His at Night (16 page)

Aunt Rachel clenched Elissande’s hand in hers. “Married? To whom?”

“If you wish to meet him, dress and come with me.”

“Where—where are we going?”

“London.” Lady Kingsley had told her that she would help Elissande obtain a special license from the bishop of London.

“Does—does your uncle know?”

“No.”

Aunt Rachel trembled. “What if—what will happen when he finds out?”

Elissande took Aunt Rachel into her arms. “My fiancé is a marquess. My uncle cannot harm me once I’m married. You come with me now and you need never see him again either: Lord Vere will protect us.”

Aunt Rachel shook harder. “Are you—are you sure, Ellie?”

“Yes.” She was a terrific liar: Her smiles were her best lies, but she was no slouch with words. “We may put our absolute confidence in Lord Vere. He is a prince among men.”

She did not know whether she convinced Aunt Rachel completely. But Aunt Rachel became pliant enough that Elissande had no trouble dressing her in a pale green silk morning gown trimmed in white chiffon, and a hat of green velvet to match.

Unfortunately, real clothes only emphasized her aunt’s grayish pallor, stick-thinness, and that particular shrinking quality she had, as if she yearned at all times toward invisibility—but she looked presentable
enough. For Aunt Rachel’s sake, Elissande could only pray that Lord Vere would appear half as formidable as she’d made him out to be.

Aunt Rachel started upon meeting her soon-to-be nephew-in-law. Elissande could well relate to that sense of delightful surprise. Inspecting him from the point of view of a stranger, she could not deny that he was a very impressive-looking man.

He was beautifully attired: all buttons properly aligned with their intended buttonholes, trousers free from food stains, and necktie not the least bit crooked. He spoke minimally—stunned into near silence by the enormity of the situation, she didn’t doubt. And he dutifully proclaimed himself honored and delighted at the “bestowal of Miss Edgerton’s hand.”

When she had shoved that hand deep down his esophagus.

He gave her one look, a quick scan of her person. She was dressed demurely in gray chiffon broadcloth—not that she could fool Lord Vere anymore as to what kind of woman she was. The thought suddenly came to her that perhaps she hadn’t needed to be entirely naked, that it might have been good enough to have been caught in his arms in her combination undergarment.

Instead he’d seen all of her.

She swallowed, looked down, and was glad when Lady Kingsley ordered everyone into the carriage.

Vere made sure he and Freddie traveled in a separate train compartment, away from the women. He slept while Freddie sketched next to him. Upon reaching London, Lady Kingsley warned him not to stray too far from his house, so she could inform him of the hour and location of his wedding.

The women left to do what women did when faced with imminent nuptials. Vere declined Freddie’s offer of company and sent a note for Holbrook to meet him in the same hidey-hole where they’d last met.

The whorehouse—their sobriquet for this particular hidey-hole—had always amused Vere with its indelicate colors and its clumsy but wholehearted attempts at elegance. But today its faux tiger-skin rug and its purple lamp shades chafed his vision and chafed it badly.

Holbrook arrived in short order. Vere tossed down the coded dossier. “From Douglas’s safe. It’s yours for the day.”

“Thank you, my lord. Well done, as always,” said Holbrook. “I shall have it duplicated in no time.”

He handed Vere a glass of Poire Williams—fruit brandies of all types fascinated Holbrook. “I understand that congratulations are in order.”

Vere refrained from mentioning that Holbrook hardly had cause to offer another man matrimonial felicitations, since the late Lady Holbrook had once stuck a knife in him. “Thank you, sir.”

“What happened?”

Vere lit a cigarette, took a drag, and shrugged.

“Not the proudest moment in an otherwise distinguished
career
, was it?” Holbrook commented lazily.

Vere flicked the barely forming ashes from his cigarette.

Holbrook played with the bead fringes of an antimacassar. “The suspect’s niece, no less.”

“My appeal is universal.” Vere drained his glass. Enough chitchat. “There was a relative with whom Douglas lived for a while in London, wasn’t there?”

“There was. Mrs. John Watts. London Street, Jacob’s Island.” Holbrook possessed an unerring memory. “But she’s been dead a long time.”

“Thank you.” Vere rose from his seat. “I’ll see myself out.”

“Are you sure, sir? On your wedding day?”

What
else
was he to do on this day? Whore and carouse? Drink himself into a ditch? Form an opium habit?

“But of course,” he said softly. “How better to enjoy this day and all that shall come with it?”

“I still can’t believe it. Penny, getting married,” said Angelica Carlisle, Freddie’s oldest friend, chortling.

She and Freddie were taking coffee—her new continental habit—in the drawing room of the town house that had once belonged to her mother.

Freddie had attended many a tea and dinner party here, read most of the books in the study, and regularly visited on Sundays, the day of the week strictly reserved for family and closest friends. Angelica had
already mentioned the changes she intended to make to the interior of the house. But she was still settling in—she’d been back in England only a month. The house remained unaltered. And the very familiarity of the setting—comfortably faded rose-and-ivy wallpaper, lovingly preserved watercolors by long-perished spinster aunts, commemorative plates from Her Majesty’s Silver Jubilee, thirty-five years ago—made the difference in her person all the more startling.

He’d always thought her handsome, strong boned and strong featured, remarkable rather than pretty. But during the years of her brief marriage and widowhood, she’d acquired a certain seductiveness to her person. Her eyes, instead of the wide-open alertness he recalled, were now heavy lidded and mysterious. Her smiles, usually just a slight upturn of one corner of her lips, somehow also radiated sultriness, as if while she conducted herself with perfect decorum, she’d been harboring very naughty thoughts beneath that façade of propriety.

And he, to his own dismay, began thinking of her as an object of desire for the first time in his life.
Angelica
, who’d always been like a sister to him, a pesky, too-honest, merciless younger sister who told him that his tailor was blind
and
incompetent, that he needed to brush his teeth at least three minutes longer, and that if he’d had more than two drops of champagne, he was not allowed to dance the waltz for the sake of public safety.

She took a sip of her coffee, chuckled again, and
shook her head. One coil of her hair, artfully loose, stroked the edge of her jaw, lending a new softness to the angularity of her features. As if aware of the fascination that one curl held over him, she pulled it straight between two fingers, then let go.

Somehow she imbued even such a minor motion with the full potency of her new powers, with the seduction of Eve.

He realized he hadn’t answered and hastened to speak. “Penny is twenty-nine. He has to marry at some point.”

“Of course that is the case. It’s the scandal that shocks me. As much as I might roll my eyes at some of his antics, Penny isn’t one to get himself into serious trouble.”

“I know,” said Freddie. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have let my guard down.”

He’d been fifteen when Penny’s riding accident happened. It had been the rare summer week they’d spent apart: he with their late mother’s cousin in Biarritz, Penny in Aberdeenshire with Lady Jane, their paternal great-aunt.

For the first few months after Penny’s accident, Freddie had been worried sick. But after a while, it became clear that while Penny would never again lucidly trace the history of the Plebeian Council or make a devilishly persuasive case for granting women the right to vote, he also did not need a nursemaid all hours of the day. It had been a small mercy in a devastating turn of events, the unfairness of which still
haunted Freddie. His brilliant, brave brother, who had claimed Freddie’s mistakes as his own before their unkind father, and who could have had a significant career in Parliament, reduced to an expert in little more than his own daily schedule.

“You did say you didn’t think Miss Edgerton was after Penny merely for his title and fortune.”

“Her uncle has a diamond mine in South Africa and no children of his own. I don’t think she is after him for his fortune, at least.”

Angelica took a bite of her Madeira cake. He watched her absently wiping away the butter the rich cake left on her fingers, almost as if she were caressing the napkin. He imagined her fingers caressing
him
instead.

“So what do you think of this Miss Edgerton?” she asked.

He had to reel his mind back from the sensual, and sometimes shockingly explicit, thoughts it had a tendency to engage in these days—thoughts that never failed to involve Angelica in some state of undress. “Miss Edgerton, ah, well, she is very pretty, amiable, smiling. Doesn’t have much to say, though, except to agree with whoever is speaking.”

“That should suit Penny. He likes it when people agree with him.”

What neither of them said, out of loyalty to Penny, was that a girl of middling intelligence and not many original thoughts was probably the most Penny could hope for.

“It’s been thirteen years since his accident,” said
Angelica. “He has managed remarkably well. He will manage this too.”

Freddie smiled at her. “You are right. I should have more faith.”

They said nothing for a minute or so, she nibbling on another piece of Madeira cake, he turning an almond biscuit in his fingers.

“Well,” they said at nearly the same time.

“You first,” he offered.

“No, no, you first. You are my visitor; I insist.”

“I—I’d like to ask you for a favor,” he said.

“In all my years of knowing you I don’t remember a single instance of your ever asking me for favors. I will admit it might have had something to do with the fact that I was constantly thrusting my opinions and wishes on you.” Her eyes twinkled. “But please, go ahead; I am resolutely intrigued.”

He loved the shape of her mouth when she almost smiled. Why had he never noticed before the magnetic pull of her near-smile?

“I saw an interesting painting at Miss Edgerton’s house. No one knows the identity of the artist. I believe I’ve seen a work in a similar style and vein. But I can’t remember when or where,” he said. “Your memory is far superior for such things, as is your knowledge.”

“Hmm, compliments. I adore compliments—flattery will get you far, young man.”

“You know I don’t know how to flatter.” Ten years ago Angelica had already been a singular connoisseur
of art. These days she was formidable in her erudition. “I’ve taken some photographs of the painting. May I show them to you once they have been developed?”

She tilted her head to one side and played with the coil of hair at her jaw again. “But I have not agreed to help you yet. First, I think, I’d like to hear your answer to
my
request for a favor. I have been waiting on an answer for weeks, if you will recall.”

And he’d been able to think of nothing else, for weeks.

He flushed despite his intention not to. “You speak of the portrait?”

The
nude
portrait she would like of herself. When he’d insisted to Penny that there was nothing prurient about a study of the female form, his head had been filled with the most carnal visions of Angelica.

“Yes, that’s it.”

She was direct and almost nonchalant, while he felt gauche, out of his element, and much too warm.

“You know I’m not an expert at the human form.”

“You’ve always been too modest, Freddie dearest. I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t have faith in your abilities. I’ve seen the studies you’ve done: You do very well at the human form.”

She was right, though it was his
preference
not to paint the human form very often. He had been a clumsy child prone to injuring himself, and as such was kept indoors when he most wished to be outside, running, spinning around and around, or simply lying in the grass and observing the changing color of
the sky. Painting the human form meant his studio, when he’d much rather be
en plein air
, capturing the effusive pink cream of a cherry tree in blossom or the undercurrents of a tête-à-tête at a picnic party.