What a Gentleman Desires (15 page)

Somewhere behind them, Piffkin chuckled.

“You have something to add, Piffkin?” Valentine asked.

The man put down the small black leather bag he’d carried into the room with him. “Me, sir? No, sir, nothing, not a thing. Everything’s
perfect.
”

Daisy could feel her cheeks reddening again as Valentine placed his hand on the small of her back and ushered her into the dressing room, closing the door behind them.

He looked at her for a long time, various emotions coming and going on his face, before he finally spoke again.

“I read your journal. Here, you should have it back.”

“Oh,” Daisy said quietly, looking at the thing as he held it out to her. She took it, quickly slipped it into the pocket of her gown. It was all she had left of her sister. “That...that seems so long ago. I mean, that I gave it to you.”

“I’m sorry, Daisy. I’m so, so sorry.”

She nodded, unable to speak.

He took her in his arms, pressing her cheek against his chest. “You know she’s gone, don’t you? You know we’re not going to find her.”

“I know. I’ve probably always known. He killed her, didn’t he? She was so lonely, she always needed to be loved, protected. He lied to her, tricked her. He lured her here, and then after he...and then they killed her.”

She looked up at Valentine, seeing him through a veil of tears. “Do you know how much I long to scream? That’s silly, isn’t it? But I long to just be alone somewhere I can scream and scream and...” She bit her lips together between her teeth, and shook her head, knowing it would aid nothing to lose control. “Why, Valentine? Why her? Why anyone? Is the world really this cruel, this twisted?”

“I don’t know how to answer that, Daisy. I wish I did.”

“My father would say we must abhor the sin but love the sinner. That seemed so easy in theory, even reasonable. When Rose and I were children, we didn’t know what real evil is. Not us, and probably not Papa, either. I only know I can’t forgive it or those who perpetuate it. Does that make me terrible?”

He kissed her forehead. “That makes you human, Daisy. Evil people, truly evil people like those in the Society...they’re not human. They still walk on two legs, but they’re not human any longer, having banished humanity from their souls. They’re self-created monsters. We’re fighting a war against monsters.”

“But...but can they win?”

“No,” Valentine said firmly. “I won’t believe that. You know I was with Charfield this morning. And I saw him for what he is, beneath his evil, beneath the mask he chose to hide behind. And do you know what I saw?”

Daisy shook her head.

“Fear. Cowardice. A willingness to betray his comrades in a heartbeat in order to save his own neck. Kate’s fiancé believed the man he caught at Redgrave Manor chose death over betrayal, but he was wrong. He chose a quick death over the hangman, that’s all, and took the coward’s way out. That’s how we’ll defeat them, Daisy, through their greed, their ambition, their evil and, at the heart of it all, their cowardice, as they turn on one another, destroy one another.”

She managed a wan smile. “Because, in the end, good always triumphs over evil?”

Valentine grinned. “And because we’re smarter than they are.”

Daisy lifted one eyebrow.

“More determined?”

The other eyebrow went up.

“Luckier?”

“We’d better hope so,
Master Valentine,
” she said. “Thank you, by the way. I promise not to go all weepy and missish on you again.”

He ran a fingertip down her cheek, then watched intently as one escaped curl all but wrapped itself around his finger. “You’re never missish.”

“That’s true. I’m perfect,” she said, this time smiling in earnest.

Valentine frowned, and looked toward the door leading to his bedchamber. “Why does the idea you and Piffkin have cried friends make me suddenly nervous?”

“I’m sure I have no idea,” Daisy told him, stepping out of his light embrace and taking up a seat on the very edge of the slipper chair in the corner of the room. “Now, what do we do next? I’m already convinced my plan of gathering up Lady Caroline and the children and all of us then simply racing hotfoot away from here holds no immediate appeal for you, although my vote is we flee and return another day. Only please tell me you aren’t thinking of doing anything too heroic. And by that, I mean heroically dangerous.”

“I need you all safely away. Far away,” he said quietly. “If I don’t present myself in the drawing room before dinner, they’ll be after us in a heartbeat. Therefore, you are now commissioned General-in-Charge of removing everyone to the inn—it’s less than a mile so the children can manage it, and Piffkin knows the way. I will give you the time to do that, and be put in a hired coach that will head for Redgrave Manor. Once I’m certain I’ve given you enough time to be safely gone, I’ll excuse myself via one means or another, and make my way to the inn, taking up Charfield’s not-too-shabby bit of horseflesh and employing an alternate route to the Manor, just in case I’m followed. We’ll all meet again there in two days. Simple, yes?”

“I suppose so. But please explain the part where you
simply
excuse yourself from the drawing room.”

“I would, if I knew that part,” he told her, putting out his hand to assist her to her feet. “Now go back to the nursery, Daisy. As you said, you’ll soon be missed.”

“In a moment. First I think we have to go over your brilliant plan one more time. With one minor change. Or did you really think you could be rid of me so easily? Oh, and then I think you could probably kiss me again.”

* * *

“G
OOD
EVENING
,
C
HARLES
,” Valentine called out as he entered the drawing room before the first gong had rung for dinner, wishing to speak to the man alone. “Will it just be us two again this evening, now that the esteemed Mr. Charfield has been called back to London? Quite exciting that, I have to tell you. A half-dozen nattily-clad soldiers charging toward us. Frappton looked guilty as sin when they clapped on those irons, although hanging him might prove problematic—with the noose slipping up and over his nonexistent chin. Or is it still the chopping block for treason?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Mailer replied absently, pouring himself a glass of wine. His hand shook, and the rim of the decanter almost danced against the rim of the glass. “Six of them, you said, and a coach? That...that sounds excessive.”

“An impressive escort, definitely. Rather like an honor guard. Or at least a guard of some sort. But enough of our absent friend. You didn’t deny we’ll be boring ourselves spitless for a third interminable evening. Please say it isn’t so.”

Mailer seemed to remember he was Valentine’s host. “No, no, I assure you, we’ll still be a jolly enough group. Only the two of us for dinner here, I’m afraid, but then we’ll move on to the real adventure I’ve been promising you.”

Valentine sat down and crossed one long leg over the other at the knee, the picture of an unsuspecting man at his ease. “Promising, yes. Providing, no. Charfield told me about his evening. A servant girl? I believe your idea of entertainment is thus far underwhelming, Charles. Tell me more about this
party
you’re so certain will make up for the delay. You may begin, if you please, by explaining why I must travel to it. Is it even your affair at all? I had assumed you were in charge.”

Come on, come on, Post. Let me hear how you plan to coerce me, use me. Even if now you simply plan to kill me. Please, take your time. And while we natter on, Piffkin and Daisy are already removing your wife and kiddies to safety.

Mailer seemed more than willing to expound. After all, what dastardly villain doesn’t enjoy boasting of his nastiness, especially to his prospective victim, who wouldn’t survive to repeat any of it?

The man took up a seat on the facing couch after placing a glass of wine on the table in front of Valentine, who slanted the contents a quick look, half surprised the contents weren’t fizzing.

“I told you about the conversations, our determination to change the face of England forever, and you’ll learn more of the
how
of that as we meet with the others. An England with the land and money and power in the correct hands, brilliant hands, and not simply passed on by something as chancy as birth order. We aid the emperor in attaining his goals, and in turn he aids us in achieving ours.”

Valentine picked a bit of lint from his breeches. “It’s called
quid pro quo,
Charles. I just recently learned that somewhere. Working with men who share our enlightened view of the world. I admit this interests me, as I am not a man without ambition, yet considered a near child by my older brothers, and not recognized as a man of worth. You and I, Charles, we’re kindred spirits, and too long denied.”

“All that will change. All of it.
You
will be the master of Redgrave Manor and all that goes with it. My cursed brother will be applying to
me
for an allowance. We have the emperor’s word on that.”

“Yes, yes. But I must admit I’m more intrigued at the moment by the prospect of this
entertainment
you’ve hinted at so broadly. Three days without an outlet for my passions thanks to you—I could be a monk, for God’s sake. The
outlets
will be prostitutes, I imagine. You’re certain they’re clean? So far, Charles, the only thing worse than cooling my heels here could be returning to London with a dose of the clap.”

Mailer laughed. He seemed to have located his bravado again, if not his courage. “Oh, they’re clean. My woman sees to that every time. And willing, most of them, eager to indulge your every fantasy. I like the unwilling ones myself. Whores only play the parts, but the unwilling ones? That’s where the true pleasure lies. Pleasure the like of which you’ve never known in the tame brothels of Piccadilly. Those will come later, but for tonight, with not all of us able to be in attendance, we make do with the whores. They’re all quite convenable. What’s your appetite? Pain? Pleasure? Men? Women? Both at once? Watching? Charfield likes to watch. Looks the fool at times, standing over some writhing Cyprian performing for him, panting and drooling and using himself like a bloody pump handle. I like blondes, myself.
True
blondes. Sweet and silky. Like licking iced cakes.”

Valentine was amazed he’d yet to leap across the table and choke the man with his own cravat. “You’re describing an orgy, Charles,” he said disdainfully. “I’m not a performer at Astley’s.”

Again, Charles Mailer laughed. Valentine longed to never hear that laugh again.

“Ah, a shy one. Many are, at first. Some always. They never show their faces. Everything else, you understand, but not their faces.” There was that laugh again. He sat forward, cupping his wineglass between his pudgy fingers. “Here’s the thing, my friend. Have you ever heard talk of Dashwood’s Hellfire Club? Not that his was the only one, but your dormitory mates must have whispered about it at school. Met in a cave, the way I heard it, held unholy rites and diddled the naked women draped in their laps while spouting poetry and politics and drinking themselves senseless. Virgin sacrifices some say, along with plans to overthrow the king, but no one could ever prove it.”

“I know what a hellfire club was, Charles, and never believed the half of what I heard. So now you’re telling me you worship Satan? What? Dress up like horned devils and drink goat blood, dance naked under the moon with your cocks dangling like undercooked sausages, that sort of nonsense?”

“But there’s a reason for it all, don’t you see? Rutting gives us strength, the ancient Greeks and Romans—one of the two, at least—knew that. And...and it creates the most intimate
bond
between us that can’t be broken. For others—not you, God knows not you—who share our dreams and interests, we offer pleasure for favors. Like...like Charfield’s man—Fratby, was it? A night with us and he’d do anything we asked, just so he could return for more pleasure. Do you see now, do you understand now?”

Valentine stood up, wanting to distance himself from the wine, which might be drugged, and from his thoughts, that ran back to his own father and grandfather performing such rites with the Society, using those rites to gather a small army of highly placed traitors. He supposed it had been so since the beginning of time, and might always be so—sex as a lure, and then as a weapon. How many empires had risen or fallen, not because of a Cleopatra or an Aphrodite, or even Homer’s Helen of Troy, but because a man felt some overpowering need to feed his twisted belief in his own powers?

His mother, his grandmother, Daisy’s sister and how many countless more were there, would there be, if the Society wasn’t stopped? Women used to bolster a man’s opinion of himself, women subjected to all manner of horrors and physical degradation, so that the men could feel powerful. Women abused, even killed, employed as tools to seduce and even blackmail other men into helping the Society. And, if the man’s ambition led to disaster, it was always the women left with the blame.

No wonder his grandmother heartily despised men.

And yet, in this incarnation, the leader of the Society was a woman. How would Trixie react to that, once she was told?

But Mailer was waiting for an answer.

“Thank you, Charles, but no. If you’d told me this at the outset, I wouldn’t be here at all. Hellfire club? I wouldn’t so lower myself as to...” He turned back to face his host, who was looking concerned, nearly frightened. Clearly what they’d planned for him was planned for later, at this so-called
party
. Mailer must be afraid he’d failed, and there were punishments for failure. “Masks, you said? No one would know who is whom?”

Mailer hopped to his feet. “Yes, yes, masks. And...and capes. Here, let me show you.” He rushed to a wooden chest beneath one of the windows, only to return holding up a large, vile green head fashioned to resemble a scaled serpent with a flat, diamond-shaped forehead and red forked tongue, a similar green scale-designed silk cloak over his arm. “There, see the eye holes? You’d be looking through those, just as if you
were
the snake.” He used both hands to move the mask from side to side. “Sliding and slithering, even biting your way through a sea of bare, perfumed flesh. I designed it for you myself. Isn’t it ingenious?”