His at Night (28 page)

W
hat a lovely garden,” murmured Aunt Rachel.

Lord Vere’s house was backed by a private garden to which only the residents in the surrounding houses had access, a situation that was both fortuitous and uncommon in London, according to Mrs. Dilwyn.

Several elegant plane trees grew in this enclosure, their wide canopies thrust sixty feet in the air to offer fine shade to those who strolled the flagstone path that bisected a smoothly clipped lawn. A three-tiered Italian fountain burbled agreeably nearby.

Mrs. Dilwyn had advised a daily intake of fresh air. Elissande, who was determined to do the right thing by her aunt, had steeled herself for a long bout of wheedling persuasion in order to extract Aunt Rachel from her bed. To her surprise, Aunt Rachel had agreed immediately to be put into a simple blue day dress.

Elissande had helped her into a chair and then, a
pair of impressively sized footmen had carried the chair, with Aunt Rachel in it, down to the garden.

A leaf floated down from the canopy above. Elissande caught it in her hand and showed it to Aunt Rachel.

Aunt Rachel stared reverently at the very ordinary leaf. “How beautiful,” she said.

Elissande’s reply was forgotten as a teardrop fell down Aunt Rachel’s face. She turned toward Elissande. “Thank you, Ellie.”

Panic engulfed Elissande. This shelter, this life, this green haven in the middle of London—the safety Aunt Rachel believed they’d found was as fleeting as a soap bubble.

For love, there is nothing I do not dare. Nothing
.

Love
was a petrifying word coming out of her uncle’s mouth. He was quite ready to wage hell’s own vengeance to regain his wife.

I fear something terrible might befall the handsome idiot you claim to love so much
.

The handsome idiot who had claimed her thoroughly in the darkness before dawn.

Except he hadn’t been at all an idiot, had he? He’d been angry, discourteous, and his language had been downright appalling. But he hadn’t been stupid. He’d known very clearly what she’d done to him, which begged the question: Had he been, like her, pretending to be someone he wasn’t?

The thought was a hook through her heart, yanking it in unpredictable directions.

The golden glow of his skin. The electric pleasure
of his teeth at her shoulder. The dark excitement of his flesh firmly embedded in hers.

But more than anything else, the raw power he exuded.

Take off your clothes
.

She wanted him to say it again.

Her hand crept to her throat, her fingertip pressed into the vein that throbbed rapidly.

Was it possible—was it at all possible that she could come out of her most desperate choice with a man as clever as Odysseus who looked like Achilles and made love like Paris…?

And her uncle had threatened irreparable harm to him.

Only two days remained.

Needham came, rebandaged Vere’s arm, and left with both the packet of letters Vere had taken from Palliser and the bundle of bloodied clothes under Vere’s bed. All without a single word. Good old Needham.

By the middle of the afternoon Vere was able to get up from his bed without immediately wanting to put a rifle to his head and pull the trigger. He rang for tea and toast.

When the knock came at his door, however, the person who entered was his wife, a smile on her face.

“How are you, Penny?”

No,
not
the person he wanted to see, not when the only thing he could remember of his predawn hours at home was his desperate release into her very willing
body. He could deduce that she must have helped him with his wound, and that he must have instructed her to get Needham, but how had they gone from an activity as distinctly uncarnal as dressing a gunshot injury to the sort of untrammeled coupling the memories of which came near to making
him
blush?

Well, there was nothing to do but to brazen it out.

“Oh, hullo, my dear. And don’t you look ever fresh and charming.”

Her dress was white, a pure and demure backdrop for her guileless smile. The skirt of the dress, fashionably narrow, clung rather ferociously to her hips before dropping in a more seemly column to the floor.

“You are sure you feel well enough to eat?”

“Quite. I’m famished.”

She clapped her hands. A maid came in and set down a tray of tea, bobbed a curtsy, and left.

His wife poured. “How is your arm?”

“Hurts.”

“And your head?”

“Hurts. But better.” He drank thirstily of the tea she offered, making sure to spill some on his dressing gown. “Do you know what happened to me? My arm, that is. My head always hurts after too much whiskey.”

“It was rum you drank,” she corrected him. “And you said a hansom cab driver shot you.”

That was stupid of him. He should never have mentioned a gun. “Are you sure?” he asked. “I can hardly stand rum.”

She poured herself a cup of tea. “Where
were
you
last night?” she said softly, with wifely interest. “And what were you doing out so late?”

She’d come to
interrogate
him.

“I can’t quite remember.”

Very deliberately she stirred in her cream and sugar. “You don’t remember being shot at?”

Well, this would not do. He was much better on the offensive. “Well, you should know firsthand the deleterious effect the consumption of alcoholic beverages has on the retention of memory.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Can you recall anything from our wedding night?”

Her stirring stopped. “Of course I remember…some things.”

“You told me my lips dripped beeswax. No one had ever told me before that my lips dripped beeswax.”

To her credit, she raised her teacup and drank without choking. “Do you mean honeycomb?”

“Pardon?”

“Honeycomb, not beeswax.”

“Right, that’s what I said. Honeycomb. ‘Honey and milk are under thy tongue,’ you told me, ‘and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of…’ Hmm, let me think, what was it? Sinai? Syria? Damascus?”

“Lebanon,” she said.

“Exactly. And of course, once we disrobed you”—he sighed in exaggerated contentment—“you were far better to look at than even the lady in the Delacroix your father stole. Do you suppose we could have you pose like that for Freddie? And not for a minuscule
canvas either—life-size, I insist—and can we hang it in the dining room?”

“That would border on public indecency.”

Her smile was beginning to assume that over-brightness he’d come to know so intimately. Good, he must be doing something right.

“Dash it. Would have been grand fun showing you off to my friends. How they would slobber over you.”

He made moon eyes at her.

“Now, now, Penny,” she said, her voice just the slightest bit tight. “We mustn’t rub our good fortune in our friends’ faces.”

Happier, he ate four slices of toast. When he was finished, she said, “Dr. Needham told me your dressing should be changed in the afternoon, and again in the evening before bed. So shall we?”

He rolled up the sleeve of his dressing gown. She examined his wound and changed the bandaging. As he rolled down his sleeve, she stopped him and asked, “What are these?”

Her fingers pointed to a series of small half-moon marks just above his elbow.

“Look like nail marks to me.”

“Did the cabdriver get his hand on you too?”

“Hmm, they seem more like they have been left by a woman. In the heat of passion, you see. She grabs on to the man’s arms and her fingers dig into his sinews.” He smiled at her. “Have you been taking advantage of me while I was mentally incapacitated, Lady Vere?”

She flushed. “It was you who wished it, sir.”

“Was it? My, could have been disastrous, you know. When a man is that drunk, sometimes he can’t get it up. And sometimes he can’t finish it off.”

She touched her throat. “Well, you didn’t have any problem on either account.”

He preened. “That is a testament to your charm, my lady. Although I must say, if we keep going at it like this, the family size will be increasing very soon.”

A thought that rather petrified him.

“Do you wish to increase the family size?” she asked, as if it were an afterthought.

“Well, of course, what man doesn’t? For God and country,” he said, as he scanned the letters that had come with his tea and toast.

When he looked up again, she wore the oddest expression. He immediately worried he’d said something that had given his act away, but he could not think what.

“Oh, look, Freddie invites us for tea this afternoon at the Savoy Hotel. Shall we go then?”

“Yes,” she said, with a smile he’d never quite seen before. “Do let us go.”

The terrace at the Savoy Hotel commanded a panoramic view of the Thames, with Cleopatra’s Needle thrusting skyward just beyond the hotel’s gardens. A steady traffic of steamships and barges traversed the water lanes. The sky was clear by London standards, but nevertheless seemed dirt-smudged to Elissande,
who had yet to grow accustomed to the great metropolis’s perpetually tainted air.

Lord Frederick had brought along Mrs. Canaletto, a childhood chum of the brothers, both of whom called her by her Christian name. She was several years older than Elissande, worldly, not given to the same sort of limitless enthusiasm as Miss Kingsley and her companions, but nevertheless friendly and approachable.

“Have you been to the theater yet, Lady Vere?” asked Mrs. Canaletto.

“No, I’m afraid I’ve not had the pleasure.”

“Then you must have Penny take you to a performance at the Savoy Theatre right away.”

Elissande’s husband looked at Mrs. Canaletto expectantly, then said, “Only one recommendation, Angelica? You used to like to tell us how to do
everything.”

Mrs. Canaletto chuckled. “That’s because I’ve known you since you were three, Penny. When I’ve known Lady Vere twenty-six years, rest assured I will tell her how to do everything too.”

Elissande asked Mrs. Canaletto whether she’d visited the Isle of Capri during her stay in Italy. Mrs. Canaletto had not, but both Lord Vere and Lord Frederick had, on a continental jaunt the two had taken together after Lord Frederick had finished his studies at Oxford.

Lord Vere talked about the sights they’d seen on the trip, with Mrs. Canaletto correcting him good-naturedly alongside: the fabled Neuschwanstein Castle in Bulgaria, built by the mad Count Siegfried (“It’s
in Bavaria, Penny, built by King Ludwig II, who might or might not have been mad”); the Leaning Tower of Sienna (“Pisa”); and on Capri, the Purple Grotto (“The Black Grotto, Penny”).

“It was the Black Grotto, really?”

“Angelica is teasing you, Penny,” said Lord Frederick. “It’s the Blue Grotto.”

Undaunted, Elissande’s husband went on. As he held forth, he dropped his handkerchief into the jam pot, knocked the contents of a slender flower vase onto the crumpet plate, and had one of his biscuits leap ten feet to land amidst the pink ostrich feathers of someone’s extravagant hat.

Lord Frederick and Mrs. Canaletto seemed to think nothing of either Lord Vere’s loquaciousness or his clumsiness. But his words and actions seemed excessive to Elissande, as if he were trying to make up for the flash of incisive intelligence he’d displayed during their predawn encounter by making himself appear especially inane.

And inept. To dilute the memory of his absolute mastery over her body, perhaps?

He had come to within an inch of convincing her that it had been a fluke—within an inch. And then he’d gone too far and directly contradicted himself—probably because he sincerely did not remember recommending, strongly, that she take measures against just such a possibility as the expanding of their family.

The lady in the pink ostrich hat, after recovering the biscuit from the depth of her millinery plumage,
approached their table. For a moment Elissande thought she might have harsh words for Lord Vere, but Lord Vere and Lord Frederick rose, and both men plus Mrs. Canaletto greeted her familiarly.

“Lady Vere, may I present the Countess of Bourkes,” said Lord Vere. “Countess, my wife.”

It was the beginning of a parade. The Season was over, but London was still an important hub for the upper crust traveling between Scotland, Cowes, and the therapeutic spas of the Continent. Elissande’s husband seemed to be acquainted with everyone who was anyone. And as Lady Avery must have lost no time in trumpeting her latest exposé, the whole world wanted to see what manner of woman had been caught with him in a most scandalous manner.