Mary Jo Putney (23 page)

When she smiled like that, Gervase felt the usual enchanted delight begin to steal over him. His lingering resentment over her request for more money dissipated. "That is the beginning of a series of payments to you."

"Oh, I'm to be paid in little bits of worked gold?" she asked with interest.

"It's the catch of a pearl necklace," he explained, "a rather beautiful double rope of pearls. I had the jeweler disassemble it." He dug a tiny object wrapped in velvet from an inner pocket. "Whenever I visit you, I'll bring another pearl. Then, when the necklace is complete, I'll have it restrung."

She examined the flawless, lustrous sphere, its silvery sheen marking it as a pearl of the highest quality. "How very imaginative, my lord! In one stroke you have surprised me while efficiently saving yourself from having to think about the subject again for months to come."

The viscount's face grew more than usually expressionless, but there was no criticism in her chiming laughter. Placing one hand on his arm, she stood on her toes to brush a velvet-soft kiss on his cheek. "Thank you, Gervase. You are most kind."

Even that light touch was enough to make him consider forgoing their ride for indoor sport, but the morning was bright and beckoning, and there would be few more as fine before winter set in. They walked back to the stables, where Phaedra had taken up permanent residence. Since Diana was now her mistress, the loan horse had become a gift horse.

As they rode the short distance to Hyde Park, Gervase felt some remorse about the pearl necklace. His midnight chat with Madeline had resulted in a commitment of two hundred pounds a month, to be deposited into a bank. Based on the cost of the pearl necklace, if he visited Diana an average of three times a week, she would receive one hundred pounds' worth of pearls each month, which would equal his original offer of a monthly three hundred pounds.

He had thought that he was being ironically clever, but she had accepted the idea with such good grace that he was a little ashamed of having calculated so closely. Since she provided such superior service, he would rather be generous than haggle over every pennyworth of value.

Shrugging guilt aside, Gervase gave himself to enjoyment of the brisk autumn air and the teasing conversation of his mistress. Diana was surprisingly well-read, and they became involved in a discussion of Restoration dramatists, a light topic for a bright morning. They had thrice circled the park and were heading back to Charles Street when Diana's words broke off in the middle of a dissertation on the female playwright Aphra Behn.

Gervase's mount was a step ahead of hers and he glanced back when her voice broke. Diana had unconsciously tightened her hands on the reins, pulling Phaedra to a stop, and her face was white and strained as she looked down a small cross street. "Is anything wrong?" he asked quickly, responding to an automatic protective instinct.

She swallowed hard and shook her head, but her voice was uneven as she signaled the mare to move forward. "Not really. I just saw a man who..."—she searched for a phrase, then ended lamely—"was once rather unpleasant to me."

Gervase felt his face harden at her remark. So she had seen an old lover. Doubtless London was full of them. His voice cool, he said, "If you placed yourself entirely under my protection, I would have the right to deal with any man who bothers you, but your present position leaves you open to insult."

She lifted her head, quick color flaring in her cheeks. "I have not asked for your help, my lord."

"No doubt the dragon who guards you chases off unwanted suitors," he said acidly.

"The dragon...?"

"Your friend Miss Gainford."

Diana laughed. "I never thought of her as a dragon, but she would make an elegant one. Or would she be a dragoness?"

Gervase smiled back, his momentary irritation forgotten. Diana had a near-magical ability to disarm, and as they rode on, debating the merits of Aphra Behn, he was calculating how much time he could afford to spend with her before going to Whitehall.

By the time they rode into her stableyard and he had helped her from Phaedra, his hands tarrying on her supple waist, he had decided that Whitehall could damned well wait.

* * *

The Count de Veseul had no trouble following Diana Lindsay and Lord St. Aubyn the few blocks to Charles Street. It was mere chance that the count had happened to see her as he returned home from a long night of illicit business. He had thought about the trollop a great deal since meeting her at the opera and had made discreet inquiries, but she seemed to have disappeared from view after the briefest of appearances on the courtesan scene.

He had been on the verge of instituting a serious search when luck had thrown her right in his path, but then, he had always been lucky. Amusing to see how quickly she had recognized him, and how the blood had drained from her face. She was no less beautiful for being frightened; quite the contrary.

Ao think St. Aubyn was one of her current lovers; if that didn't prove his luck, nothing did. The count knew a great deal about St. Aubyn, and respected the cool, analytical brilliance of the Englishman's mind. Indeed, St. Aubyn was the only man in Britain that Veseul feared might expose him, and he was delighted to see the viscount looking like a daft youth with his first woman. How satisfying to know the Englishman was prey to vulgar emotional weakness; the Frenchman had no such frailty.

After the couple entered the elegant town house, Veseul lingered in an alley opposite, imagining what the two were doing upstairs behind that proper Mayfair facade, images flickering through his brain like a lewd dream. It aroused him to think of another man possessing that beautiful wanton. Knowing that man was a British spymaster added a
soupcon
of decadent excitement. When the count finally took Diana Lindsay, it would take a very long time indeed to satisfy the desire that was accumulating.

The detour made Veseul late for his rendezvous back at the rooms he leased in a large block of flats, a busy place where comings and goings at odd hours were unremarkable. Waiting impatiently was his associate Biron, a weasel-faced man of no style or elegance, but most useful.

After they had discussed the usual business, Veseul pulled a cigar from his desk and trimmed the end as he said casually, "I want you to put someone in the household at 17 Charles Street."

Biron regarded him suspiciously. "Who merits such close investigation? Our resources are not unlimited."

Veseul lit the cigar, then exhaled, watching Biron flinch back from the stream of smoke. "Just a whore, but she has interesting guests. Make sure that whoever you put there is observant, reliable, and of unquestioning loyalty."

Biron glared, suspecting that his superior's motives were personal, but he nodded his head stiffly. "It shall be done."

Biron was an orthodox revolutionary, bound by dogma, and it chafed him to obey an aristocrat of the
ancien regime.
Veseul took malicious amusement in knowing that Biron thought the count should have been sent to Mme. Guillotine in the heady days of the Reign of Terror. The weasel-faced man had a small, unimaginative mind, and for all his revolutionary fervor, he had done less for the cause of France than the aristocrat he despised.

After Biron left, the Frenchman mused for a moment, pleased by the thought that the snare was beginning to tighten around Diana Lindsay, so slowly that she would have no inkling of what lay ahead of her. The count was not like other men, a creature of impatient lust that must be gratified instantly. A connoisseur knew how to wait and savor. He imagined how she would look with her limbs bound to the posts of a bed, her flawless face distorted by the knowledge that there would be no escape.

But he had more important things to do than contemplate what he would do to a whore, be she ever so lovely. Veseul began to write a summary of the information Biron had brought, adding his own comments about the implications before translating the report into a cipher and recopying it.

When he was finished, he folded the sheet very small, then took the heavy brass seal that bore the reversed incisions of the arms of Veseul. Unscrewing the handle revealed a second, secret seal in the form of a bird rising from flames: a phoenix.

Chapter 9

Diana moved through her daily rounds with a cat-in-the-creampot smile on her face; no amount of intellectual knowledge of loving could match the reality. Gervase was constantly in her thoughts, and not just because of the passion they shared.

The thought of making love with him produced a quickening deep inside her, but his unexpected tenderness drew her most. He was a warm and witty companion, seldom laughing but with a wry, self-mocking smile that was irresistible. With her, he was a different man from his usual cold, commanding presence. She took pride in the fact that she created that difference.

Diana wanted Gervase in her life with a fierceness similar to what she felt for her son: she wanted to be his woman publicly, to sleep all night in his arms and be accepted by his friends. It was a cruel paradox; becoming a courtesan may have tainted her forever, yet they would never have come together had she not entered the harlots' world.

Sometimes, with chill despair, she remembered what Maddy had told her:
He has a mad wife in Scotland.
Those flat words represented a conundrum she had no idea how to solve. She knew that he desired her, at least for now, but a mistress was an object of lust, not love. While she had a place in his life, it was a small, dishonorable one. Was this what she had come to London for? Surely, somewhere ahead there would be a solution.

Whenever her thoughts reached that point, she resolutely turned her mind to other things, laughing with her son and friends, practicing her knife throwing. She did her domestic chores, she hired a French cook who had a tale of woe, and she fought a running battle with Geoffrey about riding lessons.

The issue was an old one. Her son had always loved horses, and Phaedra's residence in the stables caused him to redouble his pleas for a pony. Diana felt deeply ambivalent about the subject. The life she wanted for Geoffrey meant that he must someday learn to ride. A gentleman who didn't was a freak, and that was the last thing she wanted her son to be.

But riding could be dangerous even for the best of horsemen. If Geoffrey suffered a
grand mal
or even a
petit mal
seizure, he might be seriously injured or killed in a fall.

For the last three years she had taken cowardly refuge from his desire for a pony by saying that she would consider it when he was older, but she knew she could not put him off much longer. To compensate for her refusal to let him ride, Diana let Geoffrey keep a scrawny kitten he had rescued from a gang of street boys. But few beings are as persistent as young children, and Diana knew that the subject of riding would surface again.

* * *

When he recalled the autumn of 1807 in later years, Gervase knew that rain must have fallen, the London skies must have grayed, a hundred minor irritations of living must have occurred, but he remembered none of them: the weeks passed in a haze of golden days and fiery nights.

The affairs of the nation, if not prospering, at least became no worse. The Portuguese were persuaded to remove their fleet to safety in Brazil. His own work went well as his network of informants grew ever wider and deeper, and government officials of all political stripes came to accept that his recommendations were untainted by self-interest.

But it was Diana that cast the enchantment over his life. Warm and welcoming, she was always there when he wanted her, sensing his moods, knowing when to talk and when to be silent; when to melt in his arms and when to take the lead with a gentle sexual aggression that was richly stimulating.

Diana was so much the perfect woman that she couldn't possibly be real; only a paid mistress with a flair for acting could be so wholly responsive. Gervase sometimes wondered what was the real woman and what was pretense. The warmth and sensuality couldn't be entirely false or she would not be so convincing, yet she had a maddening, elusive air of mystery that veiled the central core of her.

He seldom wasted time with such thoughts. It was easier to accept her as she appeared, and he glided through the days on a strange emotion that he neither recognized nor named. Only much later, when those perfect days were history, did he realize that the emotion was called happiness.