain she would not. She’d
not met a man in all of England during the entire season who’d so
much as turned her head. True, she’d met all manner of fops and
swells and dandies. But none made her breath catch or her heart
hammer or her knees weak. And none sent warm tingles coursing
through her to settle low in her belly. And none made her want to
throw her arms around him and kiss him until she couldn’t breathe,
as if her life depended on the air in his lungs, all the while
savoring the sweet, smoky, spicy taste of him.

And try as she might, she could not put Lord
Damon Ravencroft, or the hedonistic effect he had on her, out of
her mind. But tomorrow night at the ball she
would
rid her
mind of Lord Ravencroft, just as she'd rid his bedchamber of mice
two years before. In fact, she was so certain of it, she said to
her step-mother, “Yes, I
will
find my ideal man at the ball
tomorrow night, I’m confident. But I assure you, it will not be the
prince.”

She let out a little soft snicker. How
utterly silly! Princess Elizabeth Singh.

***

Damon moved the curtain aside and peered out
the window of the coach as it made its way through St. Giles
enroute to Lady Elizabeth Sheffield’s coming out ball. Normally he
avoided balls and cotillions like the plague, but this particular
ball held the means to an end. Not only was Elizabeth Sheffield
something to look on, if there was anything to all the ravings he’d
heard, but the sizable dowry she'd bring to him upon marriage would
pay the legal fees necessary to restore his name and secure his
inheritance. And she’d probably be as good a wife as any.

Beyond the coach window, dreary rain splashed
against flagstones and splattered in puddles, tall lamps flickered
and flared over narrow crooked streets, and he could see the
shadowy figures of forlorn, bedraggled men and women huddled
against doorways and hunkered down in protected corners. St. Giles
was as he’d remembered—an aggregate of hopeless habitation where
garbage was thrown into gutters each night to become a mass of
grime and foul vapors, and the contents of chamber pots was pitched
from windows to the street below to find its way into stagnant
water so charged with decaying matter that in hot weather it filled
the air with a stench akin to rotten eggs...

He rapped on the window and the coach came to
a halt. For a few minutes he stared at the place where he’d lived
with his mother—an abandoned building once occupied from cellar to
garret by families who lived in one room flats. Back then,
stairwells sheltered the homeless, and the pungent odor of urine
and unwashed bodies was so strong, doors to the flats remained
closed day and night. Each morning his mother sent him with two
wooden buckets to fetch water from a community cistern in which
litter and an occasional dead rat floated. One bucket was for
bathing, and for washing clothes. The other was for washing dishes
and scrubbing the flat. Then he and his mother would leave for
work, pushing a barrow and selling mussels, or picking through
refuse for odds and ends to sell on the street when mussels weren’t
available. But however desperate things got, his mother refused to
beg.

The strange thing was, until the day he first
saw Westwendham, when he was nine years old, he hadn't known how
utterly poor they were because they'd always had food on the table
and managed to stay out of the poorhouse. His mother had been
careful to point that out. Their flat was scrubbed, faded gingham
curtains hung over the single window, jute mats that covered the
floorboards were beaten each day, and the table was always dressed
with an unsoiled cloth that was removed for meals. And sitting on a
shelf above the table, like a piece of fine porcelain, was the
china bird with the broken wing he’d rescued from the garbage and
given to his mother for Christmas the year he turned twelve. But no
matter how hard she tried, his mother could never keep out the
roaches and rats.

Instinctively his hand went to his chest
where the tattooed image of a rat—pricked into his flesh by a gypsy
chit who still haunted his memories—stood as a reminder of the life
he and his mother had been forced into by a cruel father he’d never
met, a man who divorced his wife and booted her out without a penny
because she defied him by reading books. She was an abomination
he'd raved. Women were not to be educated in a man’s world. But she
had the foresight to take her precious books with her when she
left, which she placed on shelves that covered one wall of their
small flat.

Damon shared his mother’s thirst for
knowledge, and from those books he learned Latin, the classics, and
proper English grammar. From etiquette books and her Patrician
upbringing, his mother instructed him in the social graces he
needed to one day assume his rightful place at Westwendham. And on
occasion, he made his way to the Royal Victoria Theater, where for
three pence, he joined a rowdy crowd of dustmen and porters and
black-faced sweeps to watch a melodrama or a farce, or if he was
lucky, a burlesque.

The rest of his education was wide-ranging.
On the streets of St. Giles he learned bare-fisted fighting and
back-alley boxing. And in the crowded marketplace he learned how to
spot and subdue a thief and return a coin purse to a dandy for a
few pennies reward. He hadn’t been back to St. Giles since the
night his mother died, and tonight he needed a reminder of why he’d
come back to England. Westwendham was his, and he intended to claim
it, if not for himself, then for his mother. He could still see the
zealous look on her face when she impressed upon him the importance
of seeking justice and claiming what was rightfully his. He was his
father's first born, his heir—though his father never knew he
existed as his mother was pregnant when he divorced her and turned
her out…