How To School Your Scoundrel (3 page)

“You will report to this room at half eight. We will work through until ten o’clock, when coffee is brought in and I receive visitors. Your desk is there”—he waved to the small mahogany escritoire set at a right angle to the desk, a few feet away—“and you will remain in the room, taking notes of the meeting, unless I direct otherwise. You can write quickly, can you not, Mr. Markham?”

“I have recently learned the essentials of shorthand notation,” Mr. Markham said, without the slightest hesitation.

“We will take lunch here in the study, after which your time is your own, provided you complete your assignments by the time I return at six o’clock. We will work for another two hours, after which I dress for dinner. I invariably dine out. You may take your evening meal in the dining room, though you will likely find yourself alone. Her ladyship dines in the nursery with my son.” Somerton congratulated himself on the absence of expression in his voice.

“Very good, sir. Do I understand you to mean that I have met with your approval?” Mr. Markham said. His face tilted slightly against the lamplight, exposing the curve of his cheekbone, prominent and graceful, in perfect balance with the rest of his face. His arms remained crossed behind his back, his posture straight. Almost . . . regal.

What an extraordinary chap
. The thought slipped without warning between the steel columns of Somerton’s mind.

He rose to his feet. “Approval, Mr. Markham? Nothing of the kind. I am in want of a secretary. You, it seems, are the only man daring enough to apply for the position.”

“Rather a tight position for you, then, sir.”

The words were said so effortlessly, so expressionlessly, that it took a moment for Somerton to process their meaning.

What the
devil
? Had the fellow
actually
just said that?

Rather a tight position for you.
The cheek!

Somerton’s shoulders flexed in an arc of counterattack. “You have one week, Mr. Markham, to prove yourself capable of the position. A position, I hardly need add, that no man has held for longer than two months together. If you succeed in winning my—what was your word, Mr. Markham?”

The young man smiled. “
Approval
, Lord Somerton.”

“
Approval
.” He sneered. “You will be compensated with the handsome sum of two hundred pounds per annum, paid monthly in arrears.”

Two hundred solid English pounds sterling. A fortune for an impecunious young man just starting out in his profession, clinging by his claws to the first rung of the professional ladder; twice as much as his wildest hopes might aspire to achieve. Somerton waited for the look of startled gratification to break out across Mr. Markham’s exquisite young features.

Waited.

A small curl appeared in the left corner of Mr. Markham’s round pink upper lip.

“Two hundred pounds?” he said, as he might say
two hundred disemboweled lizards.
“I no longer wonder that you have difficulty retaining secretaries for any length of time, your lordship. I only wonder that you have tempted any to the position at all.”

Somerton shot to his feet.

“I beg your pardon! Two hundred pounds is impossibly generous.”

“You will forgive me, Lord Somerton, but the facts speak for themselves. I am the only applicant for the position. Evidently two hundred pounds represents not nearly enough compensation for an ambitious and talented young fellow to take on such an overbearing, demanding, bleak-faced despot as yourself.” He uncrossed his arms, walked to the desk, and spread his long, young fingers along the edge. “Allow me, if you will, to make you a counter-proposition. I shall take on the position of your personal secretary for a week’s trial, beginning tomorrow morning. If the conditions of employment meet with my approval, why, I’ll agree to continue on for a salary of three hundred pounds a year, paid weekly in advance. My room and board included, of course.”

Mr. Markham’s eyes fixed, without blinking, on Somerton’s face. That unlined young face, innocently smooth in the yellow glow of the electric lamp, did not twitch so much as a single nerve.

“By God,” Somerton said slowly. The blood pulsed hard at the base of his neck. He sat back in his chair, took up his pen, and balanced it idly along the line of his knuckles. His hand, thank God, did not shake.

“Well, sir? My time this morning is limited.”

“You may go, Mr. Markham.” He waved to the door.

Markham straightened. “Very well. Good luck to you, sir.” He turned and walked to the door, at that same regal pace, as if leading the procession to a state dinner.

Somerton waited until his hand had reached the knob. “And Mr. Markham? Kindly tell my butler to arrange for your belongings to be brought over from your lodgings first thing tomorrow and delivered to the suite next to mine.”

“Sir?” At last, a note of astonishment in that imperturbable young voice.

Somerton took out a sheet of blank paper, laid it on the blotter, and smiled. “I suspect you shall suit this overbearing, demanding, bleak-faced despot very well, Mr. Markham.”

•   •   •

L
uisa closed the door to the study and leaned back against the heavy carved wood.

Her heart still thudded inside her ribs at an alarming speed, as if she’d just finished a footrace around the shore of the sparkling clear Holsteinsee. Thank God for starched white collars and snug black neckties, or else that man—that Somerton, that predatory prizefighter of an aristocrat with his keen black eyes and his impossibly thick shoulders—would have detected the rapid thrust of her pulse against her skin.

Her tender female skin.

He would have seen right through her mask of male bravado. He would have annihilated her.

How her chest had collapsed at the words
You may go
, as if the world had vaporized around her.

And then
unpacked in the suite next to mine
, the point at which her heart had resumed beating, with this alarming and reckless patter of . . . what? Fear? Relief? Anticipation?

When Luisa was younger, before her skirts were lengthened and her hair arranged in elaborate knots and loops under a jeweled tiara, her father used to take her out in the Schweinwald to stalk deer. They would set out at dawn, while the grass still breathed out rings of silver mist, and the thud of the horses’ hooves rattled the autumn silence. In those quiet mornings, Luisa learned how to hold herself still, how to be patient, how to listen and watch. She would study her father’s movements and replicate them. She was Diana, she was the virgin huntress, wise and ruthless.

Until that October day when her horse had gone lame and she had fallen behind, unnoticed, and the familiar trees and vines of the Schweinwald had become suddenly and terrifyingly unfamiliar. She had hallooed softly. She had whistled. She had called out in mounting alarm, panic mottling her brain, and as she stood there with her hands gripped around the loops of her horse’s reins, a black bear had wandered into view among the trees and come to a stop about twelve feet away.

They had stared at each other, she and that bear. She knew, of course, that you weren’t supposed to stare. You were supposed to look away and back off slowly. But she couldn’t remember all those rules of engagement. She couldn’t leave her lame horse. She had nothing to fall back on, no rear position in which to shelter. So she stared back, for what seemed like an hour, and was probably less than a minute.

She still remembered the absolute blackness of the bear’s fur, except for a small patch of rufous brown where a miraculous ray of sunlight penetrated the forest canopy. She remembered the dark watchfulness of its eyes, the fingerprint texture of its round nose. She remembered the syrupy scent of the rotting leaves, the chilling handprint of the air on her cheek.

She remembered thinking,
I am going to die, or I am going to live. Which is it?

“Sir? Are you going to see my father?”

Luisa opened her eyes and straightened away from the door.

A young, dark-haired boy stood before her, examining her with curious black eyes so exactly like those of the Earl of Somerton, her heart jumped an extra beat for good measure.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

“My father.” The boy nodded at the door. “Are you going in to see him? Or has he tossed you out?”

“I . . . I have just finished my interview with his lordship.” Luisa heard herself stammering. Children made her nervous, with their all-seeing eyes and their mysterious minds, occupied with infant imaginings Luisa could no longer even attempt to guess. And this one was worse than most, his pale face poised upward with unsmiling curiosity, his eyes far too reminiscent of that pair she’d just escaped. She scrambled for something to say. “You are Lord Somerton’s son?”

The boy nodded. “Philip. Lord Kildrake,” he added importantly.

“I see.”

“I guess he’s tossed you out, then. Well, buck up. That’s what Mama says. Buck up and try again later, when he’s in a good mood.”

“I see.”

Young Lord Kildrake sighed and stuck his finger in his hair, twirling it into a thoughtful knot. His gaze shifted to the door behind her. “The trouble is, he never is. In a good mood.”

From the entrance hall came the sound of feet on marble, of the butler issuing quiet orders. A woman’s voice called out. The boy’s mother, probably. Lady Somerton, summoning her son.

He never is. In a good mood.

In the end, that long-ago day, Luisa had lived, but not because she had stared the bear down. The thunder of avenging hoofbeats had filled the forest, and Prince Rudolf had appeared on his white charger. He had risen in his stirrups, dropped his reins, lifted his rifle, and shot the bear dead without a break in the horse’s stride.

Luisa looked down at the little boy. He had lost interest in her now. He let out another long sigh, turned, and ambled back down the hallway, still twirling his hair.

Her father was dead. Her husband was dead. Her sisters, her governess, all scattered to the winds of England.

She was alone.

Luisa straightened away from the door and shook out her shirt cuffs. She had better get on with it, then, hadn’t she?

O
n the occasion of his fifteenth birthday, the Earl of Somerton’s father had taken notice of him at last. “Getting to be a man, aren’t you, Kildrake, my boy?” he’d said, in his rough-edged voice. “Look at the shoulders on you.”

Somerton—then merely Leopold, Viscount Kildrake—had beamed with embarrassed pride. He had returned home from school just the day before for the summer holiday, and apart from the butler, who had made the arrangements for his journey, nobody in the house seemed to have noticed his arrival. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“You’re rising fourteen now, aren’t you?”

“Fifteen today, sir.”

“Today! By God!” The earl’s red-tipped nose had dipped toward his. “Been having a go at the housemaids, have you?”

A bolt of pure fright went through young Leopold’s body, as if his father had just read his thoughts. Not that he’d attempted a single housemaid—he hadn’t dared to poach on his father’s established turf—but he’d admired them from afar. Plump bosoms and round arses and . . . He folded his hands behind his back and dug his fingers hard into his skin, because his unruly young adolescent body was already responding to the mere suggestion of female flesh. “No, sir!”

“No?” A perplexed scowl. “Well, then. Come along with me.”

It was ten o’clock in the evening, and Leopold had been on his way upstairs to undress for bed, after a solitary dinner in the family dining room. (His mother was attending three different balls that evening and took the usual tray in her dressing room during her two-hour preparatory toilette.) “Yes, sir,” he’d said, and walked outside to the waiting carriage with his father. They had proceeded to his father’s favorite brothel, where Leopold had lost his virginity to a plump forty-year-old whore in one room while the Earl of Somerton had expired of a stroke in another.

In the curious way of memory, he recalled little of the carnal act itself, or how he had come to be lying in mingled shock and shame atop the wide white belly of his companion, veins still throbbing, at the vivid instant when his father’s two strumpets had burst naked through the doorway screaming,
He’s dead! He’d dead! God save us!
He was still wearing his shirt, and his trousers were tangled around his ankles; he remembered that, because he had tripped off the bed and fallen on his face, and the whore had laughed. “Why, then, you’re the earl now! And I’ve got your mess in my cunt this instant, bless me! Ha-ha!”

He’d turned red with humiliation at the words
mess
and
cunt
;
he’d turned black with horror at the words
He’s dead
, which the other two prostitutes were still screeching, over and over. Eventually the proprietress had swept through and sorted out the bedlam, arranged for a discreet visit by a friendly pair of police inspectors, apologized profusely to the new Earl of Somerton and hoped he would continue to favor Cousin Hannah’s with his custom.

He had.

In fact, Cousin Hannah sat before him now: a different and younger Hannah, in the way of things, but just as efficient. Her violet skirts pooled on the chair about her, and her copious bosom was buttoned up to the throat, because it was daytime. By some miracle of corsetry, her waist appeared almost as narrow as her neck.

She released the stopper of a slim bottle of brandy, allowed a luxurious splash into the teacup below, and stirred with a dainty spoon of well-polished Sheffield plate. She motioned the bottle in Somerton’s direction. He shook his head patiently.

“To answer your question, sir,” said Hannah, though not before taking a sip of tea, “his lordship has frequented my humble establishment a number of times in the past fortnight, but never in company with your wife.”

“You have examined all his companions? She would, of course, have disguised herself.”

Hannah sent him a look of patient indulgence, a look he particularly loathed. “Yes, sir. As I did the previous fortnight, and the one before, and all the others.”

Somerton’s cup of tea sat untouched before him. A last thin gasp of steam rose upward from the surface and dissolved into the air. He leaned forward. “Obviously she’s been too clever for you.”

“With all respect, sir, she hasn’t.” Hannah returned his gaze squarely. She spoke firmly and slowly, as she always did, taking care to avoid the telltale pronunciation of her East End roots. Before taking over the business from the original Hannah, she’d been the best girl in the house, a true good-natured whore who actually enjoyed her work, gentle with newcomers and abandoned with regulars, dropping her haitches and her knickers with equal enthusiasm. Now she only slipped a consonant after her third glass of sherry, and only took on a customer if he was a virgin. (Defloration of the young and nervous was her particular specialty.)

Somerton smacked the table with his open palm. “She must have! What about the other houses?”

“Nothing, sir. Now, Penhallow, he makes his round about the bawdies, regular as clockwork, sometimes two or three houses a night. But he hain’t . . . he
hasn’t
brought a lady with him in ever so long. He brings his friends and takes his pleasure with the girls here, like any honest gentleman.” Just as she finished the last sentence, her eyes dropped to her tea. She lifted the cup and took a studious sip.

The air sharpened in Somerton’s ears. He had interrogated hundreds of people—usually in far less amicable circumstances than this—and he knew when his opposite number was hiding an important fact.

Or rather,
attempting
to hide. Because Somerton always ferreted out the truth.

One way or another.

He stretched out one long leg and adjusted the razor crease of his trousers until it peaked precisely in the center of his knee. Every sense was alert; every muscle relaxed with latent power, ready for use. “Brings his friends, does he? Takes his pleasure with the girls here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Every night.”

“Not every night,” she said hastily. “P’rhaps three or four in the week.”

“Regularly, then. Regularly enough that he’s a good customer, isn’t he? A customer you wouldn’t want to lose.”

Hannah shrugged. “I has enough customers.”

Somerton’s brain fastened for an instant on that telling grammatical slip. “But I suspect a generous youth such as Lord Roland Penhallow pays better than most, doesn’t he?”

“He pays well enough.” Hannah’s mouth formed a tight line, as if straining to contain something inside. She grasped the teapot and tilted it over her cup.

A half second before the liquid appeared from the spout, Somerton reached across the low table and plucked the delicate porcelain from its saucer. He held it up to the gaslight.

“A very fine cup,” he said. “Very fine indeed. Your business is doing well, isn’t it, my dear Hannah?”

“Tolerably well, thank you.”

He replaced the cup beneath the shaking teapot. “Excellent. I’m glad to hear it. I presume my little contributions have added in some small way to your store of treasure.”

“Why, sir.” Bravely. “I hope I’ve given you full value for your money.”

“Full value, my dear Hannah?” He laughed, the sort of laugh that had once made the man sitting across the interrogation table—a fit, hale, hearty, bloodthirsty fellow—roll his eyes back and slither down the wooden seat to the floor below with a resounding thump.

For an instant, Hannah looked in danger of doing just that. She recovered herself just enough to squeak, “Yes, sir. I’ve told you all I know.”

“Have you, Hannah?” Somerton picked up the teapot, removed the lid, and peered inside. “But that’s not what I asked for, is it? I asked for evidence—solid evidence, of the sort allowable in a court of law, should the need arise—of my wife’s repeated acts of criminal conversation with her lover, Lord Roland Penhallow, brother to the Duke of Wallingford.” The very words tasted bitter on his tongue. An image arose in his head: Lord Roland and Elizabeth swirling about a London ballroom over six years ago. The look of adoration on her beautiful face as she gazed upward to her Adonis; the smug look of satisfaction Penhallow returned to her. Elizabeth had worn pink. He remembered that, because of the rosy way it had shimmered in the light of the Duke of Wallingford’s ballroom chandeliers as Penhallow swirled her through the open French doors and into the intimate seclusion of the veranda outside.

Hannah said, “But no such evidence exists, sir. I’ve made my own inquiries. They’ve not seen each other, not once. His lordship . . .”

Somerton shot to his feet, sending the chair tumbling down behind him.

“. . . his lordship has his own friends, sir. I’ve watched him closely, these past weeks.” Hannah glanced down at the fallen chair and back to Somerton’s face. Her voice had steadied, her back had straightened.

The subtle exchange of power made his throat throb. “You’re in his pocket, aren’t you?”

“He pays me for his time, like any honest gentleman.”

“You’re hiding something for him.”

A flush appeared on her cheekbones. “I keeps his secrets, like any customer. Those that hain’t got to do with you.”

“You admit it!”

She rose, in that awkward straight-backed way of a woman wearing a corset laced too tight. “Lord Roland Penhallow is not meeting your wife, your lordship, not here nor at any other house. That’s fact.”

He wanted to hit her. His fist clenched at his side, with enough force to crack a walnut. In his mind, he saw a hand swinging and swinging, pounding and pounding, and he heard his mother crying,
Stop, Philip, stop
, and his father saying,
You’re a whore, a whore, fucking him in your own bedroom, you whore, you whore
, and he was paralyzed, the slim boy in the corner whom nobody noticed, watching and hurting and powerless, feeling his father’s blows on his own body, feeling his mother’s sobs in his own chest.

Hannah watched the progress of his rage. No doubt she was used to that, dealing with men in a passion. “There, now,” she said. “It’s good news, isn’t it? Whether you believe it or not.”

“You’re a fool,” he said. The swell of rage subsided. He opened his fist and stretched out his fingers, one by one.

She shrugged. “One of us is a fool, at any rate.”

Somerton sucked in his breath. Above his head, the floorboards groaned, over and over, and a man’s voice called out in time with the wooden rhythm, repeating a word Somerton couldn’t quite make out. Hannah’s confident face blurred before him.

“There, now,” she said again. She walked around the tea table and picked up the chair behind him. “Go on back to your lovely old house, sir, and talk to her. By all accounts she’s a dear lady, and true. She’ll love you again, if you let her.”

Somerton walked to the door and opened it. “She never loved me,” he said, and he strode out into Hannah’s crimson hallway and the dank London November beyond.

•   •   •

T
he painful electric lights of the Aerated Bread Company tea shop forced Luisa to pause and blink as she stepped through the doorway, earning her a hard shove to the backside.

“Oy, move along, ye bleedin’ half-wit!” someone snarled in her ear.

She stumbled aside. Her nerves were already jangling from the cramped Tube ride, from the unwholesome, greasy air of the Mansion House station, from the pushes and shoves of her fellow cheap-suited humanity. A man rushed past her, the
Daily Telegraph
fluttering impatiently beneath his elbow, to join the queue at the counter. Luisa wrinkled her nose at the inescapable steam-thickened scent of warm bread and cheap tea; it enveloped her like a hood.

A chair scraped loudly against the tiled floor. “My dear Mr. Markham. Come, have some tea. You look shattered.”

Luisa swiveled her head in the direction of the voice. A slight-boned man stood expectantly at a nearby table; to his right sat a large-boned dowager under an extraordinary hat, bearing at least three different types of papier-mâché fruit. The man wore a large smile. The woman appeared disgruntled.

Luisa drew in a deep sigh, clutched her umbrella to her side, and approached the table. “Mr. Dingleby,” she said, removing her hat and placing it upon the table. “And Mrs. . . . Mrs. . . .” She coughed. “I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

“Mrs. Duke,” the woman announced, in a high-pitched strangle of a voice. Her lips were painted a startling shade of mulberry red.

“Mrs. Duke. Of course.” Luisa made a little bow to disguise the smile that would insist on curling its way to the corner of her mouth, despite her dark mood.

She’d been against this plan from the start. She simply couldn’t imagine her uncle could pull it off. She hadn’t quite believed it could be done, that the august Duke of Olympia, that grand puppeteer of human affairs, that towering figure with his glowering ducal face, had actually transformed himself into a woman. A large-hatted, large-figured, large-featured woman who’d layered her face in enough paint to supply a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe for an entire summer’s tour, and embalmed her hair in enough red dye to color a warehouse full of Christmas mittens.

The effect
was
rather amusing, she had to admit.

“I see we are not above attracting attention to ourselves,” Luisa observed, as she took her seat next to the Duke of Olympia, and immediately found herself asphyxiated by a mouthful of immense purple-feathered boa.