Wanton Angel (Blackthorne Trilogy) (40 page)

      
He seemed earnest about wanting her to make a life in London. Working up her courage, she said, “If you're concerned with my making friends, Bertie has issued a marvelous invitation—to us both—to attend a salon at Lady Holland's on Wednesday.”

      
“Lady Holland is not received, Beth. You will not be either if you mingle with her crowd.”

      
“Bertie attends her functions and he is received. So do a great many of the upper ten thousand.”

      
“Not the women. This isn't Naples, puss.” Although she'd not experienced a bit of morning sickness in two mönths, the kippered herring on her plate suddenly smelled like the scullery garbage bin. She shoved it away. “In Naples you weren't an earl,” she said angrily. “In Naples we could enjoy life.”

      
He threw down his napkin and stood up. “Yes, but now I am Lynden. If you think I like it one bit more than you do, you're considerably in error.”

      
She watched in silence as he stalked from the room.

* * * *

      
Derrick's frustration did not altogether stem from his worries over his wife. His irresponsible brother and sister-in-law had done more than their share to gray his hair with their profligate ways. True to the predilections of the ton, Lee had been scrupulous to pay his gambling debts but let everyone from tailors to chandlers go begging for the sizable sums he owed them.

      
The mews behind the city house were filled with expensive horseflesh and the very latest in fancy rigs. He'd given Bella a team and one small carriage. After spending the morning inspecting the stables and questioning the men who worked there, he made decisions about which pieces of equipment to sell. He and Beth did not require four phaetons, two barouches and a racing sulky.

      
But that left the horses, and Derrick confessed to sharing his brother's weakness for fine horseflesh. That was why he decided to test the best of the racers and carriage horses himself before deciding which to sell. He patted the big black stallion's neck, almost certain it would be one he wished to keep.

      
“'Ee be a good 'un, m'lord,” Spralding, the head stableman, said in his thick Yorkshire accent as his gnarled hands held the reins, steadying the horse while a stable boy threw a lightweight saddle on the black's back and secured it with deft ease.

      
“I'll take him over to the park for a good run.”

      
“That 'ee'l give ya, m'lord.” Spralding's toothless mouth spread wide in a grin as he bowed respectfully to the new earl.

      
Derrick swung smoothly into the saddle and kneed the stallion into a trot. Since it was considered a savage hour by ton standards, no one was about except for a few tradesmen and household servants. Derrick carefully wended his way toward Hyde Park to give the horse a thorough run. Patting the glossy black neck, he murmured, “Do us both a world of good to work off some tension, eh, boy?”

      
The feel of a fine horse beneath him and the wind blowing his hair exhilarated him as he let the black have his head. It felt good, an escape from the confinement of city life and the troubles pressing him. He leaned forward, urging the stallion to take a hedge several dozen yards ahead.

      
Effortlessly, they breezed over it as if the black had wings on his hooves. Derrick grinned, knowing he'd keep Night Dancer. He turned the stallion sharply and headed for another hedge across a slight swale, confident now that the horse was able to make the jump, which was a good bit higher than the first one. Just as he felt Dancer's muscles tense for the leap, the saddle began to slip to the left. He considered for an instant trying to rein the horse in and turn him, but feared injuring his mount. Instead, he kicked free of the stirrups and jumped.

      
The saddle came sailing off and hit the ground with a loud whump as Derrick landed hard on his right shoulder and rolled up into a ball to avoid Dancer's flying hooves. As the horse cleared the hedge, Derrick sat up and took inventory of his body, thanking his luck for the dreary soaking rain that had fallen earlier in the week, softening the earth considerably. No broken bones, but he'd have one devil of a set of bruises.

      
Quickly he got to his feet and climbed through an opening in the hedge. Dancer had stopped and turned, tossing his head nervously. Derrick spoke soothingly to the skittish stallion as he approached and took the reins, leading him around the hedge back to where the saddle and blanket were strewn on the grass.

      
Within the hour he was back at his stable and Spralding was examining the tack. ”Yer that lucky, m'lord. See ‘ere.” The old man held up the saddle girth that had broken.

      
“It's been cut halfway through. A wonder it didn't break when I started to race Dancer and made that first jump,” Derrick said, realizing how easily he could have broken his neck flying through the air at such a speed.

      
“I'm that sorry, m'lord. I don't know 'oo cudda done this'n.” His rheumy brown eyes met the earl's penetrating blue ones, the question unasked—did Derrick have any enemies?

      
“Then this was deliberate.” He had been pretty certain when he'd checked the saddle in the park.

      
“Aye, m'lord, but I'd stake m'soul on th' lads whot work ‘ere...”

      
“Do you have someone new?” Derrick prompted.

      
The boy's name was Jem and he'd been working on tack that very morning. A search of the mews revealed that he was no longer anywhere around. One of the stable hands said he had left without a word just after Derrick rode off on Dancer.

      
As he soaked in a tub that afternoon, Derrick reviewed a number of potentially dangerous events that had occurred since he'd become Lynden. He'd dismissed nearly being run down by a drayman en route to his solicitor's office and the tiles that had fallen from a rooftop and shattered on the street inches from where he was standing while engaged in conversation with an old acquaintance from Eton. If he added the attack just before he'd left Naples, there might now have been four attempts on his life. Until the tampering with his saddle, all had seemed random bad luck.

      
Over his years as a spy, he'd made more than his share of enemies. Between leaving Spralding and retiring to this soak, he'd visited Lord Burghley at the Foreign Office and learned some interesting news that might well have a bearing on the attempts to put a period to his life.

      
Evon Bourdin was in London. Amazingly, Murat's former palace guardsman was descended from one of the oldest and highest-ranking noble houses of France's Ancient Regime—and he was cousin to Bella's odious friend, the Count d'Artois. Ardent hater of Bonapartists that he was, the count was forced to acknowledge Bourdin because of his cousin's pedigree. Proper lineage was all. That was the way things worked in the ton.

      
Bourdin certainly has reason enough to want me dead.
Placing the Frenchman at the head of his list of potential suspects, Derrick decided to confront him tonight at the Duchess of Westover's soiree.

* * * *

      
The orchestra played a waltz, still considered a scandalous innovation in England, although it had been danced on the continent for years. The crowd whirled and dipped, laughed and chattered all around Beth in a kaleidoscope of color and noise. She had never felt so alone in her entire life as she watched Derrick spin a viscountess across the floor. They made a striking couple, he so tall and dark, elegantly handsome in a perfectly tailored black cashmere jacket and trousers. The snowy white linen of his perfectly tied cravat contrasted dramatically with his sun-darkened face as he smiled at the striking brunette in his arms.

      
He had become the toast of London over the past few days. Apparently, if one was a dashingly handsome earl, the ton found it easy enough to forgive youthful wenching and dueling. His reinstatement in the good graces of the upper ten thousand was complete when some unknown functionary in the Foreign Office let out word that Derrick had been on secret assignment, working directly for Lord Castlereagh the past five years. Derrick went from pariah to hero overnight.

      
Beth wondered if one of his new friends in the House of Lords had not decided it expeditious for their political agenda to have Derrick's popularity enhanced. Her husband had shrugged off her questions, saying only that he disliked being the object of silly adulation in the news sheets but expected it would soon die down. She was not certain about the political implications of his sudden celebrity, but she could clearly see how it affected the ladies.

      
Across the room the gleam of sexual excitement in his beautiful dance partner's dark eyes was unmistakable. Charlotte was everything Beth would never be—dutiful, obedient and English. The viscountess might share a discreet affair, but she'd always do what society expected of her in public. Beth felt an acute stab of jealousy as visions of her husband lying entwined with Charlotte crept into her mind.

      
He'd been surrounded by drooling females ever since their arrival. Oh, everyone had been polite enough to his American countess—on the surface—but Beth had felt their hostile glances and overheard the tittering whispers behind their fans as they discussed the earl's very unorthodox marriage. A pity he'd been so precipitous.

      
“Don't let them see you're hurt by their hen's pecks. The lot of 'em ain't worth the pinky finger on your left hand, Beth,” Bertie Jamison said as he handed her a glass of champagne.

      
The bubbles tickled her nose as she sipped, then replied, “I'm grateful you've been so kind as to sit with me this dance. Each time I take the floor I feel like the fish my friend Vittoria kept in a huge glass bowl—on display for everyone present to comment upon.”

      
“And what could they say? Certainly not that you're gauche, ill-mannered or anything but exceedingly lovely and the picture of ladylike decorum. No need to be jealous of the attention the earl's receiving.”

      
“Am I that transparent?” she asked with a wan smile, her eyes returning to her husband's beautiful dance partner.

      
“Ah, Charlotte's no more a blue-blood than are you, if that's your worry. Her father's a Cit, wanted her to marry into a title. Flush in the pockets, so he could afford to pay Viscount Marleigh's asking price—no matter the groom was the same age as her father.”

      
Bertie was an incorrigible gossip but terribly sweet. “The poor thing,” Beth said, trying to imagine how horrible it would be to wed an old man.

      
Bertie laughed as he took a gulp of champagne. “Save your pity, Beth. The new Viscountess Marleigh wanted to land her catch every bit as much as her father did. A real proper pair of mushrooms, she and Ben Binghamton.”

      
“Ben Binghamton!” Beth gasped, almost dropping her glass of champagne.

      
“I say, Beth, do you know the blighter? A real nip-cheese with the employees at his factory, but he has gingerbread enough to mingle with the better sort.”

      
His pale gray eyes studied her worriedly as the very ground seemed to pitch beneath her feet. “Do you mean he's present tonight?” At Bertie's confirmation of her worst nightmare, Beth prayed for the floor to open up and swallow her before Ben Binghamton saw her and recognized that she had been aboard the
Sea Sprite
with him when they'd been captured by Liam Quinn.

Chapter Twenty-two

      
Derrick had not been attending Charlotte's idle chatter. The chit had half the sense of a sand flea and was twice as irritating. His mind was occupied with the earlier meeting he'd had with d'Artois and Bourdin in the Westover card room. The haughty old count had been red-faced, making furious threats, but it was the oily young fortune hunter's smirking menace that worried him.

      
Bourdin had not denied that Derrick's death would have afforded him pleasure, but he had said that any scandal would bring to light his regrettable past affiliations. Since he did not wish it bandied about London that he'd served under Bonaparte's favorite general, he was content to leave the earl alone...if the earl would be content to do likewise for him.

      
Every instinct honed by his years as a spy convinced Derrick that Bourdin was lying. The safest way to ensure that he would not expose the Frenchman was for Bourdin to kill him...or hire someone else to do so. Derrick had dispatched Bow Street Runners in search of the stable boy Jem earlier that afternoon. If they located the youth, he might be convinced to implicate Bourdin to save his own neck. In the meanwhile, all Derrick could do was be very wary.

      
Right now his life had complications enough, he thought, watching Beth engaged in conversation with his ninny of a cousin Bertie. If not for the fact that he was rich as Croesus, Bertie Wharton Jamison might be a suspect on Derrick's list of enemies. As to coveting Lynden, Bertie was a baron, Wharton being an old if minor title. He'd spent his life much the same way as Vittoria, moving among artistic and literary circles, little concerned with the proprieties of the ton, although he was received by the upper ten thousand, right up to Prinney himself. Annabella doted upon him, although he could not imagine why a woman such as his sister-in-law would find Bertie appealing. Beth seemed exceedingly fond of him as well.

      
Derrick could understand that Bertie and Beth were kindred spirits. The thought rankled, although Bertie was such a bran-faced clunch that Derrick could not imagine his wife finding the man physically attractive. Still, she was isolated and unhappy. Perhaps it might be best to send her to the Hall now. She could paint and would not have to worry about the social whirl.