The Proposition (40 page)

When his brother only stared up at the portrait, as if transfixed, Emile cuffed him along the ear.

Jeremy jerked around, scowling and holding the side of his head. "Don't do that."

"All right, but don't become sentimental or romantic.
We
are making the stupid ratcatcher into a duke's grandson.
We
are doing it, along with Bollash's help. Don't start believing your own hoax, idiot."

Chapter 26

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T
he Lamonts arrived with the coveted invitation—a mere five hours late. They brought evening clothes for Mick, along with the tailor himself for some last-minute adjustments. Mick stood in his former room upstairs before the large, full-length mirror, his arms out, while a black tailcoat with satin facings was adjusted at the cuff.

On the bed lay a voluminous cape of black worsted with a deep velvet collar and a lining of midnight purple silk. He wore black trousers held in place by wide, white, elasticized braces. In a moment, though, he would cover them up with a white waistcoat that was cut deep to show the pleats of a white shirt. A white silk tie lay draped about his neck; he didn't know how to tie it. By a chair sat evening boots, a silk top hat, and white gloves, all ready to go.

Mick looked at himself, coming together in the mirror, as the tailor finished then packed up his needle and thread. Yes, he thought, quite the posh getup. Meanwhile, the Lamonts kept staring at him and exchanging looks.

"My God," Jeremy said finally, "he looks so like—" After a pause, he finished, "A gentleman."

He saw the tailor downstairs and out, while his brother, sitting on the windowsill, began feeding Mick a history they'd invented, "if anyone asked." A history with the oddest details. Trains. He was supposed to love trains. What did he know about trains? Aside from the fact that the fellow who wanted him to work in Newcastle had sent him a ticket for a ride on one—it had arrived in the afternoon's post.

"And purple. You love the color purple."

Mick dropped the waistcoat down his upraised arms onto his shoulders, then he turned the edge of it out to show the lining. Purple. He said, "You allowed me to select the lining, remember? I do like purple, so we have no problem there. But trains. I know nothing of trains." He shrugged, offering, "Except that in America the red car at the end is called a caboose."

Jeremy returned to the room just then, overhearing. As if the fact were an event, he asked his brother, "He knows the word
caboose?"

"Indeed." His brother laughed.

Jeremy frowned at Mick, then his eyes widened. He said, "The lining of his vest is purple!"

Emile laughed again. "He likes the color. It's his favorite."

"You're bloody kidding," Jeremy said with genuine wonder.

Mick couldn't grasp their mood. He said, "Well, not my favorite, I don't think—" Though he had picked a lot of purple. He'd selected the lining for the cape as well, if he remembered correctly. He frowned, looking at it on the bed.

"How do you know about cabooses?" Jeremy asked. He sounded almost irritated.

Mick shook his head. "I read it somewhere, I think. Is it significant?"

"No." Emile queried, "Do you like the word?"

"Caboose?"

"Yes."

Mick puzzled over their fascination with the topic. "I suppose," he told them. "It has an interesting sound.
Caboos-s-se,"
he repeated.

They looked flummoxed for a few seconds, as if he'd told them a joke they were having difficulty sorting out. In the mirror, Mick watched them look at each other. Emile shrugged and shook his head; Jeremy nodded—a strange little pantomime between twin brothers who were already a fairly remarkable sight.

Jeremy moved on with: "We should come up with an explanation why no one knows of the viscountcy we've invented."

"It's a Cornish viscountcy. No birth records," Mick suggested. He wrestled the bow tie, not paying much attention to anything but trying to tie it. He was making a regular mess of it. After a few moments of silence that became noteworthy for its lengthiness, he found them again in reflection, one at the window, one directly behind him.

Both had turned toward him again, both frowning deeply, identically.

Mick turned his head to face them over his shoulder. "What?"

"The birth records in Cornwall."

Since they didn't seem to understand what he was getting at, he explained, "Births aren't recorded out in the country. There could easily be a peer in Cornwall whom no one knows about, a peer whom no one is aware of until he comes to London. Perhaps he's come to sit in Parliament and reestablish the title."

Jeremy glanced at his brother, more agitated. Then he said to Mick, "Michael." As if the name itself had a bearing. "How old are you?"

"Thirty. Why?"

"Ah." This somehow relieved him. "Two years too young," he said.

"Too young for what?"

He didn't explain, but only laughed, then said, "You are incredible. The way you talk, the way you look.
What
you talk about. Goodness, even we, who know better, believed for a minute you were—" He paused, then said, "A gentleman." He said to his brother across the room, "This bloke is brilliant! And he looks so like—" Another halt, then, "A peer. He's perfect. What a find you are, Tremore!"

"Happy to please," Mick told him, though he was more mystified than anything else.

What
were
they up to with purple and trains and Michaeling him suddenly?

The Lamonts had brought their own evening clothes. They had brought not only an invitation for Mick, but invitations for themselves as well—then had been surprised to learn Winnie intended to use hers. They seemed happy enough to allow her to come with them. Perhaps they realized that she was, for Mick, an unnegotiable part of the evening.

Perfect. No, Mick didn't feel perfect. He felt annoyed with himself. He knew the Lamonts were setting the game further, deeper into what they intended to accomplish, yet for the life of him he couldn't get a foothold into what it might be. Purple. Michael. Cabooses. What idiotic game was this?

Then, on top of everything else, he went out to give Freddie a quick bite to eat, and there she was: lying on the bottom of her cage, looking tired and hungry. She hadn't eaten what he'd given her this morning. When he took her out, she was weak. She couldn't hold her head up well.

"Ah, Freddie," he said, stoking her fur. "Ah, Freddie," he crooned over and over. "Don't pick tonight, duck. Not tonight."

All three men waited at the front door for Winnie, while they took turns fussing with Mick's bow tie. Both Jeremy and Emile wore one. Emile's was pretied and hooked into place. Jeremy could tie his, but he couldn't reverse the process and make it work at Mick's neck.

"I can do it."
        

They all turned, looking up. And there was Winnie, standing at the top of the stairs, and, oh, what a sight.

She'd run out and bought shoes, little satin slippers that were pretty on her feet. She carried her mother's purse, with its jeweled metal frame and gold tassels that looked like acorns, made of wrapped metal
threads. The only other accouterment she wore were opals, also her mother's. Mick had never seen opals until Win had taken them out this afternoon. They gleamed now at her throat, showing off her long, graceful neck. She shone like them, pale, iridescent.

As Mick's eyes rose to her face, he found another small alteration that he liked particularly well: While out buying her shoes, she'd found a jeweler who was able to mount the rimless lenses of her spectacles into a pince-nez on a satin string, a stylish solution to her nearsightedness that, as she raised the elegant article to look at him, caught pleasing light. An edge glinted warmly, playing hide-and-seek with the blue of her eyes.

Even Jeremy and Emile caught their breaths. Princess Edwina, with her hair piled up on her head. Oh, she looked the part tonight. Tall, willowy, elegant. A vision of opals and salmon-rose light and long white gloves.

Mick beamed at her. "You are gorgeous," he said. He went to the foot of the stairs and offered her his hand.

She came down only so far as the last step, though, then, looping her evening bag over her wrist, began tying his tie. Her fingers were shaking. He looked at her. She was excited. She was terrified. How very much like Winnie.

She did what no one else could—tying his tie in a few seconds—while looking as if any loud noise might make her race back up the stairs and decide not to go.

He touched her arm. "You'll do fine."

She made a face, unconsoled.

He shook his head, trying to smile reassuringly. At his timid, long-legged fairy. His tall, tetchy imp-face who had no breasts to speak of, full hips, and perfect legs. And whose idiosyncratic, capricious pieces came together somehow in a way that was so amazingly attractive his chest ached at seeing her.

Outside, they all ascended into Winnie's carriage, which then rolled out into the street at about six in the evening. They would miss dinner. They were going to be quite late, with Uelle Castle still an hour southwest of London.

In the carriage, the three men sat opposite Winnie for the first five minutes, then Mick thought, The hell with etiquette, and shifted over to sit beside her. He took her hand. She smiled briefly, letting him, then stared out the window, tense but quiet. Poor thing, he thought. Yet once they arrived, they would surely enjoy themselves: better they had this night than nothing.

Their emotions seemed to joggle along in tandem as they rode, she perhaps a little sadder, while Mick felt resigned; the two of them together in an understood bittersweet harmony. One way or another, an exciting night lay ahead. Then nothing. They wouldn't speak of it; there was no more to be said. When Mick tried to imagine his walking out her front door tomorrow morning, on his way elsewhere, he couldn't envision it. Literally, he couldn't. Nothing. As if he would step off her threshold into a void.

Eventually, from simple, baffled irritability over the fact that Emile Lamont watched him with a small, self-satisfied smile on his face, Mick said, "Why are you so happy? You're about to lose a very large bet."

The man's smile didn't change, faint but smug as he said, "Merely seeing if you can pull this off—the pure dangerous mischief of it—intoxicates me. It's worth it, even it I lose, to watch you do it." He laughed. "And of course Jeremy is going to squirm with worry all night. That's always fun."

His brother huffed, then interrupted, cutting off further exchange between Emile and Mick. Wisely perhaps. He involved Winnie in conversation, something about the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

Mick was becoming accustomed to discussions of topics he had no knowledge of, discussions that Winnie's bearing, her accent, something about her, generated when anyone came near who could engage in what he thought of as toff conversation. It didn't bother him. He settled back, listening, the rhythm of her voice reminding him of good music played well on a fine instrument. He let the sound of it lull him into daydreams as he watched the sun set into the horizon. Whenever the carriage turned a little southward, these last, gold rays would cut across Win's face, and he'd watch her mouth.

Watch what you can see of my tongue,
she'd told him as she'd shown him her teeth, making an
Eee.
Oh, yes. Whenever he listened to the tune of her voice, he wanted to lean toward her, up onto his own arms for balance, and bend down into her mouth.
Watch what you can see of my tongue.
He wanted what he could feel of it. He wanted to touch into her well-spoken
E,
into teeth with a space between, to twist his head and press himself into her clever mouth. He wanted to make her his own again for the night. Ah, tonight, he thought.

Possession. He'd tried not to want Winnie, but he did.

He wanted her so much it made him shudder to think of it. With delight. With dread. Wanting Winnie, so far above him, was as practical as wanting to walk on water. Even as he enjoyed her—the miracle of floating, the sparkles and ripples beneath his feet—he knew that to sink was inevitable. What he feared, in fact, was that he had succeeded too well, that he'd gotten out too deep with Princess Winnie of the Empty Tins and now all that was left was to drown.

There was no bridging the gap between them.

When he thought of her with her linguistics and her house and her students, it was hard to imagine a life more removed from his in Whitechapel or even his new possibilities in Newcastle.

Hard to imagine a life more removed, that is, until the place where she was born came suddenly up over the horizon.

The road curved, a zigzag that turned the carriage south along with the river. Winnie pointed. Mick leaned to look out her window: and there it was. Uelle.
Yule.
Like the pagan festival. A celebration of stone and fire, of Thor. Of power. And eternity.

Against the darkening sky, the seat of the marquisate of Sissingley rose up and onto a south bank of a bend in the river Thames. A spreading rise of yellowish stone, it extended itself out and up, the setting sun's colors sheeting up steep walls and limning a crenellated skyline of towers and sentry walks, casting the whole in an aura of a golden, pinkish orange light.