The Rake's Mistress (4 page)

All they had to do was catch the spies in the act—and find the engraver. The latter task had been allocated to Lucas and was the reason why he was currently in London.

Lucas put the letter down slowly. Finding the engraver had been like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was not that there were hundreds of glass engravers in the city, for it was a highly specialised trade. The difficulty lay in the fact that he was trying to identify a certain style of engraving. He had questioned each man, examined their work and inspected their premises in minute detail on the pretext that he was about to place a very large order with them. During the course of his enquiries he had found nothing to match the patterns he was looking for. The mystery engraver had proved tiresomely elusive. But now perhaps she had found him rather than the other way round…

Life was hard, Lucas thought. It must be a damnable business for a young and unprotected woman
to be obliged to survive by making her own living. If Miss Raleigh was tempted by work that was not quite legal, who could blame her? If she accepted a commission from the Archangel Club, one could not be surprised. There might even be a connection between the Midwinter spy and the Club. The Archangel Club was a shadowy organisation with some downright dubious members. One heard rumours…

Lucas pulled the inkpot towards him, selected a sheet of paper from the drawer, and started to pen a letter to Justin. If there
was
a link between the Midwinter spy and the Archangel Club, then only Justin had the necessary authority to penetrate the club’s mysteries. He would have to concentrate on Miss Raleigh herself and see what he could persuade her to divulge.

Lucas paused. Under the circumstances it was imperative that he should rid himself of any designs on Miss Rebecca Raleigh. There was nothing that confused rational thought so much as unbridled passion. He liked to keep the two matters entirely separate and had determined after the disastrous
affaire
in his youth that he would never make the mistake of letting his feelings cloud his judgement ever again. It was a vow that had been surprisingly easy to keep. Until now.

Lucas’s quill scratched as he outlined the situation to his brother. Of course, he could be getting
ahead of himself and the girl might prove to be quite innocent. He paused. Innocent was, in fact, a word that would fit Miss Rebecca Raleigh. For all that she was not a schoolroom miss, for all that there was a certain robustness about her as a result, no doubt, of earning her own living, regardless of all those factors there was also a vulnerability and an inexperience to her. It was a curious mix and an intriguing one. A woman who was not overset at the sight of a naked man, yet retained a certain demureness…

Lucas twitched the pen between his fingers. He did not delude himself that he was going to find the situation easy to manage. In some ways it would be his pleasure to pursue the acquaintance with Miss Raleigh and in other ways it would be the very devil to keep his mind on his work. But first, he needed to find her.

He reached out and pulled the bell. When Byrne trod softly into the room he looked up from his letter.

‘Byrne, would you be so good as to send for Tom Bradshaw first thing in the morning?’ he said. ‘There is someone I need him to find.’

‘Very good, my lord,’ Byrne said impassively. Bradshaw, who had originally been employed by Cory Newlyn on some of his more dubious adventures, was a frequent caller in Grosvenor Square. All of the servants knew not to question why.

The butler went out. Lucas sat back in his chair and picked up his list again. He could be jumping to conclusions, of course. Miss Rebecca Raleigh might be precisely what she said she was and his quarry was somewhere else on the list. A prickling instinct, a certain excitement, told him otherwise. Lucas had always had a finely developed sense of danger. It had kept him safe and gained him a legendary reputation amongst his men for having more lives than a cat. Now it was telling him that the end game had begun. His quarry was within his grasp.

I
t was the sound of carriage wheels on the cobbles outside, followed by a peremptory rapping at the door, that roused Rebecca from sleep the following morning. She turned her head and squinted at the clock on the chest of drawers opposite her bed. It was ten o’clock. The light from behind the thin curtains was bright and the street was alive with noise.

Rebecca went across to the window and threw the casement wide. Down in the street was the familiar green and gold coach with the angel crest on the door, and hanging from the coach window was a buxom beauty with tumbling golden curls and a plunging red silk dress. When she saw Rebecca peering out she let out a shriek.

‘Becca! Come down and let me in!’

Dragging a shawl about her shoulders, Rebecca ran down the wooden stairs and threw back the bolts on the workshop door, then went to unfasten the shutters. The light flooded in. It showed the
room to be narrow, neat and plain, with a workbench beneath the window and shelves displaying engraved glassware on the opposite wall. Despite its austere emptiness, the studio had touches of elegance. There was a polished rosewood desk where Rebecca took orders and a brocaded
chaise-longue
on which the customers might sit whilst they discussed their requirements or waited for their commissions to be packed. Rebecca’s uncle, who had run the business until his death some four months previously, had impressed upon her the need to present an efficient and prosperous face to the world, no matter the underlying truth. Prosperity begat further business, George Provost had told her, so the workshop was always swept clean and tidy, a fire always burned in winter and the shelves displaying the glass engraving were illuminated by candlelight to show the work to advantage.

This morning, however, there was no fire since Rebecca had overslept and she had had no maid to help her since the death of her aunt and uncle. She lived and worked alone, doggedly enduring with a business that was failing as surely as the icy rain fell on the London streets. First it was the apprentices and the journeymen who had left, shuffling their feet and avoiding her eye as they made excuses of better paid work elsewhere. She had known that they did not wish to work for a woman;
had known that the vintner whose premises abutted hers on the left and the goldsmith who penned her in on the right were making a wager over who would get her workshop when she was forced out. The commissions had fallen off with the news of her uncle’s death and she had had to let the maid go after only a month, unable to pay her wages any longer. She felt nervous living on her own, for although Clerkenwell was a far more salubrious neighbourhood than many, it was no place for a woman alone. Nan had told her this before and here she was to tell her again.

Nan Astley swept into the workshop in the manner of a duchess visiting a hovel. She held her red silk skirts up in one dainty hand for all that she knew the floor was clean enough to eat her dinner off. Once upon a time little Nan Lowell had grown up with Rebecca on these streets, and these days, widowed and embarked on a very different life, she never lost an opportunity to make a fuss over her newfound position as the mistress of a wealthy lord. To those who looked askance and told her she was no better than she ought to be, Nan turned up her nose and swept past in a cloud of jasmine perfume. It was Nan who had gained Rebecca the precious commission from the Archangel Club, for she had once been one of the famous Angels herself before Lord Bosham had taken her under his sole protection. Now she viewed Rebecca as something
of a protégée and was determined to help her gain a rich protector and escape her penury. In vain did Rebecca argue that she would rather die then sell her body. Nan ignored her protests, being something akin to a force of nature.

‘Darling!’ Nan approximated a kiss an inch from Rebecca’s cheek. ‘You look so peaky. And here was I thinking I would find you already hard at work on the vase and rose bowl for the Archangel. Whatever can have happened to you that you are still in bed at this time?’ Her big blue eyes darted around the room as though expecting to find a gentleman effacing himself against the panelling. ‘My darling Boshie positively forced me out of the house to call on you, Becca darling. Boshie, I said, nobody but nobody calls at ten, or at least only if they are most ill bred. But Boshie was very insistent.’ Nan arched a plucked eyebrow. ‘It is very cold in here, my dear. I shall get Sam to light a fire whilst you dress. Ten minutes, mind you! Do not keep me waiting!’

Rebecca trailed meekly back upstairs to dress. There was no point in resisting Nan on the small things when it took all her strength to oppose her on the large ones. It took her a mere five minutes to dress in the plain brown gown she wore when working, and to bundle up her thick, dark hair under the old-fashioned lace cap. Pausing to inspect her reflection in the speckled mirror, she thought
that she did indeed look pallid compared to Nan’s glowing and painted beauty. But such beauty came at a price and it was a cost that Rebecca had never been prepared to pay. Even now, as she faced ruin head on, she shuddered to think of it.

When she descended she found the workshop candles lit, a fire burning in the hearth and Sam the coachman fetching a tray of tea in from the scullery. Nan was reclining on the
chaise-longue
, her feet up on Rebecca’s workbench, her head tilted as she admired the red shoes that peeped from below her petticoats. She looked abandoned and beautiful, all tumbled fair curls and creamy flesh. She looked up as Rebecca came in and gave a little shudder.

‘Brown, darling? So disfiguring!’

‘I do not dress to impress in my profession,’ Rebecca said, without rancour.

Her friend’s blue eyes mocked her. ‘And how it shows!’

In reply, Rebecca pushed Nan’s feet gently off the workbench and sat down opposite her. Sam the coachman put the tea tray down on the rosewood desk and gave Rebecca a huge wink. She found herself smiling back. Sam had the bearing of an old soldier and a granite-hewn face to match, and he might work for the Archangel, but then so did she after a fashion. He also made an excellent
strong cup of tea, and that went a long way towards gaining Rebecca’s appreciation.

‘Call back for me in a half-hour if you please, Samuel,’ Nan said sweetly, kicking off the red shoes and tucking her feet up under her on the
chaise-longue
. ‘I have matters of business to discuss with Miss Raleigh.’

The coachman bowed, gave Rebecca another smile, and went out into the street.

‘Your business must be urgent indeed if it brings you out so early,’ Rebecca said. She remembered Nan once saying that one of the benefits of being a kept woman was that one worked all night and could sleep all day. Rebecca privately thought that it was not worth it, even to be the mistress of an amiable buffoon like Lord Bosham. For better or worse, she had inherited a large amount of pride and a streak of independence from her family, and that pride revolted at the thought of being any man’s mistress.

Nan did not answer immediately. She allowed her gaze to travel around the workshop, pausing as her eye fell on a slender vase on the windowsill. It was engraved with a picture of a sailing ship, a privateer with elegant lines and furled sails. She smiled slightly.

‘How is your brother these days, Rebecca? Have you heard from him lately?’

‘Not in a long time,’ Rebecca said. Her chest tightened and she took a deep breath to steady herself. No matter how much time went past, it always hurt to be cut off from Daniel; now that her aunt and uncle were dead, the isolation was much more acute.

‘A pity,’ Nan said, her blue eyes sharp. ‘Now there is a man who could persuade me into marriage…’

‘I do not believe that Daniel is a marrying man,’ Rebecca said with a small smile. ‘He is wedded to his ship.’

‘Show me a man who is the marrying kind, darling,’ Nan said, a little bitterly. ‘They are all out for what they can get, which is why we have to fleece them first.’

Rebecca pulled a face. She had heard Nan speak like this before and seen her friend’s pretty face crease with cynicism and bitterness. Rebecca herself had never had a great deal of time for love. As a child, she had been a voracious reader and had devoured everything that came within her grasp, be it romances or treatises on engraving. Once she had started to work, the time for reading and any other pursuit had become very limited indeed and Rebecca had come to the conclusion that romance belonged only between the pages of a book. As far as she could see, marriage was a matter of comfort, convenience and sometimes of financial
benefit, and yet she had never seen fit to enter the married state for any of those reasons. Not even when her aunt and uncle had died and, lonely and almost destitute, she had received three offers of marriage and had been tempted to take them simply for security… She had held out because a stubborn instinct had told her that, despite her cynicism, there had to be something better. She hoped it was true, yet in her heart she did not really believe it.

Rebecca drew a piece of paper towards her and extracted a pencil from the drawer of her desk. She started to sketch idly—little cherubs, larger angels with grave faces, wings folded, hands held piously in prayer. The angel motif was the perfect engraving for her commission. But perhaps a saintly face was not the correct image for the Archangel Club. Angels with wicked faces would be more appropriate, angels that looked like Lord Lucas Kestrel…

Rebecca bit the end of her pencil and tried to concentrate.

‘Lord Fremantle was asking for you,’ Nan said. ‘He was most impressed when he met you last night.’

The pencil broke between Rebecca’s fingers but she did not look up. ‘By my engraving, I hope,’ she said colourlessly.

Nan drummed her fingers on the brocaded edge of the sofa. ‘You understand precisely what I mean, Becca.’

Rebecca sighed. ‘I hope that you told him that I was not interested,’ she said.

There was a pause. ‘Rebecca,’ Nan said, ‘will you not at least consider it? Fremantle is rich and generous—’

And depraved and revolting
, Rebecca added, though she did not voice her thoughts aloud.

Nan waved a hand to encompass the workshop. ‘What are you trying to prove here? You know that you cannot continue. This week, next week, it will all be the same in the end.’

Rebecca looked up and met the steely blue of her friend’s eyes. She felt angry and upset. So this was why Nan had called so early. Lord Fremantle, Bosham’s crony and one of the gentlemen of the Archangel Club, had made no secret of his admiration for her when they had met the previous night. Rebecca had ignored his veiled hints and had concentrated on business, but now the inevitable had happened. Fremantle wanted her to be his mistress and he had sent Nan as a go-between, to negotiate the arrangement. Perhaps there was even a financial reward in it for Nan herself, when Rebecca complied. The thought made her skin crawl.

Nan was still looking disparagingly around the empty workshop. Rebecca knew there was no point in pretending. Her friend had seen the desperate state to which she had descended. Nan had even checked that Daniel, Rebecca’s brother, was not inconveniently on hand to defend his sister’s honour, and then she had passed on Lord Fremantle’s proposition. And the worst of it was that Nan was right. Sooner or later Rebecca would lose the roof over her head and would need to find alternative employment, although she was utterly determined that it would not be in a house of ill repute, even one so exclusive as the Archangel Club.

Rebecca thought about Lord Fremantle and felt her skin shudder. He had been everything that was courteous the previous night, but his dead fish eyes and his waxy hands had repelled her. Even had she been starving she could never have accepted his offer. The thought of those hands on her body was so repellent that she felt sick.

‘His lordship is very kind,’ she said, trying to swallow the lump of nausea in her throat, ‘but I fear I must decline his proposal. Even if I cannot continue with my own workshop I am certain I shall find employment elsewhere.’

‘As a drudge in someone else’s workshop?’ Nan asked, the derision clear in her voice. ‘You are too good for that, Becca.’

Rebecca almost said, ‘Better a drudge than a whore’, but managed to hold back, both out of friendship and also because she was not at all certain that it was true. Was her own parlous situation so much more enviable than her friend’s pampered life? Most people would think not.

‘I cannot do as you suggest,’ she said.

She knew that her voice was nowhere near as steady as she would have wished, but she also knew that Nan was canny and would not push too far. She had planted an idea and she would watch it grow as Rebecca’s plight became more acute. Sure enough, Nan shrugged lightly now.

‘No matter. It was merely a thought. Your decision will not affect your commission, of course. Lord Fremantle was most impressed by your work.’

‘Thank you,’ Rebecca said. She looked at her friend, her shoulders slumping. ‘You know how grateful I am that you got me the work, Nan, but I cannot do as Lord Fremantle wishes.’

Nan’s hard little face softened slightly. She put a hand out to Rebecca. ‘I know you think that you could not do it, Becca, but it is not so difficult in the end…’

‘I understand that,’ Rebecca said, shuddering. ‘That is what frightens me.’

She picked up her pencil again and sketched a few more angels. Lord Fremantle had been entranced
by her suggestion that she should take the Archangel image and transfer it to the medium of glass. He had placed an immediate commission for a large shallow rose bowl and a matching vase to grace the dining table of the Club, and he had offered her a huge amount of money as payment for her work. Rebecca felt cold inside. She had an unpleasant feeling that she might be obliged to offer Lord Fremantle various other services before she ever saw her money, whatever Nan said.

The difficulty was that she was trapped. If she undertook the work and the Archangel Club refused to pay then she was ruined, with no recourse. If she refused the commission because she suspected Lord Fremantle’s motives, then she would starve all the sooner, for she had only one other customer at present and no prospect of that situation changing. She had no choice.