To Tempt a Saint (14 page)

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Authors: Kate Moore

BOOK: To Tempt a Saint
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“He does not expect miracles, does he?” The Spanish woman plainly spoke to herself. No one answered.
Cleo regarded herself in the glass. She could not remember the girl she had been. She rather liked the sturdy, unadorned person in the mirror, but she knew that person would be invisible to London eyes, and Xander Jones was a Londoner to the core.
“With such a man, one has little time and many rivals. We must make no mistakes.” The Spanish woman’s doubt was palpable. She looked at the gowns hanging in their linen cocoons and back at Cleo.
Cleo squared her shoulders. She had Charlie’s pig-sticking knife. Perhaps she could get the señora to devise a special pocket in each gown so that she could have the knife handy for persuading her reluctant husband to bed her in spite of her lack of feminine charms.
The señora recovered first. She clapped her hands, and her assistant sprang into action, opening a case. The señora flung forth shifts and stockings and garters and corsets, while the assistant spread them like lolling tarts over the blue damask sofa. For endless minutes La Perez looked from that display of soft, floating femininity to Cleo as if she were trying to solve an impossible puzzle. At last the dressmaker plucked up a set of beautiful undergarments with lace edges and deep pink ribbons.
“These. At once.” She waved her elegant, long-fingered hands at Cleo and Alice and stepped out of the room.
Cleo had a moment to digest the obvious. Her new husband had a world of intimate knowledge about women. None of which he had gained by having a sister. He claimed to have no mistress, but he had not used Senora Perez’s talents to make drapery for his drawing room.
When Alice had helped Cleo into the new underclothes, Serena Perez sent the girl away to burn the offending rags. “Now we begin.”
The Spanish woman circled Cleo, appraising her with sharp black eyes. In English with only a hint of her native Spain she talked about Cleo as if she weren’t there. “Good shoulders. Arms like sticks.” She took a pinch of Cleo’s left arm between strong fingers and shook her head. “Skin brown, but clear.” She shrugged her shoulders. “There is nothing to be done about such a plain nose, but with a new corset we can give the breasts more emphasis.” She nodded. “Two breasts pull more than four horses.”
Again Cleo stood gazing at herself in the glass undergoing the dressmaker’s dismayed scrutiny. She looked as straight and brown as a beech tree in winter with a dusting of snow.
With a deep sigh Serena Perez at last nodded to her assistant, who opened the hanging bags, gently laying out three gowns of jewellike radiance, copper, garnet, and emerald.
 
 
 
 
 
C
HARLIE’S luck held, and he encountered no servants on the way to the kitchen. There he found a woman who, in spite of layers of skirts and aprons, was a bony stick. She vigorously stirred batter in a large crockery bowl.
“You, boy,” she growled at him. “What do you want?” Charlie didn’t even start at the gruff voice. Taking in the bubbling pots, a ham as big as a pumpkin, a large round of blue-veined cheese, and the warm smell of baking that filled the room, he instinctively understood the woman in the puffy white cap. She was a woman whose very nature required her to put food in front of other people, the more the better. Her greatest pleasure would be to watch a hungry boy consume her offerings. Charlie knew exactly how to compose his features in a look that would make this gruff woman happy. Bess could not have done it better.
Thus he was sitting at a long, plain table, spreading raspberry preserves on a biscuit, helping Cook fulfill her purpose on the planet, and having a rather pleasant daydream in which he told Uncle March that he and Cleo were taking back their own home, when his mysterious brother-in-law entered the kitchen from the garden.
The daydream evaporated like steam from a pot when Cook lifted the lid, and Charlie knew himself for a boy again. He stood at once.
“Sir.” His brother-in-law carried his elegant coat and cravat over one arm, making his breadth of shoulder more striking.
“Good morning. Mrs. Wardlow’s taking good care of you, I see.”
“She is, sir.”
“May I join you?”
Charlie nodded, unable to speak. He tried to find some reference to place the man’s way of moving. Farmer Davies did not move in the same easy, contained way. Mr. Tucker’s shuffle had none of the power in it that Charlie sensed in his sister’s husband.
“You can sit, Charlie.”
Mrs. Wardlow put a plate of cold chicken in front of her employer and set a foaming pint pot on the table. When his left hand took up the knife, Charlie spotted the scraped knuckles.
Mrs. Wardlow saw them, too, and put a jar of salve on the table.
Inexplicably, while Cook fussed over them, bringing sliced apples and plum cake, Charlie found himself explaining the Latin problem to the man sitting across from him. Not the knife problem. He would have to figure out how to recover the knife and get some courage on his own. He knew enough about courage to know that.
“I can get you a Latin lexicon from the study,” his brother-in-law offered.
 
 
 
 
 
C
LEO’S arms ached, and she seemed to be wearing a nettle shirt. Pins pricked her back and breasts and under her arms. All three gowns had been adjusted to her figure, and still La Perez was not satisfied.
“Take down your hair,” she ordered Cleo.
Cleo dutifully pulled the pins, and her curls tumbled down around her shoulders.
La Perez nodded, studying Cleo with the same intensity she had shown through the morning. At that moment the parlor door opened, and the dressmaker, turning to frown at the intrusion, froze. Xander Jones’s gaze, hot and startled, met Cleo’s in the mirror and held.
He had evidently not expected to find his bride standing on a box in dishabille
.
Cleo tried vainly to read the intent flickering there.
Here in his luxurious house where a curving marble nymph displayed her lush charms at the base of the stairs, Cleo stood like a brown crockery jug on the kitchen shelf. His naked gaze made her conscious of her bare feet and loose hair and the way her breasts swelled against their constraint. She lifted her chin.
“Blame my parents if you will for the folly of naming an infant after a great Egyptian seductress and then bequeathing on her a plain English nose, square jaw, and scant charms.”
Her husband did not seem to hear her.
“Is it there, sir?” Charlie’s voice came from behind her husband’s shoulder.
At the sound, her husband’s lashes came down over his burning gaze. Cleo’s last glimpse of him was that lean, brown hand taut on the doorknob. She heard him speaking with Charlie about Latin, the easy rumble of his voice sending a shiver through her.
“Ah,” said the Spanish woman, “now it is decided. First, the copper gown, for courage. A dinner with the partners, yes? They will snap like dogs.” For the first time in a long day, the Spanish woman smiled, an ally’s conspiratorial smile.
“I will bring the copper gown in three days.”
 
 
 
 
 
I
T took Cleo three days to spend her way to her husband’s notice. Each morning she interviewed potential grinders for Charlie from the notices in the paper.
Superior Classical Education, 3s 6d per hour.
In the afternoons, she shopped. At night her invisible husband escaped her company, but she heard him pause outside her door before the blaze of light in his house went dark. She heard no word from her uncle or her husband’s lawyer. It was possible, she supposed, that Uncle March thought her marriage suitable after all, but in case he did not, she had to get Charlie into school.
On Friday evening she stood on her balcony, a new shawl wrapped around her oldest brown cambric muslin, staring at the flickering shadows in the garden below when Alice knocked to tell her she’d been summoned to the master’s library.
Xander looked up as his wife halted inside the library door and caught a fleeting smile on her lips. She had buried his desk in receipts, like white leaves raked up in a pile.
When she lifted her head, their gazes locked. Her faint smile faded at once, and a tremor shook her. She was right to distrust him.
He took one of the thin sheets in his hand and let it drop again without reading it. “I take it you wanted to see me.”
She kept that green gaze level. “I merely insist on keeping our bargain, a weekly exchange of receipts.”
Oh, their bargain.
He, of course, had been thinking other thoughts when he’d summoned her. “I admire your energy. Did you patronize every establishment in Mayfair?”
“All those that cater to ladies.”
He glanced at another of the receipts, for seven yards of brown cambric from Hodgekinson, the linen draper. In spite of the sheer volume of paper, her bills could easily be settled with a trip to Evershot’s bank. Or he could have had Amos deal with them. Instead he had summoned her to his library.
“Apparently, you have a fondness for brown cambric and potatoes. Mrs. Wardlow tells me forty pounds of potatoes, at ten pence a twenty-weight no less, arrived for her larder. Are you afraid I’ll starve you?”
“I promised Charlie we’d eat them every day.” She took a stand in front of the mantel, facing him, her arms crossed in the folds of a fine patterned shawl.
“Mrs. Wardlow has no good opinion of potatoes, food for the lower orders, so she says.” He watched the little stiffening of her spine and the interesting way the move lifted her bosom.
“I’m sorry to offend Mrs. Wardlow’s sensibilities, but with butter and cream, potatoes are truly . . . comforting.”
He had scrupulously avoided her from the moment he’d opened the back parlor door to see her clad in thin lawn and white lace. Now even in faded brown cambric, a color as vivid as potato sacks, she was fully alive. Her presence in the room occupied all his senses, made him unseeing, unthinking.
Blindly he picked up another receipt. “Apparently you’re spreading all these guineas about for Charlie. Gunter’s for ices in October?”
“You think I spoil him, I’m sure.”
“He’s your brother.”
“I know you have a brother, but it’s not the same, is it? Your brother is not young and vulnerable. You don’t fear to lose him.”
He rose. Again she managed in her frank way to spear him with a careless remark. Warily, she watched his approach. For a woman who claimed to want a babe, she looked remarkably uneasy in her husband’s presence. He stopped in front of her.
“You know I can’t compete with you in extravagance,” she said.
“You try, however.”
“I’m not the one who burns candles at a rate to outdo the royal household.”
“No point in a meager glow.” He lifted her drooping shawl around her shoulders and did not miss the quick catch in her breath at his touch. It was only a brief hesitation. She plunged into speech in a strategy he was coming to recognize. Whenever he made her uneasy, words tumbled out of her.
“This household burns a week’s worth of candles per room per night. Amos and Alice spend hours cutting wicks, removing wax, and filling and cleaning lamps. It’s a wonder they find time for any other household duties.”
“You like potatoes. I like light.” He said it lightly, easily. He did not think he gave away anything, but the green eyes watched him intently, and he caught a dangerous glint of sympathy in their depths.
Coals shifted in the grate. A warm current of air stirred her skirts. He steeled himself to ignore the faint brush of them against his leg. He didn’t want her sympathy. Sympathy and desire made a bad mix, and he knew better than to confuse the two.
“Blindman’s bluff is not your game, is it? One would think you had been cast into the outer darkness as a child, brought up in a cave, raised like a mole, and now you crave light . . .”
With a quick press of his fingers against her mouth, he cut her off. He shook his head at her. “My turn.”
She closed her lips under his touch, and he released her. He could stop that mouth with his own, but then they would both be lost.
She recovered first. “You have receipts?”
“You buried them.” He took her by the arm and led her to the door. “But here’s a rough accounting of my spending. This week the East London Gas Company bought two hundred shovels, a thousand wash box scrubbers, fifty gauges, two tons of coal, and ten thousand feet of thirty-six-inch pipe.”
“I can’t compete with that.”
He opened the library door. “The first of your gowns has arrived. When Amos is through lighting candles, I’ll have him bring it to your room.”
 
 
 
 
 
A
FTER dinner, the great room of Arthur Fuller’s Conduit Street house held all the partners of the Metropolitan Works Group and their ladies quite comfortably. While the cardplayers staked a place for themselves around a pair of tables, and Mrs. Dimsdale claimed the pianoforte and began to play, six gentlemen found Xander’s wife in her copper brocade dress.

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