How To School Your Scoundrel (15 page)

“No.”

“I see.” He turned. “When you have regained a little of your strength, perhaps you might relate to me a little of how you came to arrive in my employ over five months ago, disguised so convincingly as a young man, and why you chose to commit such an extraordinary act.” He began to walk toward the bed, around the solid carved post at the bottom, until he arrived at her side, looming over her. His voice turned caressing. “And then, when you are quite yourself, perhaps we might discuss how your debt to me might best be repaid.”

In the daylight spilling from the window, she looked even paler than before. But she was most definitely blushing.

“I see,” she said.

“You have put me to a great deal of trouble, my dear girl, and I never allow myself to be put to trouble without some expectation of reward.”

She went on staring straight back at him, with her brave dark eyes, as if she could see right through his hard expression to the tumult within.

Alive. She was alive. She would live. The spark of life, he could see it right there, animating her features, dimmed but present. He wanted to fall on his knees and thank whatever God still listened to the prayers of a man like him.

“I see we understand each other,” he said.

“Your lordship.” She wet her lips again. “May I trouble you for a drink of water? The glass is on the table beside me.”

He picked up the glass and held it to her lips, and when her neck seemed to fail her, he slipped his hand beneath her head and supported it while the muscles of her throat slid up and down beneath her tissue-thin skin.

“Thank you.” She turned her head away and closed her eyes.

He set the half-empty glass on the table, picked up his riding crop, and went to the door.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

T
he telegram was unsigned, but few of the Earl of Somerton’s regular correspondents were prepared to claim ownership of the messages they sent him. He studied the crisp black typescript with his hands steepled protectively at his temples:

CONTINUED NO SIGN OR RECORD OF SUBJECTS AT CHANNEL PORTS OR RAILWAY STATIONS STOP ADVISE FURTHER ACTION

No sign of them. Not of his wife and son, not of Roland Penhallow, all disappeared from England on the same day. The day after he had confronted Elizabeth.

As if Europe had swallowed them up.

It was now approaching the middle of April, and his wife and son had been gone for over six weeks. No one at the London clubs, no one in the circuit of English gossip had heard of any planned destination. Somerton’s sources at Her Majesty’s Bureau of Trade and Maritime Information—where Penhallow plied his own spycraft with singular skill, rot him—had all returned blank.

Somerton rose from his chair and strode to the map that hung on the study wall. He had always had a great fondness for this room, which could only be reached by a door at the end of the great Somerton Hall library, nearly invisible in the old walnut paneling. A man could hide here, with his brandy and his cello and his private business. A comfortable chair, a soft leather Chesterfield, an occasional smoke. Were it not for the need for nourishment and exercise, he could exist here forever.

The map spread across six feet of wall, depicting Europe in all its detailed variety at the center, and America and Asia at the peripheries. Africa existed in the lower half of the map, overlapped on the wainscoting, but he thought he could disregard that beleaguered continent for the time being: Elizabeth would never take the boy to a land in which yellow fever and creatures with tusks lurked about untamed. Atop the little shelf that crowned the wainscoting, he kept a small jar full of pins: blue-tipped ones to indicate where his operatives had searched, and red-tipped ones to indicate where the countess (or some member of her party) had been detected.

A field of blue-tipped pins decorated the ports and capital cities of Europe, without a single dash of red to interrupt them.

Somerton glanced at the telegram. His hand hovered over the jar of pins, and then fell away. There was no news, really. No progress to mark.

He lifted up the jar of pins and hurled it against the wall, just as a sharp knock rattled the old panels of the door.

“Come in,” he barked.

The door opened to reveal a bristle-headed figure engulfed in an old dressing gown of dark green brocade, the sleeves of which had been rolled several times in a gallant attempt to free the hands. From the bottom, which dragged a few inches on the floor, a small golden brown head emerged, followed by the remainder of a corgi body.

“Markham,” he said.

“My lord.”

The sight of her, standing in his study, apparently on her own power, dressed in his own discarded dressing gown, stunned him into momentary dumbness. He hadn’t visited her room in a week, not since she had first awoken from her illness. She needed her rest, the doctor had said. She would be bedridden for days, perhaps weeks. (The doctor had given him a pointed look at the word
bedridden
.) Somerton had latched onto this excuse gratefully. Of course, it was quite improper that he should visit her now, awake and unmarried and undressed as she was. He, who never regarded propriety as anything more than a rule to be enjoyed in the breaking, nearly convinced himself that his better nature had prevailed. That he was not afraid of her power at all.

He was simply observing the proprieties.

“You should not be here,” he said at last. “You are supposed to be bedridden.”

“I am quite capable of walking short distances. I have been moving about my room for three days now. You might, however, offer me a chair.”

He walked to the yellow armchair and braced his hands on the back. “Here you are, my dear.”

She walked slowly, rather stiffly, as if her bones were made of lead pipes and not quite under her full control. Quincy walked patiently by her side. Somerton had to dig his fingers into the upholstery to stop himself from going to her, to carry her physically into the chair, notwithstanding the stubborn tilt of her chin.

“Thank you,” she said, with a touch of irony, reaching down to pat the dog’s faithful head.

He moved to the desk and propped himself on the edge, one booted foot resting on the floor, one swinging negligently in the air. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

Her gaze was fixed to the wall. “That map was not here at Christmas.”

“Ah. Dispensing with the formalities, I see. No, you’re quite right. It was not.”

“What is its purpose?”

He swung his foot a few times before replying. “The morning after we arrived here in February, when you were just beginning the course of your illness, I received word that my wife and son had left the house in London. They have not been seen since.”

“And you are trying to recover them?” Her eyes shifted from the map to him.

“Yes. Or rather, I’m trying to recover my son. My wife can go to the devil.”
And Penhallow must pay, by God.

“You can’t mean to separate them.”

“I can’t mean to live apart from my son, without so much as knowing his whereabouts. For one thing, he is heir to all this.” He waved his hand at the comfortable study around them.

“She won’t let him go.”

Her voice was strangely dull; her entire demeanor, in fact, lacked that certain zing he had always associated with the old Markham, even when the secretary was obediently copying letters and taking dictation. This Louisa bore no resemblance to that fellow. She was the skeleton version of Markham, stripped of flesh and hair and spirit, her bones poking through every inch of exposed skin.

“You should be in bed, you know,” he said quietly.

“If I stayed in my room, I should never have the opportunity to speak to you.”

“Very well. What did you wish to discuss?”

She lifted her shoulders back an inch or two. “I wish to discuss my future here with you.”

Somerton’s heart froze. To disguise the paralysis, which traveled all the way up his neck to his vocal cords, he ran his hand along the slope of his quadriceps and examined the smoothness of the fine pin-striped charcoal wool. “At the moment, my dear Markham—you don’t mind if I call you Markham, do you? I find it difficult to imagine you otherwise.”

She inclined her head.

“At the moment,” he continued, “I am rather more interested in your past than your future.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t deduced that already, you and your network of spies. Your calculating brain.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been distracted. In any case, my men are too valuable and highly trained to waste on a dull and uninspiring case of petty identification.”

The corner of her mouth turned upward a quarter inch. “I see.”

“Particularly when the solution to the problem is sitting right in front of me. Tell me, Markham. Louisa, as you call yourself. In clear, straightforward language. Who are you, and why did you enter my employ, disguised as a man?”

There, the words were out. He held his breath, waiting for her response. Afraid of her response.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My lord, how did you know where to find me, the night we left London?”

He rose and walked to the window. “I had my footman follow you, of course, since the streets of London are hardly benign at such an hour, even in February. He saw you engage in an altercation with a woman at Wellington Arch, who then bundled you into a hackney and took you to a mews behind Eaton Square.”

“Eaton Square!”

He glanced back at her. “You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t.” She swallowed hard and looked at her lap. “And what did you find there?”

“It was quite late by the time I arrived. Perhaps two in the morning. I had been otherwise engaged, you see, when John arrived home with his information.” He turned back to the window and gripped the curtain, to dispel the memory of what he had been doing that night. What he had done, the last desperate act of his marriage.

“Was anyone else there?” she asked, in a whisper.

“No. Quite deserted. There were signs of some sort of activity about, but not a soul in the building, except for the horses.”

“Has there been any note for me since? Any message?”

“None at all.” He turned back to her and crossed his arms. Markham—Louisa—sat with her hands in her lap, staring at her fingers. The windows faced east, and the sun had already climbed above the angle of direct light. The diffuse glow surrounded her too-thin body, emphasizing the fragility of her bones, the paleness of her skin. Only her hair showed any life, glimmering with reddish fire. The wholeness of her grief shocked him.

“Is something the matter, Markham?” he asked, as gently as he could.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

You matter.
His brain screamed the words.
You matter.

He thought of her stricken body on the floor, her hair matted with vomit, her helplessness. The pulsing panic in his limbs when he had emerged in despair from his bedroom at two o’clock in the morning and found John waiting patiently near the door—
I didn’t want to disturb you, sir, not with the countess inside
—with the news that Markham had been taken, Markham was in danger, all while he had been in bed with his wife—oh, always compliant, because a good wife never refused her husband’s carnal appetites—in a vain and despairing attempt to salvage the last fragile tie that might possibly have held them together, before he uttered those fatal words:
I intend to offer you a divorce
.

Actually, he had planned to say them straight out. He had planned to end the whole sham right there. But as she sat before him, cool and composed, beautiful and remote, he had thought of Philip, of what might have been, and a feeling of desperation had overtaken him. His final chance. Once the word
divorce
was spoken, he couldn’t take it back. The family, the unfulfilled promise of the three of them, would be irretrievably broken. So, sitting there on the other side of the desk, with the guilty jewel box between them, he’d challenged her instead to prove the fidelity she claimed, to prove that she was innocent. To return to their marriage, before it was lost forever.

She had taken his offered hand and gone upstairs with him, like the pretty martyr she was. And he had given her pleasure; he was sure of it. By God, he had made sure of it. He had tried everything in his power to bring her back to him, to bring back the hope that had once filled his heart, such as it was. And she had found pleasure, because they were both made of flesh and subject to fleshly desire; and still she had looked at him afterward with a kind of grieved loathing. The old look, the one she had cast him on their wedding night.

Because nothing had changed, had it? Nothing ever would.

An urge now seized him, a primal urge to run through the door, into the vast natural cathedral outside, and roar with frustration, with anger and longing. He had been in bed with his wife who despised him beneath her obedient facade; had been engaged in a fruitless act that brought him little physical pleasure and far greater heartsickness, while Markham needed him. He hadn’t understood the emotion that had gripped him then, when John had told him Markham was in danger; he understood it better now, but it didn’t help. The understanding only deepened his frustration: He was trapped, tricked once more into investing his craving for human connection into an impossible object: one that did not, and would not, ever crave him in return.

God hated him.

“Well, then, Markham.” He launched himself away from the window and strode to the desk. “I suppose we must first find you a set of clothes appropriate to your station. I’m afraid I’ve had the contents of her ladyship’s wardrobe given away to a home for fallen women, so—”

Markham straightened in her chair. “That won’t be necessary. It’s what I meant to discuss with you. I no longer have a home to return to, nor a family who needs me. I should prefer to resume my . . . my masculine disguise and return to work as your secretary. Until other arrangements can be made, of course.”

“Rubbish. Impossible.”

“It’s not impossible. Only the household here knows my true sex, and loyalty, as you yourself observed, can be easily purchased.”

His knuckles ground into the wood. “You will not dress as a man. You are a woman.”

“I was a woman before. I have need of gainful employment.”

“You will not labor for a living, Markham!” The words exploded from his throat.

“And why not?” she said calmly. “Labor is the lot of mankind.”

“It is not yours.”

“Then what do you propose?” She pushed up the sleeves of the dressing gown, which had fallen down over her hands. “I must do something, and I detest sewing. I haven’t the patience to be a governess. I suppose I might apply for work as a waitress in a London tea shop, though I daresay I should mix up all the orders and find myself sacked within a week for my insufferable cheek.”