Vanity (10 page)

He approached the circle of intimates gathered around the king. The Prince of Wales was standing to one side, glowering and tapping one foot in obvious boredom. He loathed the court ceremonies that his father conducted with rigorous and punctilious order, and his expression brightened when he saw the earl.

“Ah, Philip, come to pay your respects, eh?” He offered his snuffbox. “Damnable waste of a morning this, don’t ye think?”

Philip Wyndham accepted a pinch from the royal snuffbox. “Thank you, sir.” He smiled at the corpulent young man whose face shone red beneath his elaborately powdered coiffure. “When Your Highness attains your majority, you will no doubt have your own establishment,” he said in soothing accents.

“Yes, and you may be damned sure that’ll see the end of my attendance at these damnable levees,” the prince declared
morosely, raising his quizzing glass to examine the assembled company.

Accepting this withdrawal of attention as dismissal, the Earl of Wyndham bowed low, took his leave of the prince, and approached the circle around the king, hoping to catch His Majesty’s eye.

George was listening to the Duke of Gosford. The king’s head was courteously inclined to one side to catch the elderly duke’s wheezing tones. “Quite so, my dear sir,” the king murmured every now and again. “Quite so, Gosford.”

Philip drew closer until he was standing just behind his father-in-law. When the king raised his head, he would be bound to see him.

The duke’s discourse died in a fit of coughing. He buried his face in a handkerchief, and the king considerately looked away and caught the slate-gray eyes of the duke’s son-in-law. “Wyndham, beautiful morning, what … what?”

“Indeed, sir.” Philip bowed low. “We must be grateful yesterday’s blizzard was no worse.”

“Oh, the princesses are quite delighted with the snow,” the king said genially. “They’re all for skating on the lake … plaguing their mother for permission.” A fond parent, he chuckled indulgently. “And how’s Lady Wyndham, recovered I trust from her lying-in, what … what?”

“She’s waiting on the queen this morning, I believe, sir.” Philip bowed low again.

“And the child … thriving, I trust?”

“Yes, sir. You are too kind.”

The king smiled a dismissal and the earl stepped backward. He offered his father-in-law a brief bow and a curt good morning. The man warranted no further attention. He was an old dodderer and had served his purpose. Once the marriage with Gosford’s daughter was celebrated, the Earl of Wyndham was assured of a place in inner court circles and had no further use for the duke’s connections.

He melted into the throng, aware of the eyes, some
speculative, some envious, that had watched his audience with the king, gauging its length and intimacy. It had been a very personal conversation, one that marked the Earl of Wyndham as one of the king’s favored courtiers.

Philip moved into a window embrasure and discreetly dabbed his forehead. It was hot in the room and his scalp itched beneath his wig. He adjusted the frills of his lace cravat and regarded the Prince of Wales still holding his place across the room. It was no secret that the prince caused his parents endless heartache with his intransigence and debauchery, but at least the king had a male heir. Unsatisfactory in his character, perhaps, but a strong male heir nevertheless. An unsatisfactory male heir was better than some mewling female brat.

An unconscious frown drew his thin eyebrows together, and one hand moved involuntarily to the small pocket in his waistcoat. His fingers brushed the silk pouch, feeling the shape of the tiny ring it contained. One of the three Wyndham rings. It had been slipped on his finger at birth—his to keep in trust for his own son.

Letitia would have to do better next time … if he could bring himself to cover her pallid, doughy body again. The woman revolted him. And even more so since the birth. She whimpered and sniveled whenever he came near her. He knew from the doctors that she hadn’t healed properly from the birth and was plagued with intermittent bleeding, but of course she was far too nice in her sensibilities to mention such a thing to her husband, who was presumably expected to divine from the air whether she was in a fit state to receive his advances.

He took snuff and debated whom he should approach next. The Duke of Merriweather would probably warrant cultivation. He had the king’s ear when it came to patronage.

As he moved away from the window, his eye caught that of a tall, elegant man in a turquoise velvet suit, standing in the doorway to the salon.

There was something about the man that raised Philip’s hackles. Something about the way he stood so negligently
surveying the room as if no one in it could have the power to engage his interest. Philip had seen Lord Rupert Warwick around in the last few months, an ever-present face but one who strangely never attempted to attract the attention of the king. He had his own friends among the most reckless and extravagant sets and was known to drink deep and play high at the gambling tables and to have an eye for the ladies that was generally reciprocated. But he was something of an enigma. It was generally held that he’d lived on the Continent until his arrival in London some months ago, but no one seemed to know much else about him. But he was personable, well-bred, and apparently wealthy enough to live as high as he pleased, and that was all that counted.

Lord Rupert continued to hold his eye, and Philip inclined his head in a small bow of acknowledgment that was immediately returned with a flickering smile. Philip turned away, frowning. There was a quality to that smile that disturbed him. It had a complicity to it, as if the man held some secret that he believed Philip shared. Which was patently absurd, since, apart from a brief introduction, he didn’t know the man from Adam.

Suddenly wearied of his attendance in the hot salon, the Earl of Wyndham made his way to the double doors leading into the antechamber. To his annoyance he found Lord Rupert Warwick ahead of him, standing in the doorway almost barring his exit.

“I give you good day, Lord Wyndham.”

“And I you, Warwick.” Impatiently, Philip moved to step around his accoster, but somehow Lord Rupert seemed still to be in his way.

“I trust Lady Wyndham is in good health,” Lord Rupert inquired, taking a delicate pinch of snuff. “And your daughter, of course.”

That smile flickered again over the well-shaped mouth, but the slate-gray eyes remained impassive, resting on the earl’s countenance. “Even daughters ensure the continuation of one’s line … and it’s to be assumed that where daughters lead, sons will follow.”

His smile broadened and he bowed again before Philip
could find a suitable response. “Excuse me, I see Alex Winterton trying to attract my attention.” And he strolled off, leaving the earl frowning in annoyance, wondering why he felt as if the man had been making mock of him and why he’d been left without a word to say for himself.

His exit now clear, the earl returned to the antechamber. Margaret, Lady Drayton stood by the window in a circle of eagerly attentive gentlemen. She plied her fan vigorously, and her high, trilling laugh could be heard clearly above the chatter that sounded like a rookery of starlings. The air, overheated from the fires and myriad candles, was heavy with perfume and pomade, overlaying the ripe odor of stale bodies, less than immaculate linen, and the richness of brocade, velvet, and silks stiffened with use.

Philip crossed the antechamber and joined the circle around Lady Drayton. She smiled at him over her fan, her heavily rouged cheeks startling against the white of her high-piled powdered coiffure, her china-blue eyes round beneath the thin arch of her plucked eyebrows. He noticed that she was wearing the emerald eardrops he’d given her after their last assignation. He didn’t recognize the silver fillet she wore in her hair and wondered sourly which of the incomparable beauty’s other admirers had been responsible for that. Maybe even the half-senile Viscount Drayton.

That ancient and unsavory nobleman, a footman in attendance, was sitting in a bath chair by the fire, nodding to himself and muttering, his wig askew, his linen spotted. It was common knowledge that he turned a blind eye to his wife’s lovers and opened his purse strings wide for her so long as she accommodated his own particular, and it was rumored somewhat deviant, needs. But Margaret had been educated in a King’s Place nunnery, and there was little she wouldn’t do in the realms of fleshly intercourse if the price was right.

She was still damnably desirable, though, Philip thought, his loins stirring as his gaze rested on her ripe bosom, two powdered white globes swelling from her décolletage. Her nipples would be rouged, he knew, and it
would take but a fingertip to expose them above the lace edging …

“La, my lord, but you’re drooling like a starving wolf,” trilled Viscountess Drayton, tapping his wrist playfully with her fan. “I do believe his lordship would like a bite.” She brushed the back of her hand carelessly over her breasts and laughed around the circle all of whom joined in, eager to participate in the mockery.

Philip flushed but hid his discomfort. “Indeed, my lady, when such lush fruit is on offer, a man must be but half a man to refuse the invitation to dine.”

“Bravo, my lord.” Laughing, the lady linked her arm through his. “Lud, but it’s monstrous hot in here. You may escort me to my carriage before I melt.”

“Before the paint runs,” murmured a gentleman sotto voce as the two moved off, the lady’s flowing silk saque billowing around her.

“Wicked, Carson!” The comment was accompanied with a rich, merry laugh.

Peter Carson turned, grinning. “But irresistible, Rupert.”

“Oh, I grant you that.” Rupert watched Lady Drayton and Philip Wyndham disappear into the farther chamber. “She is a veritable Toast.”

“Oh, most certainly,” his friend agreed. “But I’d be careful about dabbling in that pond, myself. It’s said she had to have a course of mercury not so long ago.”

“Calumny!” Rupert chided mockingly. “One of the High Impures with a dose of clap? Surely not.”

“I’ll lay odds Drayton gave it to her,” Peter said with his lazy grin. “The old goat’s been riddled with it for years.”

“A stiff price to pay for a title and fortune, even for such a one as Margaret,” Rupert observed, raising his glass to examine the doting viscount, still nodding beside the fire, apparently unaware of his wife’s departure.

“Life’s short, my friend, best to make it as sweet as possible,” Peter said easily. “On which subject, do you play
at Lady Buckinghamshire’s tonight? It’s said the stakes are to be a hundred guineas at the faro table.”

“Worth the visit, then,” Lord Rupert observed. “Yes, you may look for me there, Peter.” He bowed and moved off in the wake of the Earl of Wyndham and Lady Drayton.

Philip still physically resembled the twelve-year-old boy of eighteen years ago, although the angelic golden curls were concealed beneath his wig. But his physique was still willowy, his countenance smooth, his eyes clear, with that ingenuous glow that had deceived so many. Only his twin could see the cold flicker of calculation beneath the openness of his expression, the occasional cruel twist to the wide, full mouth. He could see them because he knew them. He knew his brother almost as well as he knew himself; it was a knowledge that ran with the blood in his veins. They were like two sides of a playing card, only the reverse image was strangely distorted.

Rupert moved aside into an alcove from where he could watch his brother relatively unobserved. He often found himself doing this even when it would serve no useful purpose. It was a form of obsession, watching his brother’s lips move, watching the way he walked, smiled, exerted his charm. Occasionally, Rupert could see a resemblance to Gervase in the way Philip tilted his head, the upward sweep of his lashes, and always in the slate-gray eyes that were his own. But whenever he saw that resemblance, he would be swept with a crimson tide of rage so powerful, it made his hands shake and brought black spots dancing before his eyes.

In the dark reaches of the night he still heard Gervase’s scream on that long-ago cloudless summer day. And he heard Philip’s taunting voice.
“You tripped him. I saw you.”
He felt again his own desperate helplessness as his twin said,
“They’ll believe me. They always believe me.”

And they had, of course. As they had always been ready to believe the worst of young Cullum, who was always in trouble, sometimes of his own making and sometimes not. He’d become accustomed to it and accepted the earl’s brutal beatings with a philosophical stoicism. But this had been
different. The accusations had not at first been open. How could one accuse a boy of deliberately murdering his brother? Philip said he was sure it had been an accident, that Cullum had been playing a game when he’d tripped up Gervase. Of course Cullum couldn’t have known that Gervase would go over the cliff when he lost his balance. Cullum would never had done such a stupid thing if he’d thought.

But the whispers had grown and the stares had become more accusing. He couldn’t walk into the village without feeling the eyes on his back, hearing the forest fire of whispers as he passed. And in his own house it was worse. Everyone looked at him askance. His father had beaten him with such savagery that even now he carried the memory in his nerve endings, but worse than the physical pain had been the contemptuous rejection that had banished him to dark corners of the house, where he lurked, ignored, while Philip basked in the golden warmth of approval. Philip, who had tripped Gervase. Only no one would believe that truth; to speak it would bring worse punishment.

But Philip was the younger twin by two minutes, and Gervase’s death had left Cullum heir to the earldom. His father had raged at this, had screamed at lawyers when they’d told him nothing could be done to change the laws of primogeniture. Philip could not be his heir while his elder brother lived. So his elder brother, in a black despair, had removed himself.

Twelve-year-old Cullum Wyndham, no longer able to endure the taunts and the cruelties, seeing himself through his father’s eyes—the unworthy and unwanted son—almost believing himself now that his twin’s version of the accident was the truth, had disappeared one day. His clothes had been found on the beach. It was said in the village that the guilt had been too much for him. And the Earl of Wyndham had rejoiced in the heir he wanted.