What an Earl Wants (12 page)

“The cork-brained popinjay?” Trixie looked at Jessica again.
“Clearly his mother was the imbecile in that union, although I never put much
store by Turner Collier’s ability to think much beyond his— No, don’t frown so,
Gideon, I’ll be good.”

Jessica bit back a smile. The dowager countess was so petite,
so beautiful, the very picture of a sweet and gracious lady. When she spoke as
she did now, it was rather like the surprise one felt when a child uttered a
naughty word. You really weren’t sure at first you’d heard correctly. A line
from an old nursery rhyme flitted through Jessica’s head:
And when she was good she was very, very good...and when she was
bad...

Trixie’s expression took on the attitude of interested
listener. “Now explain why this cheeky child is here. I’m not such a slow-top
that I don’t realize it has something to do with what we discussed
yesterday.”

It didn’t take long for Gideon to relate Jessica’s concerns
that the Society might approach Adam to take his father’s place in the devil’s
dozen, but the dowager countess quickly pooh-poohed any notion the Society was
still active.

“I won’t say it ended with Barry’s death, not immediately, but
it couldn’t have gone on for more than another year before straggling to a halt,
or I would have known.”

“Your grandson is of the opinion you know everything, your
ladyship, up to snuff on all suits, as it were,” Jessica said as she offered the
woman a small plate of iced cakes. Gideon had warned she’d have to give in order
to get, and she would do so now. “As I was promised as the guest of honor at one
of their ceremonies five years ago, I can only conclude he’s incorrect, and you
don’t know everything.” She raised her chin a fraction. “Or you’re lying.”

Trixie’s kohl-darkened eyes assessed Jessica again and then
slid to her grandson. “Linden, you said?”

“Yes, James Linden. Jessica’s late husband.”

The dowager countess swung her feet to the floor and sat up,
again skewering Jessica with a look. “By-blow of a baron who shall remain
nameless, invested with all the myriad vices of his father and the cunning of
his blowsy strumpet of a mother—perished of the clap, I believe, the pair of
them, and the baron’s innocent wife, as well, poor thing. Jamie Linden. Now
there’s a name I’d hoped never to hear again. Dead now? Wonderful. If you were
smart, you buried him upside down, so he couldn’t dig himself out, but only
closer to hell.”

“Actually, ma’am, we left him in the bed where he died, only
careful to first empty his pockets,” Jessica said, feeling more vindicated for
what she’d done then she’d ever had until this moment. “I have no idea what the
innkeeper did with the body.”

“
We?
You said ‘we’? No, don’t
answer that yet, we’ll get to it. Gideon, clear away this insipid tea and pour
us all some wine. Begin at the beginning, Jessica, if you please.”

“I’d rather not if you don’t mind, ma’am.”

“I
do
mind, most especially that
you insist upon calling me ma’am, as if I’ve one foot hovering over an open
grave. Perhaps it would help if you called me Trixie, as I believe we’re going
to be discussing things that could only be hindered by formality. Lord knows it
would help me. Ma’am?” She gave a delicate shudder of her slim shoulders.

Jessica bowed her head, concentrating on her hands, folded in
her lap. “Thank you...Trixie. But I’d still rather not.”

Gideon pressed a wineglass into her hands. “She’ll have it from
you one way or another, you know. Trixie? Who was Jamie Linden, other than some
anonymous baron’s bastard?”

“When I knew him? Thank you, pet.” She took the wineglass and
quickly downed half its contents. “No, the foul taste is still in my mouth, just
from saying his name. Who was Jamie Linden? I suppose that would depend on the
day of the week. Card shark, schemer, purveyor of pipe dreams too numerous to
enumerate and always with airs above his station. When riding high, he was
accepted on the fringes of society, as he always knew the location of the best
cockfights, the jockey who could be bribed to lace his mount with pepper to get
a good run—there was this one time he managed to have a live river eel shoved up
a stallion’s rump just before the race. Ran like the wind, pet, that horse did,
and if it hadn’t managed to expel the thing before the bets were settled, your
father would have pocketed a tidy purse.”

Jessica felt herself blushing. She had been the man’s wife. How
could she look at Gideon again and not see condemnation or, worse, pity in his
eyes?

“So Linden was one of my father’s contemporaries?”

Jessica could feel Gideon’s gaze on her, imagine him adding
figures in his head.

“Yes, but not a friend. Jamie Linden was your father’s man of
all work, Gideon,” Trixie said. “He would make arrangements, ease his way
whenever necessary. Provide the entertainment for their gatherings, as it were.
If the ceremonies did go on, I would imagine he continued to offer his services
as procurer.”

Jessica took a swallow of wine, as her mouth had gone quite
dry.

“You would
imagine,
Trixie?” Gideon
asked, his voice low and hard. “You’re still telling us you didn’t know? I think
Jessica’s right. Either you’ve lost your touch, knowing everything there is to
know, or you’re lying.”

“And you’re impertinent,” the dowager duchess told him sharply.
“All right. I may have...heard things. Five years, you said, dear? I suppose
that could be true. As I remember it, old Walter stuck his spoon in the wall
five years ago, so they would have needed to hunt up a replacement. Explaining
the investiture ceremony Jessica spoke of, you understand. Oh, don’t glare,
Gideon, I didn’t make up the rules!”

“What else do you expect me to do?” he asked angrily, and
Jessica bowed her head, attempted to make herself invisible if possible.

“I agree. It was all...terrible. And yes, I’ll admit I
suspected it was still going on five years ago, in its own haphazard way, not
nearly as efficient as when Barry was in charge. He had a true talent for
leadership, your father, much of it sadly wasted on feeding his myriad vices as
he eventually caught himself up in his own trap. Not all of them continued to
wear that damnable rose your father concocted, so you wouldn’t know their names.
If they still meet, they’re much more covert now, more of the members from a
generation not as familiar to me.”

“But perhaps with the requisite number still replenished with
eldest offspring, as Jessica suggests? And yet I was never approached.”

Jessica raised her head to look at Trixie when she didn’t
immediately answer Gideon’s question.

“They knew better than to dare come anywhere near you,” she
said at last, for a fleeting moment looking every day of her years. “I would
have destroyed them.”

“And Adam?” Jessica asked, her heart pounding.

Trixie retook her reclined position. “Yes, please, back to the
twit. He’d be the perfect candidate, actually. Devoted to his own pleasures, not
too sharp in his wits, although clearly with a high opinion of himself even if
everyone else refuses to see his brilliance. Easily coddled into most any
stupidity, led by his most intimate appendage, as it were, introduced to the
delights of the flesh as his birthright, told he was better than anyone,
privileged, untouchable. Heady stuff, especially for a twit. He’d do as a lesser
member—everyone can find a good use for a biddable idiot.”

Gideon sat down beside Jessica; she resisted the urge to reach
out, take his hand. What his grandmother was saying couldn’t be easy for him to
hear; it certainly wasn’t easy for her. “Lesser member? There are—were—degrees
of membership, even inside the devil’s dozen?”

“Everything has tiers, pet. And leaders. There were their other
interests to consider—our way of government being uppermost. Barry was very much
impressed by the French and their third state, the
tiers
état,
and I’m sure, had he lived, would have applauded them for
having the good sense to eventually separate their monarchs’ heads from their
shoulders.”

“There was a dislike for kings?” Gideon asked, sounding
somewhat surprised. Jessica decided he had a flair for playacting, and that
Trixie was only now getting to the part of her tale that interested him
most.

“Hatred would be a better term. Disgust, for another.
Hanoverian upstarts, beginning with the first George, who brought his odiferous
sauerkraut
and guttural language to the Crown,
followed by his forgettable son. And then Farmer George, our current mad king,
who lost us the American colonies. Barry didn’t live to see the posturing
buffoon who is destined to be the fourth George come into his full flower of
idiocy, but I can imagine his displeasure with the man. And for all government
save the one he and his acolytes would have erected in its place. Remember, pet,
your father died in 1789. The Bastille had just fallen. Passions were running
quite high throughout England, both in support of the French and in fear of the
same thing happening here. But that’s enough of that, and I’m sure it all died
with Barry.”

“They were planning their own revolution?”

“You’ll badger me until you get it all, won’t you? You’re a lot
like me in that regard. Very well. But then we will never speak of this again. I
mean that, Gideon, never again. Even two decades in the past, what your father
planned could come back to destroy the Redgraves. Sedition? Regicide? No, we
don’t speak of it.”

She held out her wineglass to be refilled, waiting until Gideon
had replenished it and handed it to her before speaking again. “Your father and
his cohorts were not the only ones to dream such dreams. Again, remember the
times.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité!
Pretty words
for the masses, opportunities for the ambitious. There were many hot-blooded
young men who looked to France and saw what they believed were great
opportunities if repeated here in England. Your father planned a lot of things.
He was young, yes, but as with Caesar’s Cassius, he was
ambitious.
He took what your grandfather began in the pursuit of
pleasure, and saw the possibilities for so much more.”

“But there were only the thirteen,” Jessica pointed out,
immediately wishing she hadn’t spoken. The dowager duchess was clearly unhappy
with this conversation.

“Yes, thirteen. But providing carefully selected invited
guests—there were so many guests, safe they believed, in their masks and
cloaks—with free and unbridled access to their every vice, their every twisted
appetite? Gathering those of weak moral fiber and yet with entry into every
corner of society, every door in government from the House of Commons to the
King’s Privy Council, corrupting them, thereby
owning
them? Think about that. Stupidly, unwittingly, they gave
Barry power over them all. It was a brilliant if distasteful strategy, I
suppose, as far it went. If I told you some of the names, which I will not, you
would be appalled. Sadly, these two decades later, some of them still occupy
positions of power.”

She took another sip of wine. “Barry saw in the French unrest
what Napoleon Bonaparte must have recognized several years later, knowing
someone
eventually had to rise from the ashes and take
the reins. Although the victories that would bring your father and his
handpicked minions into power would not be on the battlefield, but covert—and
more than faintly disgusting. I never wanted you to know any of this, Gideon.
But he was quite mad, your father. Brilliant, but quite mad. Could he have
succeeded? I sincerely doubt that, his appetite for opium would have brought him
down, eventually. But it became increasingly clear even to me, his own mother,
that he must soon be stopped, one way or another. We would have been ruined if
he failed, ruined if he succeeded. I both mourned and rejoiced the day he died,
almost welcoming the scandal that followed, as we had been saved from the most
damning scandal of them all.”

Jessica turned away as the dowager blinked back tears before
taking refuge in her wineglass once more.

The room was silent for a time, a long, uncomfortable time,
before Gideon spoke. “How many other members from my father’s time are still
alive?”

“One,” she said quietly. “With Turner gone now, too, just the
one.”

“Yes, but you’re forgetting those who took their places,”
Jessica said, her mind racing. “The eldest offspring. Why couldn’t one of them
be our killer, to protect his father’s memory, or to protect his own reputation
if word were ever to get out? And what about those guests Trixie spoke of—one or
more of them might also feel vulnerable. Your father’s Society was plotting the
overthrow of the monarchy, Gideon, for pity’s sake. The Society was still active
five years ago in some ways, I promise you that, although I can’t say it
functioned as it once had. It may still go on today, in one form or another. But
to be a member today would make it logical for anyone to believe there are still
plots against the government, and all while Bonaparte threatens to invade us.
That’s reason enough for a dozen murders.”

“Now you’re simply speculating, my dears, and rather wildly at
that. Without Barry, their leader was gone,” Trixie reminded them. “The
ceremonies, the masks, the orgies, the opium eating, I’m sure they went on. It
was that side of things that most attracted many of the members, as Barry well
knew. So, yes, I
know
they went on. But I was
assured by Ranald Orford himself, the rest of it quickly shriveled to
nothingness. Barry made them believe they were capable of anything. Without him,
they had to convince themselves, and that wasn’t possible. If they still meet,
it’s only to be naughty little boys, nothing more.”

“Naughty?” Jessica was instantly incensed. “My father was going
to turn me over to be used in some horrible ceremony.”