Vixen in Velvet (18 page)

He remembered the way she’d stood rapt with the painting so many others had shunned.

He remembered the silk and lace and ribbons and the warmth of her body in his arms. He remembered the low, delicious murmur of perfect Parisian French when she’d thanked him and the enticing hint of Paris in her otherwise flawless English speech. He remembered her scent, simple and fresh and utterly beguiling.

“I noticed them, Theaker and his friend,” she went on. “They seemed to be with the others though somewhat apart. Obviously they were gentlemen. If the Mystery Woman was hovering in the background, looking for a way to get to Swanton, she might have noticed them and approached them. Or they might have noticed her.”

Lisburne dragged himself back to reality and the infuriating truth. A beautiful summer night ruined because of Theaker and Meffat. When he got his hands on them, he’d kill them. Slowly.

“Since she’s young and attractive, they wouldn’t hesitate to approach,” he said. “Though probably not if she’d had the child with her. It’s hard to say. It’s certainly possible that they encouraged her to include the child this night, as a heartrending scene prop.”

They were cunning enough to think of such a thing. Theaker was, in any event. And if, instead of creating a complete hoax, they’d merely leapt at the chance to help the woman embarrass Swanton, was it unsporting to kill them on general principles?

“I can imagine the crowd about Swanton intimidating her,” Leonie said. “She might have felt desperate, but unsure how to approach him. And if she seemed vulnerable, these sound like the sort of men who’d approach, thinking she was easy prey.”

She nodded, satisfied with this possible scenario, and the flowers sprouting from her head bounced, an incongruously happy movement. “I knew I needed to follow them,” she said. “Then, when I saw her get into the hackney and not seem alarmed because another man was already inside, I was sure they were all in it together, whatever it was.” She smoothed her gloves. “Yes, that’s better.”

“All sorted, then?” he said.

She looked up at him.

He smiled. “You’ve neatly narrowed the harrowing scene and its hundred possible interpretations into two lines of inquiry. I can picture the ledger in your mind—or perhaps, when you get home, you’ll make a ledger page. One column for Theory A. One column for Theory B.”

“Somebody,” she said, “has to be the organized one. Somebody has to keep her feet on the ground.”

“I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know.”

H
er house was dark when they arrived. Lisburne found this less than reassuring.

“Where are the servants?” he said, as she unlocked the private door at the rear of the building.

“In bed,” she said. “I try not to make them wait up for me.”

He couldn’t imagine how she would undress herself without a maid’s help. Probably two maids. But then his mind started exploring the process of undressing her, and that led to his exploring the ways he could assist.

He wiped that train of thought from his mind.

There was no point in indulging the fantasy. It would only add to his frustration. The undressing wouldn’t happen tonight. Or ever, if he didn’t mend matters.

Not all the charm in the world would win her over after this disastrous night.

“One of them will have to be roused,” he said. “You need to eat something.”

“I can find food belowstairs,” she said. “I’m used to looking after myself, you know. We moved to this grand building only a few months ago. In the past we made do with only a housemaid. There was a time, in fact, when we hadn’t any servants, and looked after ourselves.”

“If you go downstairs in your present state, you’ve an excellent chance of stumbling and breaking your neck,” he said. “The odds of your survival improve if you go upstairs, holding the rail firmly. I’ll wake somebody and have them assemble a meal of some kind from the larder.” He waved at her. “Go.”

“Fenwick might be awake,” she said. “He’s not fond of early bedtimes. He didn’t grow up in an orderly world.”

“I’ll find him,” Lisburne said.

The building was a tall one, but like many others in London, it was narrow. Buildings of this type tended to adopt the same layout. He knew enough, in any event, to envision the servants’ quarters here as a good deal smaller than those in his town house in the Regent’s Park. True, he never ventured belowstairs, because the master of the house simply didn’t, and violating this rule would throw any self-respecting set of servants into a tizzy. A household was a delicate and complicated mechanism. Tizzies could be disastrous.

All the same, he had a clear image in his mind of the floor plan. He understood each of his houses. He knew who worked where and what they did and what it cost. He’d lived abroad, but that didn’t mean he’d abandoned his property and those who worked for him. With rank, power, and wealth came responsibility. That was one of the first lessons his father had taught him.

Somebody had to be organized. Somebody had to keep his feet on the ground. Somebody had to take charge, ready or not.

A short time later

T
he Marquess of Lisburne had made sandwiches. For
her
.

Leonie stared at the tray in his hands, then at his face, wondering if she’d fallen asleep and entered a dreamland of marvels and miracles.

“The boy was half asleep, and I could understand almost nothing of what he said,” Lisburne said. “I know several languages, but Cockney is not among them. I stumbled about the place on my own. I found half a loaf of bread and ham and cheese and mustard. I found a very good bottle of wine. I know how to open a bottle of wine. I even know how to make a sandwich.”

He set the tray down on the table.

She hadn’t yet made it to her dressing room to undertake the tedious process of undressing, beyond discarding her mantilla. She hadn’t advanced beyond the sitting room. Entering it, she’d seen one of Sophy’s notebooks on a table. Leonie had opened it and looked at the so-familiar handwriting. And she wept. But only for a moment. She was happy for her sister. For both sisters. Truly. They’d fallen in love and the men had married them, in spite of finding out they were Dreadful DeLuceys as well as Noirots, the DeLuceys’ French counterparts. That was miraculous and wonderful. They were happy. She wanted her sisters to be happy.

Her trouble was, she was tired, and the night had been difficult and discouraging, and she hadn’t eaten, and so yes, she was . . . emotional.

She knew all that. She’d pulled herself together.

Then he’d walked through the door, carrying sandwiches he’d made for her with his own aristocratic hands.

At that moment, she gave up fighting and fell in love with him.

“I hope you’re meaning to join me,” she said as crisply as she could. “You can’t possibly expect me to eat all that.”

“I intended for you to invite me,” he said. “I’m famished. Unlike Swanton, I’m crudely lacking in delicate sensibilities and unable to live on
feelings
.” He transferred the plates and glasses and bottle to the table from the tray, leaned the tray against the nearest wall, and set about serving.

He took Marcelline’s chair, not quite opposite, but not beside Leonie, either.

“Eat,” he said. “I slaved over this meal.”

“You’re obsessed with food,” she said.

“You work too hard to skip meals,” he said. “You need your strength. The girls need your strength. I need your strength. We’ve a mystery to solve, and we need to do it quickly.” He raised his wineglass. “But not tonight. Tonight we calm our turbulent spirits and sustain our bodies with food and drink. Tomorrow we go on the hunt.”

“We,” she said.

“We both have a problem,” he said. “It’s in our best interests to solve it together. I’ll never solve it with Swanton. I need your brain. The one that narrowed our choices to two. That one. I love that brain.”

Her heart skipped. Twice. She raised her glass. “To justice, then,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Tonight, just us.”

D
isturbingly enough, it was only the two of them. Disturbing because Lisburne could feel her sisters’ absence. He wasn’t a fanciful man. This feeling had nothing to do with sensing anybody’s spirit in the house. It was the little signs about the sitting room: an open notebook whose handwriting was feminine, but not hers . . . a sketchbook that must belong to the Duchess of Clevedon . . . three chairs at the table . . . odds and ends betokening other personalities. The room itself had been arranged for three people.

This sense of somebody missing troubled him, but while they ate, he kept the talk to easy channels. Fenwick was a good choice. Leonie was teaching him, Lisburne learned, and the boy was a quick learner. His speech had already improved, she said, and he had learned the alphabet as well as how to write his name. He could recognize a fair number of words, especially on printed materials. He’d advanced remarkably, though she’d been able to work with him at odd times and only for a few weeks. But when he was tired or excited, she said, the Cockney consonants and vowels and slang crept back, and yes, it was difficult to discern his language’s relationship to English.

“Have you any idea what possessed your sister to pluck him from the streets and bring him home?” he said.

“Sophy decided that so much criminal intelligence would be far too dangerous let loose in the streets, and much more useful to us,” she said.

“I’ve only ever seen him open doors for customers,” he said as he refilled their glasses.

“He has a strong affinity for horses and an extensive knowledge of carriages,” she said. “He makes friends with all the grooms and coachmen and hackney drivers. We gain a great deal of useful information that way. His former associates and other connections have helped us more than once already with certain problems. And our ladies seem to like him. Some have made a pet of him. But no, as you seem to be wondering, we don’t make it a habit to rescue boys from the streets. We chose to put our efforts into women.”

More than two years’ effort . . . which a pair of aristocrats had undone in minutes.

He needed to make it right. Which meant he needed to get his head clear first. He needed to think.

They’d finished eating, and he hadn’t any excuse for lingering. It was past time he left.

He rose, meaning to make his adieus, but he put it off, again. Because she seemed so utterly alone, sitting at the table meant for three. He could so easily picture the three heads—brunette, blonde, and red—bent together to share confidences, complaints, jokes.

And so he looked about him and said, “Please tell me you’ve someone living with you besides the servants.”

“Selina Jeffreys has moved in, at Clevedon’s insistence,” she said. “You haven’t seen her because she’ll have gone to bed hours ago.”

“I should have thought Matron would be more suitable,” he said. “An older woman.”

“As a chaperon?” She lifted an eyebrow. “I’m not a lady. Shopkeepers don’t require chaperons.”

“Perhaps not, but most women have a man about the place, for safety, if nothing else.”

“My sisters and I are not most women,” she said. “You sound like Clevedon. He wants me to move to Clevedon House. Can you imagine?”

He could. It would be the proper, not to say wise, thing to do.

It would be deuced inconvenient.

“I should have a footman dogging my steps every time I left the house, as Marcelline does,” she said. “I don’t know how she tolerates it. But then, she’s been ill, and not entirely herself lately. In any case, I know it’s only a lure to get me away from here. He wants us to stop working at the shop. He has other plans for us. I’m not . . . ready.”

Lisburne thought, and it took some thinking, because women in his world didn’t work, and he found it difficult to perceive her as a woman not of his world. Whoever had had charge of her upbringing had brought her up as ladies were brought up. She was a lady. It was there in her speech, her manner, her walk. It wasn’t acting. There was no mask to slip.

Yet she wasn’t a lady.

He walked about the room, admiring the collection of prints hanging on the walls. A dozen beautifully colored French fashion plates. And, surprisingly, a set of Robert Cruikshank’s satirical prints. Each dealt with fashion excesses and absurdities.

“You’d be bored, I suppose,” he said. “With nothing to do. When you didn’t grow up in that way, it must seem an empty life. Oh, this is brilliant.” He paused in front of a print titled
A Dandy Fainting or—an Exquisite in Fits
. Cruikshank had set the scene in an opera box. The images were hilarious, the speech balloons equally so. Lisburne couldn’t help laughing.

She rose and moved to stand beside him. “I think the gentlemen are so sweet.”

“ ‘Mind you don’t soil the dear’s linnen,’ ” he read. “Says another, ‘I dread the consequence! That last Air of Signeur Nonballences—has thrown him in such raptures’— Ha ha! I see myself. And Swanton, of course.”

“You are exquisite, beyond a doubt,” she said. “We may blame Polcaire, yet the result is the same. The print pokes fun and makes them seem precious and effeminate. But it exaggerates greatly for comic effect. The reality is rather different. So many of the dandies I’ve encountered are manly men—quite as
virile
as Lord Swanton, certainly.”

He looked at her. She was looking at the print and smiling.

Her spirits had risen, clearly. He’d done the right thing in making her take food and drink. They’d cleared the plate of sandwiches and emptied the wine bottle.

Now he must do the intelligent thing and go home.

“It would seem I’ve done my job,” he said. “You no longer bear the smallest resemblance to the poor, fainting dandy. Still, you must get some sleep, else you won’t be much good to me tomorrow—and you ought to expect me first thing.”

“Noonish, you mean,” she said.

“Thereabouts, yes.” He looked about the room for his hat.

“You can leave the tray and dirty dishes and cutlery for the maid to deal with,” she said. “I’m aware that gentlemen assemble their own sandwiches on special occasions. However, I strongly doubt your aristocratic nerves can withstand the shock of clearing away and washing up.”