Wicked Becomes You (3 page)

Gerard looked up. “What—Alex!” He started to rise, then caught himself. “You’re back! We had no idea!”

“Neither did I,” said Alex. “A sudden decision when I reached Gibraltar. The whole place reeks of blood pudding—brought the motherland to mind.”

In fact, he’d received several telegrams during his stop there: two outraged screeds from his sisters, and a half-dozen cautions from friends who had seen Christopher Monsanto dining in Buenos Aires with the Peruvian trade minister. It seemed that the Yank now had his overbearing eye on Alex’s contracts with the Peruvian government.

The thought seemed to add weight to his exhaustion. He would probably regret not having turned back for Lima at once.

“Well.” Gerry was making a swift, critical inspection, his gaze raking Alex from head to toe. “I must say, this is a splendid surprise.”

As always, the inspection grated. As always, Alex produced a smile. “Will I live?” he asked. “Or does the deathbed draw nigh?”

His brother had the grace to redden. “You look whole enough. Do sit, then.”

Alex picked up an armchair on his way across the carpet.

“Careful,” Gerry said sharply. “That’s heavy.”

Sweet Christ. Alex dropped the chair in front of the desk and took his seat. “It weighs no more than a ten year old,” he said. “Really, Gerry, has it escaped your notice that I outstrip you by a head?” Since his fourteenth birthday, he’d been outrunning and outfighting his brother in any number of arenas. But if he picked up a toy poodle, Gerry would probably feel the need to call out a warning.

“Bulk, not height,” Gerry said critically. “Bulk is what matters.”

Alex eyed his brother’s ever-expanding gut. “Yes, I suppose that’s one view of it.”

“You look as if you could use a meal. And some sleep.”

He made a one-shouldered shrug. “Writing something, were you?”

“Ah . . . yes.” Gerard fingered the corner of the page. “Speech for tomorrow. This nonsense with the Boers . . .” He sighed. “Half the Lords wants a war.”

“How novel.”

Frowning, his brother peered at him. “Actually, Alex, we fought in the Transvaal in ’81.”

Gerry had never had an ear for irony. “Did we? Never a dull moment, then.”

The frown was slow to clear. “Mm, yes. When did you arrive, then? Have you seen the twins yet?”

Had Alex not been listening for it, he might have missed the note of anxiety flavoring this last question. Gerry did not know, then, that the twins had already informed him about the Cornwall estate. “Not yet, no.”

“They’ll be over the moon to see you, then. Worry about you terribly.”

“Still?” He’d hoped that having children would redirect their focus, but his siblings seemed to have a marvelous capacity for multidirectional anxiety.

He reached out and retrieved Gerry’s pen, flipping it through his fingers. The tortoiseshell was second rate, a poor imitation of Chinese loggerhead, probably from Mauritius. It was exactly the sort of product that Monsanto, until now, had specialized in trading.

From the periphery of his vision, he saw Gerry’s fingertips come together into a steeple. This was the sign of imminent moralizing. Alex set down the pen and smiled.

“You can’t blame them,” his brother said. “You would not believe the rumors we hear about you.”

“Oh, I might,” said Alex.

Gerry took no note of this comment. “Listen, hell,” he continued in disgust. “Read, more like. The bloody newspapers are full of it! Dreck masquerading as financial news. And what do you expect? That spectacle with the showgirl—I’m surprised you weren’t prosecuted.”

Showgirl? Dimly, Alex recalled an acquaintance in New York twitting him over something along these lines. Bizarre. Some of these stories he started himself; his notoriety usefully eliminated most of the tedious social obligations to which he otherwise would be bound. But the showgirl belonged to that sizeable group of rumors that other people were kind enough to fabricate for him. Had he paid these faceless benefactors, they could not have served him better.

“Disgraced her, did I?” He was curious despite himself.

“I don’t know how else to describe such behavior in public!”

In public, no less. That did not sound impressive so much as stupid. How typical of Gerard to believe it of him. “Yes, well, the lung power,” Alex said with a shrug. “Foolish of me to underestimate her. She said she was a contralto, but to be honest with you, I think her range goes higher. Perhaps she’d lacked the proper . . . tutelage.”

Gerard made a scornful noise. “Is that meant to shock me?”

“No. If my aim was to entertain people, I’d have gone into the theater.”

No doubt Gerard’s glare made his soft, wheezing opposition in the Lords cower and tremble. Once or twice, in their childhood, it had made Alex tremble, too. Then Alex had mastered it himself. In his experience, it also worked well on foreign trade boards and corporate men desperate for investment. Paired with a smile, women fell before it like dominos—although, alas, he’d never tried it on a showgirl. They generally preferred coins to smiles, whereas Alex used money to buy goods; he did not buy people.

At any rate, the glare was useful. It also strained the eyes. “You’re going to give yourself an aneurysm,” he said mildly.

Gerard reached up to rub his brow. “Tell me this. Do you really think I waste my breath out of priggishness?”

The silence wanted an answer. Christ. Did they have to do this
every time
he came home? “No,” Alex said. “I think you waste it out of stubbornness.” Had it fallen to his family, Alex would have joined the church. The world was changing; grain from the Americas, meats and wools from the Continent, had sliced into the profitability of English agriculture. But the Ramseys still fared very well, and no son of Lord Weston, his father had often informed him, would dirty his hands in trade. In other words: the Ramseys would cling to the past and ignore the present so long as they could afford it.

Even as a boy, Alex had found this philosophy absurd. He’d spent his entire childhood buried in the country—for his own good, they’d said; for the sake of his health. He’d had no intention of hiding from the world as a man.

“You may call it whatever you like,” Gerard said. “Stubbornness or stupid optimism, I don’t even know. But I am certain of one thing: you keep leading this bohemian lifestyle, you’re bound to pay for it one day. Cross the wrong man and you’ll have a bullet in your brain. And in the meantime, it’s damned embarrassing for
us
.”

Alex rubbed his eyes. Dry as sand. Perhaps, in the first years out of Oxford, he’d derived an idle amusement in scandalizing stuffed shirts—but even then, he’d done it only by happy accident, never as a deliberate goal. “The bit about the showgirl is rubbish,” he said. “I don’t misbehave in public, Gerry. It’s bad for business.”

Gerard snorted. “Oh, indeed, God save the profit margin. And even if it’s rubbish, what of it? Do you think it matters, now, whether these stories are true or not? The way you live, who can tell? Who’s even bothered to wonder? Either way, it’s
we
who pay the price!”

Alex nodded and reached inside his jacket.

“Yes? A
nod
? Is that
all
you have to say for yourself?”

Alex laid the bank draft atop the desk.

Gerard leaned forward to examine the draft, then looked up, scowling. “What’s the meaning of this?”

“You need money, don’t you?”

“According to whom?”

Alex sat back and kicked out his legs, crossing them comfortably at the ankle. “The trade winds.” He glanced around the room. He’d been gone for seven months, first in the United States and then in Peru and Argentina. In that time, his sister-in-law had redecorated. The bust of some dead Roman now glared blankly from one corner. An entire wall had been consumed by an oil of some eighteenth-century massacre, replete with gleaming swords, anguished grimaces, and riderless horses, wild-eyed. “New painting,” he remarked.

A pause. “Yes,” Gerry said gruffly. “Picked it up from auction. I expect you don’t like it.”

“No, it’s quite impressive.”

“I know what you prefer.”

“So you do. Children’s scribbles, I believe you’ve called it.”

Gerry tried out a smile. “Well, you have to admit it, Alex. Very little talent required.”

Alex shrugged. What modern art required was an imagination drawn to possibilities, rather than braced by smug presumptions. Certainly the work of Gaugin did nothing to flatter a British imperialist’s vision of his role in the world. “But I meant it,” he said. “The painting is striking. I particularly admire the discreet pools of blood. Came cheaply, I assume?”

Gerard’s jaw firmed. “I can well afford the purchase, but clearly you think otherwise. I’ll thank you to tell me who’s maligning my name.”

“Your sisters. You mustn’t blame them. It was a natural assumption, upon learning that you’d sold the Cornwall estate to Rollo Barrington.”

Gerry slowly lowered his hand. “Oh.”

Alex waited, but that seemed to be the extent of Gerry’s reaction, which in itself seemed significant. His brother so rarely declined an opportunity to hear his own voice. Requirement of a nobleman, that healthy self-regard. “Interesting man, Barrington,” he said casually. “Never met, but I’ve seen him in passing. Heard a good deal as well. He’s making quite the reputation with these purchases of English land. Curious thing, though: nobody can say where he gets the money for it.”

Silence.

“What puzzles me,” Alex said, “is why you didn’t come to me first.”

His brother flushed. “Because I don’t require your help.”

He laughed softly. If Gerry were dying of thirst and spotted Alex two feet from a well, he still would not think he required his younger brother’s help. It simply would never occur to him that Alex might be able to provide it. “Right. So you sold it for, what . . . a lark?”

“That estate was an albatross round my neck, and well you know it. Rent rolls falling for five years straight. There was barely a household left to me by the end.”

“True.” But since when had Gerard cared for financial wisdom? He was a creaking anachronism who spent his free time in musty gentlemen’s clubs, raging against the nation’s decline into capitalist barbarism. His only comfort, he often opined, was that most of England’s soil still rested in civilized hands. That he had sold a good deal of this sacrosanct substance suggested a variety of possibilities, but nothing so rational as a sound economic decision.

Gerard was growing redder. “What do
you
lot care, anyway? The twins never spent a night there. And God knows I’ve never heard you speak fondly of the place.”

“No, I’ve no particular love of Heverley End.” It had been little more than a prison to Alex as a child—the echoing house to which he’d been banished for months on end when his lungs had grown contrary. “But you must admit, the decision seems peculiar. Moreover, Bel and Caro had to learn of it from the gossips. If you wish to discuss awkwardness, I imagine that gave the showgirl a run for her money.”

Gerard looked back to his half-finished speech, his stubby fingers linking together atop the page, then separating again and clenching into fists. He pulled them abruptly into his lap, out of Alex’s sight, like secrets to be hidden.

The gesture raised some unpleasant feeling that Alex did not want to examine. If Gerry required his pity, he did not want to know the cause. Unlike his siblings, he did not enjoy worrying. It was a pointless exercise by which nothing was gained. “Tell me the problem,” he said flatly. “I’ll fix it.” This, after all, was the reason he’d come when he should have been halfway around the world, attending to his own business.

“Listen to me: you will let it alone.”

“If only I could. Alas, I’ve promised the twins to buy back the land.” And he was determined not to have made this trip for nothing.

His brother gazed stonily up toward the painting.

Alex took a breath, leashing his impatience. “Barrington stands to make quite a profit by selling to me,” he said evenly. “My last bid was double what he paid you. Yet he proves remarkably difficult to contact. Four letters I’ve sent now, and I’ve still to receive a reply. I was hoping you might facilitate our acquaintance.”

“Alex.” Gerard looked into his eyes. “I said,
let it alone
.”

What the hell was going on here? “Perhaps I will,” he said with a shrug. “Lazy by nature, you know.” At his brother’s snort, he gave up a lopsided smile. “Only give me a reason for it, Ger.”

Gerard’s snort flattened into a sneer—that same damned sneer inherited by every firstborn brat Alex had ever had the misfortune to meet. “It seems I must remind you of a very basic fact,” he said through his teeth. “I do not explain myself to you—”

“Thank God for that,” said Alex. “I’ve little enough time as it is.”

Gerry’s palm slammed onto the desktop. “Amusing,” he bit out. “You are very amusing, Alex, never doubt it. A veritable family clown. But much as it pains you,
I
am the head of this family. The land is
mine
to dispose of. You may remind the twins of that, if you please. And
you
may interfere in my business the same day you hand me the reins of your little business.” He gave a nasty little laugh, sounding, for a moment, exactly like the schoolyard bully he’d once been. “God knows,
that
would be rich. Bilking Chinamen of their tea. Wheedling teak from coolies in India! Christ, but you do the family proud.”