Never Romance a Rake (29 page)

After a moment had passed, Rothewell sighed. “It was a colonial backwater, Camille,” he said. “There was a woman who came from the church once—concerns had been raised, I collect, about Xanthia living under my uncle's roof, given all that went on beneath it—and there was talk of taking her away to live with a family in Bridgetown. But nothing came of it.”

Then his gaze shuttered, and he turned once again to his window.

They said no more for the duration of the drive through the City. But when the carriage rumbled beneath Temple Bar, Rothewell seemed to bestir himself as if from a dream. “Are you happy, Camille?” he asked. “In Berkeley Square, I mean? You are satisfied there?”

For an instant, she hesitated. “I have never had a home of my own,” she said quietly. “
Oui,
I like it well enough.”

“I am glad,” he said quietly. “I would never wish you unhappy.”

“But if I might—” She paused, and snagged her lip between her teeth.

“Yes?” He looked at her pointedly. “Go on.”

“I have some things still at Limousin,” she said. “Sentimental things which I should like to send for.”

“But of course. What sort of things?”

“
Bagatelles,
really,” she said. “Things to…to warm the house. A pair of landscapes which I like, and some
objets d'art.
A set of needlepoint pillows and a portrait of my mother. A few of my favorite books.”

“More of your dry financial tomes, eh?”

It took her a moment to realize he was teasing. “A few,
oui
.” She found herself blushing. “But also some geography and history—even a novel or two. The house, you see…well, it feels a little bit empty. I know you have not been there long. And I just thought that…” She searched her mind for the right word.

“You find it uncomfortable?” he suggested, once again stroking the dog pensively.

“Certainement pas,”
she said hastily. “It is a lovely home and very comfortable indeed. I should have said it merely lacks ambience.”

He seemed to consider it. “I daresay you are right,” he said, his gaze fixed upon the shops along the Strand. “Xanthia and I wouldn't know ambience if we tripped over it. You should furnish it however it pleases you.”

Their conversation fell away, and after a few minutes had passed, in which his eyes remained fixed beyond the window, he surprised her by calling to his coachman to halt.

“Why are we stopping?” she asked.

“It is a surprise,” he said in his grim, raspy voice.

When the steps were down, he climbed out to help her descend. Inordinately curious, Camille laid her hands on his shoulders. Rothewell lifted her out as if she weighed nothing, then turned and set her lightly onto the pavement. Behind them, Chin-Chin danced about on the banquette, whining.

“Oh, bother!” said Rothewell under his breath. “Come along then.” With that, he plucked up the dog and tucked him into his waistcoat.

They doubtless made an interesting sight strolling along the shop-lined Strand, with Rothewell's dark, rather ominous form towering over Camille's slender, far shorter one, and the little dog's head sticking incongruously from Rothewell's waistcoat.

Her hand on his arm, they strolled languidly past drapers and haberdashers and china shops until, a few yards along, Rothewell turned into an elegant, bow-fronted shop with a polished hook harp in the window. The small sign which swung from a brass bracket read
JOS. HASTINGS FINE STRINGED INSTRUMENTS.

Inside, the place smelled of beeswax and of freshly sanded wood. Harps, harpsichords, and even a small spinet sat about the shop, the latter in a state of disrepair. Camille looked about in wonderment as a thin, pale gentleman came from behind the counter.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “The harp catches one's eye, does it not?”

“
Oui,
it is most lovely,” said Camille a little breathlessly.

The man steepled his fingertips lightly together. “You have excellent taste, ma'am,” he said. “It is a McEwen single-action, and they just don't make them like that anymore.” He bowed slightly to Rothewell. “Shall I price it for you, sir?”

“No, thank you,” he said, extracting his card with one hand as he supported Chin-Chin with the other. “What we want is a piano. A grand piano.”

A look of greed flashed across the man's countenance but was quickly veiled beneath a mask of obsequiousness. “You have certainly come to the right place, my lord!” he said, glancing at Rothewell's name. “The grand piano is the finest instrument money can buy. I have a lovely Babcock due in from Boston in a few weeks' time.”

“No, not an American piano,” said Rothewell a little irritably.

“Sir, the Americans really are not to be sneezed at.” The man looked wounded. “The Babcock has a modern one-piece, cast-iron frame; one which will far outlast your lifetime.”

Rothewell's mouth twisted wryly. “That I do not doubt,” he said. “But what we want is the sort of piano you sold last year to the Marquess of Nash.”

“
Mon Dieu,
” Camille whispered, clutching at Rothewell's arm.

The pale man grew paler still. “Oh, dear,” he murmured. “The six-octave Böhm. A truly exceptional instrument, of course.”

“Of course,” said Rothewell, ignoring Camille's grip. “How long shall it take?”

The man winced. “Sir, those are Viennese-made, and very hard to obtain.”

“How long?” he said firmly.

“Why, it could be months, my lord,” he said. “The Babcock can be had on a six-month order, and a good English piano in half that. But the Böhm—why, the one we just received was bespoke almost a year ago.”

“You have one?” said Rothewell, his voice suddenly sharp.

“Well, yes,” the pale man admitted. “But it is
bespoke
.”

“Indeed? By whom?” Rothewell had extracted his purse.

“Well, by the French ambassador's wife,” he answered.

Rothewell laid a banknote in his hand. “Then unbespeak it,” he said quietly.

The pale man looked down at the banknote and swallowed hard.

Camille gasped.

“Well,” said the man unsteadily. “Well, I daresay…I daresay there could have been a delay in shipment.” He paused to lick his lips. “And after all, ambassadors come and ambassadors go, do they not?”

“Yes,” said Rothewell grimly. “And I will not
go
. Away, I mean.
Ever
.”

The pale man cast him a nervous glance, and tucked the banknote into his coat pocket. “It seems we have struck a bargain,” he said brightly. “Congratulations, my lord.”

“We are in Berkeley Square,” said Rothewell. “When can you deliver it?”

The man cast a nervous glance toward the back of the shop. “Early next week?” he answered. “But through the alley, I think, my lord.
Not
the front door.”

“
Mon Dieu,
why did you do such a thing!” Camille protested, as he helped her back into the carriage ten minutes later. “Really, Rothewell, it was not necessary.”

Indeed, she considered, she and her mother could have lived an entire year in reasonable comfort on the cost of the new piano alone—and never mind Rothewell's bribe.

Rothewell settled himself into his seat and extracted Chin-Chin from his brocade cocoon. “Walk on!” he cried to the coachman. Then, returning his somber, silvery gaze to hers, he said, “We are married now, Camille, and I wish my wife to have only the best. But the piano—ah,
that
is for me.”

“For you, my lord?” She set her head to one side and studied him.

His eyes drifted slowly over her. “So that I might have the exquisite pleasure of hearing you play,” he explained, his voice dropping an octave. “It is customary, is it not, for a wife to—er, to
entertain
her husband with her many talents?”

Camille felt a frisson of desire mixed with embarrassment, but she refused to look away. “And do I, my lord?” she whispered. “Do I entertain you satisfactorily thus far?”

For a long moment, he said nothing. “Oh, I think you know the answer to that question, my dear,” he finally answered. “I think you know very well indeed.”

Oddly pleased, Camille relaxed against the seat and said no more.

Upon their arrival at Berkeley Square, Rothewell escorted her into the house with the dog trotting at his heels, then vanished. Camille went upstairs to find her grandfather's old letter, and rushed into Rothewell's bedchamber. Her shoulders fell with disappointment when she found the room empty.

She had hoped that he might be there; that she might reach out for him and feel again that sense of emotional intimacy they had shared so briefly in the shadowy confines of his carriage. It was a heady, almost dangerously seductive feeling, that wish to unburden oneself to someone who cared, and to yearn to be the vessel for the outpouring of another's grief—restrained, perhaps, though Rothewell's was. Still, they had shared something of themselves with one another.

Lingering, she drew in his tantalizing scent, cool and diffuse in the shadowy stillness of the room. She looked about the austere, ordinary walls. So many of her first impressions in this house were beginning to make sense. The lack of anything intimate, such as a portrait or a trinket. The emotional bareness of the décor. If she poked through her husband's drawers or riffled his desk, Camille sensed, she would find nothing. Nothing but folded clothes and unused letter paper. They had been three children who had possessed nothing of sentimental worth. Nothing which they wished to remember.

And into this cold, austere place, he had brought her—a cold and austere wife; one whom he seemed at times to wish to make even more so. Why? Why had he married her? Did he not wish for warmth and love? Perhaps they were kindred spirits, she and her husband, both afraid to want for anyone or anything. Afraid to hope. Afraid to love. But his voice in the carriage—that had been neither cold nor austere. And for the first time outside the bedchamber, he had looked at her with both tenderness and raw desire, his suggestive words running over her skin like molten honey.

Camille set her forehead to the smooth, cool wood of his bedpost, and fleetingly closed her eyes. She was falling. Falling fast and hard. And suddenly it dawned on her that she did not want to fail as a wife. She wanted to shake off the coldness, perhaps even at the cost of her own pain.

But could her wounded, withdrawn husband ever be convinced? Or was this the marriage—and the emotional distance—he would always insist upon? Her hand trembling a little, Camille laid the letter at the foot of his bed and left.

If Rothewell read the letter, he did not mention it. Camille found it on her writing desk the following day and tucked it back into her prayer book in which she had brought it from Limousin.

The following week, Rothewell surprised Camille by proposing a visit to Neville Shipping. The drive to the Docklands was fascinating, taking Camille deep into a part of the city she had never seen. The sounds and smells were gloriously uncultured—fetid mud, rotting fish, steaming meat pies, and the scent of the sea carried in by the massive merchant vessels which floated almost cheek by jowl across the Thames.

As they made their way along Wapping Wall, the alleys they passed were choked with stacks of barrels, crates of squawking poultry, and craggy-faced men with red noses and rough surtouts. Men of the sea, and of the slums. Rothewell pointed out the front door of Neville's offices, a grimy, nondescript building of four stories which was wedged between a cooperage and a shop selling rope and sailcloth.

At the front door, Rothewell lifted her down, spun her neatly over the pavement, and set her high on the doorstep. Camille looked down to see the pavement below splattered with what looked like fish offal and sodden straw.

“A vile place,” he muttered, kicking a fish head from his path. “I daresay I'd no business bringing you down here.”

“Not at all,” Camille protested. “I think it fascinating.”

Inside they were greeted by Xanthia, who was clearly stunned to see her brother. She tossed down the pencil and ledger she'd been poring over and came at once to the door. “This frightful account!” she said, obviously exasperated. “Thank God someone has come to save me from it.”

After a brief introduction to Mr. Bakely, the head clerk, Xanthia gave them a quick tour of the counting house. The ground floor was one large room, surprisingly well-appointed, and generously lit from the wide rear windows which overlooked the Thames. The half dozen clerks, she noticed, gave Rothewell a wide berth but bowed to her as she passed between their desks.

“Do come upstairs,” Xanthia suggested when they were through. “Mr. Bakely, give me back the ledger and I shall sort it out upstairs. Will you have one of the lads bring tea?”