Midnight Pleasures (26 page)

“No! Which
number
are you?”

“Oh,” Braddon replied. “I’m the second. M’father was made into an earl in the ‘60s.”

He watched Vincent scowl. It seemed even horse trainers knew that second earls were new earls. “M’great-grandfather was a viscount,” Braddon said defensively.

“Humph.”

“I wish to marry this man,” Madeleine said to her father, ignoring silly male fidgets over numbers of horses and numbers of earls.

“You may not marry him if he intends to take you to America,” her father stated.

“Then we shall stay in London and pretend that I am a French aristocrat,” Madeleine said practically. “Braddon’s friend will help me learn how to be a great lady. I shall go to a ball, and Braddon will pretend to fall in love with me, and there we are!”

Garnier’s mouth twisted. Clearly it went against the grain with him to countenance such a tricky scheme.

“And if someone finds out?” he growled at Braddon.

“I’ll marry Madeleine immediately,” Braddon said. “I’d just as soon get married now anyway. My family can’t do anything about it, and I don’t give a toss for my reputation among the
ton
.”

Garnier looked approving at that.

“You could be the daughter of the Marquis de Flammarion,” he said grudgingly to Madeleine. “You are the same age.”

“Oh, Papa,” Madeleine cried, “what a splendid idea!” She turned to Braddon. “My papa worked for the marquis and his family. I was too young when we left France to be able to remember them, but Papa has told me all about their estate in the Limousin, and the house in Paris, on Rue de Vosgirard. The marquis was rather strange and rarely went about, but his wife was very beautiful and elegant.”

“What about relatives, sir? London is crammed full of French émigrés, and they all seem to know one another.”

“No one knew the family of the marquis,” Garnier said. “He kept himself to himself. His wife, yes. She used to travel to Paris occasionally. But the marquis and his daughter were always at home.”

“That’s all right, then,” Braddon said with relief. “You don’t need to talk about it much, Madeleine. After all, if the marquis’s daughter was around your age during all the troubles in France, she wouldn’t remember much.”

He turned to Garnier. “I presume the marquis didn’t survive? He won’t be turning up in London, will he?”

Garnier shook his head firmly, his lips pressed in a straight line.

But Madeleine didn’t look entirely happy. “How can I pretend to be the daughter of the Marquise de Flammarion?” she said miserably, looking at her papa. “You have told me again and again how elegant, how perfect the marquise was. What of the people who knew her? They will take one look at me and know that I am nothing like the beautiful marquise!”

The two men who loved her most in the world looked at Madeleine blankly.

“You
are
beautiful,” Braddon said, absolute faith in his voice. “Besides, daughters often don’t look like their mothers. Look at my poor sister Margaret. M’mother used to swear that the girl had too many freckles to be her daughter, but Margaret made a perfectly reasonable marriage, for all that.”

There was a moment of silence after this tangled speech.

Vincent Garnier’s brows were drawn together in a terrible scowl. “You are a lovely girl,” he told Madeleine presumptively. “Besides, people will assume that you take after the marquis.”

“But they must have known what
he
looked like,” Madeleine persisted. “I am sure he was slim and elegant too.” She looked down at her curvaceous body. “I simply don’t look like an aristocrat!”

“You look better than any of those frivolous muffin-brained women,” her father bellowed. “I do not want to hear another word about it!”

Madeleine jumped in surprise. Her father was a taciturn man, not given to speaking overmuch. But he rarely shouted either.

“All right, Papa,” she agreed.

Braddon took her arm and smiled down at her, his blue eyes clear and truthful. “I wouldn’t want you to be slim and elegant, Madeleine. I want you just the way you are.” Something about his tone made a flush rise in Madeleine’s cheeks.

“Ne dîtes pas ça!”
she protested. “Papa will hear you!”

But when Madeleine looked over at her father, he had turned back to his accounting books, and she couldn’t tell by the little smile tugging at his mouth whether he had heard Braddon’s comment or not.

“Go! Go!” Garnier barked. He looked sharply at Braddon. “You may ask Lady Sophie to visit us when she returns from her wedding trip. I should like to meet the woman who is supposed to teach my daughter to become a lady. From
The Morning Post
, she appears a mere fribble!”

Braddon bowed respectfully, hoping to God that Sophie was not one of those women who would put up a fuss about visiting a public stable. And hoping that the
Lark
would return to London soon.

Lord Breksby fully shared Braddon’s feelings about the return of the
Lark
. He was spending quite a bit of his time fretting over the unpleasant news that Napoleon hoped to sabotage England’s gift to Selim.

Sophie’s mother, caught up in a whirlwind of new, but not unpleasant, experiences, also wished fervently that her daughter would return to London. Eloise found the house strangely silent without Sophie, even populated as it was by some forty servants. On the other hand, she seemed to bump into George wherever she turned, whereas before her daughter married, she saw him only in the evening.

Somehow her husband wasn’t as interested in ambling off to the club as he used to be. Now that he had breached the sacred portals of his wife’s bedroom … well, it was a good bit of fun to lure his starchy marchioness into an afternoon indiscretion. But George missed his little Sophie, too. It hadn’t occurred to him just how much he counted on her blithe acceptance and love to make him feel less—could it be lonely? Shaking off the thought, George went to find Eloise. Why not bother his wife, even if it was only ten in the morning?

All in all, there was quite a flock of Londoners thinking about the
Lark
‘s return to port. Down in the district known as the Whitefriars, a sleek and sinuous gentleman was expressing that very wish.

“As soon as Foakes returns,” he said, turning his eyes from the spiders dangling from the dark and lowly rafters above him, “I suggest that we approach him … gently.”

His companion wrestled with his meaning. “Whether we’re gentle or not,” he pointed out, “Foakes hasn’t got the scepter. And now they won’t give it to him till he’s over there, I hear. It’s a shame, that’s what it is. A bloody shame.”

Monsieur Foucault (for so he was known when in London) sighed. He did not know how the information had leaked to the English government about his delicious plan to substitute an exploding scepter for Selim’s ruby scepter, but there was no point in weeping over it. “Clemper has been turned off, and we now have no way to obtain access to the scepter.” His tone was a delicate reprimand. “We must, therefore, obtain our goal through other means. And our goal is to ensure that the English ambassador presents a serious danger to Selim’s coronation.”

“I still think it’s a shame,” said Mole (for so he was known among his intimates). “I had it all set up so beautiful. Clemper was going to substitute the scepter in the flash of an eye.”

Monsieur Foucault sighed again. It pained him as well, since he intended to appropriate a few of the rubies with which the English government was so liberally adorning the scepter.

“Why don’t I turn one of the new fellows working on the scepter?” Mole suggested.

“Impossible,” Foucault replied. The odor in Mole’s little house was truly distasteful. Foucault decided to breathe through his mouth, which gave his voice a curiously breathy tone. “The original jewelers have been dismissed, to the man, and I am quite certain that the new employees will be less amiable than our dear Clemper.”

“Well, you may be right,” Mole allowed. “So what do we say to Foakes when he returns?”

“I believe that we shall approach the gentleman as ambassadors from Selim’s court,” Foucault replied.

“Oh.” There was a moment of silence.

“You
do
speak Turkish … I distinctly recollect that being a condition of my employment,” Monsieur Foucault said gently, taking a lace handkerchief from his pocket and waving it before him. He did not look at Mole.

“I speak some,” Mole said, just a trifle dubiously. “Learned it at my mother’s knee, I did.”

Monsieur Foucault did not express his belief that Mole’s mother was an unlikely teacher. “
Bu masa mi?
Translate that, if you please, my dear Mole.” Behind his dreamy tone was more than a hint of steel.

But Mole was up to the challenge. “ ‘Yes, this is a table,’ “ he ventured, rapping the sturdy wood before him.

Foucault smiled, and Mole relaxed. “You needn’t say much,” Foucault observed. “I shall present myself as a envoy from Selim’s court. And
my
Turkish is excellent.”

Mole nodded. He plucked at his worsted trousers.

“I shall send my tailor to you,” Monsieur Foucault said, a glint of amusement in his eye. It suited his sense of humor to command the delicate François, his genius of a tailor, to enter the perilous darkness of the Whitefriars alleyways.

Mole nodded again.

“You, my dear Mole, might keep an eye on Patrick Foakes’s town house in the next few days. I should like to approach him just as soon as he returns. And while you are there … perhaps you would be kind enough to enquire about his household, in the remote,
remote
possibility that our gentle approach does not prosper.”

Mole’s eyes brightened. This he could understand. “Right you are,” he said cheerily.

Monsieur Foucault strolled back out to his waiting carriage, a smile hovering on his thin lips.

Chapter 17

T
he
Lark
docked late on a Tuesday evening in March, having been gone some six weeks. The Honorable Patrick Foakes and his party had to wait a good half-hour to disembark, to the delight of four stevedores lounging on the dock. They didn’t notice the presence of a rapscallion French lad, but they certainly did notice Sophie, whose petite form and fair curls were the very emblem of a lovely Englishwoman. A demure, proper English lady.

Which she wasn’t.

The
Lark
docked with a rebel onboard. Sophie had sailed to Wales with no thought of helping Braddon. Yet as the boat neared the dock, along with the realization that she had nothing to fill her time but the dreary round of shopping and taking tea, a sneaking, wicked ambition began to grow in her heart. Eloise prided herself on her social acumen, on her ability to spot a less-than-perfect lady at ten paces. Who better than her daughter to fool the entire
ton
and pass off a horse trainer’s daughter as a French aristocrat?

Forget learning languages that she would never be able to speak. Sophie was going to become an artist, like her friend Charlotte. She would create the picture of a French lady. A living testament to Eloise’s strong-minded training, if only Eloise knew. Which she never would, Sophie reminded herself. Her mother’s moral sense was far too strong to countenance an intruder breaching the sacred walls of the
ton
.

One problem loomed large. What would Patrick think of the whole scheme? Sometimes Sophie imagined he would relish the drama and the hint of risk, and sometimes she thought he’d be disgusted by the attempt.

That evening, Patrick, Sophie, and Henri were just finishing a late supper when Sophie asked, “Didn’t you and Braddon used to carry through a great many schemes when you were at school together?”

At the mention of Braddon’s name, Patrick looked up. Oddly enough, he had just been wondering whether Sophie had yet forgotten about Braddon. It seemed not.

“Silly childhood stunts,” he said brusquely, returning to his chicken. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no real reason,” Sophie said airily. “I was just thinking about Braddon and you as children.”

Worse and worse, from Patrick’s point of view. Why on earth would his wife want to spend a moment contemplating Braddon, unless she was hoping to see him soon?

“What sort of stunts?” Henri’s eyes were bright with interest.

“Braddon was always trying to gammon some teacher into thinking that he was someone other than himself.”

Henri shrugged. That didn’t sound very interesting. “May I be excused?” he asked. He was slowly returning to the normal pursuits of a healthy twelve-year-old, far from the rigors of war. He had spent the afternoon in Patrick’s stables, and the stableboy had offered to show him a painting of a two-headed cow in the evening.

“Was Braddon successful in his disguises?” Sophie asked, after Henri had left the room.

Patrick rolled his eyes derisively. “Never.”

“Oh, poor Braddon,” Sophie said mechanically as her mind whirled. It seemed that Braddon was just carrying on a tradition by trying to pass off his future wife as a French aristocrat. And clearly, Patrick would not want to be party to Braddon’s new “stunt.” Perhaps more important, the idea sounded remarkably foolhardy, in light of Braddon’s history of failed masquerades.

Patrick didn’t like the pucker of worry that appeared between Sophie’s brows. Why was his wife sparing any sympathy for that good-for-nothing lout? Braddon’s honored place as an old and dear friend evaporated from Patrick’s mind.

“Braddon lies,” Patrick said, a blunt edge in his tone. Sophie’s eyes flew to his, startled by the sudden disgust in his voice. In the back of her mind she could hear David Marlowe saying that Patrick was a stickler when it came to honesty.

“He lies? What do you mean?”

“He’s precious close to a loose fish. He rarely distinguishes between truth and falsehood.”

Sophie looked at her husband inquiringly, but Patrick didn’t want to continue. In fact, what with one thing and another, he found himself in a pucker of a mood. The way to mend it, he thought, is a little intimacy with m’wife. So he nipped around the table and sat on the arm of Sophie’s chair. Without another word, he began pulling the pins out of her hair and scattering them on the carpet. Slowly, slowly, curls the color of honey and sunlight fell down Sophie’s back and over her shoulders. And by the time Patrick’s long, clever fingers ran through her hair a final time and moved to the hooks on her dress, Sophie had long ago stopped thinking of Braddon and Braddon’s problems.

Thus, it was somewhat to Patrick’s dismay that the very first billet to arrive the next morning was from the Earl of Slaslow.

“What the devil does he want?” he growled, the very picture of a jealous husband.

Sophie looked at Patrick in surprise. “I’m sure he is simply being polite. He invites me for a drive.”

Patrick snorted. Since when was Braddon a punctilio? His manners were easy to a fault.

“You are not available,” he stated presumptively.

“I’m not?” Sophie was really surprised now. Was Patrick the possessive sort of husband? It was a rather thrilling thought. Thrilling but impractical.

She folded her hands in her lap and looked up at her husband. “Is there some reason why you don’t wish me to see Braddon?”

“It doesn’t look right,” Patrick replied.

“I’m a married woman,” Sophie pointed out. “No one will think twice if I drive in the park with a bachelor.”

“But you were engaged to this particular bachelor!”

“I’m married to you,” Sophie remarked. “Surely you don’t think that I would ever have an affair with Braddon.”

Put in this cold, reasonable light, Patrick had to admit that no, he didn’t think Sophie would ever break her wedding vows—with Braddon or anyone else. She had integrity, his little Sophie.

“Oh, all right,” he said, feeling as if he had somehow lost a battle. “See him all you like! Set him up as your cicisbeo!”

“I don’t think I shall do that,” Sophie replied calmly. “A cicisbeo ought to be able to string more than two sentences together, don’t you think?” There was a twinkle in her eye that made Patrick feel much better.

Sophie walked to the door of the morning room. “One always has one’s husband,” she teased, “if one wants to have a muddled conversation!”

Patrick gave a mock growl and reached out to catch his giggling wife, but she whisked through the door and was gone. Patrick caught up Braddon’s letter, which she had left behind. It was a decidedly
un
-lover-like note: “I need to see you. I’ll pick you up in the landolet tomorrow at four.” “Landaulet” was misspelled.

He was being unreasonable, Patrick admitted. It was just … it was just that Sophie had not uttered a word about being in love with him. In fact, she didn’t seem even to be thinking of it. Here they had spent well nigh two months together, in the closest of quarters, and his wife had shown no sign of declaring herself.

Just then Sophie popped her head back into the room. “What’s more, I shall expect all my cicisbei to speak excellent French!” she said saucily. As Patrick stood up he met her eyes, which were looking at him with wicked suggestiveness. It had been an enormously gratifying realization, the discovery that he could turn his wife into a melting, wild seductress simply by whispering a few throaty words in French.

Then her smile faded. “Are you reading my letter, Patrick?” Her voice was suddenly cool. Patrick looked down and realized that Braddon’s note was still in his hand. He dropped it as if it had caught fire.

“Why does he
need
to see you?”

Sophie’s backbone straightened. “Not because we are setting up an assignation. Given that, it is not your concern.”

Patrick’s mouth tightened to a thin line. The guilt he felt reading Sophie’s correspondence made his tone much harsher than it might have been. “It damn well is my concern! You are my wife, and your reputation is my business.”

“Are you implying that my reputation will be tarnished by driving with Braddon?”

“Well, your reputation is already not the best, is it?” Patrick said rashly. “Now that you’re married, everyone will be expecting you to lead me a pretty dance!”

“A pretty dance,” Sophie said, pausing on each word. Her heart was pounding in her throat. “You think that my reputation is so … tarnished as to make me notorious?”

“Your reputation isn’t really a concern,” Patrick said, reversing himself. “Braddon’s intentions are the important thing. I fail to see what business a known rake could possibly have with a young married woman, besides the obvious.”

“One rake would certainly know another,” Sophie retorted, distaste clear in her tone. “However, as it happens, Braddon showed little interest in seducing me before I was married, and I am quite certain that his interest is now nil.”

“Braddon is a loose screw,” Patrick said, thrusting his hand through his hair in frustration. “I cannot like his stringing you along, for God only knows what purpose. What I mean is, I know his purpose! Pretty strong, fishing in his best friend’s pond!”

“That is an indescribably vulgar thing to say,” Sophie replied icily. “But since we are lowering ourselves, let me point out that
you
are the one who originally fished in Braddon’s pond!”

“Why shouldn’t I wonder what your business with Braddon is?” Patrick shouted back, his temper out of control now. “
He
may not have wanted to kiss you, but the same can’t be said of you, can it?”

Sophie gasped. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean,” Patrick said furiously, “Braddon told me that you talked him into eloping because you were madly in love with him. It was just your bad luck that I came up that ladder when you were waiting for Braddon … in your bedchamber!”

Rage surged up Sophie’s back. “You! You dare to imply that I seduced you? You! A man everyone knows is a lothario! The kind of man,” she added scathingly, “who seduces his best friend’s bride. You may
not
imply that I was planning to seduce Braddon. I had decided to cry off from my engagement—and you know it! You waited long enough before letting me know who you were.”

“No lady invites a gentleman into her chamber unless she wants him to know of her availability. You sure as hell didn’t fight me off when I came over to the bed!”

The back of Sophie’s throat was burning. “I did,” she said, caught between the urge to scream and the urge to cry. “I did push you away, until you took your hood off.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you only succumbed because it was me in those robes? That’s a bit of a tall order!”

“It’s the truth.”

“So you think I will believe that you married me for love?” Patrick sneered as he moved toward her, his feet silent on the wooden floor. “Let me see, you were so desperately in love with me that you turned down my proposal and begged another man to elope with you.”

“I didn’t say that!”

Patrick raised one mocking eyebrow. “Didn’t say what?”

“I didn’t say I married you for love,” Sophie spat.

Patrick was within a handspan of his wife now, close enough to see the teary glimmer in her eyes. The sight made his anger abruptly disappear.

“So you married me for lust.” His tone was milder now. “Well, we were caught in the same trap, weren’t we?”

Sophie stared at him in dumb frustration. Then she steadied her voice. Not for nothing had she witnessed a hundred—or a thousand—marital quarrels.

“I am not having, nor am I planning to have, an affair with the Earl of Slaslow,” she said slowly and clearly.

“Yes,” Patrick said. He was beginning to wonder what it was they were fighting about.

“And I did not intend to seduce Braddon, had he appeared in my bedroom window rather than you,” Sophie stated.

“I accept that.”

“One more thing,” Sophie said stonily. “I may have married you for lust, but I will never question what the current object of your lust is. It may be that in the future we shall both find other amusements, but I will not read your correspondence, nor will I countenance you reading mine.”