Simply Shameless (9 page)

Helene took a moment to copy the address of the Knowles's solicitor and set the letter to one side. She continued to sort the mail, removing the latest Ackermann's journal to read later. Under a flyer about a miracle cure for baldness, she discovered a slim letter in a familiar hand. The signature scrawled across the corner of the letter was too hard to read, and the red seal was unfamiliar too.

She unfolded the single sheet and peered at the closely written script.

"Dear Maman, I am writing to inform you that I am married. Please do not interfere.

Your daughter, Marguerite, Lady Justin Lockwood.
"

Helene stared at the note until the words blurred in front of her eyes.
What in God's name
had Marguerite done}
She was only a child. Helene crumpled the letter in her fist. No, not a child anymore. She was twenty-one. Old enough to elope. Old enough to deceive her mother and evade the nuns who were supposed to care for her. It was Helene's fault.

She should have insisted Marguerite come to live in England as soon as she had completed her education, not allowed her to stay on and teach.

Helene stood up and began to pace the small space, her hands clasped to her breast. She would have to leave for France immediately, find out where her eldest daughter had gone, and have the marriage annulled. She stopped walking. The name of the man Marguerite had married sounded both English and vaguely familiar. She snatched up the crumpled parchment and reread it.

Lord Justin Lockwood. An image of a dark-haired pretty-faced man formed in her head.

Had he ever visited the pleasure house? Helene went into the back room of her office where she kept her records and hauled out some of the large leather client books until she found the one labeled
L-M.

Wiping dust from the surface, she lugged the huge volume onto her desk and started her search.

"Ah, yes, here he is."

Her ringer alighted on his name. Not a paid-up member, but he had been admitted as a guest on several occasions by Sir Harry Jones. It was unfortunate that he was only a guest. If he had been a member, she would have far more intimate information about him and his sexual preferences. Helene tried to picture his friend, Sir Harry, whom knew she had served in the military during the Napoleonic campaigns in Spain.

A sudden sharp image of the two men sitting close together in one of the salons came to Helene, and she slammed the book shut. She had to get to Marguerite. Lord Justin Lockwood was not the sort of man who should ever marry. He seemed far too interested in his best friend. A sudden commotion outside her door made her look up. Judd, her butler, flung open the door.

"I apologize, madame, but these two persons insisted on seeing you."

With a sense of shock, Helene stared into the determined faces of the young man and woman who had pushed their way past her butler. How on earth had they found her? The young man smiled without humor and sketched a bow.

"Bonjour. Aren't you going to wish us a happy birthday,
Maman."

Chapter Seven

"It isn't your birthday until tomorrow."

Helene's reply was automatic. She took a deep steadying breath. "Christian, Lisette, what are you doing here? You are supposed to be at school."

She leaned back and gripped the edge of the desk, desperate to feel something solid behind her. Something to hold her up after the series of shocks she had suffered that morning.

Christian shared a quick conspiratorial glance with his sister. "We decided we didn't need to go to school anymore. We used the money you sent us for our birthday to come and visit you instead."

Christian smiled again, but his smile was not meant to reassure. He took his sister's hand and guided her into one of the chairs facing the desk. Helene fought to recover her customary composure. If Christian meant to shock her into agreeing to anything he suggested by turning up so unexpectedly, he would have a battle on his hands.

"I repeat, what are you doing here?"

"Don't you know,
Maman}"

"If I did, why would I be asking you?"

Christian nodded, his hazel eyes narrowed as he studied her. "Setting aside the fact that you have lied to us for years about your occupation and refused to let us visit you in England—"

Helene lifted her chin. "I am not accountable to you for my actions. I did what was best for us all."

"Best for you, you mean."

Helene released her grip on the desk and sat down behind it, needing a barrier between her children and herself. It was easy for Christian to stand there and condemn her, so easy for him to judge her and find her wanting. God, she did that to herself every day anyway; she hardly needed his help. Surreptitiously, greedily, she studied her son. The length of his legs and his height came from his father. His features and hair color from her.

"I refuse to argue with you about any of this until you tell me exactly why you decided to cross the channel and find me."

Christian sat down next to Lisette and took her gloved hand. Lisette was almost as tall as her twin, her hair a shade darker, her eyes a light golden hazel that reminded Helene of Philip.

"It's about Marguerite."

"I received this from her today." Helene found the letter she'd just read and showed it to the twins. "Apparently she has married. Did you know of this?"

"Of course we did. She left a letter for the nuns, and they came to tell us." Lisette leaned forward, her gaze as condemning as her brother's. "We guessed she had eloped, but we wondered if it was some scheme of yours."

"And that is why you are here? To accuse me of yet another - crime?" Helene rubbed her forehead, where a headache threatened. "I find your ability to believe the worst of me quite depressing."

"The man Marguerite married is an English lord. We thought you might have sent him to Paris to meet her." Christian's gaze wandered around the room, his curiosity almost palpable. "Since she completed her education and flirted with the idea of taking vows, she's been helping the nuns teach the rest of us."

"I know that. It's the only reason I allowed her to stay at the school and not come to England as I wanted."

"You wanted Marguerite and not us?"

Helene sighed. "Marguerite is older than you. I wanted you two to complete your education before I made any decisions about your future."

Christian continued to talk as if Helene hadn't spoken. "Lisette and I noticed a change in her a few weeks ago. She was very distracted but not as if she were frightened, more that she was in her own little world. Then she stopped turning up for the lessons at all."

"Did she tell you she was leaving?"

Lisette shrugged. "The last time I saw her, she told me not to worry and that she was going to be very happy. The next day she was gone."

Helene smoothed the leather cover of the massive book in front of her. "I certainly didn't send Justin Lockwood to France. I was just checking my records to see if he was a client here, and I found his name as a guest. But he doesn't know of my connection to Marguerite. And why on earth would I want to encourage my own daughter to elope?"

"To relieve you of one of your burdens?" Christian said.

Helene bit down on her lip to prevent a hasty retort. The twins had a right to their grievances. She had allowed others to bring them up and had never been a proper mother to them. She always tried to remember that when they treated her with such contempt.

Sometimes it was hard. Today, it was almost impossible.

"I was intending to leave for France today and find your sister." Helene stood up. "If you wish to accompany me, I would enjoy your company."

Lisette smiled for the first time. "We're not going anywhere."

"I beg your pardon?"

Christian stood, too, and looked down at her. "We've decided to stay and see the sights of London. I'm sure you'll allow us to live here with you, won't you,
Maman}"

"But I'm going to France to search for Marguerite."

Christian shrugged. "We'll be here when you get back." He looked at her plain dress. "Do you double as the housekeeper as well as the brothel keeper?"

; Helene stared straight into his eyes, hoped he could see the Janger building in hers. To her relief, he was the first to look away. She opened her desk drawer and sorted through the neatly labeled keys.

"I have some guest suites in the other house. You are welcome to stay there for the night.

Tomorrow I'll instruct one of my staff to put you up at a decent hotel and to find you a chap-erone, Lisette."

Christian frowned. "What do you mean, the other house? We want to stay here, not in a hotel."

Helene moved toward the door, her head held high. "Despite appearances, this house is actually two buildings knocked into one. The back part is actually the house on the square directly behind us."

She nodded calmly at Judd, who had remained in the hallway, and walked down the staircase to the basement. She didn't wait to see if the twins followed her. The smell of roasting pork from the kitchen made her feel nauseous.

"This area joins the two houses together. Today you may eat in the kitchen or be served in your rooms." She passed the kitchen door, moved into the small dark courtyard that was lit by oil lamps, and opened another door into the rear section of the building.

"The guest rooms are up two flights of stairs. My private apartments are on the lower level. You also have your own private entrance at the front of this house, which faces onto Bar-rington Square."

She paused at the top of the stairs in the wide cream-carpeted hallway. "I'll assume you wish to be next door to each other." Helene checked her key ring, unlocked the two doors, and went into the second room. She paused to light the fire and open the heavy blue drapes before swinging around to the twins.

"Do you have any luggage?"

Christian shrugged. "Someone from the shipping company will deliver it later today."

To Helene's satisfaction, her brisk no-nonsense attitude had obviously left him uncertain of how to proceed. She had no intention of arguing with him or Lisette about their unplanned arrival. Christian didn't know that she'd learned to make the best of a bad situation well before he was born. Her search for Marguerite was far more important than trading insults with the twins.

A few riotous weeks in London and then hopefully they would be ready to go back to France again or at least compromise on new living arrangements. Despite her misgivings, she had planned on inviting them over to visit her at some point that year. Well, that point had arrived, and once she had sorted out Marguerite's more pressing problems, she was more than ready to deal with the twins.

"Aren't you going to shout at us?"

Lisette leaned toward the fire, her slender hands held out to the blaze, her wary gaze on her mother.

"Why would I waste my breath? You are here, aren't you?" Helene opened the doors that connected the two suites and lit the other fire as well. "Perhaps after I find Marguerite, she will wish to visit with me, too, and I'll have all my family together."

Christian laughed, and the harsh sound reverberated around the room.

"Don't lie,
Maman.
We all know you don't have a maternal bone in your body."

Helene walked back to the door. "You know nothing about me, Christian. And that was my choice to make, not yours."

She met his gaze. "Perhaps it is time for there to be honesty between us. Perhaps your visit will enable us to make something out of the bonds that tie us together."

Christian moved to stand beside his sister. "Perhaps we don't care what you want?"

Helene faced them and suddenly envied their closeness. "Then why did you come here?"

"As we said, to make sure you help Marguerite."

"If Marguerite wishes to be helped, I will help her."

"What do you mean, if she wishes?"

"She is twenty-one and old enough to marry without my permission." Helene shrugged.

"If she is really set on this course, there is little I can do to prevent her from choosing her own husband,"

"So what you are actually saying is that you won't do anything at all."

Helene studied her son's angry features. "You deliberately misunderstand me. But I promise you, if Marguerite wishes to get out of her hasty marriage, I
will
make it happen."

His sneer was like a slap in the face. "As if you have the power to help anyone."

Helene raised her eyebrows. "Yet, you came to me for , help—remember that."

He stared at her, his expression as challenging as her own. Helene turned her back on him and walked to the door.

"I would still like to know how you found out exactly where I live. I doubt it was blind chance that brought you here."

Lisette took off her bonnet. "We received a letter from someone who said he was your friend."

"My friend." Helene ignored the angry glance Christian gave his sister and concentrated on Lisette. "What exactly did he say?"

"That you ran a brothel in Mayfair and that you were a notorious whore."

"And you chose to believe him?"

Lisette blushed. "But he was right, wasn't he?"

God that hurt.
It was her own fault for lying to them, but in her own defense, she'd hoped to spare them the harsh realities of her life.

"I do not have time to explain everything to you now, but I'm certainly not a whore, and this isn't a brothel." She held Lisette's gaze. "Does it truly look like that to you?"

"I've never been in a brothel before,
Maman."
Lisette stuck her lip out. "But you did lie to us. When you visited us, you said you were a housekeeper and that you couldn't keep us with you because your employer hated children."

Christian snorted. "She couldn't keep us with her because she was too busy with all her men."

"That simply isn't true. I was busy building my business, and, yes, it is not the sort of place any woman would want to bring up her children." Helene held out her hands in a placatory gesture. "I wanted you to have the security of a decent home, the advantage of an excellent education, and the opportunity to grow up with your sister."