Fool Me Twice (16 page)

For God’s sake.
His housekeeper was right: his entire staff seemed shocked whenever he moved, as though they imagined him incapable of it.

“Where is Mrs. Johnson now?” This reference had cleared up nothing. She seemed to him all the more baffling in light of it.

“Downstairs, I believe.” Jones was wringing his wrists.
“In the study. Sorting through your . . . correspondence? She assured me that she had your permission.”

Downstairs.

He smiled blackly. Very well. He was not a child. He could send for her, yes. But let the servants see that he could not only rise from a chair, he could also—O holy miracle—descend a staircase.

He strode through the sitting room. The door opened into the hallway without argument. Indeed, it swung open so easily that for a moment he hesitated, stupidly surprised.

The butler’s slightly labored breathing announced how closely he followed. Only Jones’s presence behind him forced Alastair out.

The hallway smelled of wax and flowers, like a church before a funeral. He refused to draw it too deeply into his lungs.

Familiar furnishings lined the path. A lacquer vase full of roses. The bust of his great-grandfather. Oil paintings of past battles, distant victories of empire. An easy walk. A short trip. Downstairs, so simple.

The thick carpet absorbed his footsteps. Why did this seem so difficult? He had
chosen
to stay in his rooms; he had not been
trapped
there. Why was his chest constricting? He reached out to touch the bank of windows overlooking the street, and the chill of the glass startled him, yanked him to a stop.

These windows had been warm when Margaret died. For months after her passing, he had paced their length. At night, they had glared like blank eyes, blinded by the darkness outside. Anyone might have stood concealed in that darkness, watching him.

And what might that onlooker see, but a fool whose
bliss had been borne of ignorance? His achievements had been flukes, happy accidents. His defeats had been deliberate, engineered by his wife.

How cleverly she had schemed against him.
She
should have been the politician. He’d often told her so, by way of praise for her advice. Now he knew so, by way of her skill at betrayals.

After a time, he had started to avoid windows. His world had contracted to his private chambers, because there he need not worry what face he showed the world. The one he had worn before her death was a lie. The one he had discovered afterward was unbearable, grotesque, too much like his father’s: fit only for hiding away.

He took a deep breath and made himself walk onward. The banister came into his hand, a solid length of mahogany, guiding him down the stairs. There must be a third face for him yet to try. He could not go back to the lie he’d once been.

He stepped into the vestibule, not looking at the double doors to the street, turning away from them for the archway into the east wing. But he felt those doors like an itch between his shoulder blades: a warning, or a temptation, or an axe beginning to fall.

He passed the formal salon where so many receptions had been held. Where he had greeted guests, and conducted negotiations in corners, and felt so damned
important.
So righteous and purposeful.

This house should be burned. What was it but a testament to falsehood? It held an entire history of how much he had cared, how cleverly he had laid his plans, how devoutly he had believed in a cause wider and nobler than himself.

How fitting that it smelled like a funeral.

The study door loomed. He grasped the doorknob like an anchor, and only once he stepped inside, closing the door in Jones’s face, did he exhale.

His housekeeper did not notice his entrance. Humming to herself, she stood atop a short ladder, browsing through shelves of old estate records.

Her inattention suited him. He leaned against the door and waited for his pulse to calm.

Mrs. Johnson. The spectacles, the severe chignon, the drab wool skirt and plain white blouse belonged to a governess, a schoolmistress, a spinster aunt. But her youth, her self-possession, her flame-red hair, and her wandering hands did not.

What was she humming? Not the usual music hall ditty. Surely it was not . . . Beethoven? Since when did domestics, former maids, visit the symphony?

“L’ho trovato,”
she cried, and with an air of triumph, plucked a book off the shelf.

His housekeeper spoke Italian.

She tucked the book beneath her arm and lifted her skirts to clear her descent. Very trim ankles, had his Italian-speaking housekeeper. One slim boot felt for a lower rung. Her stockings, he saw, were lace.

Lady Ripton must have paid her very well for a maid.

What was she doing, prowling through his estate records?

He wrestled with a sudden suspicion. She spoke in accents too refined for her position. She did not have the demeanor of one trained for service. She wore lace stockings. She talked to herself in Italian. She was far, far too young.

What of it? Did he imagine her a
spy
? For whom? He gritted his teeth. His doctors—those he had bothered
to see, before he’d turned the rest away—had cautioned that paranoia was the sign of an unwell mind.

He cleared his throat. Alerted, she gasped and twisted to gawp at him. “Your Grace!
Here!
”

So even she had imagined him incapable. Why that should gall him, he could not say. Who was she, but a servant? He felt a dangerous smile form on his lips. “Here,” he said. “Yes. Does that not suit you?” Why would she need his ledgers in order to sort through his correspondence?

Her spectacles slipped down her nose. Those eyes alone might have riled a man’s suspicion. He did not care how blind she was. Those eyes were weapons, and she did not strike him as a woman to waste such resources.

No.
Even to his own mind, these thoughts sounded ludicrous.

“What are you doing with my records?” he asked.

“I th-thought—” She still looked wide-eyed. “Your steward from Abiston. He wrote with a question about the crop yield from a seedling in use at another estate. I thought I might make notes to guide your reply.”

That was not the reasoning of a maid, nor a housekeeper, either. “I read Lady Ripton’s reference,” he said. “Very interesting stuff. She holds you in peculiar esteem.”

Did trepidation briefly shadow her face? “Her Ladyship is too kind.”

“I thought so as well.”

She clutched the ladder and did not reply.

When had she ever been at a loss for words? Perhaps he could not trust his instincts. But that did not mean he needed to ignore them. “Which raises the question,” he said. “Why did you decide to leave her service?”

“Oh, I . . .” She put her foot on the next rung and made an awkward hop; the ledger slipped from her arm and went tumbling onto the carpet.

She’d dropped it deliberately.

No, she hadn’t.
You mustn’t indulge these fancies,
Dr. Houseman had chided him.
Your mind is unbalanced by grief; it cannot be trusted.

His brother had put it more bluntly:
You’ve run mad.

But it was not a
fancy
that his housekeeper spoke Italian, hummed Beethoven, and had left a comfortable position in a bid to mop and dust his floors.

She was making a swift descent of the ladder now.
L’ho trovato,
she had said:
I’ve found it.
What
precisely
had she been looking for? He started toward her, determined to get his hands on the book before she could look through it.

She glanced over her shoulder, saw him coming, and lost her footing. With a cry, she stumbled off the ladder.

Let her fall.
But his body disobeyed, lunging forward to catch her. A grunt burst from him; he staggered backward. Mrs. Johnson was not light.

Much to the good fortune of his pride, he caught his balance—and then a shock prickled over his skin, for he registered the feel of her. Young, yes: she had the curves of a woman in her prime. A scent enfolded him, rose water mixed with soap, and beneath that, the warm note of her skin. Glowing, soft, freckled.

She made a sound like the squeak of a mouse. He told his arms to release her. Slowly, they obeyed. He took a single step back, and now his brain and body truly parted ways, for he was devouring her with his eyes, and a certain long-dead part of his body was stirring, and he
cursed
its resurrection.

How long had it been since he had thought of, imagined, wanted a woman? Not his wife, not a nightmare, not a black bottomless sin that spread across his memory, his history, like a blot of ink, but a
woman.

A woman’s body. A woman’s movements. The rapid pulse in the base of this woman’s long, pale throat, the flick of her lashes as she stole a glance at him, the bend of her long waist, of her wrist, as she gathered up the fallen ledger. The curve of her breast as she clutched the dusty book against it.

The shape of her lips as she spoke, their color, the hue of pale roses, the color of her scent, her skin petal soft:

“I am mortified,” said those lips. “I’m so terribly clumsy.”

And her voice, soft and smooth, like the slide of silk sheets across skin—how long since such graces had been apparent to him? He had not touched a woman since his wife. He had never touched a woman before her; he would not be his father, no. But in those bachelor days,
ah,
how difficult virtue had been.

His heart was knocking in a loud, painful rhythm, his belly tight with animal need. He turned away from her, bewildered and furious with himself, lest she catch a glimpse of this adolescent disgrace, his cock as stiff as a cricket bat.

He dragged in a breath, and all he tasted was her: the scent of her, the warmth. His bloody
housekeeper.

Who was not as she seemed.

He wheeled back on her and instantly regretted it, for she was staring at him, and had not yet recalled the need to fix her damnable spectacles. Cornflower-blue eyes met his, then shied away. A frisson seemed
to pass between them, a moment of unwanted understanding: they were not only master and servant. They were also a man and a woman, alone together behind closed doors, with the feel of each other still burning on their skin.

He strode to his desk, dropping into the seat, putting a bulwark of oak between them. Blindly he groped for—a pen, yes, that would do.

His blotter was covered in paper. Tallies and figures. He blinked. A pile of opened correspondence sat next to the inkwell.

Focusing, he discovered a list, names and dates beside neatly inked notes. She was constantly delivering these lists to his rooms. But now, for the first time, he read one.

Lord Swansea, September 14, re: Illuminating Company, would be honored if you would join the board of trustees.

Mr. Patrick Fitzgerald, September 14, re: signs of blight at Abiston—seed issue? Consult other estates using same supply?

Lord Michael de Grey, September 15, re: wedding: date set for Christ Church in Piccadilly on 30th instant.

He had promised to attend. But he hadn’t.

Lady Sarah Winthrop, September 16, re: Harry: no word from him in three months, request you press ambassador to mount a search.

He grimaced. For the sake of the family, he certainly hoped that Michael and Elizabeth’s union proved
fruitful; Harry Winthrop, the heir apparent, was good for nothing but rascality, vagabondage, and opera gossip.

“I am almost caught up.” Mrs. Johnson crept up with uncharacteristic timidity. “I believe I will finish by tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he said flatly. Ten, twelve months’ worth of mail, and she would manage to read through it, summarize it, and finish it within a handful of weeks.

He flicked aside the topmost page with one nail. In tidy columns, she had transcribed the sum and total of the life he had ended, abandoned, departed: all the wheedling for favors, the solemn petitions, the ingratiating overtures.

Mr. Stephen Potmore, September 4, re: your health, concerned inquiry, kind regards.

He cleared his throat. “Yes, you’re expedient, are you not? Lady Ripton, I believe, mentioned that skill—an expert manager of correspondence, she called you.” He glanced up, found her hovering, her gaze downcast.

At least she had not helped herself to a seat. That was something. “Sit down,” he said.

Their eyes met as she sat. He did not look away, though she did.

Ah, but there was no blush like a redhead’s. He fancied he could see the very capillaries dilating beneath her skin.

He took hold of himself. Attraction between master and servant went against all codes of decency. But sometimes, inevitably, it did happen. How one handled it marked one’s status as an honorable gentleman. His late father, for instance, had been the classic lecher:
forever groping this one, leering at that one, no matter the woman, no matter the witnesses—his children, his guests, his own wife.

In honesty, Alastair had not minded it so much for the betrayal it signified to his mother—for Elise de Grey had been no saint, no matter what her younger son still claimed. As a boy, Alastair had seen her emerging from other men’s rooms, late at night, when no one should be roaming.

No, what had bothered him was how well his father fit the caricature of a gross, oversexed aristocrat. The late Duke of Marwick had talked a great deal of high-minded business about noblesse oblige. But in practice, he’d been a sketch from
Punch,
a dirty joke for schoolboys. His divorce, the vile details of his affairs and his wife’s accusations, had occupied front-page headlines for months.

Alastair could remember the pride he’d once felt in having overcome that sordid legacy. How self-righteously satisfied he had been with his own virtues.

Yet behold this list of letters left unanswered. Questions from his stewards. Overtures from old allies. Proposals from men with whom he’d done business to great reward. All of them, neglected. And even now, reminded of his responsibilities, Alastair was not thinking of rent rolls, of tenants and crops and politics, of duties and how best to atone for his neglect of them.