Almost a Gentleman (30 page)

She smiled. "You may, Mr. Simms, and thank you. No, life isn't at all tedious, these days." She sneaked a quick, tactful glance at her pocket watch, for she had an appointment at half past eleven.

"Well, I won't be keeping you, but I brought you these for safekeeping." He handed her a small black velvet pouch. "And to enable us to pay for the repairs to the Brunswick Square carpets and furniture."

"Quite right." Carefully, she spilled a few gems into her hand.

After Phoebe's "funeral," all the ancestral jewelry had gone back to Henry's mother. But a few of the gifts that Lord Claringworth had made his young wife couldn't be accounted for and had had to be reported stolen. Over the past few years, however, one or another flawless stone would make its occasional way out of the velvet bag, journeying to a narrow building beside a canal in Amsterdam, where objects of dazzling beauty were handled with solid, unimpeachable, and untraceable rectitude.

"My blood money," Phoebe would say, whenever the fee for one of those stones had its way back to her. "The only money I've ever truly earned." And in fact, Kate thought now, the rubies she held in her palm did look like drops of blood.

"Yes, I'll take care of it," she murmured.

"And these." He gestured toward sandalwood box. "The poison pen letters, my lady. She said they were important evidence, and must be kept safe."

"Indeed." What sad objects he'd brought for safekeeping: the spoils of a dead husband's abusive behavior and the ravings of a vicious, anonymous madman. "Well, I'll protect them, but I certainly shan't read them."

She reached across the table and took the old tutor's brown-spotted hand into her own soft white one.

"And do try not to worry, dear Mr. Simms." she added. "I know how much you love Phoebe. But if we are very lucky, from now on we will be forced to share her with someone else."

"I don't want to let you out of bed." Lord Linseley tightened his arms around her as the first morning light peeped under the curtains.

"I need a wash," Phoebe protested. "You've made me quite wonderfully sticky all over." She kissed his cheek and pressed her body into his, belly against belly, the mound of her quim against his spent penis. "Sticky and still wet, some places."

"Umm, yes, that was nice just now, wasn't it? But as soon as you get out of bed, you see, our first night together will be officially over."

"What a romantic creature you are," she murmured. "Fascinated by symbol and ritual and using silly words like 'official' to mask your fascination. I'll wager that you loved reading the Arthurian legends as a boy. And volume after volume of fairy tales as well."

He laughed. "People don't generally describe me as a romantic."

She slid out of his grasp.

"But yes, you're right, I've read them all," he added. "Numerous times. Especially the tales where the hero wins his princess."

She dipped a sponge into the hot water that a servant had brought up to her room a little while earlier. How clever of her to have guessed what sort of child he'd once been, he thought as he watched her soap her arms and neck.

Gracefully, she raised an arm and began to scrub herself in the slender hollow underneath it. How miraculous it was, he thought, that someone could know such private, personal things about you without having been told. And how provocative those moist tendrils of pale brown hair were, how tenderly they outlined the swooping curve below her arm. They were a shade fairer than the bright chestnut bush between her legs. Marston's Byronic dark locks were dyed, then—he wouldn't have guessed.

"If anyone should inquire, I'll tell the Cockburns to say that Mr. Marston left quite early for Scotland," he said. "And that Lord Linseley spent the night with a mysterious lady of great beauty and charm."

He smiled as he said it, for in fact she looked entirely
un
-mysterious this morning. She simply looked very pretty, energetic, and unselfconscious, flushed pink and white in the cold morning air. Her nipples, with their devastatingly large aureoles, were puckered to a dark, pinkish brown. A small, secretive, satisfied smile played about her lips as she spread her legs to sponge the insides of her thighs.

The smile became wistful, troubled.

"I find it difficult," she said, "to keep in mind the hatred that's been directed at me—and at Billy, and probably at you as well, in consequence. We're really
not safe
, are we? And yet everything
feels
so sweet and safe this morning."

"It doesn't matter. I'll handle Crashaw when he comes, and then we'll be done with the problem. We can be done with Marston, too."

She turned her face away, reaching for one of the towels that the servant had hung by the fire to warm. "I do hope Billy spent a comfortable night. I must go see to him before breakfast."

He rolled over on his front, resting his chin on his hands as he watched her step into her drawers and slide her legs into her stockings. She knit her brow; he tossed her a garter that he'd retrieved from among the bedclothes. She smiled, caught it neatly, and then immediately lost herself once again in the serious business of dressing.

He liked to watch a woman costuming herself in the morning. Especially after a long, languorous night of lovemaking, he found himself oddly touched by the quick movements, the brisk, everyday deftness and self-absorbed concentration women seemed inevitably to adopt as they donned their clothes in preparation for reentry into the everyday world.

You'd never know from looking, he thought, that Phoebe didn't dress every morning in dainty lawn drawers and pink-tinted stockings. Her quick tugs at buttons and laces, little frowns of annoyance or nods of satisfaction were deliciously spontaneous. He felt as moved by the sight of her nakedness disappearing behind her clothes—well,
almost
as moved—as he had by the revelation of her nakedness last night.

But what was she doing now, over there near the window? Ah yes, searching for the corset that had got flung somewhere or another. She laughed, waving it like a pennant as she rose to her feet.

"Will you help me with this, David? But I mean really help me with it. No sly stratagems to pull me back into bed."

"Yes, come here. It's all right, I must begin dressing as well. And so I hereby declare our first night together officially over and our life together officially begun."

Billy was much better this morning, almost managing to grin from out the carriage door, where Phoebe and David found him waiting. He'd slept most of the night, the chambermaid reported rather prissily, which was a mercy…

Since he'd had to sleep through all the commotion David and I were making
, Phoebe finished silently on the disapproving chambermaid's behalf. In any case, his eye was no longer swollen shut and his complexion looked healthy under the bruises.

"G'bye Rosie. Thanks for ev'rything, luv," he called to the chambermaid, who waved and blew him a kiss in return.
He won't absolutely lose his looks
, Phoebe thought,
he simply won't be as breathtaking as he used to be
. Dr. Riggs thought he'd probably walk with a slight limp; he certainly wouldn't be making any more monstrous profits for Mr. Talbot. As the carriage rolled out of the Swan's courtyard and into Ermine Street, she wondered what Billy could do now to earn his living, for he wouldn't be picking any more pockets if she had any say in the matter.

Perhaps she could ask David about it this evening, she thought, if he wasn't still feeling offended by the disrespect Billy had shown him yesterday. She looked up, realizing with a start that while she'd been woolgathering, he and Billy had struck up a lively conversation.

About horses, it seemed. More specifically, about the four horses pulling the carriage, whose names and vital statistics Billy seemed to have learned from Mr. Dickerson early this morning. It wasn't the sort of discussion Henry and his friends had when considering the purchase of a new team or saddle horse: gentlemen of their set had been interested in a horse's price, pedigree, and elegance of proportion. This morning's conversation, in contrast, was quite a bit messier: David and Billy, it seemed, shared a lively fascination with the diseases that horses were prey to and the possible remedies for them, in all their infinite variations.

Phoebe found the substance of the discussion less diverting than the look of deep concentration animating the faces of its participants. And when the conversation turned to the fine points of draining pus from an infected hoof, she decided that perhaps she didn't have to listen at all. She nestled into the sealskin lining of her pelisse, ignoring the sense of the words while she enjoyed the good-humored cadence of the voices speaking them. Billy had clearly quite forgotten about his disrespectful behavior yesterday. And David, just as clearly, had decided not to dwell on the offense.

Ah, but now they
were
talking of something interesting.

"Yessir, I learnt
that
one from an animal surgeon when I were a little nipper, no higher than yer waist. A good man he was, the surgeon, old and wise and the animals knew it too. Well, when I weren't helpin' me dad on the land—Yorkshire it were, thanks for askin' sir—I come and watched the surgeon, and helped him too, when he'd let me, for he knew everything and I wanted to know it too.

"That was before we had to leave. Killed me dad, leavin' the land. So I never learnt as much as I'd wanted to."

Billy had told her a great deal about being a prostitute, and something about picking pockets as well. But he'd never told her anything about earlier, happier times, the times he was so readily sharing with David now. She hadn't even known he'd been a farm boy.

"So you like animals and the people who take care of them, do you."

"Yessir, I does, a lot, sir."

"I ask, you see, because I thought you might pass your convalescence at the home of a Mr. Goulding, who helps care for the livestock at Linseley Manor. He's a nice old fellow, talks a blue streak about animals—loves any creature lucky enough to have been born with a tail, wings, or even fins. Mrs. Goulding is very nice too—and a good cook, we wouldn't put you with somebody who wasn't a good cook. Their children have grown up and gone off on their separate ways; all well employed and starting families of their own. And not a bad one in the bunch, as Mrs. Goulding enjoys telling me—she'll tell you that too, every chance she gets. Anyway, they've got a spare bed and lots of affection going begging. Does that sound like it might suit you, Billy?"

She saw from Billy's hesitant new smile how much it did suit him.

"But it's not just what
he
needs," David whispered to her later after Billy had dozed off. "Or what Mr. and Mrs. Goulding need, though they
will
be quite delighted to have him to talk to and fuss over. It's what
I
need. For you don't mind, do you, that I don't want him under my roof? I mean, he's a good young fellow, but having him too close to us—I find it distracting, in the light of… recent history, you know. Somehow it all feels too liberal for me, rather too much like one of those cultish erotic experiments Mr. Blake might favor."

"No, I don't mind." She smiled. It was interesting to discover the multiple, contradictory facets of his personality. A satyr, a dreamy romantic—and also a stuffy, conventional country gentleman with a horror of "cultishness" and "erotic experiments."

"Oh no, by all means let us stay clear of 'erotic experiments,'" she said.

"You're mocking me, you know what I really mean… oh but look, straight to your right. Do you see that church spire?"

For they were entering "his countryside." He became boyish, eager to point out every village and steeple. And in fact some of the churches were quite fine, many of the ancient villages comfortable and prosperous. But it was the huge sky that captured Phoebe's imagination. Fully three quarters of the view that presented itself through the carriage window seemed to be moody, poetic, passionate sky.

Of course, she thought, it would be prettier in summer, with the beech trees all green atop the wolds, those low, rolling, forested hills that softened the sweep of the landscape. But in bleak winter the sweep of it was exciting just by itself. "From those wolds over there to the east," he told her, "you can see clear to the spires of Lincoln cathedral. And you can see my lands as well."

"Will you take me riding over wolds like that?"

"Of course I shall. I want you to see it from alongside me. I want you to feel as proprietary about it as I do."

"I do like your countryside, David. I feel safe here."

"You
are
safe here."

At least so long as I stay
. It would be a beautiful stay, she thought. And for now she simply wouldn't think about its inevitable ending.

The Gouldings had been delighted to take Billy. And to entertain the earl and his party at a gracious, if simple, impromptu supper. It was dark outside when Phoebe and David left the cottage; Billy was still seated at the kitchen table, with three spaniels and two terriers dozing beneath his propped-up leg. A second helping of leek and potato soup sat steaming in front of him; Saint George, the big, imperious ginger cat, had taken possession of his lap; and Mr. Goulding was deep into a disquisition on how to cure a bull of sunstroke. David had been right about Mrs. Goulding's cooking, Phoebe thought. The soup had been delicious.