How To School Your Scoundrel (11 page)

He lifted it up into the light.

The miniature was a fair likeness, he acknowledged, though it failed to capture the mischievous glint in Penhallow’s hazel eyes, the charming, idiotic flop of golden brown hair that invariably made its way onto his brow. Moreover, you couldn’t see those muscular shoulders that had powered Oxford to victory in the 1882 Boat Race, nor the negligent posture he assumed as he leaned against some fluted Grecian column in a London ballroom, expecting worship the way other men expected breakfast.

Still, the beauty was all there, the perfect features, the damned happy smile. Why shouldn’t he smile? He’d been sitting at the bottom of the jewel box of the most beautiful woman in London, the wife of one of its most powerful aristocrats. Why the devil shouldn’t he be as happy as a clam, as the cat who stole the cream.

Damn you, Markham.
He mouthed the words rather than said them.

Markham didn’t answer. Markham had simply deposited this box and left the room, so that Somerton might examine its contents alone.

Perhaps that was for the best, after all.

And yet. He felt the strangest surge of yearning in his belly for the secretary’s straightforward, thin shoulders, his quiet posture, his guiltless face and patient brown eyes. The warmth and promise of his clean young limbs.

He picked up the jewel box and flung it against the wall. It struck with a thud rather than a crash, and rolled unharmed into the Oriental rug, surrounded by its sparkling contents. For a moment he stood, not breathing, and then he walked over and picked up each piece, one by one, and put them all back where they belonged.

•   •   •

A
warm, wet tongue lapped Luisa’s nose and cheeks, drawing her upward out of a deep and dream-clogged sleep.

“Quincy!” She flung her arm around the dog. “What the devil? Is it morning?”

The room was dark; not the slightest hint of light emerged from the cracks of the heavy velvet drapes. Quincy went on licking her ear with businesslike strokes, until she was gasping with unwilling laughter.

“Stop it. Stop it, I say!” She struggled to her elbows and blinked to recall herself. For a moment, she was surprised to see the room around her. She had been dreaming of home, of the colorful autumn Schweinwald set against the violet mountains, except that the man galloping at her side was built on a different scale than lanky Peter, and his hair was velvet black . . .

She bowed her head into the sheets. She wasn’t Princess Luisa; she was Markham. This wasn’t her light-filled chamber facing the grand panorama of Holstein province; this was a dark and stately room in a London town house, and she was wearing blue-striped flannel pajamas and a thick linen bandage around her breasts, because the Earl of Somerton slept on the other side of the wall, in all his masculine majesty.

Quincy licked her hand. She looked down, where his furry shape made a dark smudge against the bedspread. She reached out and felt for her pocket watch on the bedside table, but it was too dark to see the face.

Quincy yipped urgently, bumping her hand with his head.

“What’s the matter, love?” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

The dog turned and leapt off the bed and ran to the hallway door. She couldn’t see him in the blackness, but she could hear his paws click on the wooden floorboards as he turned in impatient circles below the knob.

Luisa smothered a yawn. “Quincy, for God’s sake. Can’t you wait until morning?”

Clickety-clickety-click.
Quincy landed back on the bed in an explosion of furry urgency. He butted his head against her chest, he raised himself up and smothered her face with sweeping licks of his long tongue.

“All right, all right!” she whispered fiercely. She set him aside and swung her legs off the bed. Her robe lay on the armchair next to the wardrobe; she shrugged herself into it, shoved her feet into her slippers, and trudged to the door, where Quincy was lifting himself into the air in ecstatic pirouettes. She turned the knob, and Quincy squeezed out the crack and shot down the hallway toward the stairs like a greyhound.

The lights had been put out long ago, but enough glow remained from the streets outside to guide her down the grand staircase to the entrance hall. Quincy stood waiting at attention on the marble tiles, head tilted to one side, wondering at the vastness of her lethargy.

“I shall have to find the key to the garden door,” Luisa began, but Quincy was already darting off, not in the direction of the garden, but down the hall to the earl’s private study. “Quincy! What on earth?”

He turned around, whined, and scampered the rest of the way to the study door, from which, Luisa could now see, a dim bar of light glowed at the bottom.

“Oh, Quincy,” she whispered.

He danced and whined, staring back at her plaintively.

Luisa’s heart tripped. She hurried after the dog, inhaling the cold air of the hallway in anxious gasps. He would have found the jewel box by now. What had he done?

“Is something wrong, Quincy? Is he all right? Has he hurt himself?”

Oh, please God. Not that.

She grasped the handle, and in her haste and panic, it was not until she had actually begun the motion of flinging open the door that she heard the delicate strains of the cello within.

For a moment, she didn’t see him. He wasn’t sitting at the desk, his usual posture. The fire was nearly out, the room chilly, filled only with a music of gaping loneliness, of abandonment. A pungent spiciness note saturated the air, the scent of Scotch whiskey.

The notes were coming from the corner near the window. She turned slowly. Quincy settled at her feet with a relieved sigh.

He played with his eyes closed and his jaw set, at an angle away from her. He must have known she was in the room, but he showed no sign of it: not a flinch, not the slightest curious movement in her direction. His arm plied the bow, and the sensitive wood called out in sorrow.

Luisa could not have said how long she stood there. When the last low note dissolved into the whiskey-scented air, she hardly dared to breathe. Somerton sat without moving, head lowered, resting the tip of his bow on the edge of the red-patterned Oriental rug, as if listening to the dying echoes of the music, and then he picked up the glass on a nearby shelf and drained it.

“What were you playing?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer. He lifted his bow and loosened the hair, and then he plucked a cloth from the open case beside him and wiped first the bow and then the strings of the cello itself. He propped the instrument against the chair and walked, with a kind of studied steadiness, to the tray of drinks, where he refilled his glass.

“Something to drink, Markham?”

“No, thank you.” She tightened the belt of her robe and slid her hands into the pockets.

He made his way to the desk and sat down in his accustomed place, from which he controlled his immense wealth, his vast networks of spies, his intricate schemes, his web of power. He set down the drink and put his head in his hands and stared at the jewel box before him.

“My lord,” Luisa said, in a low voice.

“She never loved me,” he said.

Luisa bowed her head.

“Her heart is closed to me. It always was.” He picked up the drink and swirled the liquid in a gentle circle about the sides. “I remember the day we married, the way she looked at my damned beak of a nose, my plain face, as if she were looking at a corpse. As if she were attending her own funeral.”

“Sir . . .”

“I was madly in love with her. I saw her at a garden party, and I knew I had to have her. I had to make her mine. And do you know what she did?”

“No, sir.”

“She went off with Penhallow. Before I could secure an introduction, he had taken her off in the shrubbery. I never stood a chance, did I? A handsome chap like him, a smooth-skinned, lyric-tongued Adonis.” He took a drink. “But I got him out of the way, didn’t I? I gave her parents a hundred thousand pounds for her. An offer no one could refuse.”

“Oh my God.” Luisa’s throat closed; she had to swallow, twice, to allow herself to breathe.

“I did my best. I swear I did. I was never any good at wooing women, but I know how to give them pleasure in bed, and by God I gave her pleasure. And even that didn’t work. It made her hate me more. She thought, you see, that if she endured me like the martyr she was, if she felt nothing, she could still be true to him. But I made her want me, and she hated me for it.”

“She doesn’t hate you,” Luisa whispered.

He looked up at that, and the bleakness of his smile made her ribs ache. “My dear Markham. I assure you, she does. When she got with child, I retired from her bed. I couldn’t stand the way she looked at me afterward, as if I’d betrayed her by making her spend. She never said
no
to me. That was a point of pride with her. Oh no, she never said
no
; what a good, obedient wife. So I was the one who walked away. I never visited her bed again, from that day to this.”

He rose from the desk in a lithe movement. How extraordinary, that a man built on such burly lines could move with such animal grace. Luisa watched him cross the room, tossing down the rest of his whiskey as he went, and when he couldn’t go any farther he hurled the glass into the fireplace and pounded his two hands against the mantel.

“She never loved me. She never loved me at all.”

Luisa stood near the door, brimming over. Quincy’s wet nose nudged her ankle. In her mind, she heard the cello vibrate with agony, that searing phrase at the end, over and over.

She took one hesitant step, and another. Her feet were cold in her slippers, as if all the blood had gathered near her heart. When he did not object, or bark at her to go away and leave him in peace, she came closer, and closer, until she could feel his warmth tingle the tiny hairs on her skin.

She laid her palm against his white linen shirt.

A sound came from his chest, like the low howl of an animal, but she kept her hand in place on his back, counting the strikes of his magnificent heart, the slight contractions of muscle that told her he was sobbing.

“My son,” he said. “I don’t even know my son.”

“Oh, my lord.”

Somerton drew in a long breath and straightened. The glass case of the mantel clock reflected a portion of his face, his cheekbone and a single bleak eye.

“Go to bed, Markham. We will both endeavor to forget this hour.”

“Sir, I can’t . . .”

“Go to bed.”

Luisa let her hand slide away, down the granite curve of muscle. She curled her fingers into a fist and stuck them back in her pocket, and then she walked slowly to the door, Quincy trotting at her heels.

At the last instant, with her hand on the knob, she stopped and turned her head. “You should sleep, sir.”

He hadn’t moved from his position at the fireplace, braced in place against the mantel. His dry and humorless laugh hurt her ears.

“Ah, Markham. I shall sleep in my grave.”

T
he newspaper headline was thick and crisp: LOST PRINCESS FINDS LOVE IN ENGLAND; SET TO WED DUKE OF ASHLAND IN STORYBOOK ROMANCE; ROYAL BALL TONIGHT IN PARK LANE TO CELEBRATE ENGAGEMENT; PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF WALES EXPECTED TO ATTEND.

Below it, her sister Emilie’s blurry face peeked out, empty of her usual spectacles, from between the heavy charcoal-clad shoulders of two giant men. One was the Duke of Olympia, gray hair wisping from beneath the brim of his black top hat, and the other was in the act of lifting his hat to reveal . . .

The paper flashed away from her hands.

“It’s that thrilling,” sighed out Annabelle, the new housemaid, holding the folded sheets above her porridge. “The most romantic thing I ever heard. Imagine, a princess like that, walking about London. Imagine if we was to bump shoulders on the pavement, her and me.”

“Imagine,” said Luisa. She fought back the anxious jump of her pulse and returned her attention to her breakfast, which she now took below stairs, since that was where one discovered anything of interest about the household. Besides, the flow of chatter, the companionable clink of chinaware and cutlery gave her the comforting sensation of fellowship. Of belonging to a place and a set of people: not quite a family, but a well-meaning substitute for it.

Strange, really, how a simple shared half hour made one feel capable of almost anything. This morning, weighed down by thoughts of the countess’s jewel box, by the deadly silence in the room next to hers, she had needed the reassurance of ordinary human contact more than ever.

And then the newspaper had appeared next to her plate, emblazoned with her sister’s unsettling tidings.

“I think she’s pretty. Don’t you think she’s pretty?” Annabelle tilted the paper helpfully.

Luisa smiled. “Oh, very pretty. Very lovely indeed.”

“But that duke what she’s marrying! Isn’t he a sight! With that . . . that mask to one side of his face, like a pirate. And that white hair!”

“He might be blond.”

Annabelle peered closely, nearly brushing the paper with her long nose. “No. No, I’m sure it’s white. What a frightening cove he looks. I think she could do much better, and her a princess.”

“I’m quite sure she could.”

“He’s fearfully rich, however. That’s what Mrs. Plum says. I suppose that makes a difference, if you ha’n’t got a proper fortune anymore, like her. Though he looks such a pirate, p’raps she means him to go back to her own country and fight the anarchists for her.”

Luisa’s fork froze at her lips.

“He’d settle their hash, wouldn’t he, a great big fellow like him. He looks as if he might as well kill you as look at you.”

“Yes,” Luisa whispered. She lowered her fork back to her plate and stared at the remains of her breakfast.

Good Lord. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

If she could win Somerton over. Confide in him, convince him to take her side. He’d take action faster than Olympia, that was certain. None of this waiting about, fiddling with spies and intelligence, waiting for the so-called right moment, as if such a thing existed when one’s country was controlled by despot revolutionaries.

He’d settle their hash, wouldn’t he?

If the upright and honorable Duke of Ashland could make anarchists cower in his path, what might an all-powerful and entirely unscrupulous Earl of Somerton achieve?

But would he help her at all? Could she trust him with her secret? What promises would he ask in return? What could she offer him, other than herself? What might he take for himself, if he rousted out the Brigade by his own hand?

“But the thing I wonder is,” said Annabelle, oblivious to the racing thoughts in Luisa’s head, “where has the other princesses got to?”

“What’s that?” Luisa forced her hand in the direction of her teacup.

“The other princesses. This one’s turned up, but where are the others?”

“I . . .” Luisa drank a sip of tea. “I can’t imagine.”

“I daresay they’re hiding out somewhere, in some poor cottage in the moors,” said Annabelle.

Polly piped up from the other side of the table. “I think they’re in some crumbly old castle by the sea, huddling around a single peat fire and attended by a loyal old servant and a . . .”

Annabelle clucked her tongue. “You’re reading too many of them novels, Polly Green, that’s what. What do you think, Mr. Markham?”

Luisa swallowed the rest of her tea, dabbed her mouth with her napkin, and rose to her feet. “I think I’m likely wanted upstairs by now. If you’ll excuse me.”

•   •   •

T
he Earl of Somerton, as she suspected, was already dressed and sitting in the chair before his desk when she strode through the doorway five minutes later. The gilded jewel box still sat to one side, next to the leather blotter, gleaming in the morning sunshine. He looked up with his characteristic expression of glowering disapproval, as if—as he had suggested—last night’s meeting had been banished from his mind.

“Mr. Markham. How good of you to join me.” He cast a pointed gaze at the clock above the mantel.

She followed it. “It’s only a quarter past eight, sir. I’m not expected until eight thirty.”

“Having left such a parcel for me to discover last night,” he said, nodding at the box, “did you not then consider the necessity of arriving early this morning, in order to deal with the consequences?”

“I did not, sir, as I cannot directly read minds, despite my multitude of other talents.”

“Insolence, as usual, primary among them. No, don’t sit. I have an errand for you.”

“I am at your service, of course.”

Somerton returned his attention to the paper before him. The scratch of pen filled the vast stillness of the study, in a percussive duet with the ticking clock. “You will this evening, at half past seven o’clock, attend her ladyship, who I presume will be found in the nursery at this hour, reading to our son. You will present my compliments, and inform her that I require the honor of her company here in the study on a matter of great urgency.”

Luisa cast an agonized glance at the jewel box and swallowed back the bitterness at the back of her throat. “Sir, I . . .”

“Did you not imagine that some account must be made of the contents? Or did you not trouble to inspect them?”

“I found the portrait, of course, but it doesn’t necessarily mean . . .”

Somerton looked up. “I beg your pardon. Did I ask for your opinion on the meaning of another man’s portrait in my wife’s jewel box?”

“No, sir, but . . .”

He folded up the paper with brusque strokes of his fingers and reached for a stick of black sealing wax. He held it next to the blue flame of the gas lamp. “Then have the goodness to communicate this simple message to Lady Somerton at the appointed hour. In the meantime, you will take this note to Mr. Nathaniel Wright, of Wright Holdings, Limited, in London Wall.” He pounded the seal into the melted wax and held out the note to her.

She held it between her fingers and examined the seal. “Rather archaic, isn’t this?”

“A convenient way of ensuring that one’s messages are read only by the intended recipient.”

“Your lordship, I don’t know what it is you’re planning, but I must forcefully advise you—”

“Advise me? My own secretary,
advise
me?”

“—that revenge of this kind, for an offense of this kind, invariably hurts the man who inflicts it. Can you not contemplate—”

“What I cannot contemplate, Mr. Markham, is why you have the effrontery to imagine that I either care or heed what you have to say.”

“Because I want you to be
happy
, sir!” The words exploded from her mouth and disappeared into the wood-paneled walls of the study. “I want you to be good,” she finished in a whisper.

Somerton’s face did not betray the slightest flicker of reaction. “How kind of you, Mr. Markham, to take such an interest. And since you demonstrate such a ravenous appetite for afternoons of leisure, you may take the rest of the day off once you’ve delivered Mr. Wright’s note, so long as you return in time to deliver the message to her ladyship.”

“That’s not necessary. I . . .”

“I shall see you here this evening at half past seven o’clock, Mr. Markham.”

The voice of finality.

Luisa tucked the note into her inside jacket pocket. Her mouth had gone dry. “Will there be anything else?”

Somerton smiled his mirthless smile, baring his even white teeth. “I think that’s sufficient for one morning, don’t you?”

•   •   •

T
he Duke of Olympia held the paper above the steaming teakettle with a pair of efficient steel tongs.

“This does not sit well with my conscience,” said Luisa.

“You’ll find that sort of squeamishness dries away soon, my dear. You’ve done the right thing, bringing this to me.”

She watched him tilt the note to a precise near-vertical angle. His hands were perfectly steady. “Only because I’m afraid of what he might be planning. What it will do to him—to all of us—if he succeeds.”

“Yes, he is a rather unscrupulous chap, isn’t he? But not beyond reform, I believe.” Olympia lifted the paper away from the teakettle and popped away the seal with the tip of his knife.

“You’re quite certain you know what you’re doing? Won’t this Mr. Wright know that the seal’s been opened?” Luisa peered anxiously over his brown-tweed shoulder. She had found him out riding in Hyde Park, as he usually did at ten o’clock in the morning, in case she had any message to communicate too urgent to wait for Sunday afternoon.

Not that she had accosted him directly, of course. She had made the agreed-upon signal and proceeded to the agreed-upon pub on a street near Piccadilly, where a secretary on his business about town might reasonably be expected to wet his thirst on a pint of good English ale. This was the first time she had visited this agreed-upon back room behind the agreed-upon wood panel, and she was suitably impressed by the efficient array of professional tools laid about the cabinets and walls. Including, it seemed, a teakettle and a humble gas hob.

“Quite certain,” said Olympia. He read quickly, refolded the note, and opened a small drawer filled with neat rows of sealing wax in various colors.

Luisa made a noise of outrage. “You’re not going to let me see it?”

“Of course not. It has nothing to do with your situation, my dear.”

“Then what
has
it got to do with?”

“Matters that do not concern you.”

She put her hands to her hips. “Uncle, I am a head of state, if you’ll remember. Besides, I’m quite sure it has something to do with poor Cousin Roland.”

“You’re quite right about that. But there’s nothing to fear. Lord Somerton is only doing exactly what I hoped, and exactly when I hoped it. It’s all going quite according to plan.” Olympia was rummaging through a cardboard box filled with seals, examining each one. “With any luck, Penhallow will be safely out of the country within a fortnight, and—”

“With Lady Somerton?”

“Questions, questions. Ah! Here we are.” Olympia held up a seal triumphantly and set the box aside. With his other hand, he held the wax stick next to the hob, until it gleamed a rich tar black.

“Well, is he?”

“I suppose that remains to be seen, doesn’t it? In any case, none of these activities has to do with your own case. Another matter entirely, and one of the highest possible secrecy.” He stamped the seal into the wax and held out the note to her. “Now, off you go, and never fear.”

“But you’ve already involved me. I need to know—”

Olympia shrugged his overcoat back over his shoulders and replaced his hat on his gleaming gray head. “My dear, you have it all wrong. The less you know, the safer for everybody concerned. Most especially your own valuable self.” He took her hand, kissed it, and winked. “Trust your old uncle, eh?”

•   •   •

T
he rest of the afternoon off.

Luisa sank into her chair and removed her gloves. Her hands, so cold in the bitter February air outside, now prickled with perspiration in the typically overheated atmosphere of another of the ubiquitous ABC tea shops.

What had Somerton meant by that? Nothing good, of course. He must be planning something particularly dastardly, if he wanted her away from the premises, unable to interfere.

She should interfere. She should go back right now and . . . what?

She looked down at the cup of tea before her, the anemic watercress sandwich. Actually, she detested watercress. She wasn’t quite sure how she had come to order it; she had been moving along like an automaton ever since leaving Olympia’s secret Mayfair bolt-hole at noon. She hardly remembered delivering Somerton’s note. If someone had asked her to describe the offices of Wright Holdings, Limited, or indeed Mr. Wright himself, she would have answered, with difficulty, that both the offices and the man were discreetly magnificent.

He had given her a sharp and searching look. That had nearly jolted her out of herself, awakening her protective instincts with a start. Gray eyes, very keen, the only vivid memory she had of the entire errand.

No doubt he’d been curious because she had insisted on delivering the note in person, had had him pulled from some sort of meeting that was no doubt essential to the delicate nerves of Britain’s financial markets. “From Lord Somerton,” she had said, thrusting the note toward him.