The Painted Lady (19 page)

* * * *

In the end, Kasey decided to go to Maidstone himself, rather than send a letter.

“What?” his brother squawked. “You ain’t leaving me in charge again, are you? The aunts made me walk the confounded cur. Ticky stole a child’s sweet roll, right out of the nipper’s hands. Put paid to my progress with the nursemaid, I swear.”

“I’ll only be the day. Maidstone is not far off.”

“What about Lady Phillida and the Buttonwhites’ ball tonight?”

“I never accepted for the Buttonwhites’, and never offered myself as escort to the lady.”

Jason studied his feet, what could be seen of them under his billowing yellow Cossack trousers. “I, ah, accepted for you.”

Kasey did not have time to probe into his brother’s motives, whether it was the free food or the hopes of small-stakes gambling, or the safer bet of Kasey’s gratitude, with its concomitant gratuity. “Then you shall have to attend, won’t you?”

“You don’t mind? Truly?”

Kasey minded the cawker’s spotted neck cloth more.

* * * *

The duke took Ticket for a walk across the square, where, as expected, he found Dimm sitting on a bench, keeping a notebook of who came and went from Caswell House. The Bow Street veteran was, ostensibly, feeding breadcrumbs to the pigeons, just an old man enjoying the fresh air. Ticket ate the crumbs and tried for the pigeons.

“Any news from the docks?” Kasey asked.

“Too soon to say, Your Grace. My nevvy is showing the picture around. And some of the other chaps is trying to track down those other names you gave us, those other pretties you’ve had in your keeping. Let’s hope there’s no murders soon, Your Grace, what with the force fighting over that list. Right kindly of you to be concerned about the other girls, too, helping to finance the investigation and all. Many a gent wouldn’t give a groat to inquire as to the well-being of a onetime whore.”

Most men weren’t being suspected of murdering their past mistresses, either. Kasey pointed to where his curricle was drawn up in front of the house. “I will be going to Lytchfield, near Maidstone, to visit the young lady we mentioned. I hope to be back this evening, so you might as well go home and put your feet up.”

“Right nice of you, Your Grace. M’nevvy ought to be here taking notes on how a true gentleman behaves. I just might take your advice, too. Good luck to you, Your Grace.”

Kasey knew he’d need it.

* * * *

Sir Osgood rubbed his hands, practically counting the money that would fall into them. “Back again, are you, Your Grace? I told you that you’d ought to have stayed longer to achieve total balance among your humors.”

His Grace’s humor was wearing thin. Lilyanne was out on a gathering expedition, and he’d been forced to cool his heels because this old fool could not be disturbed during his nap time. As Cosgrove had informed the duke, being rudely awakened would produce an unhealthy shock to Sir Osgood’s brain. Another fifteen minutes—without being offered refreshment—and Kasey would have shown the knighted numbskull how unhealthy leaving a demented duke in one’s parlor could be.

“You misunderstand me, sir,” he said now, one of the greater understatements of the day. “I have come merely to extend an invitation to Miss Bannister to visit with my aunts in London for a brief time.”

“Your aunts? Did they know my niece’s mother?”

“No, but they are in need of her special talents.”

“Your aunts suffer nervous disorders?” Bannister’s fingers almost danced across the note he was writing, very much as if he were moving the counters on an abacus.

What his aunts suffered was jealousy over the affections of a push-faced pug. And boredom. “Miss Bannister’s presence would be a steadying influence. I would, of course, recompense you for her services, as well as pay a stipend to Miss Bannister herself.”

Kasey thought politeness kept Sir Osgood from packing Lilyanne’s bags, that and laziness.

“Yes, it might serve. The girl has been discontented of late. There is not enough for her to do, I believe, with no guests in residence at the moment, now that you have left us. A taste of the City ought to make Lilyanne appreciate her lot more. Once she sees the chaos of the metropolis for herself, the empty pleasures, the frivolous overindulgence, she will be more amenable to my idea of extending our services to young gentlemen in need of guidance.”

What, the old dolt was going to take in incorrigible schoolboys, when the schools would not have them, and inflict them on Lilyanne? That was the most lunatic idea Kasey had heard since he’d heard his painting speak. For that matter, the painting made more sense! He’d take Lilyanne to London if he had to kidnap her at gunpoint, then surrender himself to Dimm as an abductor, after all. Miss Bannister, he vowed, was not returning to this asylum. He would not, at this moment, examine his anger on her behalf.

“In fact,” Sir Osgood was saying while Kasey fumed, “I think I might go along, to keep my niece safe from the temptations of the City. She is too trusting, you know, too innocent of the sham sophistication that holds sway in London. Furthermore, Lilyanne might need my consultation on a course of treatment for your aunts, and I will want to oversee her notes, of course. A few more successes and I will be ready to present my findings of a definitive cure for dementia to the College of Medicine. Yes, an excellent idea, Your Grace. We would be pleased to accept your hospitality.”

* * * *

Catherine also accepted an unextended invitation. “You truly cannot expect two old ladies to protect Lilyanne’s reputation in a household of gentlemen, can you? Or her featherbrained uncle, who threw the two of you together here in the country? No, the more watchdogs the merrier, I say.”

Kasey said he absolutely refused to take Wolfie along. Although that might solve the matter of the pug
....

“What about your husband and his threats of incarceration?” he asked. “Don’t you fear his reprisals?”

“But you said he is sickly. He’ll be at home in Manchester, his son by his side.”

“What if Edgecombe hears, though? I doubt even my influence can protect you from his grudge.”

“Oh, I am hoping he does hear that I am in London, staying at the home of a nonesuch, dancing, flirting, shopping. Nothing’s bound to hurry the old dastard on his way to Hell faster than the news that I am enjoying myself.”

Chapter Twenty

When a rosebush died—no, Lilyanne would not think of it that way. When a rosebush was transplanted, rather, taken away to bloom elsewhere, a hole remained. You could see it, trip in it, kick the sides in, but until you found something else to fill that hole, another shrub, a bucket of dirt, a pile of leaves, you were going to have to face an ugly hole.

That’s how Lilyanne felt, like a big, empty hole where something lovely had once thrived. How was she supposed to go on with her life, when she had no direction and few choices? She had nothing with which to fill that void.

Lilyanne pulled her wool cloak tighter around her as she walked home, her basket filled with the last flowers for drying. The chill, raw weather, the overcast days, the coming of winter, were all of a piece with her dreary thoughts. She almost wished she’d never met Kennard Cartland, His Grace of Caswell, the man she would ever more think of as Kasey, the duke who smiled at her once upon a time.

He was like the finest wine, she decided, although she had never had any, smooth and rich and intricate, intoxicating to so many senses at once. One sip and common ale lost all its appeal. One sip and she’d be thirsty for the rest of her life, Lilyanne feared. She sighed. Her own life was more like pale lemonade, with as few lemons as Uncle Osgood thought necessary.

She sighed again, this time because she was goosish enough to sigh the first time, wishing for what she could never have. The man was a duke, for Heaven’s sake, and she was nobody.

Lilyanne told herself she needed a plan, that was all. She’d come about, make something of herself, be somebody. She’d already sent letters to three employment agencies in London, but it was much too soon to expect any answers. Lady Edgecombe, who knew all the local merchants, was going to ask if there was a market for dyed wool, or fine knitted goods. Not exactly the rainbow heights of girlish daydreams, but possible avenues out of Uncle Osgood’s cellars.

Uncle, of course, kept no wine whatsoever in his cellar.

Continuing on her walk home, Lilyanne kept communing with the blue devils. Botheration, she thought as she approached the house, she absolutely had to stop thinking about the duke. Now she was even conjuring him up, the way he had the woman in the picture.

The imposing figure waiting on the front steps was no apparition, however. He was wearing his caped driving coat, but no hat, as usual. A lock of fair hair had fallen across his forehead in youthful disarray, but this was no lad, either. Gracious, Lilyanne thought as her steps hurried her closer, almost running now, she’d forgotten how handsome the duke really was. Not even her midnight dreams had remembered the depth of his dimples or the brightness of his smile.

Kasey was smiling, but his eyes were not, she saw when she reached the steps, dropping her basket there. They looked pained, as troubled as when the duke had first arrived. She knew what had happened from one close look at that dear face.

“She spoke to you again, didn’t she?”

Kasey came down the stairs and took her hand. He raised it to his lips with both of his gloved hands, then tugged her back down the path and around to the back of the stable, out of sight of the house windows. Then he pulled Lilyanne toward him, folding her in his embrace as if he needed her strength to stand.

Lilyanne reveled in the closeness, at being the one Kasey turned to in his need, although she mourned for his misery. She mourned, too, for the heartbreak she would suffer when he left again. For now she held him tighter, trying to fill the emptiness.

His
grip loosened after a bit, and Lilyanne stepped back, brushing the hair out of his eyes. “Have you come back to consult with Uncle Osgood, then?” she asked. “What did he say?”

“No, I did not mention my problem to your uncle. What for? So he can prescribe another long walk, another meal of overcooked pap? I was not drunk or dead on my feet. I had not been immersed in an orgy of indulgence. My mind was clear, I tell you, not a
-
swirl in Turbulence. I hadn’t been with a woman, hadn’t feasted, and hadn’t been painting, not then, anyway.”

“But later?”

“Later I tried to paint a carriage, carrying the woman away. My carriage, my horses, my street. My wasted effort, for when I awakened, the carriage was headed in the opposite direction, bringing her back. If the painted coach could not get rid of her, a boiled potato certainly cannot.”

Lilyanne had to stop herself from touching him again, from straightening his collar, squeezing his hand. She was not entitled to such familiarity, despite the duke’s admission of celibacy. Still, she could not help feeling angry over his pain. “Why do you not destroy the horrid thing and be done with this nightmare?”

“I thought of that, ripping the canvas or painting over it or consigning the thing to the fire, but where would she go?”

Lilyanne did not have to ask who the “she” was. “You are worried about her? You feel sorry that your monster might be homeless?”

“No, I fear where she might reappear. If you knew there was a ravening beast in the neighborhood, wouldn’t you rather have it in a cage where you could watch it, than at large, never knowing when it will attack? My lunacy seems fixed on that picture, in that attic. I tried to leave it there, to lock the door and never go back, but a different kind of insanity is reaching for me. Women are vanishing, women I have, ah, painted.”

“I don’t understand.” Lilyanne well understood that the women he painted were paid for more than modeling. “I do not see the connection.”

“I did not either, at first. A gentleman from Bow Street pointed out that true coincidences were rarer than hen’s teeth, meaning that I was the common factor in the disappearance of the two women. Now I find it more peculiar that Dolly and Veronique vanish just when the lady in the portrait appears.”

“No, I am certain—”

“Are you? How do you know that I did not paint those women and then murder them, getting rid of one of the bodies on the way to my last visit here? That’s what Inspector Dimm suspects, I think, and he doesn’t know about the painting, the phantasm, or that I called on your uncle.”

“Impossible!”

“By Zeus, so is that shrew on a stretched canvas! What if my insanity caused me to injure those females in a moment of depravity, but then forget because the deed was too terrible to remember? I have heard of men losing all memory of battles they fought in berserk frenzies. Could the painted lady be a composite of the missing girls? She said she was a figment of my imagination, but what if she is a product, instead, of my guilt?”

“No, I would never believe that! You are too kind, too reasonable, and your eyes don’t have that hectic look I’ve seen in the truly mad, like Frederick Spires and the girl who tried to burn down Bannister Hall. You could never do such a thing, I know.”

“Thank you, my dear. I only wish I had your confidence.” He touched her cheek briefly, then led her into the stable when he realized she must be chilled. His bays were settled in their stalls and the grooms were at supper, so they could be private. Not proper, but private, for all that.

While they were walking, Lilyanne had been thinking. “What did the portrait say? Did she accuse you of mayhem and murder?”

Kasey leaned against a post. “No, she complained that I’d painted her feet too big, that she had no one to talk to while I was gone, that the smell of paint thinner was making her bilious.”

“There! I cannot see anyone, real or not, quibbling over details with a demented murderer. That would be like telling Attila the Hun to wipe his boots before invading. No, you could never hurt a woman.” He might break her heart, but that was something different. “On the other hand, do you think it possible that whatever is manipulating the picture is evil, doing away with your other lady friends, eliminating the competition? Perhaps it is your painted woman who is the demon?”