Wicked Little Secrets (4 page)

Her aunt fingered the edge of the Bible she was reading. She rarely left the house except to go to church, and she was always hesitant about letting Vivienne anywhere beyond the environs of the square. “Very well,” she finally said. “If Mr. Vandergrift would approve. But you know it will tax my poor nerves until you are safely returned under my roof. Harold will take you in the carriage. Now, mind you are to wait inside for him after the lecture and not wander off into the street. London has become a regular Sodom and Gomorrah, I tell you.”

***

When Vivienne arrived at the Royal Academy, she had to think she was safer out in the lawless streets of Sodom and Gomorrah. The building was packed with men—only men—and not the usual stately patrons or oddly dressed artists whom Vivienne would have expected to find, but boisterous, wild-eyed men who looked as if they’d just stumbled in from a chop house or gaming hall. The stairs were so clogged it took five minutes to reach the correct floor. The whole time, she clutched her overstuffed reticule and copy of
The
Ethereal
Graces
of
the
Delicate
Sex
close to her chest, giving sharp elbow jabs to several men who “accidentally” bumped into her.

Finally, she found the source of the male attraction: the Lawrence James exhibit. The men who waited to get in formed a disorderly line outside double doors. A gentleman dressed in dull gray livery and sporting a curled wig guarded the entrance, letting only a few men pass at a time. Across the hall was the Blue Room, but the door was locked.

As she turned to ask the guard for help, the door to the Lawrence James exhibit swung open, and two men with large, lustrous eyes ambled out as if drunk. On the wall above them was a massive painting of a lady with moonlit skin and honey-colored hair reposing on the gentle waves of a blue silk sheet. One hand rested behind her head, while the dainty fingers of her other hand entwined the fine curls of her most feminine area. Her breasts were round and more than a little generous. Yet to Vivienne, the most scandalous detail of this painting wasn’t the tantalizing breasts or the slight parting of the lady’s limbs, but the enticing smile on her lips as she gazed boldly at the viewer.

A thick heat burned in Vivienne’s female parts. She stood mesmerized. In her imagination, she lay on those same sheets, her breasts exposed, all these men gazing upon her.

“Pardon miss, may I help you?” she heard a man say. The guard was looking at her with raised, expectant brows.

She jumped backward, falling into the lap of a man sitting on a bench behind her. She leapt up and tightened her book to her chest, trying to appear prim and proper. “I-I am here for the lecture on art masters for
ladies
of
gentle
breeding
,” she announced loudly, as if to assure every man in the room that she was such a lady. There were several snickers from the queue.

“Aye,” the guard said. “Mrs. Smith-Figgle sent a note this morning saying no gentle ladies would attend on account of the Lawrence James paintings.”

“Well, I think she could have decided in enough time to put a retraction in the paper.” Vivienne fumed at the inference that she wasn’t a gentle lady.

“This here James exhibit was supposed to be over by now,” the guard explained. “But thems downstairs pushed back the opening while the police searched for them stolen paintings. But then they gives up and put the exhibit on anyway, without them masterpieces. So Smith-Figgle didn’t know what’s what.”

“Umph,” Vivienne said. Now she had to wait an hour before Harold came around with the carriage. She wasn’t ready to fight off the elbows and roaming hands on the staircase just yet. So she edged down the bench, putting several feet between herself and the man whose lap she’d had the misfortune to acquaint herself with.

The owner of the lap had a gin blossom nose and smelled like the Thames on a hot summer’s day. He smiled at her and leaned in. “I like pretty ladies of gentle breedin’.”

“Thank you,” she said weakly, then pulled her bonnet lower and raised the book to her face, but she couldn’t read a single word. The moonlit nude filled her mind, so vivid and detailed it was as if this Mr. James had painted it on her brain. She squirmed in her seat, trying to stop that dark pulse between her limbs.

The door opened again, and she tried to keep her eyes focused on the pages, but she couldn’t. Her gaze strayed to the beautiful painted siren who seemed to stare at Vivienne and silently whisper, “You want to be me, don’t you?”

No! No! These thoughts are wrong.

She raised Mrs. Beatrice Smith-Figgle’s book to block the seductress’s image as four well-dressed young men strolled out. They shared a deep, throaty laugh.

“Let’s get out of here,” one said. “I’ve got an itch that needs some scratching. What say you, John?”

John! Vivienne peeked over the edge of the pages. Surely, not her John.

One of the gentlemen had turned so that Vivienne could see the side of his face. Her lungs went flat. Her fiancé!

“I think Seven Heavens is in order,” he announced, slapping his friend on the shoulder, unaware of his fiancée not four feet away. “I’ve got an early wedding present tucked away for my pleasure,” he said rather loudly, as if he were bragging to all the men in the room.

“Your personal James painting in the flesh, heh?” one of his friends asked.

“A darling little thing,” John replied, the reckless sneer on his lips lifting the side of his mustache.

Vivienne bolted up, ready to throw the stupid delicate sex book at John. But he had folded into the crowd around the stairs. She wanted to chase after him. Yell at him. Drag her nails down his face. She kept swallowing, thinking she might cry, but all she felt was the emptiness of shock in her heart.

She shouldn’t expect her husband to be completely faithful. Mrs. Hudson, the family housekeeper and the closest thing Vivienne and her sisters had to a mother, told her that a husband’s wandering was the “sad cross married ladies had to bear.” But she didn’t want that kind of marriage. She wanted… she wanted to be some man’s only love. All her life she felt she had been competing for the attention of her father or trying to please her uncle. For once, she wanted to be the loved one, the praised one.

Then she remembered her father’s bruised face after the duns had finished with him and his plea for her to behave. Just what had she agreed to?

She let go of the book, and it thudded on the floor.

“Careful there, gentle lady,” the red-nosed man said.

***

The old landau lumbered through packed streets. Vivienne rested her head against the cool glass window of the carriage. Her stomach hurt, and she felt a headache blooming in the area just behind her temples. The city appeared to be painted in pale gold as the late afternoon sun drooped just below the rooftops. People were going home, their heads down, collars turned up. Merchants were sweeping their steps and bringing their signs inside. As the carriage rolled into Wickerly Square, she spied a dirty street boy wearing a bright blue coat over his slender shoulders standing before her aunt’s door. The boy’s limbs had grown out of his clothes like an insect bursting through its old skin. His coat sleeves barely came to his wrists. Dirt stains streaked his trousers, and the heels of his scratched boots were worn down.

As the landau approached her aunt’s mounting block, the youth’s head whipped around and Vivienne saw that he wasn’t a boy at all, but a diminutive young man, about her own age, with brownish-blond hair brushed forward in oily strands. His nose was bent as if it had been broken. He took off across the street, jumping the fences in the center of the square and then disappearing.

Just how much separated Vivienne from this poor ragged street pauper probably begging for an odd job so he could eat? If it weren’t for the money lent by creditors and an offer of marriage, she and her sisters might have the same fate. She felt guilty for being so angry at her fiancé.

You
probably
misunderstood
John
, she told herself. She shouldn’t be so quick to jump to such unsavory conclusions. She must strive to be better. She hugged her book to her chest. “Perfect wife,” she murmured as the carriage came to a stop.

***

When Vivienne opened Aunt Gertrude’s front door, the house seemed on fire with activity.

“Oh, my nerves!” Her aunt’s wail echoed down the stairwell. “No, not
Dr. Gideon’s Pills of Fine Humor
. I need
Milner’s Coca Tonic Wine
at once.”

Milner’s Coca Tonic Wine
! Her aunt only took that for the most dire of nerve spasms. All thoughts of her fiancé and being a perfect wife flew from her mind as Vivienne rushed up the stairs and into her aunt’s chamber.

Aunt Gertrude was sprawled on her bed, her pointy lace boots hanging over the edge and her expansive belly forming a mound atop the covers of her white bedspread. A handkerchief was unfolded over her face, its center rising and falling with her breath, and her Bible was clutched to her chest.

“Jesus, come for me!” she cried. “I am ready.”

The housekeeper’s nervous fat fingers were knocking about the small apothecary on Aunt Gertrude’s commode. “Aye, I can’t find the blessed tonic.”

At the foot of the bed, distraught Garth was turning in circles, barking at the ceiling as if making his own beckonings to the Lord.

Vivienne snatched up the green square bottle, sat on the side of the bed, and removed the handkerchief from her aunt’s face. Perspiration slicked the little hairs about Aunt Gertrude’s forehead; her cheeks were flushed and her eyes large and wild.

“What is the matter?” Vivienne cried and shoved two pillows beneath her aunt’s back. Her aunt was so stiffly laced she couldn’t bend but slanted her body instead.

Vivienne tilted the bottle back, giving her aunt the tiniest sip, but the woman grabbed the medicine and took a rather sailoresque swig. “Oh, love, it’s the plagues of Egypt!” she cried and gulped down more.

“Now stop talking like that,” Vivienne said soothingly. “The Thames hasn’t turned to blood, and I don’t see any flies or frogs or other pestilence about. What has put you in such a state?”

Aunt Gertrude seized her niece’s hand. “My dear Vivvie, promise me that you’ll be a pious wife. That you will always stay above the price of rubies.”

Vivienne paused. John’s arrogant smirk when he spoke of his early wedding present filled her mind. What was the price of a virtuous husband? Above diamonds? Or perhaps a gentleman’s worth didn’t fluctuate with his lapses of virtue?

“Promise me, dear Vivvie, that you’ll be a virtuous lady,” her aunt insisted. “This is the most important thing in all the world.” Her eyes narrowed. “No matter how the devil may tempt you… with… with ripe luscious apples and golden calves and silken chemises.”

“Wait, silk chemises aren’t in the Bible. Biblical women wore—”

“But they are in the black soul of the devil, I tell you! Chemises, lacy drawers, and stockings are all in there. He waits for a lady to slip, he whispers to her, enticing her, tingling her… tingling her nether regions.”

“Nether regions?”

“Lady parts! The devil dwells in a lady’s parts,” her aunt cried. Vivienne thought of all the paintings lining the walls at the Royal Academy, those ladies with their devil-filled parts exposed.

Her aunt released an anguished whimper and reached again for her bottle, but Vivienne held it tight. “I’m not quite sure coca tonic wine is what you need. Perhaps
Dr. Gilliam’s Elixir for Clear Thinking
—”

“You must remain steadfast in your faith,” Aunt Gertrude continued. “Pious in your actions. Promise me that you’ll never give in to the wicked desires of your body.”

“But if I’m married, shouldn’t I…”

“Promise me!” her aunt screamed and squeezed Vivienne’s fingers.

Vivienne bit her lip to stifle her cry of pain. For a woman prostrate on the bed, begging Jesus to take her from this world, she was remarkably strong.

“Say it!”

“I promise,” Vivienne conceded, although she wasn’t quite clear about what exactly she was vowing.

Surely it wasn’t wicked for a man and wife to do things that begat children? Her aunt was so distraught as to not make sense. Married couples were being fruitful and multiplying all the time in the Bible, and based on Vivienne’s very limited education in these matters, begetting involved the tingling and mingling of the wicked parts. A husband’s and wife’s parts, that is, not those of a fiancé and his early wedding present.

“Now tell me, what is the matter?” Vivienne said in a forced calm voice and kissed her aunt’s cheek. “Let me help you.”

“You can’t.” Her aunt raised her eyes to the heavens. “Only the Lord can.”

“Well, perhaps I can be of assistance to the Lord,” Vivienne suggested. “What has happened to upset you so?”

“I shan’t speak of such things.”

“Come now. I’m your little Vivvie. You can tell me.”

Her aunt shook her head. “’Tis too horrible.”

Garth had stopped spinning and now crawled to his owner and licked her chin. “My little doggie,” Aunt Gertrude cooed and clutched her Bible tighter to her bosom. “I want to be alone with my Savior and my doggie.” She covered her face with her handkerchief again and sniffed. “And do leave the tonic.”

Miss Banks cleared her throat and jerked her head toward the corridor. Vivienne trailed her into the hall.

“What has happened?” she asked in a low voice.

The housekeeper was a thick Irish woman with a blubbery face and stubby neck on her wide shoulders. Her hair was still a lush red with only a few silvery threads running from her temples.

“Oh, I mustn’t say anything,” she said loudly, her eyes drifting toward her employer. “Don’t you be a’frettin’ and a’worryin’ when you need to be gettin’ married.” The woman started to the room at the end of the hall, looking over her shoulder to make sure Vivienne followed.

Vivienne almost said,
No! That’s Uncle Jeremiah’s study!
But then she remembered that he was dead. All these years later and his words, “Stay out of my library, bad seed,” still held power. It was a relic of a room, seemingly unchanged since the early 1700s when Aunt Gertrude’s great-great-grandfather moved in. The walls were decorated with panels covered with a heavy fern-colored print resembling a medieval tapestry. The same pattern of flower gardens and weeping willows was repeated in both the upper and lower panels. Between the windows hung another painting of Jeremiah Bertis, again in his black robes, his face as grim as ever. Against the wall stood a huge mahogany bureau like the one her father had in his study.