The Devil to Pay (21 page)

Sidonie’s eyes widened. “Whatever do you mean?”

Devellyn smiled tightly. “Well, perhaps I misinterpreted,” he managed to say. “But it certainly looked to me as if your brother means to choose them for you. Perhaps it’s best I go.”

Sidonie’s faint smile faded. “Don’t. Please.”

“I am sorry,” he said quietly.

Sidonie’s mouth tightened. She nodded stiffly, then turned away. When next he looked back, she had vanished around the corner and into the next row. Frustrated and disheartened, Devellyn wound his way between the rows and stalls, back in the direction they’d come, mentally berating himself for putting Sidonie in such an awkward position, even as he damned George Kemble to hell.

Unfortunately, Kemble had not gone to hell. Instead, he stood at the last stall, almost blocking the way as he picked over a selection of bundled herbs. He shot Devellyn a venomous look as he passed and stepped boldly backward, right into Devellyn’s path.

“A word of advice, old chap,” he murmured, lifting one dark brow. “Trifle with my sister, and you’ll rue the day.”

Devellyn jerked to a halt and glowered down at the smaller man. But Kemble did not back away. Instead, he leaned ever so slightly into Devellyn, which was disconcerting to a man accustomed to intimidating people with his size.

“Just what the hell is your problem, Kemble?” he finally asked.

A mocking smile curved the man’s lips. “I don’t have problems,” he said, returning to the job of picking over his herbs. “Not for long, at any rate. Instead, I have a vast array of solutions. Stay away from my sister, or I shall find one for you.”

Devellyn felt a red-hot rage rush through him. “By God, that sounds like a threat.”

“Then you’re not as dumb as you look.” Kemble dropped a bundle of greenish gray sprigs into his basket. “Still, it wouldn’t trouble me one whit to put a bullet through your brain—if you’ve still got one.”

“Why, you dandified little upstart!” Devellyn grabbed him by the elbow, but Kemble threw it off in disgust.

They had begun to draw a small crowd, and the girl tending the herb cart had backed judiciously away. Kemble’s smile had turned caustic. “You’ve no notion who we are, have you?” he hissed. “You are ignorant about what is going on here. You are a fool, Devellyn. A bigger fool, even, than I expected.”

For the second time that day, Devellyn found himself tearing his glove off. But Kemble just laughed and waved the back of his hand dismissively. “Oh, keep it on, Devellyn,” he said. “I’m not a gentleman. I don’t have to accept your challenge. I can just shoot you in the back if I wish. Now, take yourself off and go find a card game to sharp, or some wench to tumble. Something—
anything
—to distract yourself from my sister.”

Devellyn just stood there, stunned, with his glove half-off. George Kemble dropped some coins on the edge of the herb cart and calmly walked away.

Mother Lucy’s was a particularly disreputable bordello perched on a particularly disreputable corner of Soho. There, the wine was tolerable, the women willing, and Lucy so ugly it made her girls appear as swans by contrast. And so Lord Devellyn had little difficulty in saying
yes
that night when Alasdair and Quin Hewitt turned up to drag him there for what they termed “a good bucking-up.” After all, what reason had he to say no? He was a free, rich, and perpetually unattached male.

They arrived at ten, surveyed the merchandise, and by half past, Quin had chosen himself a particularly hard-looking blonde and taken her upstairs for what he described as a quick poke. It was near midnight now, and Quin hadn’t been seen since.

Alasdair leaned an inch nearer. “Dev, d’you reckon she ate him alive?”

“Depends on what he paid her.” Devellyn took a languid sip of his wine, which did not seem at all tolerable tonight. He was still stewing over his altercation with George Kemble.

They were lounging on a pair of overstuffed divans covered in some freakish purplish fabric and watching Ilsa and Inga Karlsson entertain a small crowd of especially dissipated-looking gentlemen with what passed for their famous song-and-dance routine, but which consisted of a vast deal of bouncing, squealing, and bending over. And they were naked—or so bloody near it as made no difference. Everything the good Lord had given them back in Gothenburg was poking out through a slit or a crack or a little wisp of something. It was cheap, vulgar, and—well, a jolly good show. A man would have to be dead not to get a rise out of Ilsa’s bare bottom, and at the moment, Devellyn had a stellar view.

Ilsa and Inga, who aspired to a career in theater, were such a rarity that Mother Lucy served them up as more of an appetizer than a main course. Or perhaps it was more of a bait-and-switch routine. Only the wealthiest of gentlemen could afford the outrageous sum Lucy asked for the pleasure of the twins’ company, so she set them up on a little dais in the drawing room, as a more egalitarian entertainment offering which brought customers through the door in droves. However, after a chap watched long enough, or got desperate enough, he either paid the price, or hired something cheaper. Mother Lucy had cheaper.

“You know, tonight I just don’t fancy something cheaper,” said Alasdair, who was fiddling with his cuffs or his coat sleeves or some damned thing, in a calculated effort to avoid looking Devellyn in the eye. Alasdair was nothing if not predictable. “Let’s hire Ilsa and Inga,” he went on. “No one else has, and Lord knows we can afford it.”

Devellyn was too tired—or too
something
—to argue. “Fine,” he said, getting up off his divan. “I’ll go pay the piper.”

“Why, I wouldn’t hear of it!” said Alasdair, leaping to his feet. “Allow me, old boy.”

Devellyn knew that when a Scot insisted on paying for anything, a wise man got suspicious, but he was too distracted to remember it just then. Alasdair wandered off for what, in hindsight, seemed an overlong chat with Mother Lucy, who looked as if she’d forgotten to shave that morning. Twenty minutes later, he wandered off again, leaving Devellyn alone with the twins in a dark, overheated room upstairs—his way of apologizing, perhaps, for the Vespasian coin fiasco. And Inga—at least he thought it was Inga—was kneeling between his boots and pushing his knees wide. She eased one hand up his crotch and made a sound of pleasure which needed no translation.

Devellyn was only human; he felt his groin grow warmer and heavier. The girls were breathtakingly beautiful. Ilsa giggled and circled behind his chair. He could feel her bare breasts, warm and heavy, brush his body as she leaned over to suck his earlobe between her teeth.

“Sucking is very good, ya?” said Inga, looking up at him through a sweep of pale lashes. “We like to do it to you. Already we cheer you up, see?”

Damn Alasdair for painting him a charity case! But Inga’s clever fingers had already slipped half his buttons free. Devellyn’s erection sprang from the folds of linen and wool as Inga pushed them away. Yes, very cheerful, indeed.

“Ooh, so big,” purred Inga, her expression coquettish as she rolled his stiff cock between her palms. “Too big for little Inga, I am thinking.”

Devellyn laughed. “Oh, I very much doubt that, my dear.”

And he did doubt it. The girls at Mother Lucy’s were as well-worn as yesterday’s stockings. While Ilsa reached around to untie his cravat, Inga bent forward until he could see her heart-shaped buttocks. Deftly, she ran the tip of her tongue along his length.

“Take it, Inga,” encouraged her sister. “You can do it.”

But that well-worn stocking image was abruptly and indelibly fixed in Devellyn’s mind. He looked down at what Inga was doing, and suddenly, it sickened him. Not, precisely,
what
she was doing. Or that it was being done to him. But it was just…just the place. The atmosphere. The fact that he had to pay for his pleasure; that no one ever had or ever would just offer it up to him gratis because they wanted
him.
In fact, until today in Covent Garden, he’d never even asked anyone to take him on without having one hand already on his purse. But Sidonie was not the sort of woman one offered money to.

Inga had her mouth on him now. “She is good cheering up, ya?’ whispered Ilsa, rubbing her bare breast against his cheek in invitation. But it was not especially good. Certainly, it was not cheering—well, save for that one perky little part of his anatomy.

God, this is not what I want,
he thought.

What he wanted, he wasn’t going to get. He reached down and threaded his fingers through Inga’s cornsilk hair. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said gently. “This just isn’t working for me.”

Ilsa stopped rubbing her breast against him, and leaned over his shoulder to glare at his crotch. “What you meaning, is not working?” she asked indignantly.
“Stenhård,
like a big brick, that thing is!”

“Ya, thick like one, too,” muttered Inga, sitting back on her heels.

And for the first time in his life, Devellyn had grasped the fact that his body could want one thing and his mind quite another. And that his mind, once he actually allowed it to function, was going to win. Always. Which probably explained why copious amounts of alcohol had so often come in handy.

This truth came to him so suddenly and so clearly, he was already up and stuffing in his shirttails in when Inga stood, looking a little grateful. Ilsa, however, was less than pleased. She circled around Devellyn’s chair and began to jerk on the little wisps of frothy fabric she’d just divested.

“Dashing bloody hell,” she said, clearly struggling with her frustration and her English. “Come on, Inga. He is no good. We go to dance.”

“Nej då!
No more dancing!” said her sister wearily. “My feet hurt. I want work only on my back now.”

Devellyn hitched up his last button. “Never mind the dancing,” he said, artfully arranging the fall of his trousers around his difficulties. “I’ll slip out through the alley. You two just squeak the bedsprings a bit, make a good show of it, then lock the door and…well, have a nap or something.”

“Ya?” said Ilsa disbelievingly.

“Ya,” said Inga. “Nap sounding good to me.”

“Then I insist, my dear,” said Devellyn, tossing Inga an extra ten-pound note.

The girls widened their eyes at one another as if they couldn’t fathom their good fortune. Or perhaps they were just questioning Devellyn’s sanity. Certainly, his still-erect cock was. But in any case, by the time he had his cravat retied, Ilsa was bouncing up and down on the bed for all she was worth, while Inga sat in the chair moaning, panting, and screaming, “Yes! Oh, oh! Yes, yes,
YES!”

Devellyn watched in admiration. Perhaps Ilsa and Inga had a future in the theater after all? He just shook his head, and, somewhere between an
oh! oh!
and a
yes, yes!
he seized his moment and slipped quietly out the door.

The following afternoon, the rain returned to London, this time followed by a fog which settled over the city like a blanket smelling of coal smoke and old fish. And the fog was not the worst of it. Belowstairs at Number Fourteen, household matters were not running smoothly. At the crack of dawn, Mrs. Tuttle had dragged herself out of bed to prepare breakfast, but her incessant cough had rattled the rafters all day. Sidonie felt a little guilty. It had not, apparently, been the sherry which had sent the poor woman to her bed after all.

Because of the damp, Meg had been dispatched to do all the cook’s outdoor errands, which ensured they would take twice as long, since she always dawdled in front of Devellyn’s house in the frequently fruitful hope that Henry Polk would come out and make sheep’s eyes at her. Thus it should have come as no surprise that afternoon when Mrs. Tuttle sent the girl off to the bakeshop in Great Russell Street, and Meg did not promptly return.

All of an hour passed, and Sidonie had almost decided to throw open the door and just shout across the street through the fog when she heard the basement door slam below. Meg was back, then. Just in time to hear Tuttle’s latest spasm of barking and hacking.

Concerned, Sidonie found Julia in the parlor. “Can you bear another omelet for dinner?”

Julia looked up from her hemming. “Tuttle really does not sound well, does she?” she mused, drawing her stitch taut. “I wonder if we oughtn’t send for Dr. Ketwell?”

Sidonie gave her a wintry smile. “I shall go break the bad news.”

But their cook was well enough, it seemed, to engage in a little light gossip. Sidonie was but halfway down the kitchen stairs when she overheard the two servants speaking in hushed tones interspersed with giggles.

“And one time, says Henry, they peeked into the study, and what did they see but that Sir Alasdair fellow passed out on the divan!” she heard Meg continue. “With Lord Devellyn laid out neat as a corpse, right in the middle of the floor! Still in their coats and boots, they were, and staggered round like drunken sailors when the housemaid woke ’em up a’sweeping out the grates.”

“Oo, that Lord Devellyn,” said Mrs. Tuttle darkly. “He’s a wicked one, I do hear.”

“Oh, you hear right, ma’am,” said Meg in an undertone. “Last evening, they went down to Soho and stayed out half the night. Afterward, they forgot poor Wittle, and walked all the way home with his lordship singing hymns, and Sir Alasdair keeping time with his walking stick a’thumping the bottom of the beer barrel. Been to a very rough sort of whorehouse, they had, Henry says.”

“Watch that tongue, girl!” warned Mrs. Tuttle.

“Well, what am I to call it?” asked Meg. “A nunnery? Anyways, it’s named Mother Lucy’s, Henry says, and they’re forever going. Once they stayed three whole days. Says it’s a proper den of iniquity, whatever that is. Sounds rackety, though, don’t it?”

Tuttle responded with another paroxysm of coughing, which allowed Sidonie to clatter loudly down the stairs. Both servants looked up innocently. “It’s back to bed for you,” she ordered Tuttle, who was peeling potatoes and onions. “I shall finish those vegetables whilst Meg fetches Dr. Ketwell.”

When both servants began to protest, Sidonie cut them off, her tone uncharacteristically sharp. “Just this once, could the two of you simply do as I say?”

They did. Meg all but leapt back into her cloak, while Tuttle bustled off into her room, leaving Sidonie with a sharp knife and half a peck of peeled potatoes which she promptly hacked into untidy chunks while mentally naming off all the best parts of Lord Devellyn’s anatomy.

So he’d been off to Mother Lucy’s last night, had he?
Thwack! Thwack! Thunk!
Why was she surprised?
Thunk! Thwack!
Was it not just the tawdry sort of place she would have expected a man like Devellyn to frequent? And calling Lucy’s “a proper den of iniquity” was like calling the Royal Pavilion a bastion of quiet elegance.

At least she could take comfort in one small thing, she decided, turning her knife on the onions. At least Lord Devellyn had not suffered overmuch from her refusal of her affections. At least he had found something pleasurable to do with his evening. Surely she had not imagined he’d keep some quiet, lonely vigil by the fire? No, of course not. The Devil of Duke Street had a reputation to maintain. Sidonie looked down and realized she had hacked the onions to shreds.

“Well?” said the Marquess of Devellyn when Henry Polk came back through the front door. “I hope you did not hang about my front doorstep in the fog for forty-five minutes to no good effect.”

Polk looked flummoxed. “I’m not exactly sure, sir.”

“Not sure?” boomed Devellyn. “Well, what did she say, man? What did she know?”

His words came out harsher than he’d intended. He did not like being put in the humiliating position of having to quiz his servants about the goings-on in his own house, let alone someone else’s. Already the staff was wondering why their ordinarily oblivious employer was paying so much attention to the people who lived across the street.

Polk opened his hands expressively. “It’s a queer situation, my lord,” he admitted. “I don’t think those ladies tell Meg much.”

Perhaps her employers had noticed Meg’s propensity for idle gossip, Devellyn almost remarked. Then he thought better of it and instead returned to the drawing room. “What do you mean, they don’t tell her much?” he asked, sitting back down to the coffee service he’d abandoned moments earlier. “The girl lives in, doesn’t she? She must know their comings and goings.”

“You’d think so, sir,” Polk agreed. “But when I tried to find out where Madame Saint-Godard had been all those evenings last week, Meg seemed uncertain whether she’d been from home at all.”

“The devil! How can that be?”

Polk shrugged. “Meg says she hears
madame
coming and going at odd hours,” the footman answered. “Says she has no maid, though Mrs. Crosby sometimes dresses her hair of an evening. Otherwise, she does for herself and keeps to herself. Says she has a suite of rooms upstairs, and stays shut up in ’em with that big black mouser she carried over from France. Talks to it, Meg says.”