Games of Pleasure (33 page)

Guy turned to warm his hands. “You still think the crux of this business is some kind of extortion scheme?”

“Why else would Hanley promise Miracle's favors to Willcott? Apparently, he wasn't satisfying any deviant interests of his own.”

“God, it's foul! I'm not sure how you refrained from killing Hanley yourself.”

Ryder sipped at his cup. “I didn't know enough details to justify it when we last met, or I might well have done.”

Guy paced away across the room to stare out at the gray hints of dawn beyond the window. “But what the devil could Willcott have been blackmailing him about?”

“I've no idea. But if we're right, he'll go to almost any lengths to prevent our finding out.”

“But Hanley knows that you've taken Miracle under your wing. Doesn't that make Wrendale an obvious target?”

“For what?” Ryder picked up the poker and rattled the coals in the grate. “If he came here in person, I'd take the greatest pleasure in shooting him down like a dog—after the proper formalities were exchanged, of course.”

“And I imagine he knows that. If it should come to a duel, I'd be happy to act as your second, of course.”

Sparks leaped in the soot at the back of the fire, scattering and disappearing like shooting stars. “Thank you. Anyway, I've had enough of skulking about the countryside like a vagabond.”

“Yet he's bound to guess that Miracle's going to tell you what happened on the yacht.”

“Which makes him doubly dangerous. He's desperate to recover whatever he thinks Miracle stole from him. He's probably equally desperate to silence her.”

“And to silence you?”

Ryder set aside the poker and leaned back into the harsh embrace of his chair. “That depends on what he believes my feelings are toward her. If the situation were reversed, Hanley would side with me against a courtesan—purely from gentlemanly solidarity—even though he hates my guts. So if he assumes that she's only a temporary interest, he'll trust that I'll abandon her without compunction, rather than involve myself in a scandal.”

“And what are your feelings toward her?” Guy asked.

“That's none of your bloody business.”

“No, I suppose not. You're my social superior and five years older, for a start.” Guy's boots thudded on the carpet as he strode back across the room. “We've never really been intimate, have we? Yet I spent my boyhood admiring your every gesture and striving to be more like you.”

“Good God! Did you?” Ryder laughed. “Obviously you've no idea how I envied you and Jack. From the day you were born, you both had so much more freedom than I did.”

“I suppose we did,” Guy said. “But we envied your power far more.”

“The grass is always greener.”

Guy stared down at the fire, as if making up his mind to something.

Ryder studied every perfectly shaped bone, every nuance of shape and texture, with cold objectivity. Guy Devoran had inherited all the fey good looks of the duchess's family: tall and lean, but with the whiplike strength of a greyhound and the graceful economy of movement of the born horseman or swordsman. Women no doubt fell at his feet, if he so much as snapped his fingers.

Had Miracle ever loved him? Did she still?

“Yet perhaps this situation demands the tearing down of fences,” Guy said at last. “I happen to care a great deal about Miracle. The state of your heart may be none of my business, but—as you yourself just said—your intentions toward her are an important part of the picture with Hanley.”

Ryder poured more coffee, without the brandy this time. “You don't like him, either, do you?”

“We've no personal feud, but he's always made me think of a snake. I told Miracle—”

“Go on,” Ryder said with icy forbearance. “What did you tell Miracle?”

Guy dropped into a chair, then looked up, obviously aware of all the implications of what he was about to say. “I warned her not to accept him when he offered her carte blanche a few months ago.”

Not only grass was green. Ryder swallowed the ignoble impulse to strangle his inappropriately decorative cousin. “So you were on intimate terms that recently?”

“Not in the way that you think. We're friends, that's all.”

Ryder set down his cup and brushed aside the temptation to refill it with liquor. This was far too important to risk dulling his tired mind with more brandy.

“Perhaps you and I have never really been close enough,” he said. “Yet you're my cousin and Jack's best friend. I trust your integrity implicitly. I think we are, as you have just so astutely observed, going to have to spill our bloody guts to each other about Miracle.”

Guy gazed away across the room. His profile had that same damned angelic purity as Jack's.

“I can tell you some of the facts about how I met her. As for the rest, I don't know. Half of the story is hers. She might not want it told.”

“Not so easy, is it,” Ryder said, “when the boot is on the other foot? The same reservations apply to her present relationship with me, of course. However, her life is at stake. Hanley can decide at any time to bring a charge of murder against her. In the circumstances we'd better swallow our personal discomfort, and for her sake share all the information we have. Nothing said here will go beyond this room, obviously.”

“Very well,” Guy said. “I suppose I should start. I assume you know that she's not a lady by birth?”

Ryder nodded. Distaste and curiosity and dread seethed in an unholy mix in his gut. He had avoided pushing Miracle for the truth about her past. Because he didn't want to know? Because it was bound to reveal the impossibility of any real future together?

His cousin leaned forward, hands clasped between his spread knees, head bent as if he studied a speck on the carpet. “What has she told you of her upbringing?”

“Not much. She said she was apprenticed into a cotton mill when she was six.”

Guy glanced up to meet Ryder's gaze. His eyes blazed. “Have you ever seen the inside of such a place? The mills are the pride and joy of our burgeoning industrial landscape up here in Derbyshire. The apprentices are properly fed and clothed, and they all go to church every Sunday. Yet the children work unimaginably long hours in indescribable noise and dust. The machinery stops for nothing, not even when a child falls asleep at the job, at the cost of an eye or a hand or a life.”

“I thought many of the new mills were built to be models of social care?”

“They are. But it's a harsh life for a child without the comforts, however humble, of a home and a loving mother. That's how Miracle spent five years of her childhood, sleeping on a straw pallet with the orphans in the apprentice house, working long hours in the mill, spending any remaining moments sewing and mending.”

“But she wasn't an orphan,” Ryder said.

“No, but her father apprenticed her to the mill all the same.”

“He sold her?”

“If you like. She never saw him again. The only other activity besides church and work was a few hours' schooling once a week. The apprentices are taught their letters, so they will make better Christians and more useful workers.”

“Which is more than one can say for the workhouse, or for the child of the average farm worker.”

Coals fell in the grate as the fire died down. Both men ignored the small sound, as if they were caught together in some desperate net.

“Farm life can be physically brutal, also, of course,” Guy said. “Yet the villages of England boast their quota of elderly rustics: men who've spent a tough life in the fields, yet are hale enough for all that.”

“God! Wyldshay is full of them. We're as dependent on them as they are on us. It would be pretty damned inhuman to turn a man out to starve, after he's labored for the duchy for a lifetime.”

“You also provide dame schools, so every child on the estate is guaranteed a decent chance in life. Yet somehow I think we'll never see these mill children grow old. Their lungs fill with cotton dust. Their souls wither in the face of all that relentless machinery. The girls almost never see the sky, except in glimpses. Even the meanest crow scarer in the fields knows what it is to chase butterflies, or stare dreamily at the clouds.”

“What happened when Miracle was eleven?”

Guy rubbed one hand over his mouth as if to brush away a bad taste. “She was seen walking to church with the other children one Sunday by a gentleman named Sir Benjamin Trotter. Her beauty was already quite extraordinary, I imagine, and her intelligence would have been obvious after two minutes' conversation. Sir Benjamin bought out her apprenticeship papers and took her into his house.”

Dread uncoiled in his gut. “In what capacity?”

Beneath the flush of reflected firelight, Guy's face was drawn. “What do you think?”

“For God's sake!” Ryder's head snapped up as disgust and rage ripped through his heart. “Did he begin to abuse her right away?”

“You'll have to ask her. She told me only that Sir Benjamin gave her the run of his library. I think she's grateful to him.”

“Though he ravished her when she was still a child?”

“I only know that, when he died, she was sixteen and had been sharing his bed for some time.”

A deep shudder racked Ryder's body. “He'd made no provision for her in his will?”

Guy shook his head.

“What about her brother?”

“Dillard was still unmarried and living over a master shoemaker's store. He couldn't support her. Yet, whatever his other faults, Sir Benjamin had given Miracle the manners and education of a lady. She was accomplished and extraordinarily well-read. His family allowed her to keep her clothes and some trinkets, and a cousin handed her a few gold coins, so she traveled to London to become an actress. No other occupation was open, except the grinding poverty of occasional farm work.”

“Because she refused to go back to the mill?”

“Do you blame her? And having been publicly ruined, she couldn't become a governess, or a lady's companion, or even get work in a haberdasher's.”

Ryder leaped to his feet to stride across the room. Unable to pass through the wall, he stopped to stare blindly at the leather-bound spines in the bookcases.

“We talk very glibly of virtue and purity, don't we? I have tried to understand, to imagine the desperation that might lead a woman like Miracle onto such a path. I suppose I expected her to starve?”

“You might say that she triumphed, instead,” Guy said.

Ryder punched his fist against the wooden molding at the side of the bookcase. A blind, incoherent rage cascaded, past analysis, at the very edge of his control. “How did you meet her?”

“How does any young blood meet an opera dancer? I went to the green room after a performance and begged her to honor me with her favors.”

“And did she?”

“No. She'd only recently arrived in town. She still thought she could live decently enough off her earnings on the stage. That was impossible, of course.”

Ryder looked back at his cousin through a black fog of confused resentment. “So she joined the rest of the muslin company and took a lover?”

“Shall we walk in the long gallery? If you don't expend a little physical energy soon, you might murder me yet.” It was said with a smile, but Guy's eyes reflected the haunted, bleak feelings that contaminated Ryder's every breath.

The men strode up through the house in silence, their boots resounding on the oak floors. Ryder sucked the dawn air deep into his lungs as they walked. The gallery stretched the entire length of the house, lined with tall windows on the north side. Family portraits ranked opposite them: an endless procession of ladies and gentlemen—his ancestors—who had never known anything but excess. Harsh echoes bounced down the long space as the men paced in silence from one end to the other.

“So she changed her mind?” Ryder asked at last. “And accepted your offer?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you?”

“Eighteen. Only two years older than she was. I had very little money to spare, but I shared my winnings at the tables or the racetrack, whenever I could.”

“And so you made her into a professional courtesan, after all.”

“Yes, if you like.”

It hung unspoken between them: Guy had not taken Miracle's virginity, obviously. But had she taken his? Ryder's anguished rage began to dissipate in the face of his deep-seated sense of fair play and justice. Miracle's inevitable path in life was not Guy's fault. Yet he felt a poignant, yearning envy for that love affair, experienced in the first flush of youth, before Miracle had experienced all the casual indifference of her wealthier lovers.

“So what happened?”

“We were children. We fell in love. We quarreled. Neither of us knew how to trust what we thought we had found. Even with my help, she didn't have enough to pay the rent. My lifestyle was too erratic. After a few months, it simply blew apart. One day I walked out in a rage. When I came back, it was too late. She was already under the protection of a much richer man.”

“If it counts for anything,” Ryder said as they turned at the end of the gallery and began to stride back, “I'm glad that she had those months with you first.”

Guy stopped dead. “God! That's the most generous thing any man ever said to me.”

“No, I mean it. For her sake. Shall we shake hands on it?”

His cousin grasped his hand and grinned. “I think she won't forgive my telling you all this.”