Vixen in Velvet (17 page)

I
f Lisburne carried her, she would go to pieces.

Leonie let him take her arm and escort her to the supper box.

She sat, trying to summon her composure—and wondering at having lost it in the first place—while Lisburne gave the waiter an order.

The waiter had hardly gone when Lord Swanton turned up. And instantly launched into apologies.

She put up her hand. “Don’t,” she said. “Not a word.”

He looked at Lord Lisburne. “Sit,” he said. “Not a word.”

The poet sat. He looked wretched.

But what did she care? For him this was a temporary ailment, to which his lawyers would apply the infallible cure: money. For her and for her girls, it was a catastrophe.

“I do
not
understand,” she said. “Hadn’t you the slightest inkling?”

Swanton shook his head. “I swear—”

“No hint that you might be called to account publicly?” she said. “Because I recall one or two mentions of woman problems in
Foxe’s Morning Spectacle
. It never occurred to you that these might be warnings, rather than the usual random scandalmongering?”

Swanton pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know. Lisburne can tell you. I get letters nearly every day from somebody claiming I promised this or that, including marriage.”

“But those were either typical begging letters or incompetent attempts at blackmail,” Lisburne said. “The writers seemed ignorant of Swanton’s having only recently arrived in London. He couldn’t possibly have formed the sort of ‘attachments’ they claimed. Or done any wooing. He hadn’t time. I can vouch for that.”

“Then the woman’s lying?” Leonie said. “It was a performance, meant to discredit you, no more?”

Lord Swanton looked at his cousin.

“Which is it?” Leonie said. She wanted to scream, but they’d all received quite enough attention. “The Milliners’ Society has lost at the very least a hundred pounds in pledges this night, because we’re instantly tainted by association. I can’t counteract this without knowing the truth.”

Lisburne began, “My dear, I promise—”

“Don’t,” she cut in. No
my dears
. Not now. Not ever. “For the same reason, it’s more than likely I’ll lose customers as well. I’ll be weeks, possibly months, undoing the damage. The least you
gentlemen
can do is answer me straight.”

“I wish I could,” Lord Swanton said. “The trouble is, I don’t know.”

Chapter Nine

A thousand faults in man we find—

Merit in him we seldom meet;

Man is inconstant and unkind;

Man is false and indiscreet;

Man is capricious, jealous, free:

Vain, insincere, and trifling too;

Yet still the women all agree,

For want of better—he must do.

A.A.,
The Literary Gazette
, 1818

F
or once Leonie Noirot wasn’t hiding much.

For once her face mirrored her feelings, and Lisburne well understood them.

She stared at Swanton in patent disbelief.

“The little girl,” Swanton said. “The woman said she was not five years old. She said it happened in Paris. It might have happened.”

“Might have,” she repeated.

“He doesn’t remember,” Lisburne said. “And it’s no use trying to make him remember.”

“Are you claiming amnesia?” she said. “Because otherwise . . .” She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, her mask was back in place. “It takes a great deal to shock me, Lord Swanton.” Her voice was nearly steady now. “Yet I’ll admit I’m a trifle taken aback. Were there so many women in your life in Paris at the time that you
lost track
?”

Swanton’s face reddened.

No help for it. He’d only jabber on inarticulately. Explanations would fall to Lisburne, as usual. “It was a difficult time,” he began. “After my—”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Lady Alda,” came a familiar feminine voice from somewhere in the vicinity. “I had always thought—at least the general my papa said so, and as we all know, he’s always right—but where was I? Oh, yes, I had always thought that in this greatest of great nations of ours, a man was innocent until proven guilty.”

Everyone at Lisburne’s table went still.

The red faded from Swanton’s face, which settled into the frown of concentration he usually applied to composing verse.

“Yes of course, anything is possible, or so some will believe,” Gladys went on. “People believe in hobgoblins, too. Perhaps you weren’t aware, my dear, that Vauxhall is notorious for attracting strange characters, especially those desperate for attention. There was that fellow— What did he call himself? The Great something. What was it? About ten years ago, I believe. I read about it in one of Mr. Hone’s books. Do you know to whom I refer, Mr. Bates?”

A masculine voice answered. Not Bates.
Flinton?
That timid fellow, who lived in terror of his great aunt? Talking to
Gladys
?

Swanton turned his head this way and that, trying to locate the speakers.

The voices seemed to come from behind their supper box, but Lisburne couldn’t be sure. So many voices. And the orchestra was playing. Gladys’s voice wasn’t really louder than anybody else’s. It simply carried, or soared, like a songbird’s.

Which was a strange image for Gladys, admittedly.

“Yes, thank you, Lord Flinton,” Gladys said. “ ‘The Aerial.’ That was the name I wanted. Sometimes styled as ‘The Great Unknown,’ as you said. He believed his beauty was without equal in all the world. He would prance among the audience right there, in front of the orchestra, handing out cards, and challenging the spectators to produce anybody who could match him.”

Bates’s voice responded this time. Then Lady Alda Morris said something.

Gladys laughed. “That would have been more amusing, certainly,” she said. “And only think, my dear, if I had been there, to see the expression on his beautiful face when I took up his challenge!”

Yet another masculine voice entered the conversation. The fellow uttered only a word or two, not enough to enable Lisburne to identify him.

The voices began to drift away.

Swanton jumped up from his seat, looking wildly about him. “Where is she?” he said. “That voice!”

“It’s only Gladys,” Lisburne said. “A pity she couldn’t go on the stage. She projects so—”

“Is it she? That voice!”

“Yes, perfectly audible,” Lisburne said.

“I must find her!”

“I recommend you don’t.”

“She defended me!”

“Only to vex Lady Alda, I’ve no doubt. Confront Gladys, and you risk becoming the target of her wit. Be warned: She has a fine, skewering way with words.”

“Then let her do her worst,” Swanton said. “I half wish somebody would.” And away he went.

Leonie watched him go. “Is he insane?” she said.

“He’s overwrought,” Lisburne said. He rose. “It’s unwise to let him go on his own. He’s completely distracted.”

She waved a gloved hand. “Go,” she said. “I’m not keeping you.”

She was overwrought, too, though she hid it well.

He looked in the direction Swanton had gone, then back at her. “You’d better come with me. You can’t stay here alone.”

Her smile was cool. “I strongly doubt I’ll be alone for very long.”

Too true. At least a hundred men here tonight would happily take his place. Maybe two hundred.

He sat down again. “To the devil with him, then.”

“I doubt he’ll come to harm,” she said. “If he wants to talk to Lady Gladys, he’ll have to push his way through her throng of admirers. You might have been too preoccupied to notice how many gentlemen accompanied her.”

“I counted only three masculine voices,” he said. “She had Lady Alda and Clara with her as well. The three men could be anybody’s followers.”

“Tomorrow’s
Spectacle
will tell us,” Leonie said. “If, that is, there’s room, once they’re done demolishing Lord Swanton, Maison Noirot, and the Milliners’ Society.”

Though she spoke coolly, he detected the undercurrent of anger and grief.

“We’ll make it up to you,” he said. “I give you my word.”

“That and the Botticelli, if you please.”

He was trying to decide how to respond to this when she glanced about her, then leaned in, wafting toward him a tantalizing scent of lavender and Leonie. That didn’t help in the Intelligent Reply Department.

Dropping her voice, she said, “He doesn’t
remember
?”

Lisburne leaned toward her, careful to avoid the things sprouting from her coiffure. “He was distraught,” he said, keeping his voice low, too. “After my father died.” It was hard to get the words out. He hated speaking of that time. “When we first arrived in Paris, we sought distraction in the way young men often do. Swanton hasn’t the stamina for dissipation. He fell ill. When he recovered, he had only a confused memory of the previous weeks.”

She sat back again. She lifted the tips of her fingers to her temple.

“I know it sounds ridiculous,” he said. “At best. You’ll wonder at the depths of depravity to which we must have sunk.”

“When it comes to men, I rarely wonder at anything,” she said.

“We tried to be completely dissolute,” he said. “We began by attending certain exclusive parties, where gaming, drink, opium, and women—expensive women—were in plentiful supply. Two weeks of that nearly killed us. Maybe the opium destroyed his memory. Or maybe it’s just him. His mind’s like a roiling ocean, and some things sink to the bottom, like ships lost in storms.”

“You’d think he’d have some recollection, however dim, of seducing an innocent young woman,” she said.

“Especially since it’s so foreign to his nature,” he said. “It could only have happened during those two weeks, and I’m having trouble imagining where and when he would have encountered any innocents during that interval.”

“But we don’t
know
,” she said. “I will not call the woman’s credibility into question unless I’m positive. Too many women end up with the Milliners’ Society or on the streets because it’s always the woman’s fault. And now we mayn’t have a Milliners’ Society for th-them.”

He was appalled. He’d never seen her so near breaking, or even approaching breaking. He remembered how confident she’d been, the grace with which she’d taken the stage, the way she’d held the audience in the palm of her hand, her radiant expression when she returned backstage, confident she’d triumphed.

In a moment she’d lost all she’d won.

No, the damage extended farther than undoing this night’s achievement. He’d looked into the Milliners’ Society. He knew when it had been founded and how it was supported. He knew she and her sisters had put money into it when they hadn’t much to spare from the shop’s earnings. He remembered her expressing hopes of expanding into the building next door. If the support they’d so painstakingly built fell away, they could lose everything they’d achieved. And if the shop lost customers as well . . .

No point now in reviewing the
if
s. It was a nightmare, as Swanton had said, and he didn’t know the half of it.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this,” Lisburne said. “I promise. And I’ll make it right.”

She turned away, blinking, and gave a short laugh.

The waiter appeared with their supper.

T
he waiter’s arrival jolted Leonie back to her present surroundings.

She looked up and saw, behind him and everywhere about him, a land of fantasy. Stars twinkled in the heavens and lights twinkled among the trees and on the buildings. Coming down the covered walk to the supper box, she’d seen the orchestra building with its multicolored lamps, a structure that might have been conjured from
The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments
. From it came the sound of real music. An orchestra played and people danced. It wasn’t homemade music or organ grinders on the street.

Her girls would hear real music this night, perhaps for the first time in their lives. They’d see Vauxhall’s wonders, too: the paintings and sculptures, the Gothic and Chinese temples, the Eagle fountain and the Submarine Cave, the hermit telling fortunes, the jugglers and dancers and acrobats. And the fireworks. Above all, these were gardens, a pretty place out of doors, instead of dingy streets and poky rooms.

She thought of the cramped building she and her sisters had taken pains to make into a comfortable and attractive home for unwanted girls. She thought of Cousin Emma, who would have been so proud of what they’d done. A weight pressed on Leonie’s chest.

She watched Lisburne peel off his gloves. For some reason, the sight of his bare, aristocratic hands made her want to cry.

She stared hard at the food on her plate and took off her gloves, though she didn’t see how she could swallow a morsel.

“When did you last eat?” Lisburne said.

“Midafternoon,” she said. “I meant to dine before I came here, but I was too—too—” She swallowed. “Excited.” She blinked hard. “The opportunity.”

He gazed at her for a moment, his face taut. “I’ll make it right,” he said. “I promise. But you must eat something. A bite of ham. Look.” He cut a piece from the ham on his plate and held it up. “Vauxhall’s ham is famous. It’s so very thin, you’ll think you haven’t swallowed anything so gross as meat. No, you’ll think you’re inhaling a gossamer confection made by fairies.”

He mimicked Swanton at his most earnestly and dramatically poetic, and she laughed because she couldn’t help it. Yet the weight pressed, and she was terrified she’d burst into tears.

Don’t think about tomorrow
, she told herself.
Don’t think about failure. You’ve played worse hands than this. All the Noirots and DeLuceys have.

But she was so tired of playing bad hands. So tired of losing everything and starting over again. And now she wasn’t sure she could count on Marcelline and Sophy to help her start over.

“Never mind,” he said. “I should have realized: You’ve borne enough punishment for one night. I’m going to take you home.”

L
isburne paid for their uneaten suppers and took her away. She was too demoralized to put up any real fight about abandoning the Milliners’ Society girls, so he had to assure her only three times that Simpson would send Matron and her charges home in a hired carriage, and it had all been arranged beforehand, and she couldn’t seriously be proposing to take them away before they saw the fireworks?

Since it would be hours before Vauxhall closed, and since those of Swanton’s audience too indignant to remain had gone by now, Lisburne was able to get his curricle from the coach field quite quickly.

If Vines was surprised at the early departure, he was too disciplined to show it or evidence any confusion at seeing Miss Noirot climb into the vehicle instead of Swanton.

During the journey, she told him what she’d been doing when she disappeared. Though he could actually feel his hair standing on end, Lisburne called on all his willpower not to rage at her for endangering herself. He didn’t point out that dressed as she was, she’d invited trouble. Nothing terrible had happened, he told himself. And it was too late to take a fit now.

All the same, he fretted and, when she’d finished, had to exert his self-control to the utmost in order to say only, “It must have been Meffat in the hack. He and Theaker have been a matched pair since their schooldays. I’m not surprised. When I saw Theaker take her away, I knew they were involved. They think it’s a fine joke, I daresay. They always did enjoy tormenting Swanton.”

She looked up at this. “Are those some of the boys you thrashed at school?”

He swallowed his surprise. “Somebody had to,” he said. “How did you learn of that?”

“Clevedon,” she said. “But knowing they’re involved doesn’t tell us whether they put her up to playing Woman Wronged or simply encouraged and helped her embarrass Lord Swanton in public.”

“Does it not strike you as an unlikely coincidence, their simply happening upon possibly the only woman in the world Swanton might have wronged during two weeks of his entire life? In Paris?”

She turned away, seemingly watching the passing scene. But he knew she was thinking. It was in the way she held herself and in the tilt of her head and the arc of her neck.

“Not entirely unlikely,” she said at last. “I was trying to recall where I’d seen Theaker before. It was at the British Institution. When you picked me up, and—”

“I remember,” he said. “Vividly.”