The Water Nymph (6 page)

Indeed, if Crispin had known that Richard Tottle’s personal apartments would be covered almost entirely in pink silk, he never would have come. The walls, the doors, the bed, the divan, the curtains, all were of pink silk, and what could not be covered in silk was at least made pink. The floor was topped with a carpet needlepointed in a thousand pink roses, the mirror was framed with pink glass flowers, the fireplace was surrounded with pink tiles, portraits of pink women smiled out of pink frames… not even the chamber pot, Crispin was appalled to see, had escaped the plague of pinkness. Consulting his pocket watch, he saw that he had been there for less than an hour, even if it felt like five.

Having given up on finding the other half of the list Tottle had been clutching when he died, Crispin decided to render it meaningless by destroying the cipher that had been used to encode it, which anyone would need to decode it. He himself had the only other copy, and without it the list was completely illegible. But so far Crispin’s searching had been in vain: he had been unable to find the cipher anywhere, and he did not know how much longer he could last in Tottle’s salmon-pink sanctuary. He had just decided to take the love letters he was sorting through with him and look at them in the soothing space of his dark-wood-and-burgundy library, when he heard the footsteps on the stairs.

Noting that they did not stop at the floor below, where the offices were, but continued up toward the door to the pink paradise, he carefully replaced the letters in the top compartment of the (pink) desk and concealed himself among the (pink) drapes.

Whoever was on the other side of the door was no professional. Not only had they crept up the stairs noisily enough to alert the dead, but they were now struggling with the simple lock on the door. He was half inclined to slide across the room and undo the lock for them, if only to ease the tension of waiting, but suddenly the door opened and the footsteps entered the room.

Sophie was glad there was no one there to see her gaping. She had never been in a room like this before, had only vaguely imagined that such places existed. There could be no doubt that it was consecrated entirely to pleasure, from the triple-wide bed to the paintings of women—Satan’s knockers, what were they doing to that satyr in the one between the windows?—to the strange musky odor that permeated the air. She moved around the room slowly, taking in the proliferation of pink furnishings, astutely studying the paintings (could her leg go in that direction? she wondered, extending one of them out slightly as she studied a woman who was ecstatically making love with a swan) and feeling completely overwhelmed.

And perhaps a bit ill, a sort of relapse of her feelings from the night before. She had just removed her riding cloak, having begun to feel a little warm, and started to wonder what could be causing the illness now, since the mustache was gone, when the pink curtains on her right stirred slightly and a figure emerged.

“Don Alfonso. What a pleasant surprise,” Crispin said in a voice that left it unclear whether he meant it sincerely or as the saltiest sarcasm. “You have shaved.”

Sophie should have known this would happen, she told herself, smoothing the skirt of her gown. She should have expected him to be there, she thought as she ensured her bodice was straight, making a mess of things, probably stealing things so that he would win their bet. That thought was immediately followed by another, and before she could stop herself she looked at him and said, “You bastard.”

“Perhaps Miss Champion should take lessons from Don Alfonso about the basics of courtesy. Generally it is considered good form to wish someone good day before belittling their bloodlines.”

“You drugged me,” Sophie replied, ignoring his etiquette pointers. “You put something in the wine last night and drugged me so that you could get here before me and take away important evidence.”

Crispin raised his eyebrows. “Ingenious. I had not even realized it myself. With your powers of deduction, evidence would just be a hindrance.”

“Then you admit it?”

“Unfortunately, while I enjoy your company excessively, I did nothing to prolong your visit to my house last night. You yourself mentioned that your last meal had been days before, and I suspect that the wine you gulped like a sailor just went to your head.” Noting that she was about to protest, Crispin went on. “Do not imagine that I enjoyed trying to sleep through your snores on my divan.”

Sophie’s eyes grew huge with indignation. “I do not snore.”

“You most certainly do. At first I thought one of the wild bulls from the bullbaiting ring must have run away and invaded the room, but then I realized it was just you.” Despite concentrating on not laughing uproariously, Crispin still had plenty of attention left over for watching Sophie’s rising wrath. However, he now saw he had made a mistake, because he had not anticipated that once antagonized she would inhale and exhale quite so deeply, making it impossible not to look at the low-cut bodice of her dress, or that she would color quite so marvelously against its green silk. What had begun as an exercise to unsettle her, seemed to be unsettling him instead, and Crispin had to remind himself that he had a job to do, a very important job, no part of which involved throwing the woman before him on the pink bed and making love to her. Indeed, the sooner he got away from her, the better off he would be.

Sophie shared his opinion. She had just realized, with horror, that she had wronged Octavia. It was not the mustache paste that made her ill; it was the Earl of Sandal. He was not only obnoxious but noxious as well. She felt distinctly sick in his presence, and it was not helped any by the enormous bed just behind her, or the paintings covering the walls. The best thing to do was to get away from him as soon as possible.

“I humbly beg your pardon,” Sophie said, her manner suggesting new meanings for the words “humbly beg,” “and I assure you my snores will never bother you again.”

“Good,” Crispin said with finality.

“Good,” Sophie echoed. “Now, if you will just show me what you have taken, I will leave here and not trouble you at all.”

Crispin spread the fingers on his hands and turned them over so she could see both front and back. “Empty,” he explained. “I have taken nothing. Of course, if you do not believe me, I would be happy to remove my clothes and let you inspect them yourself.”

This was very bad. The thought of sharing the pink Parnassus with him, naked, occasioned a new wave of the spiced-wine warmness that made Sophie unsteady on her feet, and she stepped backward, until she felt the supporting structure of the bed behind her knees. “I would rather let you win the bet than have to see you unclad,” she told him. “In fact, I would rather let you win the bet than have to see you at all. I will go down to Richard Tottle’s office on the floor below and look around until you have finished here.”

Crispin was disgustingly gallant. “I should hate to have it said that I chased a lady out of a chamber such as this. I will go downstairs and allow you to stay here, studying the paintings unfettered. With practice, I think, you could master that position with the swan.”

The door closed on his back before Sophie could tell him that he was by far the most terrifically horrible millipede in all London, probably in all England, possibly in all the world. There were about a dozen other unflattering adjectives longing to push themselves out of her lips, but she bit them back and told herself to concentrate on the task at hand. She went first to the bundles of love letters that Crispin had been flipping through earlier, and untying them, she began to read. They appeared to be notes left by the two people who shared the room when one or the other was absent. Half the bundles, tied with a silver cord, were signed “Your forever loving, Dickie.” That had to be the private nickname of Richard Tottle. The other packets, tied with gold cord, were all concluded with the words “Hundreds of kisses from your dearest Darling.” Sophie read the salutation for the fourteenth time and groaned. If she had hoped to glean any information from Richard Tottle’s lover, Sophie now saw, she was bound to be disappointed. How could she possibly figure out which of the hordes of darling women in London “Dickie” had been receiving hundreds of kisses from? And why couldn’t she have used a real name like normal people? Sophie had begun pacing around the room, flapping one of the offending letters in each hand, when the door burst open and a man entered.

“Constable,” he pronounced gruffly as he took her arm. “Come with me, miss. You are under arrest.”

The constable had to drag Sophie down the stairs. She was too stunned to speak, or even fight, which suited him just fine. When they reached the landing in front of the office, he ducked in and said, “I’ll take the chambermaid back to Newgate for questioning.”

A fat man detached himself from the group going through the stacks and stacks of paper in the office, and approached very close. “She’s a tender morsel,” he said, squinting at Sophie myopically. “Why not let us do the questioning here?”

Sophie began to stir a little, but the constable tightened his grip on her arm. “I got my orders,” he told the other man. “Take any witnesses to the prison for questioning, those are my orders, and I’m going to follow them.”

The fat man did not spare a glance for the speaker but kept his eyes on Sophie and periodically licked his lips. “Very well,” he agreed finally, giving his belly a doleful pat. “But don’t forget to save some for the rest of us. A fine dish like that, you eat too much and you’ll be sorry later.”

The constable grinned, and directed his charge down the remaining stairs. They had just shut the door of
RICHARD TOTTLE, ESQ., PRINTER TO THE QUEEN’S
place of business, when Sophie hissed through closed teeth, “What the devil do you think you are doing?”

“Saving your life,” Crispin hissed back from under the hat he was wearing as a disguise, his hand not leaving her arm. “The final entry in Richard Tottle’s account book is for a payment of one thousand two hundred pounds from ‘Sophie Champion’ for ‘Information.’ And apparently, based on what those constables in there were saying, someone found the tattered remnants of a bill of credit for that amount signed by you in Richard Tottle’s purse. Another group of them have already been dispatched to your house to arrest you. Unless for some reason you would relish being apprehended by that charming and hungry gentleman in there, I suggest you come along quietly.”

“What do you mean,” Sophie asked, stuck back in the first part of his statement, “that there is an entry in Richard Tottle’s account book under my name?”

“I should think that even with your rudimentary mental capacity that easy statement should make sense,” Crispin growled, dragging her onto his horse in front of him.

“And I should think that even with your glaring ignorance of the laws of civilized society, you would have learned that forcing women against their will onto your horse and insulting them is unacceptable. I demand that you let me down this moment. I have my own mount.”

“Good.” Crispin’s grasp around her waist tightened. “By leaving your mount here, we guarantee that the constables will start their search for Sophie Champion in this neighborhood and give you time to get out of London.” As he spoke, Crispin took off the ridiculous floppy hat of Tottle’s that he had appropriated when he heard the footsteps on the stairs, stuffed it under his saddle, and signaled his horse into motion with a click of his tongue.

“What do you mean, ‘get out of London’?” Sophie turned her neck around as far as it would go to face him. “How do I know there really is a warrant out for my arrest? Or that you did not put that entry in the ledger yourself while you were in the office, or leave that bill of credit on the body when you searched it, in order to frame me, so you could win our bet?”

“Because I am a gentleman,” he told her, eliciting a snort that called into question the status of her own gentle blood. “And because I took the liberty of pouring ink over the last entry in the ledger, to complicate things a little.”

Slowly, the expression on Sophie’s face changed into one that he had not seen before. “Why?” she asked simply.

“I would never want you to say I won our bet unfairly,” he evaded. “But you will have to leave London.”

“I will do no such thing,” Sophie said, still facing him.

Crispin sighed. “Would you at least agree not to go home? To go and stay somewhere that no one will know about?”

Sophie’s eyes narrowed, and the thoughts that she had been having, thoughts that mitigated his odiousness from severe to manageable, instantly receded. “Do not for a moment suppose I would agree to move into your house.”

“Do not for a moment suppose I was going to suggest it,” Crispin returned in the same tone. “No, I was thinking of a friend of mine. He owns many houses in London and would undoubtedly be happy to host you.”

“I have plenty of friends of my own with whom I can stay,” she said indignantly.

“Friends you would be willing to send to the gallows for harboring a fugitive?” Crispin challenged.

“No,” Sophie answered slowly. “Do you?”

Crispin nodded. “I saved Lawrence’s life once, so he owes me a favor. Besides, he is quite skilled at staying out of official trouble.”

Sophie took this information in for a moment, then asked, “Does he have a cook? A good cook?”

Not as good as yours is supposed to be
, Crispin almost responded, but caught himself in time. He did not want her to know that he had been making inquiries about her. “Yes, one of the best.”

Sophie brightened considerably. “Very well, I will go. But I will not be a prisoner.”

Crispin should have been relieved, but instead he felt a strange dryness in his throat and tightness in his breast at the thought of leaving Sophie with Lawrence. It was not jealousy, Crispin told himself as he worked to quash it, because he had inured himself to that years before when he learned that such emotions make one weak. Not even if Sophie Champion was the most interesting woman he could ever remembering encountering. Not even if as boys he and Lawrence had made a game of seducing each other’s female companions. Not even if Lord Pickering was considered one of the best-looking and most charming men in England. Crispin sifted through potential maladies in his mind, and then, with tremendous relief, realized the problem. It had nothing to do with Sophie or Lawrence at all. Dry throat, tight knot in his breast—clearly he was just thirsty. The fact that his thirst was redoubled when he happened to look at the back of Sophie’s head and catch the sunlight turning her hair into a thousand dancing rubies meant nothing at all. He was sure he had read somewhere that rubies made men thirsty.

Thirst tied in well with the errand he needed to do, but the presence of Sophie did not. He had found several other entries in Tottle’s ledger that surprised him, and one name in particular, but not having had time to spill ink over the record book’s entirety, he worried that the constables would see it and eventually track it down. Before that happened, he wanted to interview Kipper Norton and find out why he had paid Richard Tottle a hundred pounds promptly on the first of every month.

Kipper, he knew, spent the better part of his days in one of London’s more devious establishments, which pretended to be a patriotic association—even going so far as to supply entertainments in honor of the Queen’s birthday and other festivals—so that those noblemen with vigilant wives might make repeated and lengthy visits without arousing their suspicion. In reality, the Worshipful Hall Of Righteous English Statesmen was an extremely expensive house of pleasure with very comfortable benches, chairs, and private rooms. The thought of taking Sophie there made Crispin even thirstier, but he worried about the delay that getting her settled with Lawrence would entail.

“Your friend cannot live here,” Sophie said over her shoulder as they drew into the stable yard of the Worshipful Hall. “It is a house of pleasure and—” She broke off abruptly and turned to face him, her eyes filling with suspicion again. “Unless you plan—”

Crispin stopped her before the accusations could begin. “No. I have to see someone, someone I think will be here, and I have to do it before the constables find his name in Tottle’s ledger as well. I thought it only fair to bring you along. If you object, you may stay here.”

“Why should I object?” Sophie challenged, sliding off his horse. “I bought the building.”

Crispin stared down at her, momentarily dumbfounded. “You what?”

“Well, not intentionally. Several years ago, Judith and Delilah—the Cruet Twins—came and asked me for five thousand pounds and I gave it to them. They were so eager for the money that I did not ask what it was for, and by the time I found out that I had funded a brothel, they had already paid me back. They wanted to pay me interest, but I would not accept it.”

Crispin had climbed off the horse and relinquished the reins to the uniformed stableboy by then, but he continued to stare at her with a mixture of disbelief and, despite himself, admiration. He had never met a woman quite like Sophie Champion.

She leaned close to him to confide shyly, “I have to admit, I have never been inside a place of this type. I am excited to see what it is like.”

“‘Excited,’” Crispin repeated, and followed her in.

She paused as she crossed the threshold to let her eyes adjust to the artificial darkness. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she whispered as she surveyed the entrance hall. It was paneled in dark wood, and each wall was hung with paintings of English noblemen, which looked to have been done early in the century. “They told me when they paid me back that they made the entry look like a proper patriotic society so that if people strayed in by accident, they would never know otherwise. That painting against the far wall, the one of King Henry the Eighth, cost five hundred pounds.”

Crispin nodded as she propounded the many merits of the entrance hall, only half listening, his mind completely absorbed with the idea that giving out interest-free loans was a very strange way for a woman, particularly a woman of questionable means, to employ her money. He was roused from this thought by the appearance of a somnambulant-looking steward. “I am looking for Kipper Norton,” Crispin announced, extending a silver coin toward the man. “He told me to meet him here.”

The steward nodded, then slowly moved his sleepy eyes to Sophie. “There is a charge for female nonmembers,” he told Crispin, who reached into his purse and extracted another silver coin.

“They did that so that when men choose to bring their wives or mistresses here, the other girls do not lose out,” Sophie explained as they followed the formal steward through a door. “I think it is a very wise idea.”

Crispin was newly struck dumb by this statement, as well as her subsequent account of how Judith and Delilah had decided to cover everything in red velvet because it seemed people spent more money in such surroundings. He wondered briefly if red velvet had the same, parching effect on men as rubies, and decided it did when he noticed that passing through the main red-velvet chamber—with all those men leering at Sophie—was giving him a mammoth thirst. Fortunately, he had regained his power of speech enough to order a tankard of ale by the time the sleepwalking steward had shown them into the dark corner, plush in red velvet, where Kipper Norton was making a close study of the décolletage belonging to a brightly painted blonde.

The steward cleared his throat, and Kipper looked up, confused. He squinted at them for a moment, an act of near impossibility given the way his eyes bulged out of his head, then recognition flashed across his face and he smiled gaily at Crispin. “Sandal, what a pleasure to meet you here.” His eyes moved to Sophie, and his smile broadened. “Glad to see you brought one of your own. I hate having to share.”

Only Sophie’s surprise at how much Kipper looked like a flounder, despite his thin red hair, kept her from explaining that she was not there in the capacity he had assumed. Whatever the cause of her silence, Crispin was grateful for it as he slid onto the bench on the other side of the table from Kipper and the blond woman, and motioned to Sophie to slide in next to him.

When they were seated, Kipper took them in, a sly smile spreading across his face. “She’s foreign, isn’t she?” he asked Crispin. “One of the ones that you brought back from France with you, right?”

Crispin saw his chance to continue her blissful silence and seized it. Before Sophie could reply, he was saying, “Yes, French. She can’t speak a word of English, or understand it either.” He drained the tankard and leaned confidentially across the table toward Kipper, upsetting a dish of sugared almonds. “And you know what they say about Frenchwomen.”

Sophie glowered at him. “Pompous caterpillar,” she gritted out under her breath. She had been having such a nice time during her first visit to the Worshipful Hall, despite his presence, but now he had ruined it.

“What did she say?” Kipper asked immediately, his eyes bulging even more than usual with innuendo. “Did she propose one of those French things? You know, that ‘Men Age a Troy’?”

Crispin was about to reply that she had actually requested a
tête-à-tête
with Kipper alone, when the murderous expression on Sophie’s face caught his voice. “No, not a
ménage à trois
. She said simply that my friend seemed nice.”

Kipper smiled fishily. “Tell her I am nice. Very nice. And very rich. My wife has pots of money.” He pantomimed a pot of money, eliciting only a glare from Sophie, but increased interest from the blond woman next to him.

Crispin leaned over to whisper in Sophie’s ear. “If you do not stop scowling this moment, I shall leave you alone with him. Is that clear? If it is, nod once, smile brightly, and coo something French sounding.”

“
Vous êtes un bastard
,” Sophie cooed through clenched teeth with a nod and a sweet smile.

“She says she will remember that,” Crispin translated. Then, noticing that the rekindled ministrations of the painted blonde upon hearing of Kipper’s pots of wealth threatened to occupy Kipper’s mind entirely, Crispin decided to proceed with his questions. “Kipper, I was wondering. Have you ever done any business with Dickie Tottle?”

Kipper rolled his fish eyes, trying to think. “Dickie Tottle? Never heard of him,” he said, popping a sugared almond into his mouth. He extended the bowl toward Crispin. “Try one. They are very good. A specialty of the club.”

“No thanks,” Crispin declined, frowning slightly. “It’s strange that you have never heard of him. He told me that you were one of his investors. Something about you giving him twelve hundred pounds for a new undertaking. That doesn’t sound like a sum to forget about easily.”