Suzanne Robinson (7 page)

“Eight—that’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking,” Georgiana said. She leaned down and retrieved the newspaper.

Jocelin watched her calmly flap the paper out between her hands to straighten it. He knew Georgiana. Once she decided upon a course, she could seldom be diverted from it. He still winced when he remembered the time she decided to ride his cavalry horse to church. Women! Women were one of the few subjects upon which Jocelin and his father agreed. He didn’t want to think about how much this small point of accord meant to him. Early on Jocelin had witnessed his mother’s dependence upon Father, her helplessness in the face of the roughness of the outside world. She needed protection. Women in general needed protection, sometimes from their own impetuous natures, as with Georgiana. It was one
thing for a man to flout the conventions, another for a woman. He glanced suspiciously at his sister.

“And just why have you taken it in your head to marry a man who could die at any moment? Oh.”

Georgiana looked up from the editorial she had been reading. “Exactly. While he’s alive, he’ll dote on me and give me what I want, and then he’ll die. I’ll be a widow, and I can do as I please. No playing the slave to a husband-master for me.”

“You’ll make Mother have heart palpitations again.”

“Mother has palpitations when it suits her. They’re useful in getting Father to do what she wants.”

“Mother isn’t like that.”

“Oh?” She raised her brows and wiggled them at him.

He’d always hated Georgiana’s cynical attitude about their parents. When Father hadn’t believed him about Yale, Mother had given comfort. Although she hadn’t been able to stand up to Father on his behalf, Jocelin had understood.

He frowned at his sister. “Women are delicate, Georgiana. And you can’t disgrace yourself with such an indelicate course of action.”

This comment earned him another disgusted look. He sighed and debated with himself as to the wisdom of arguing with Georgiana. Perhaps he should wait. She hadn’t come out yet. He could round up eligible young men and cast them in her way next year. Yes, that was a far more advisable strategy. Arguing with Georgiana usually proved fruitless. His father’s voice broke through his reverie.

“Jocelin has come to his senses, Delia, so you needn’t worry any longer. He’s going to make the
rounds and look over the new crop next season. He can start with house parties. Old Clarendon has gone to his place up north. He’s got three daughters, each with fifty thousand and good blood.”

“I was thinking of Lucy Lyttleton,” Jocelin said.

The duchess gasped and waved her handkerchief in front of her face. The duke flushed, patted his wife’s arm, and snarled at his son.

“You watch your tongue in front of your mother and sister.”

Jocelin stood, grinning, and buttoned his coat over his snowy evening shirt. Lucy Lyttleton was the scandalous widow of Lord Lyttleton. She’d seduced him when he was sixteen. At least, she thought she’d seduced him. In actuality he’d picked her out and allowed her to pursue him. He’d been at Sandhurst, angry, desperate for distraction.

He went over and kissed his mother’s brow. “I must go. An appointment in the city, Mother.”

Georgiana kissed his cheek. “So, we’re both on the block, up for sale.”

“Georgiana!” cried the duchess.

Jocelin laughed, bowed to his father, and left them. As he entered the foyer and nodded to Vincent for his coat, a footman escorted several men through the vestibule.

“Jos, I’m glad we found you.”

Jocelin smiled a greeting at Asher Fox, who slung his coat at the footman. He shook hands with Alex Stapleton and Lawrence Winthrop. As usual, Stapleton’s nose was red from drink. Winthrop, Lord Winthrop, pursed his lips and nodded to Jocelin as if he were a judge instructing a bailiff. He led them into the library, where Stapleton aimed himself at a liquor cabinet. Winthrop took the chair nearest the fire as if
it were his right, but Asher Fox was too excited to sit. He pounded Jocelin on the back.

“Palmerston has come out for me at last, old fellow.”

“Excellent,” Jocelin said as he sat on the edge of his father’s desk. “Now if he will refrain from antagonizing the queen, his support will mean a great deal.”

Asher leaned on the desk next to him. They both had the tall, muscular build required to be a member of the Heavy Brigade cavalry, but Asher was the taller by a fraction of an inch. He had always reminded Jocelin of an old painting of a Charles II cavalier with his brown curls, heavy-lidded eyes, and crusading spirit. Asher appeared to consider Jocelin’s words, then glanced sideways, causing the hair on Jocelin’s arms to rise. When Asher Fox looked at him that way, it meant Jocelin was going to be hounded into doing something he didn’t want to do.

“What?” Jocelin demanded.

“Speaking of the queen …”

“Oh, no.”

“As the son of a duke, you can request an audience.”

Jocelin pushed himself off the desk and shook his head.

Stapleton waved a brandy snifter at him. “Hear him out, old fellow.”

“Yes,” Winthrop said quietly from his throne. “Hear him out.”

“The last time she allowed me into her presence, it was to tear into me for my sinful ways.” Jocelin ran a hand through his hair. “She thinks I’m a satyr in evening dress.”

“You are,” said Stapleton with his nose in the snifter.

Jocelin threw up his hands. “She threatened to refuse to receive me.”

“Well, Jos,” Asher said with a grin, “she has her throne to keep, you know. Can’t appear to tolerate debauchery, not our proper little German hausfrau queen.”

“There. You see?” Jocelin rummaged through the liquor cabinet for whiskey.

“Cowardice is unbecoming to you,” Asher said.

Jocelin glared at his friend and sloshed whiskey into a glass.

Asher continued. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t thought you could do it.” He came to Jocelin and placed a hand on his friend’s arm. “Her majesty doesn’t want to admit it, but she’s drawn to you. I’ve seen it. Think, Jos, of how it must be for her, stuck with that stuffy prig of a husband. She doesn’t realize it, but part of her longs for a bit of dash and go, a minuscule taste of what she’ll never have—courting and romance.”

“She disapproves of me,” Jocelin said as he shook off Asher’s hand.

“Not as much as you think.” Asher lowered his voice so that only Jocelin could hear him. “Only I know the whole of it, my friend. Only I ever will.”

Jocelin glanced at his friend briefly, unable to bear for long the sympathy he found there.

“You don’t play fair, Ash.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s just it,” Jocelin said quietly with a smile. Turning to the others, he said, “Vincent will have announced you by now, and Mother will be wondering where you are.”

Winthrop waited for Stapleton to open the door
for him, and the two left. Asher remained behind, his gaze fixed on Jocelin.

“Will you do it?” he asked.

Jocelin shrugged. “If I must. We need people like you in Parliament. And now you must excuse me. I’ve an appointment.”

“Not with that Ross fellow. Dear God, I thought when you came back from this bloodletting of yours, you’d have purged yourself of this, this need.”

“Nick Ross is a friend.”

“But what you’re about has nothing to do with friendship.”

Asher approached him again. Jocelin concealed his surprise when the older man snatched his whiskey glass from his hand.

“You can’t keep doing this,” Asher said. “It’s perilous beyond imagining, not only to your body, but to your soul.”

Jocelin turned away from Asher. “I lost that long ago. I live my days in a dark night of the soul. I’m irredeemable, Ash. Let me go.” He rang for Vincent.

“You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“But I won’t go alone,” Jocelin said as Vincent entered with his coat, hat, and gloves.

He donned the garment and took his hat and gloves from Vincent. Asher accompanied him to the door, and Jocelin slapped him with his gloves.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “Such a mawkish face you put on. If the tzar’s army couldn’t kill me, I should be safe in London.”

He left Asher staring at him with a worried frown, ran down the steps to the street, and climbed into his carriage without looking back. He hated the way Asher seemed to know without asking when he
was going into East London. He disliked causing his friend pain.

Asher had taken him in that night fifteen years ago, when he’d fled Yale’s house. He’d taken him in, heard his confession, and accepted him in spite of it. Throughout the ugliness that followed, Asher had remained his friend. As his commander during the war, he had taken from Jocelin more than most officers would take from a junior.

The carriage came to a halt in front of a town house of grand proportions. For a few minutes Jocelin remained inside, lost in memories. The interior was dark, but a street lamp cast a yellow glow in the mist. He heard the clip-clop of hooves as a hansom cab passed. It slowed, but drove on and turned a corner.

A flower vendor strolled by, but Jocelin’s expression warned her, and she didn’t try to sell him her wares. He sighed and touched the handle of the door. A woman walked by, a servant by her plain dress. He caught a glimpse of an apron and a cap.

He could have sworn he smelled lemons as he stepped to the ground. He whirled, took two steps after the woman, then stopped himself. His imagination, that’s what it was. He had to get hold of himself. Loveday had lectured him like a disapproving schoolmaster about Miss Gamp. Hang it! He couldn’t be alone for more than five minutes without lusting after the woman, and he had yet to see her clearly in daylight.

Jocelin muttered to himself as he swerved and planted himself at the front door of the town house. A parlor maid answered, recognized him immediately, and conducted him into a drawing room warmed by a too-hot fire. He heard someone running downstairs, and Nick Ross sailed into the room, resplendent in
evening dress. From his coat of finely woven Saxony to his white silk waistcoat, Nick could have passed for a nobleman.

“You’re late, your highness.”

“Asher delayed me.”

“You go making these pissers wait, they’ll have your carcass floating in the river come morning.”

“You’re fizzed because you don’t like to wait.”

Nick pulled on his coat, then stuck his hand in an inner pocket. Withdrawing a small revolver, he broke it open and examined it.

“I think this bloke’s the one.”

“Damn all,” Jocelin said softly. “Are you sure?”

“Nah, but I will be once I get me—my hands on ’im.”

“ ‘Him,’ Nick. Your
h
’s, remember, not ‘im,’ ‘him.’ ”

“Yes, your h-h-h, h-h-highness. Come on, love. My carriage is out back.”

Jocelin pressed his hand against his coat and felt his own revolver. The hammer gouged into his rib, and he adjusted the gun inside his pocket. The carriage pulled out into the street behind Nick’s town house the moment he closed the door.

As they drove east, he settled back for the long drive to St. Giles. They passed Notting Hill, Kensington, and Hyde Park, then drove up Oxford Street. Buildings began to crowd close, and he lost the scent of Hyde Park greenery in the stench of broken drains. The deeper into St. Giles they went, the more frequent the beer shops became, until the streets seemed to consist of nothing but pubs. The carriage slowed as foot traffic increased. Here vendors hawked meat pies, and costermongers offered fruit and vegetables to hurried and wary pedestrians.

They turned down a street of broken cobbles with three gin shops and several boardinghouses. Jocelin pulled his white silk scarf from beneath his coat collar and wrapped it around the lower half of his face. Nick did the same. The carriage slowed to a walk as it approached the corner. The back right wheel sank into a hole and climbed out.

Jocelin looked through the window. The boardinghouse on the corner looked like the two across the street. Prostitutes sauntered by, only to be chased away by a doorman of monumental proportions. Two professional men stumbled out of the noisy pub next to it and weaved their way past the entrance. The doorman watched them until they rounded the corner, his hand on a bulge in his coat pocket.

Their carriage stopped in front of the boardinghouse. Jocelin eyed the doorman, who spat on the cracked pavement and grinned, revealing a picket fence of broken teeth.

Jocelin glanced at Nick and murmured, “ ‘O God! that bread should be so dear, / And flesh and blood so cheap!’ Time to buy flesh and blood, old chap.”

L
iza wiggled and bounced in the seat of the hansom cab, so great was her impatience to see the carriage they were following. Beside her, Toby Inch leaned to the side and craned his neck to see around the horses and down the street lit by a single gaslight.

She tugged on his coat. “Which way did they go?”

“Turned down Wigs Lane.” Toby suddenly yelled, “Here now, you get out of the way!”

Liza dared to poke her head sideways out of the cab. She hadn’t done so when there was a chance she might be seen by the driver of the carriage they were following. Two men rolled into the street at the feet of
the cab’s horse while a blowsy woman stood over them, screeching about pickpockets.