Stroke of Genius (5 page)

That sounded as naughty as his nude sketch, so she looked away, trying to imagine him on another continent. A ‘Lady’ in front of her name was her mother’s wish, not hers. But that was none of his business.

“Engaging me to sculpt your hands is a good opening gambit in the husband hunt,” he said with a smile in his tone. “It shows you to be a young woman from a family who understands and values quality.”

His ego was beyond measuring. Perhaps another continent wasn’t far enough. Another planet might do.

“Tell me. How will your campaign for ‘ladyhood’ proceed?” he asked as he rubbed a thumb across a portion of his sketch to smooth the shading. “Presentation at Almack’s, I assume.”

Grace bit her lower lip.

He chuckled. “Never say you haven’t been able to purchase a voucher.”

Grace tried to ignore him.

He made a tsking noise. “Say what you will of the she-dragons who guard the gate at Almack’s, they cannot be bought and they are well-nigh incorruptible.”

“No doubt you’ve tried.”

“For what purpose? I’m not in the marriage market. However it may interest you to know that I do possess a voucher to that exclusive establishment, awarded to me by Lady Hepplewhite after I did a bust of her eldest that pleased her,” he said, a sardonic grin on his face. “Artistic genius is not without its compensations.”

“Or its conceit,” she murmured, then raised her voice. “For your information, I do not possess a voucher because I have not yet applied.”

Not having a voucher to Almack’s was no disgrace if she’d not attempted to secure one. If it were noised
about that Grace had been turned down, it would mean Polite Society need not even acknowledge she existed. Better to put off making her application till she was more certain of the outcome.

“If you must know,” she said with exasperation, “my family and I are planning an outing to Vauxhall this evening.”

“Hmm. No doubt you’ll be seen by some of the ones you hope to impress.” He looked up from his work, all hint of levity drained from his features. “But the gardens are open to the public, which means all manner of riffraff are allowed in. Beneath the revelry, the seedier side of the city is apt to burst forth. If you want my advice—”

Grace was saved from whatever Crispin planned to say by Wyckham’s appearance in the doorway.

“Beg pardon, sir, but you wished to be informed when the new shipment of stone arrived,” his manservant said.

“Rest for a moment, Grace. I need to see to this.” Crispin grabbed his walking stick and followed his servant out without so much as a by-your-leave.

“It would serve him right if I was gone when he returned,” she muttered as she shook her arms to restore circulation to her fingertips. The tingle gave way as blood screamed back into her hands.

The threat to disappear was an empty one. Her mother would have a fit if Grace left the sitting early. Besides, she was loath to wander Cheapside without being sure her coach was waiting at the end of the alley. She stood and decided to take a turn around the room, pausing by each block of marble where figures were emerging from different colors of veined stone. Even unpolished, the works were bursting with life. Unapologetically human, warts and all, it was like walking through a crowd
of real people frozen between one heartbeat and the next.

A draped canvas stood on an easel in one corner, oddly out of place in this garden of stone. Grace padded over to investigate, lifting a corner of the sheeting.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Crispin’s voice made her jump away guiltily before she was able to snatch a peek.

“I was just—”

“Just being a nosy female,” he finished. “Did it occur to you that if I wanted that canvas on view, I wouldn’t have left it covered?”

“I meant no harm.”

“Of course not. Your sort never do.”

His black scowl was out of all proportion to her offense.

“We’re finished for this day. Wyckham! Show Miss Makepeace and her servant out.”

Grace flinched as though he’d slapped her. The man had just dismissed her! She straightened to her full height. Others might fear what he could do to them in marble, but she refused to cower.

“Excellent. I’ve had quite enough of you as well,” she said as she breezed past him. “If you don’t want anyone to look at it, I suggest you keep the canvas in your private rooms, not in your open studio.”

“Be here at eight again tomorrow morning.” He frowned at her, but his voice lost its rough edge.

“Regrettably, I have another appointment that will engage me for the entire day.” She had no such thing, but she was tired of him ordering her about. “Perhaps I can fit you into my schedule the day after, but not until nine o’clock. Good day, Mr. Hawke.”

Crispin watched her go. The full sunlight in the atrium rendered her gown nearly transparent and he
was treated to a glimpse of her long legs beneath the palla.

Once she disappeared around the corner, he strode over to the canvas and yanked off the sheeting.

The sketch was of the woman who’d invaded his dreams for the past month. The wanton succubus caused him to wake with either an aching cockstand or a damp sheet and a flush of pleasure like he’d never known.

Only to be followed by yawning emptiness when he realized she was but a dream.

Capturing her on canvas had started as a lark. A fortnight ago, he told Wyckham that he was drawing a sketch without a model. She was his ideal woman, he said, the one his soul was destined for, even though he knew she was nothing more than mist. He thought capturing his dream nymph on canvas would make sense of the recurring night phantom.

Instead it only cemented her image more firmly in his brain.

And he never fancied he’d meet her in the flesh. Now that he knew her name, he doubted he’d ever be free of her. Not that he would act to make his fancies real. The idea was laughable.

“Do you think she saw it?” Wyckham said from behind him.

“No. She wouldn’t have left so quietly otherwise.” Crispin picked up a bit of charcoal and added a tiny mole near the figure’s elbow. Then he tossed the sheeting back over the easel again. The fine linen billowed over the portrait. Anyone viewing the sketch would never believe Miss Grace Makepeace hadn’t sat for it personally.

And in splendid nakedness.

No one knew for certain why Pygmalion shoved people away, but one suspected the reason was rooted in his past. A past he guarded as if it contained diamonds and pearls.

Twenty-five years earlier

Peel’s Abbey, a Cheapside house of pleasure

The bells of St. Paul’s chimed the hour. Seven of the clock. The “gentlemen” would be coming soon. Time to make himself scarce just as soon as he finished scrubbing the corridor outside Madame Peel’s chamber.

“No, Leo, I don’t hold with such things,” young Crispin overheard Madame tell one of her best clients. Leo was a longtime customer and one of the few allowed to enter her inner sanctum. “It ain’t natural.”

“But that’s what makes it so very lucrative. My friend runs the cleanest molly house this side of the Thames. Your bootblack boy is a likely lad. I assure you he’d be well treated. A regular pet, that one.”

“He’s too young,” Madame protested.

Crispin heard her bracelet tinkle merrily and pictured her imperious gesture in his head. The girls always said he had more imagination than a body needed. Even though Crispin knew the sparkly gems in Madame’s bracelet were only paste, he thought it a thing of beauty. A bright spot of color in a world of gray.

“The boy’s only five or maybe six.”

“But big for his age,” the man said. “And so very comely.”

There was a long pause and the boy in question leaned closer to the crack in the door to Madame’s private chamber.

“You’re only against it because you figure the mollies cut into your business with some of the upper crust,” the man said with a laugh. “You’d be well compensated for the boy.”

In the silence that followed, Crispin didn’t dare breathe. Something inside him shivered once and then went perfectly still, a wild young thing hiding from the predator sniffing nearby.

“No,” she finally said.

He released the breath he’d been holding.

But even a lad of five or six knew Madame Peel’s “no” was only a deferred “yes.” If Peel’s Abbey had a few lean weeks, the answer would change in a heartbeat. He knew it as surely as he knew his own name.

Crispin knew lots of things. He’d lived at the Abbey all his life. After the pale, dark-haired woman he called mother died of a fever there, Crispin toddled around the pleasure house, growing up wild as a thistle, with little help from the adults around him. The girls who worked there took little notice of him. They wandered about the house in various stages of undress, thinking it didn’t matter to such a youngster.

But he noticed, and it did matter. He knew the line of a long feminine leg and the curve of a breast almost before he could talk. And they meant something to him. Enough for him to be sure he wouldn’t be happy as a molly’s pet.

The girls talked over his head while he played with little wooden soldiers he’d carved himself. He knew which of the “gentlemen” were kind and which were
rough, who had a short sword and who was gifted with a long one, but was loutish in his bed-play. He learned about every whore’s trick and every possible manner of coupling before he could read his first word.

If Madame Peel was set on selling him, he’d have to run away. But he didn’t want to leave the Abbey. It was all he knew.

So Crispin made himself useful at every opportunity. He spit-shined Madame’s black boots till she could see herself in the glossy leather. He ran errands for the girls while they slept in the mornings. He’d always been clever with his hands, so he drew pictures that pleased them, making the thin ones more plump and giving the chubby girls one less chin.

He gave Madame no excuse to rid herself of him.

And every evening when the “gentlemen” came, he crept to the garret and hid.

Pygmalion shunned the society of others, but that didn’t mean he had no need of it. Almost against his will, he found himself drawn into the swirl of life.

The gas lamps of Vauxhall winked on throughout the pleasure garden like a long strand of glowing pearls. They cast the pavilions and statuary into a beguiling half-light, teasing the eye and tempting the senses. Strains of a sprightly tune wafted over the murky water of the Thames.

“It’s like a magical kingdom,” Grace exclaimed as their boat docked at the garden’s stairs. The park was now accessible by land, thanks to the new Westminster Bridge, but her mother had wanted to ride one of the little ferries across the river from Whitehall.

“There. You see, Horace? It’s just as I remember it.”

Minerva had spent time in London with her English cousins as a child and Grace suspected she frequently embellished her memories. At her first sight of Vauxhall, Grace knew this was not one of those times.

“The water trip adds so much to the experience.” Minerva clapped her gloved hands together in satisfaction.

“It might if I were a duck,” her father said gruffly.

Grace cast a quick glance at her earthbound father. All ledgers and schedules, Horace Makepeace was not one for flights of fancy. Even the idea of something as frivolous as a “pleasure garden” was abhorrent to him. Worse, he’d been abominably seasick on the voyage
over from Boston. The ferry ride over the gentle swells probably seemed more rolling to him than to Grace and her mother.

“Are you feeling all right, Papa?”

“Never better.” He swiped his bald pate with his handkerchief. Grace knew the only thing Horace Makepeace detested more than tardiness was weakness, so he wouldn’t show any if he could help it. “Let’s not dawdle. We agreed to meet your cousins at nine sharp.” Horace consulted his filigreed pocket watch. “That gives us less than a quarter hour to find them in this confounded press.”

“Never fear,” Minerva said as she took her husband’s arm and led him up the stone steps. “I know exactly where they’ll be.”

Once they reached the gate, Grace’s father grumbled at the admission price. “Three shillings and six pence. Apiece! I thought you said it was only a shilling to get in here, Min.”

“Hush, dear. Someone might hear you,” her mother scolded. “Times change and so do prices. Besides, it’s not as if we can’t afford it. And this is all for Grace, remember.”

Her father’s expression softened a bit. He snugged Grace close and planted a quick kiss on her forehead. “Anything for my baby girl.”

I’m not a baby,
Grace wanted to cry. The nonsense of seeking a titled husband was her mother’s wish. If not for the lure of the throbbing city of London itself, Grace would have been quite content to remain in Boston, scribbling her stories and reading her books.

Minerva’s blood was blue on her mother’s side and she never let anyone who’d listen forget it.

“Your great-grandmother was the daughter of a real English viscount,” she often told Grace. “But she
married down—a commoner, and then she followed him to America.”

Grace thought the tale oozed romance, but all her mother saw in the story was the loss of status. Minerva was determined to recapture her family’s toplofty standing through a brilliant match for Grace.

What her father made of all this, Grace wasn’t sure. Horace Makepeace was born the son of a cabinetmaker, but through his own hard work and ingenuity had risen to become one of the wealthiest men in Boston. He’d built a lovely brownstone on Beacon Hill for them and showered his wife with every possible indulgence.

But that wasn’t what she wanted.

“I’ll buy the girl a title if that’s what it takes to satisfy you, Minerva,” Grace had overheard her father offer in exasperation one night after they thought she’d gone upstairs to bed. “God knows I’ve got the chinks for it.”

“Horace,” her mother had said reprovingly, “people of good breeding find the discussion of money distasteful.”

“People of good sense don’t. And even people of good breeding need money, though they are often incapable of making it for themselves. Mark my words. The size of my wallet will see to our girl’s future sooner than all the good breeding in the world.”

Grace had tiptoed on up the stairs before she overheard something she didn’t wish to know her parents believed of her.

Like how gawky and awkward she was. And how difficult it would be for her to catch the eye of a member of the aristocracy without the requisite social charm. Or the way she danced as if springs were attached to her feet. And on the subject of her feet…honestly, had any young lady of quality ever suffered from such large
feet as she? Her brothers always said she ought to be able to walk across the Charles River on them.

Her father called the boys off and joked that Grace, like the new statehouse going up, needed a “good foundation” but she never found it funny. The list of her shortcomings was endless.

Fortunately her father’s pockets were equally bottomless.

As she walked alongside her parents through the beautifully dressed throng, she was grateful that the cut of her gown was of the first water, even if she wasn’t.

“Just imagine how difficult a time I’d have of things if I was gawky and awkward
and
poor,” she muttered.

When they reached the base of a larger-than-life statue, Minerva stopped and tried to peer over the heads of the crowd, a difficult task for one so fashionably petite. “This is where the note said my Washburn cousins would meet us.”

“Well, where are they?” Her father pointed up to the statue. “And why in blue blazes is that fellow in his dressing gown?”

“Horace, mind your language.”

“Mind my language? Have you forgotten how long it took you to get me to say ‘blue blazes’?” her father asked with a wicked glint in his eyes. “I suppose I could always go back to saying why in h—”

“It’s a statue of Handel, Papa. You know, the German composer,” Grace said, hoping to stall her parents’ eternal argument.

They didn’t seem happy unless they were fussing with each other over something. She’d pored over the guidebook of London landmarks before they embarked on this evening’s outing, hoping for a wealth of distracting information with which to diffuse little tiffs.

“The artist wanted to show Handel in his dressing
gown, as his friends and family might have seen him,” Grace explained. “It’s so folk realize that even though he was a genius, he was still just a man.”

“A man in his dressing gown.” Her father gave a little snort. “Minerva, where are these cousins of yours? I don’t mind telling you, they’re late.”

“I don’t know,” her mother said fretfully. “But if we wait here too long all the best supper boxes will be taken.”

“Perhaps you and Papa can secure a box and I’ll see if I can find your cousins,” Grace suggested. “The note said Miss Washburn will be wearing green and her brother will be sporting a red boutonniere on his lapel. That should be easy enough.”

“I don’t like it,” her father said.

“Nonsense, Horace. One of the lovely things about Vauxhall when I was a girl was that ladies could walk about unescorted in perfect safety. She’ll be fine so long as she stays nearby. We’ll be right over there, lambkin,” her mother trilled. “It’s the perfect place for the after-dinner concert.”

Which meant the box was situated so the occupants would be seen by all the right people.

Grace took her little guidebook from her reticule and thumbed the dog-eared pages till she found the map of Vauxhall.

“There’s a pavilion up this path I’d like to see. If they entered from the land gates, our cousins should walk that way.”

Despite her father’s grumbling, her mother waved her on. Grace scurried away before her mother was overruled. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes Horace Makepeace put his foot down.

Once she was out of their line of sight, she put the guidebook away. She didn’t want to see any stuffy pavilion.
She wanted to see the Dark Walks, the places lit only by moonlight and small fires.

Vauxhall was astonishingly liberal in its admission policies and theoretically the lower classes could rub elbows with the upper crust. But in reality, people tended to gather in stratified groups, like flocks of birds all nesting in the same large tree, confining sparrows to one branch, snowy doves to another. Only the “birds of paradise” seemed to come and go at will between the branches.

Grace enjoyed scandal as much as the next person. She’d heard of those fashionable courtesans and followed their wild exploits in the daily tabloids. This was her first chance to see them in glorious plumage.

She didn’t know their names, but she recognized them on sight. They were bedecked with jewels and the lines of their gowns made Grace feel like a pauper. A coterie of young men tagged after them, hoping for an ardent glance. But however outrageously the women flirted with others, they clung to the arms of their patrons.

Grace decided there must be an unwritten rule in England that stated the wealthier a man was and the more power he wielded, the more fiendishly ugly he must be.

She shivered, hoping whoever her future titled husband might be, he would be neither wealthy nor powerful.

As the way grew darker, the sounds of the dignified string quartet faded and coarser, much more joyous music took its place. She passed a group of people cavorting around a Maypole. The young women dancing in the circle let their hair fly unbound, lifting their hems to display shapely calves. There were all lovely and wild as a group of wood nymphs cavorting about Dionysus.

No one troubled Grace as she moved along the path, but the underbrush on either side of the walk was teeming with life. Lovers found the soft grass an inviting trysting spot and the furtive sounds of lovemaking seemed to come from behind every bush. Grace felt hot all over and she knew her cheeks must be scarlet.

But she didn’t want to turn back.

This was life she’d never find in her library if she looked a hundred years. And a writer needed to experience life, didn’t she?

Up ahead, the trees thinned and a broad lawn spread out around the path. Near the top of a small rise, a group of fellows blocked the walkway. There were no gas lamps in this part of the park, but by moonlight, she counted five of them circling a single person.

A person leaning on a cane.

The sound of raucous laughter reached her ears. One of the ruffians darted in and tried to knock the cane out from under the man in the center. He stumbled, which amused his tormentors no end, but managed to remain upright.

A red haze clouded Grace’s vision.

How dare they? There was such joy in the garden, why did some people have to ruin it by seeking their fun in the distress of others?

“I say,” she yelled and stomped toward them, quivering with righteous indignation. “What is the meaning of this outrage?”

Bullies were always cowards at heart. Stand up to them and they’ll take to their heels. That was the firm consensus in all the books she’d read on the matter.

Apparently these bullies hadn’t read the same books. The five of them turned toward her as one, their teeth displayed in smiles that held no mirth at all.

“Well, lookee what we ‘ave ‘ere,” one said. “A fair bit o’ muslin, ain’t ye, peach?”

“My name is not Peach,” she said primly, stepping back a pace. “And I’ll thank you to keep your distance. We’ve not been properly introduced and I have no wish to become acquainted with those who prey on someone weaker than themselves. Shame on you.”

The man Grace was trying to help swore softly.

“Don’t she talk fair?” the ringleader said. “Makes you wonder what else that little mouth can do. Shall we give it a go, luv?”

Panic curled in her belly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she babbled. “Whatever you’re referring to, I’m disinclined to oblige you. I’d rather not ‘give it a go.’”

“Shut up, Grace,” the man with the cane murmured.

How does he know my name?
She squinted at him, but the man’s face was in shadow.

“Aye, good idea. Shut up, Grace,” the bully said. “Gorblimey! If you don’t, we’ll have to find something to put in your mouth what’ll make you shut up.”

“I gots somethin’ right here, mate,” one of the others called out, clutching his own groin.

Grace’s eyes flared wide. Panic blossomed into full-blown fear. She stepped back, but caught her heel on the raised rock-edge of the path and fell flat on her bottom on the long grass. This was far worse than landing on her mother’s Hakkari carpet.

“Aye, that’s the ticket, luv. May as well get comfy. You’ll be on your back a while this night.” The leader laughed and shoved the groin-grabber back. “Me first, mate. You can ‘ave her afters.”

Then suddenly the man with the cane leaped forward and knocked the head ruffian’s legs out from under him
with a deft flick of his cane. The miscreant went down with a yelp and then a yowl of pain when the point of the cane came crashing down on the back of his knee with such force, Grace heard bone crunch from where she sat.

Then the man resumed his casual stance, leaning innocuously on his walking stick, before the fellow on the ground could even roll over to face him.

It all happened so fast, if Grace had blinked she might have missed it. But she hadn’t blinked and in the faint light, she’d caught sight of the man’s face.

Crispin Hawke.

She’d left his home that afternoon determined to treat him with cool disdain the next time they met. Now she’d never been so happy to see anyone in her entire life.

“The cripple’s gone and damaged me, mates!” The bully hugged his ruined knee to his chest, rocked in pain and loosed a string of inventive curses. “Get ‘im!”