Guilty Series (29 page)

With a roar of frustration and rage, he slammed his fist against the door, hardly noticing the pain. She was right. He had lost the impetus to end his life, and he cursed her for taking from him the easy way out. Now he knew his fate was to live with this torture until he went mad.

London
March 1832

T
he ostrich plume was tickling her nose, and there was nothing Grace Cheval could do about it. She slid the bow across the strings of her violin, trying to concentrate on the allegro of Vivaldi's
L'Autunno,
rather than on the huge feather that had come loose from her hat and fallen forward across her cheek. She prayed she wouldn't sneeze.

The feather wasn't her only problem. Ballrooms were always too warm, especially at these crowded charity affairs. Worse, the ball was Fancy Dress, and the costume she had been given to wear did not help. The heavy velvet doublet of a highwayman made playing her violin for an entire evening a tiring business. The combination of doublet, plumed hat, and leather mask made her feel as if she were in an oven. As she played, Grace shook her head several times, trying to get the ostrich plume out of her face without missing a note of the music, but it was a futile attempt. The silly thing insisted on falling right back down again to tickle her nose.

Vivaldi finally ended, much to her relief. As the couples who had been engaged in the quadrille left the ballroom floor, she set her violin and bow in her lap, then lifted her hands to yank the ostrich plume out of her hat. When it came away, she tossed it aside and turned her sheet music to the Weber waltz, which was the last dance of the evening. She lifted her violin once again as one of her fellow musicians leaned closer to her.

“You only got half of it,” he told her in a low voice. “The other half is poking straight up out of your hat.”

“Rot,” she shot back as she tucked her violin beneath her chin. “You are such a liar, Teddy.”

“I'm not lying,” the young man answered, settling the laurel wreath of Caesar more firmly into his chestnut brown hair before lifting his bow to the cello between his knees. “Sticking up like that, it looks like a house chimney, only fluffy.”

Grace raised her own bow. “I can always tell when you're lying. Your ears get red.”

He gave a chuckle as they began to play. Grace had performed at so many balls during the past three years that she knew most published waltzes by heart, and that enabled her to have a look at the dancers as she played.

Queen Elizabeth danced by, along with her partner, Henry the Second. Helen of Troy was next, with a man whose costume was merely a black evening suit and long, gold-lined black cape. He made her think at once of Faust's devil, Mephistopheles. The two made a striking pair, for the woman's white toga was an eye-catching contrast to the man's dark clothes and coloring. As the couple swirled past her, she noticed that his black hair was long and tied back, an odd thing, many years out of fashion, yet not quite in keeping with his costume. He wore no mask, and her glimpse of his face caused her hand to falter in surprise. Her violin hit a strident note. She recovered herself, and the pair moved out of her line of vision, but Grace knew she had not been mistaken in her recognition of him.

Dylan Moore.

She would never forget the night she had met the famous composer, and she doubted most other women would forget either. A compelling man, tall, with eyes of true black. Meeting his gaze had been like looking into an abyss where no light could penetrate the depths. A man with a resolute jaw that said he usually got what he wanted, and a cynical curve to his mouth that said he was easily bored by it afterward. A man of breathtaking genius, wealth and position, a man who seemed to have everything life could offer, a man who had put the barrel of a pistol beneath his chin.

She could still remember the sick lurch of her stomach as she had watched him from behind the heavy velvet curtain of the Palladium that night five years ago. She had played her violin then, too, hoping the notes of Moore's own music would not be drowned out by a pistol shot.

Etienne had taken her back to Paris only a day later, and she had not seen Moore again, but she had heard a great deal about him during the five years that had followed their strange encounter. Everyone from Paris to Vienna and back again had been eager to discuss the latest news about England's most famous composer. There had been plenty of it.

His tempestuous love affair with the actress Abigail Williams was the stuff of legend, an affair begun when he had jumped down from his box at Covent Garden and carried her right off the stage in the midst of a play, ended when she had found him in bed with a beautiful Chinese prostitute he had supposedly won in a card game. He had lived openly with half a dozen women during the past five years, including a Russian dancer and the illegitimate daughter of an Indian rajah.

In addition to news about Moore, there was gossip. It was said that a riding accident had affected his brain and he was slowly going mad. It was said that he drank and gambled to excess, used opiates, smoked hashish. It was said he went without sleep for days at a time, fought countless duels but only with swords, and rode his horse at breakneck speed no matter whether he was riding on the Row or jumping fences at a country house. It was said there was no dare he would not take up, no challenge he would let pass, no rule he had not broken.

Moore and his partner moved in front of her again, only a few feet away this time, and Grace sucked in a deep breath, startled by the change in him that five years had wrought. He still had the same wide shoulders and lean hips she remembered, the body of a man skilled at sport, but his countenance had changed. His face was still a handsome one, but it bore the unmistakable lines of dissipation and neglect, lines carved indelibly into his forehead, the corners of his eyes, and the edges of his mouth, lines that should not have existed on the face of a man just two years past thirty. She realized with a flash of anger that the gossip must be nothing less than the truth. The man had always been rather wild, but now he looked as if he had become exactly the shameless libertine gossips whispered about.

Grace did not know what had prompted him to contemplate suicide five years before, but she remembered her own conviction that he would not make another attempt, and it seemed she had been right. Instead of choosing to die, he had clearly decided to go to the opposite extreme, living hard and fast, as if trying to gain every bit of sensation out of each moment.

Despite his declaration to her that he would never write music again, it would seem that he had. His opera,
Valmont,
published four years ago, was still playing in opera houses all over England and Europe. His Nineteenth Symphony last year, while not as highly acclaimed as his previous work, had still been a smashing success. But he did not produce music with the fevered energy of earlier days, and during the past year, he had published only one sonata.

Too busy, perhaps,
she thought, noting how closely he held Helen of Troy as they waltzed, how he leaned down to murmur in her ear. Scandalous behavior, especially at a public ball, and so in keeping with his reputation.

At that moment, Moore glanced in her direction, and she lowered her gaze to her sheet music, grateful for the hat that shaded her eyes and the mask that shielded her face. When she looked up again, he and his partner had melted into the crowd of dancers once again, and she was glad of it. She knew he was not her business, but it did not keep her from a sense of frustration that she had saved a man's life so that he might squander it on debauchery and excess.

The waltz ended, the couples left the floor to move toward the supper that awaited them, and the musicians began to pack up their instruments. As Grace tucked her violin and bow in their velvet-lined case, she put Moore out of her mind. His life, or the wasting of it, was his own affair.

She placed her sheet music on top of her violin, then pushed down the lid of her case and fastened the buckles of the leather straps. She picked up the case by its handle and used her free hand to grab her music stand. “I will meet you and the others out behind the mews,” she told Teddy. “This room is much too warm, and I need some air.”

He nodded. “Next time we play a Fancy Dress ball, I will see if I can find you a more comfortable costume,” he said with a grin.

“Do,” she agreed with fervor as she turned away. “Bring me a bit of cold tongue and ham from the supper, would you, Teddy?” she requested over her shoulder as she moved toward the door out of the ballroom. “That is, if you can sweet-talk any from the serving maids on your way out.”

Grace departed from the ballroom, leaving the male musicians to their usual practice of flirting with the maids who assisted with the supper, caging a free meal of the leavings and stealing a kiss or two. Turning away from the grand staircase that led down to the front entrance of the public ballroom, she walked to the far end of the corridor. Like servants, hired musicians took the back stairs. She went down to the ground floor, then slipped out into the cool, moonlit night.

As she crossed the line of carriages that clogged the alley, Grace nodded to the drivers, who waited to take vehicles around front when the evening's festivities ended. She continued on through the stable mews to the alley behind, where she would wait for Teddy. He lived near her own lodgings in Bermondsey and would see her safely home.

Grace set her violin case and music stand beside the brick wall that separated the stables from the street beyond, then began to remove some of the stifling clothes of her costume. She doffed the hat, letting her long, straight hair fall down her back, then she pulled the mask from across her eyes and removed the doublet, glad when she was down to the breeches, boots and white linen shirt that were all that remained of her costume.

Though it was early spring, winter still lingered. A light, chilly wind drifted through the alley, and the cold air felt refreshing on her sweat-tinged body after the stifling atmosphere of an overcrowded ballroom. Unfortunately, the breeze brought with it the unpleasant smells of London. Even in Mayfair, even when it was cold, one could not escape the mingled odors of the river, rotting garbage, and coal soot that permeated the air.

She closed her eyes, turning to lean her back against the alley wall, inhaling the smells that swirled around her with distaste, wishing she could go back to the English countryside of her girlhood—sleepy summer air, the sound of the ocean, the hum of bees, and the scent of roses, but that wasn't possible. One could never go back, and ruined women couldn't go home again.

Etienne had promised to show her the world, and he had. She thought of all the beautiful, exciting places her husband had taken her during their marriage. Paris, Salzburg, Florence, Prague, Vienna…all the European capitals, where Etienne had been the darling of aristocratic, wealthy patrons, and his paintings had been their adored possessions.

There would be no country summers, no roses, and no home for her now. The earnings of an orange-seller who played her violin at parties could not even pay the rent on her tiny room and put food in her mouth, much less find her a home. “Someday,” she vowed to the night air, giving voice to her dearest wish, “I shall have a home again, a cottage of my own in the country. Cream-colored,” she added, “with slate blue shutters and a garden of roses.”

“Might I suggest a few window boxes of bachelor buttons, geraniums, and ivy as well?”

That amused question interrupted her daydream, and Grace opened her eyes to find the unmistakable form of Dylan Moore only a dozen feet away from her. “And perhaps,” he added, “a horse chestnut tree?”

He stood by the stable wall, his long hair loose now, the cloak hanging from his powerful shoulders like a shadow, and his white cravat glimmering between the folds of midnight black. “Do you talk to yourself often?” he asked.

“Only when I do not realize someone is eavesdropping.”

Moore made no apology for that. “At last, I have seen my charwoman again.” He took a step toward her. “I tried so hard to find you. I searched everywhere. I went back to the Palladium, but you had left your post without giving notice, and no one there knew where you had gone, nor anything about you. In any crowd, I scanned face after face, desperate to see yours. I observed every woman I saw scrubbing a floor. I studied the face of every violinist I came across. I even made inquiries of the Musician's Livery. All to no avail.”

“Why did you search for me?”

“To tell you how much I hated you, of course.”

The words were lightly spoken, but Grace sensed he meant them. “Hate me?” she repeated. “But I saved your life!”

“Yes, and how I cursed you for it.” He took another step toward her, and the movement brought him out of the darkness and into the glow of the streetlamp behind her. “Sometimes,” he went on, “I tried to convince myself that I had conjured you in a dream, that you were a fancy wrought by my deepest longings, and that I would never see you again because you did not exist. Yet I could never quite accept the notion. I wanted so badly for you to be real. As hard as I tried, I could not keep hating you, even though you saved my life when I did not want to be saved.”

“But now, with the passage of time, are you not glad you lived?”

“Glad? God, no!” His vehemence startled her. He lowered his head, pressing his palms against his skull as if he had a headache. “Dear God, no.”

There was such genuine anguish in his voice. Grace looked at him, feeling a tug of compassion, and she ruthlessly shoved it away.

Artists.

Her husband had sucked so much compassion out of her that she had little of it left. Tormented artists no longer held any charm for her. “Poor fellow,” she said. “Wealth, fame, connections, success, good looks, and talent. How you must be suffering.”