Vanity (37 page)

Her father’s presence prohibited close questioning, so he bided his time, but with some impatience.

“I’ll leave you to your port,” she said when the covers were removed. “I’m eager to see my protégé.”

Rupert and her father rose as the footman pulled back her chair.

“I’ll come to the kitchen, Griffin,” Octavia said to the hovering butler. “He’s probably more at home there.”

“I should think he’s most at home with the devil, madam,” Griffin declared, a chip appearing for once in his impassive facade. “He’s pulled the cat’s tail, spilt Cook’s sauce, and put boot blacking all over the damask tablecloth that the parlor maid was ironing.”

“In three hours!” Octavia exclaimed.

“Is it only three hours, my lady?”

A crack of laughter escaped from the head of the table where Rupert sipped his port. “Octavia, my dear, I wonder if you know what you’ve unleashed.”

She grimaced. “I think I’d better find out.”

In the kitchen she found one small boy wrapped in a sheet, an exasperated cook, a parlor maid armed with her flat irons, lamenting the state of the tablecloth, and a scullery maid scrubbing the great cooking pots with strong-smelling lye.

They all stared as the lady of the house hurried in for all the world as if she were completely at home in kitchens. But, then, they none of them knew how at home Octavia had been in Mistress Forster’s kitchen in Shoreditch.

“Oh, dear, Frank. Whatever have you been doing?” Octavia, in a rich rustle of silk, her skirts swaying gracefully, came to the fire where the child sat on a stool. His pale, gnomelike face looked much older than his years, and his huge eyes stretched wide at the sight of this magnificent apparition.

“Nuffink.” He shrank back warily as she bent over him. “Is ol’ Bilbo comin’ to get me?”

“Is that your master?”

The lad nodded and blinked. “’E’ll kill me when ’e comes,” he said with a curious matter-of-factness. “Not supposed to git lost in them chimbleys, but I couldn’t find me way out.”

“Old Bilbo, or whatever he calls himself, isn’t going to take you away,” Octavia reassured, stroking his spiky hair.

He shrank suspiciously away from the caress. “Course ’e is.” His eyes darted to the scrubbed deal table where the remnants of dinner waited to be dealt with. “Can I ’ave ’nother piece
Q
’ that apple pie?”

“For mercy’s sake, my lady, he’s had six slices already.” Cook bustled over, wiping her hands on her apron. “He’ll be sick if he has any more. His belly’s as shrunken as a dried nut, poor little tyke.”

“’Afore ol’ Bilbo comes fer me,” the child pleaded, a knowing look in his eye as his gaze darted appealingly between the two women.

“He’s not coming for you,” Octavia said firmly. “And I think it’s time you went to bed. In the morning we’ll find you some clothes.”

“I’ll take ’im up to the attic with me, m’lady.” The
scullery maid bobbed a curtsy, wiping her perspiring forehead with the back of her red, work-roughened hand. “’E’s about the same age as me little brother what always shares me bed at ome.”

The scullery maid was little more than a child herself, and there was a note of homesick longing in her voice.

“If you think you can manage him,” Octavia said doubtfully. Little Frank, clean and well fed, didn’t seem nearly so docile and pathetic as he had tumbling in a volcano of soot into the Earl of Wyndham’s bedchamber.

The recollection brought that rollicking wave of mirth again, and she hurried out of the kitchen before she yielded to it in front of the already startled kitchen staff. She felt so wonderfully lighthearted, as if she were walking on air. It didn’t occur to her that having faced the worst and then having that fate so abruptly snatched from her was enough to unbalance the steadiest nature.

Rupert was alone in the dining room. Oliver, not a great port drinker, had retired to his own apartments to plan his new project.

Octavia was chuckling as she came in. “Has Papa gone up? Perhaps I’ll join you in a glass of port.”

She pulled out a chair close to Rupert’s and pushed an empty glass toward him across the highly polished surface of the table. The candlelight was beginning to throw golden pools onto the table as the sun slowly sank below the horizon.

Rupert filled the glass from the decanter at his elbow, then leaned back in his chair, his forearm resting on the table, fingers curled lightly around the stem of his own glass.

“So am I to hear the story, Octavia? Something has been amusing you mightily all evening, and it seems hardly fair to keep the jest to yourself.”

“No, I’ll tell you. It was the funniest thing!” She went into a peal of laughter, sipped her port, and choked.

Rupert leaned over and thumped her back with a degree of vigor. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

Octavia struggled to compose herself. She wiped a tear
from the corner of her eye with a fingertip. “We were in Wyndham’s bedchamber and—”

“You were where?” All color drained from his face, and his eyes were featureless gray pools.

“In Wyndham’s bedchamber for our assignation,” she explained, taking another sip of her port. “And while we were in … in medias res … as it were, there’s this great thump and bang and scream …”

Laughter overcame her again. “And all this soot pours from the chimney,” she gasped. “It filled the air, fell down like filthy black rain all over the bed—”

“Stop it!”
he shouted, slamming his fist on the table, setting the candle flames dipping, the silverware rattling.

Octavia stopped, staring at him. His face was deathly white, a rictus of rage. A quivering started in her belly.

“It was very funny,” she said, not understanding this anger. “You should have seen Philip, in his drawers, totally bewildered …” She began to laugh again, but it was all mixed up with the quivering in her stomach and the lump in her throat.

Rupert’s chair crashed to the floor. He leaned over and seized Octavia by the upper arms, half dragging her across the table as he shook her.

“Stop it!” he hissed with a low-voiced ferocity more frightening than the previous bellow.
“For God’s sake! Stop laughing!”

But she couldn’t seem to stop. Tears poured down her cheeks, and the laughter welled in her throat and exploded in great gobbets of hilarity. He shook her until she was catching her breath on wrenching gasps and her body was limp in his hands.

He dropped her and she slid back into her chair, slumped against the back, her head drooping in defeat as her breath sobbed in her chest.

Rupert stood at the table, his white knuckles resting on the surface as he looked at her, waiting for the Octavia he knew to reenter her body. He was nauseated with rage and frustration, the image of his brother in medias res. God in
heaven, how could she joke like that? Joke about his brother about to possess …

He pressed his hand to his mouth, for one dreadful minute thinking he was going to vomit.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded when she seemed to be gaining control of her breathing. “I told you you were to tell me of every one of your dealings with Wyndham. You were to keep me apprised of your plans. You were to go nowhere with him without my knowledge.”

Octavia raised her head slowly. Her eyes were blank, and when she spoke, her voice was dull, as if she were reciting by rote. As she spoke, he wondered if she’d heard him, for she made no attempt to answer his question or to respond to his own violent outburst.

“I nearly had the ring. It was in his waistcoat. He dropped it on the floor when he took it off—”

“Stop it!”
He held up a hand, desperate to stop this recreation, this spinning of images that he couldn’t endure to picture.

But she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “I was waiting for the opportunity to pick it up, and when Frank dropped from the chimney, I thought I had my chance. But he started to beat the boy with a riding crop, and I had to stop him, so I dropped the waistcoat. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged in rueful apology as if she were apologizing for losing his handkerchief. “Next time—”

Her voice died as he leaned over and seized her by the shoulders, his fingers curling like spines, his face very close to hers.

“Be quiet and listen to me. Why didn’t you tell me what you were planning? You were instructed to do so. Why did you disobey me?”

Octavia blinked at him, his words penetrating the self-absorbed fog of her nightmare. “Why should I have told you? You don’t tell me what you’re planning.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” he said, shaking her again in furious punctuation. “It has been agreed from the
outset that you follow my direction in
everything.
Now, why did you break that rule?”

Octavia winced as his fingers bit deep into the bare skin of her shoulders. But his anger didn’t seem to touch her. It flowed off her like water on oiled leather. She felt none of his anguish, aware only of her own, of the violent surge of emotions flooding her now that her hysteria had been punctured and she could feel again, think clearly again of what she’d so nearly had to endure. And what had merely been postponed.

“What difference would it have made if I’d told you?” she asked, her voice low and bitter. “I was doing only what I’d contracted to do. You knew it was going to happen. Why should you need to know when? Did you want to sit here imagining it?” she threw at him with sudden vehemence. “Was that what you wanted? You’d bought a whore and she was doing a whore’s work and you would get some twisted amusement out of imagining it?”

Where were these hideous words coming from? They tumbled from her lips, deadly as an asp’s venom, and she didn’t know how or why. She didn’t know she’d ever thought like that. But some festering boil was lanced, and the poison gushed forth, unstoppable.

Rupert was gray, for a moment unable either to stop the tirade or to think of any response.

Octavia fell silent, as shocked by the words she’d spoken as he was by hearing them. Long shadows fell across the table with the last rays of the dying sun, and slowly Rupert’s fingers opened on her shoulders and he stepped back.

“How could you say such a thing?” His voice was soft and puzzled, deep hurt in his eyes.

“You said yourself at the beginning that only my body would be involved in the transaction, that my mind and emotions would not be engaged. That is whoredom,” she said flatly. “You engaged a whore. And why should you have thought otherwise? After the shameless way I came to your own bed?”

She turned her head away from the stabbing gray eyes, suddenly drained by the outpouring of emotion that she
hadn’t until this minute put into words even in the most secret places of her soul.

Rupert took a deep, shuddering breath. “There was nothing shameless about that first night, Octavia.”

“Of course there was. I behaved like a wanton. We both know that if I hadn’t, you would never have suggested that I seduce your enemy.”

Rupert raked a hand through his hair, disturbing the dark-brown locks waving neatly off his forehead. He walked away from the table to the window, where he stood for a minute looking out into the fast-falling dusk.

Behind him Octavia still sat at the table, wondering now whether she had really meant every word she’d spoken. Although her behavior had been shameless that first night, she didn’t regret it. But before she could put her thoughts into words, Rupert spoke suddenly into the quiet.

“You had nothing to do with what happened that night in the Royal Oak.”

“How can you say that? Of course I had everything to do with it. You told me I invited you.”

“So you did, but you weren’t responsible for your actions,” he said without expression, still staring sightlessly into the encroaching night.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Octavia was suddenly cold, her hands like ice. She had the feeling that something nasty was in the room, something nastier than her own outpourings.

“Do you remember having a tankard of punch?” He spoke still without expression.

“Yes.” Apprehensively, she stroked her throat, frowning at his averted back.

“Perhaps you don’t remember saying that it wanted ground cloves.”

“Yes, I do.” Apprehension grew now to fill the corners of the room with the evening shadows.

He turned from the window. His face was pale against the dark frame behind him, his eyes almost silvery.

“There was a substance in the cloves designed to relax
you, to remove your inhibitions … to stimulate your sexual responses.”

Octavia stared at him. She remembered how she’d felt, the peculiar sense of excitement, of restlessness, of drifting in some wonderful, sensual world with no mental threshold, no emotional barriers. The dreamlike quality of that night of love.

“You drugged me?” She asked the question tentatively, as if she couldn’t grasp the idea.

“Yes.”

“You … you
violated
me.”

He moved his hands in a gesture that could have been either denial or acceptance. “It could so be said.”

“But why?” Her voice was a mere thread, yet filled with a desperate intensity.

Rupert came back to the table and sat down. The candlelight fell on his face, illuminating the harsh planes, the deep lines suddenly etched around his mouth and eyes.

“I needed your cooperation,” he said simply. He could think of softer ways of putting it, but he’d deceived her enough. “I needed to bind you to me in some way. To show you another side of yourself.”

“I see.” Octavia took a sip of port. Maybe it would dissolve the lump in her throat, the constriction in her chest. “It worked, didn’t it?”

He reached out to take her free hand lying limply on the table, but she snatched it away as if from a burning brand.

He withdrew his hand and said, “I ask you to believe that I haven’t thought in those terms since we began this.”

“I don’t know what difference that makes,” Octavia said dully. She wanted to weep and scream and throw things. She wanted to scratch his eyes out. Her icy-cold hands shook with the power of her need to hurt him.

She pushed back her chair with a violent scrape on the oak floor. “Excuse me, I think I’ll go to bed. Since it’s so important to you, I’ll let you know when I have my next assignation with your enemy.”