My Pleasure (15 page)

The servant, mute as a mime, motioned the revelers to follow him. They fell in behind him, whispering and giggling like children as he led them down a long, dimly lit corridor that stank of old lamp oil, expensive perfume, and overripe bodies. At the end of the passage, he flung open a door.

Light and noise poured over her, filling her ears and eyes. Horns bleated and violins shrieked above the laughter and gabble of hundreds of voices. Candelabras and chandeliers reflected a thousand candles, throwing back the sheen and shimmer of satin and silk in every conceivable color and vibrancy, gowns and headdresses and gloves and fans and masks, bedizened with feathers and fur, gems and paste, hammered silver and gold wires. Animals and characters from books and mythology, history, and drama, populated the huge ballroom.

Before Helena could get her bearings, she’d been swept into a stream of moving bodies. She craned her neck to stare up at the minstrels’ gallery, where more crowds hung over the rails, shrieking and babbling, fans gesticulating madly to move the air over the press of hot bodies, glasses tinkling as champagne poured from the bottles circulated by a troop of footmen.

Overwhelmed, she fought free of the churning mass of people and edged back toward the wall, trying to catch her breath, her heart pounding as she looked for Oswald. There were so many people. So much movement. So much noise and color.

At one end of the room, a dais had been erected, and it was from here that the squawks and shrieks of misused instruments came, their masters being otherwise occupied with the women sitting on their laps. One man, dressed as a satyr, ran amuck through the crowd, tooting on a horn. A butterfly, broken wing askew, pounded at the keys of a pianoforte.

Helena stared, horrified and fascinated. She couldn’t believe she was here at this…bacchanal! It was completely beyond anything in her experience, a Vauxhall gone mad! She must leave. She must go. She must find Oswald and tell him these assignations were ended.

She looked around for a harlequin, but the lurch and bump of the crowd kept shifting her further down the length of the ballroom, the press of bodies so close she could scarcely breathe. Then, as swiftly as she’d been sucked into the stream of humanity, she was spit out again into a small, deserted area beneath the minstrels’ gallery. Gratefully she sank into a chair standing forlorn and empty against the wall. The noise thrummed against her ears, and her skin felt moist with the breath of hundreds of gyrating bodies.

“More! More! More!” A chant had started in an area in front of her, along with cheers and hoots.

“More? The devil take you all, you would eat a man alive to satisfy your appetites, wouldn’t you?”

Helena froze. She would know that voice anywhere. Ramsey.

He laughed, and the sound was both amused and filled with rage. “All right, then. Who next?”

She rose to her feet, but the press was too thick to see through.

“Both of them? At once?” Again, that terrible, discordant laugh. “Well, why not? Why the hell not?”

She tried to push her way through, but no one would step aside. Thwarted, strangely apprehensive, she finally scrambled atop her chair to see what held the others transfixed.

Ramsey stood in the center of a tight circle of spectators, having shed both coat and waistcoat. His white shirt was damp, clinging to his torso, and though he still wore a cravat about his neck, the ever-present gold rose winking from the rumpled folds, it looked like a noose waiting to be tightened. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves, and his forearms flexed as he swiped a flashing rapier through the air, missing by scant inches the faces and forms of those standing nearest. They hissed and scrambled back out of the blade’s path, and he grinned savagely, and though his gaze was fixed on the tip Helena knew that he had gauged to a hair’s breadth how close that shining tip came to slicing open flesh.

She stared, amazed at the change a single week had wrought in Ramsey. His skin, ever pale, looked bleached in stark contrast to the damp, tumbled black hair clinging to his neck and brow. And he seemed somehow lighter, too, as if the hours had set about paring every bit of softness from him and leaving nothing to pad the flesh separating skin from muscle and bone. Only his eyes held color, a deep blast-furnace blue, as though the devil himself inhabited Ram’s tensile form, staring out of those beautiful eyes while burning him up from the inside. And like the very devil he smiled, his handsome mouth provoking and mocking and wretched. Unimaginably wretched. She’d always suspected the devil would wrench pity as well as horror from the human heart.

“Well, come, I haven’t all night,” Ram gestured to a man in a powdered wig. Muttering and grumbling, the gentleman shrugged out of a blue silk coat, while beside him another man in the black velvet of a Spanish grandee shifted his weight experimentally back and forth on his toes, jabbing at the air with a rapier.

“Hadn’t you best don one of those new wire helmets, Munro?” someone called out.

Munro, in the midst of executing a feint that sliced the tip off a plume adorning a lady’s turban, snagged the woman’s arm and dragged her giggling to his side, and in a stage whisper asked, “Does he consider my opponents’ talents so slight that he fears they will forget the rules of engagement and sever me from my mortal coil?”

The woman shook her head, eyes wide.

Ramsey smiled into her face. “I should be so lucky.”

“But there are two of them, Munro. And you are…you are…”

“Foxed? Jug-bitten? Properly shot in the neck?” Ramsey asked, his expression beatific and dangerous and desperate. “So I am. And so saying, ’tis my challengers who ought to be wearing those damned baskets, not I. Because otherwise I might kill one of them, and, well, I can ill afford to kill my clients. However would I pay my tailor?

“So find them a pair of those curst mesh baskets!” he demanded, leaning heavily on his sword’s point, his eyelids falling half shut.

He was, Helena realized, not only drunk, but exceedingly drunk. Dear God, he could not really intend to fight?

“Damn you to hell, Munro,” sniffed the grandee, swatting away the wire contraption one of the servants offered him. “Can’t act the gentleman and leave me the part of craven. En garde!”

Having dispensed with any question about helmets, the man lunged forward. With a collective gasp, the encircling crowd fell back, the ladies tittering wildly.

And Ramsey laughed. He laughed even as his sword arm flew out, the buttoned foil driving as unerringly straight and true as Gabriel’s burning sword, engaging the grandee’s. Ramsey flowed backward and sideways, graceless as Lucifer plummeting to earth on burnt wings, he blocked and parried, lunged and retreated, elegance and precision so ingrained he flew even when he staggered.

Helena’s breath closed in her throat as suddenly the fight was joined by the other man, who, having finally dispensed with his coat, attacked. It was incredible. Unfair. Too much. Ram would be hurt.

But Ramsey only backed into a corner, using the surrounding spectators as a shield. The man in shirtsleeves growled in frustration and plunged forward. Ramsey shifted, turning his torso sideways. The man’s point flew past him. Grabbing his guard, Ram leaned back, forcing the man into a prolonged lunge as Ram’s own rapier’s tip pressed firmly into his challenger’s shirt, right above his heart.

“One gone,” Ramsey said lightly and swept his foot nonchalantly beneath his opponent’s heels, sending him crashing to the ground. The crowd howled with delight.

And now the grandee pressed forward again.

“What the hell was that, Munro?” the grandee panted, his face reddening.

“Scottish play,” Ramsey answered. By contrast, he did not seem in the least winded. “Crude. But effective.”

“Thought…you were a disciple of…Angelo’s?” The grandee pressed a high attack, forcing Ram to lift his sword and expose his side.

“I favor whatever wins,” Ram returned. Steel clanged as the man drove suddenly downward. Ram parried and went on, “Sir John Hope presents some interesting conjectures. ‘Rules,’ he calls them.” He might have been discussing a book in the reading room of a gentlemen’s club.

“Tell me,” panted the grandee.

“ ‘Whatever you do, let it always be done…calmly.’ ” His arm swept down to counter a sudden feint.

“ ‘And without Passion.’ ” He followed through by taking the grandee’s blade and sliding his tip along and around it on a hiss of steel.

“ ‘And Precipitation. But still with Vigor—’ ” He attacked, his body following the line of his blade in. The grandee gasped and tried to parry, yielding ground—but not enough. The kiss of steel on steel filled the air, “ ‘—and all Briskness imaginable.’ ”

It was as though Ramsey’s blade had teeth, holding the grandee’s high and then slinging it low, his riposte quick and clean. And then, so quickly Helena could not see how it had happened, the buttoned point of Ramsey’s blade rested at the base of the grandee’s throat. The crowd burst into applause.

“Magnificent, isn’t he?”

With a start, Helena looked down. Oswald Goodwin stood beside her, his foolscap bells tinkling softly as he lifted up on his curled-toed shoes, trying to see better.

“You’re likely never to see better swordsmanship than that, Miss Nash,” he exclaimed with fervent hero-worship. “Why look! He’s going to go at it again!”

Anxiously Helena watched. Ram wove slightly where he stood, his eyes drifting without purpose or focus over the circle of animated, masked faces. His smile faltered, and he waved his hand impatiently.

“Who next? Come! One amongst you must be an adequate foe!” he exhorted them. When no one answered his challenge, he swung away from them contemptuously. At her side, she heard Oswald murmur, “I have to see better. I must!”

She barely noted his leaving. All she could see was Ramsey, encircled by an ever-tightening group of people in masks and costumes, their voices high, their eyes glittering feverishly, their shrill laughter like the howls of a dog pack. All except for one figure.

Across the circle stood a man dressed in the black, stylized mask of some fantastical bird of prey, a short beak jutting above his lips and shadowing the shape of his jaw. Unlike the other spectators, he stood motionless, his attention not on Ramsey Munro but on her. She could feel his cold scrutiny.

“What of it?” Ram shouted again, and then, as if he too had caught the scent of something hostile in the currents that moved through the room, he swung about and caught sight of the dark bird of prey. “How about you, sir?” he demanded. “You have the look of a man who’s at least held a sword.”

The man shivered visibly but then only shook his head slowly in negation. “No?” Ram studied him a second longer, his head cocking to the side. “I know you—”

“I’ll have a go!”

The voice of a young man broke over the noise. Ramsey turned as a young rajah strutted into the circle, paste jewels adorning his turban, rings on his hands, pearls at his ears. Ramsey threw up his hands in mock defeat. “Good Lord, Figburt, if your plan is to blind your opponent, you have succeeded beyond your wildest imaginings.”

It was the boy from Vauxhall.

“Now, dab the milk from your lip and get you gone from here before I have your mother pounding down my door demanding to know what I have done with her whelp.”

The crowd roared with laughter.

“Not I, sir,” the boy said staunchly. “Not until I have tested my sword against yours.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Figburt. What do you think you need to prove?”

“That you can’t disarm me.”

“Ah,” Ram said. “A bit of revenge?”

“Aye.”

“Far be it from me to caution against vengeful endeavors. But wait a second, lad. If we are to be reenacting that memorable night…” His unfocused gaze roamed about the ring of faces, falling on a young woman, her garish yellow hair tumbling down her mostly naked bosom. He snagged her wrist, yanked her forth, and dipped her over his forearm.

Helena felt the blood leave her face in a rush.

“For luck.”

His mouth descended on the girl’s. At once she flung an arm around his neck, pulling his head, while the other hand settled high on Ram’s thigh, moving upward. The crowd hooted and whistled, and some clapped.

Helena felt as if she’d been struck. As if he had struck her. She reached out, seeking a bolster that wasn’t there. The girl’s touch moved even higher, seeking a more intimate purchase. Helena squeezed her eyes shut, faint and mortified, and opened them to look straight into Ramsey Munro’s eyes, stark and damned and riveted upon her. The girl still writhed suggestively against him, his body still stood bowed over hers, but his eyes belonged to Helena.

She didn’t want him.

He’d already belonged to too many.

She stumbled off the chair and pushed her way back through the throng, reeling along the perimeter. In front of her, a door stood ajar. Without thought she dashed through it and into a back alley erratically lit by smoking lanterns and adrift in mist. A light rain had begun, soaking the shadows and making the cobblestones slick beneath her feet. A couple locked tightly together blocked the passage leading to the main thoroughfare, sounds of animal urgency coming from them.

My God. Helena wheeled in the opposite direction, hurrying past stacks of crates and boarded doorways, piles of refuse and heaps of broken bottles. Above her, the blind, dark eyes of windows stared down with inimical indifference. A rat squeaked, and she doubled her pace as the thick, warm drizzle grew heavier.

Her hair fell from its elaborate coiffure, and the flour whitening it ran in rivulets down her bare shoulders into a river between her breasts. The velvet skirts grew sodden. She paid none of it any heed. A litany of self-castigation had begun in her mind.

Fool! Fool, to flirt with this life, his life. Fool, to think one could come near a burning angel and not be singed. Fool, to wish she had been the one in his arms…

The passage turned, and she found herself in a small yard occupied by a broken handcart, the only other egress a narrow black slit in the corner. She stopped as a sudden feeling of danger fell over her.