How To School Your Scoundrel, page 11
• • •
Three or four months ago, Somerton might have finished off such a satisfactory meeting with an hour or two in a whore’s bed, or perhaps a prearranged engagement with someone’s restless wife, followed by a few more hours of drinking and gambling at some den of suitable iniquity.
Three or four months ago, in fact, he had. It was October, and the night had smelled of frost when he emerged up the area stairs of the Duke of Southam’s town house in Cadogan Square, dogged with a dissatisfaction that had little to do with Her Grace’s disappointing performance in bed. Like most famous beauties, the duchess proved the old saw that the hunt was more interesting than the kill, and since the duchess was a long-practiced adulteress, even the hunt had been brief and lackluster at best. As a rule, Somerton preferred to seduce wives who had never strayed before: so much more challenging, such a frisson of danger and betrayal, such an explosion of untapped passion. The more virtuous the lady, the more headlong her capitulation. In that first slick entry between a pair of forbidden legs, he felt, at least for a fleeting moment, that his world had righted itself.
But the dissatisfaction had always returned, and this time more than ever. The duke was an old self-important fool who deserved to be cuckolded, his wife was even worse, and yet Somerton couldn’t shake the sensation that he had done something wrong. That his soul had gone so far off its kilter, it might never recover. And as he had walked down Cadogan Gardens in the chill October air, and the brown leaves had swirled around him in the London midnight, and a pair of drunken gentlemen staggered past, Somerton had felt colder and colder in his fine wool coat, and sicker and sicker, and he had found a sewer drain and retched up brandy and bile until his stomach seemed to have turned inside out.
Afterward, instead of proceeding in the direction he had intended, where a table and a bottle awaited him, along with a pack of cards and a pack of identically dark-souled men, he turned around and staggered down Sloane Street in the direction of his own house.
He couldn’t approach his wife like this, only minutes out of another woman’s bed, green-faced and defeated. But perhaps in the morning, fortified by coffee, he might head upstairs to the nursery and begin a conversation of some sort. A few words, to bridge this years-wide chasm between them. To rest one knee at the altar of her virtue, and ask for God’s blessing from her.
When he turned the corner of Chester Square, his steps had quickened. He felt warmer already, and a kind of peace had invaded that region of his belly that had heaved itself almost into oblivion a short while ago.
Then Somerton saw him.
A tall figure, wearing a dark hat, lingering outside the area gate of Somerton’s own mansion, the way Somerton had lingered briefly at the area gate of the Duke of Southam. Just like Somerton, the man had pulled his hat farther down his forehead, turned, cast a last glance upward at the magisterial windows above, and walked briskly away.
Somerton’s feet had screwed themselves into the ground. Had he wanted passionately to move them, he could not. He could only stand there helpless as the figure approached, as the head ducked away at the last instant, and the Adonis features of Lord Roland Penhallow burned once more into the tissue of his brain.
The next morning, instead of climbing the stairs to the nursery, he had sent a message around the usual channels to Mr. Norton.
He had not, however, returned to his old nocturnal habits. Whenever he contemplated another seduction, or another businesslike transaction with a well-trained whore, the taste of vomit had risen most inconveniently in the back of his throat. The sensation of sickness and decay was so great, he sometimes had to sit and put his head between his knees, to draw in several slow breaths of air, until the wave of nausea passed at last.
Now, on this frigid February night, he emerged from the Sportsmen’s Club to find the piles of gray slush freezing in place on the pavement, and the streets unaccountably devoid of hackneys. It was hardly yet eleven o’clock, yet he knew better than to consider a visit to Cousin Hannah, or to the faithful old Black Seal in St. Katharine Docks.
Instead, he turned his steps to Piccadilly and a cold trudge homeward, huddled in his overcoat, knife and pistol tucked securely in the inner pockets, and when at last he arrived in his study, his mind was calm enough to take in the sight of the jewel box in the center of the leather blotter without any inconvenient physical symptoms.
He stood a moment, without moving, as if to memorize the details. In reality, the carvings, the gilt design, the letters stamped on the lid—EHM, her maiden initials—drifted through his eyeballs without making any permanent impression inside.
He sent a glance around the room, to see if Mr. Markham were sitting in one of the chairs by the fireplace, or the window seat at the opposite wall, but no slim, brown-suited secretary rose up to greet him. Above him, the members of his household slept quietly on their various floors. He was quite alone.
So he walked carefully around the side of the desk and sat down in his comfortable leather chair, and without any weak-willed hesitation he opened the lid of the box.
He recognized a few of the pieces. He had given them to her himself. Throughout the course of their marriage, he had never shirked that essential duty of an aristocratic husband; at every birthday, every Christmas, he had presented her with a bauble appropriate to her station, always more expensive than the one he gave to his current mistress, if he had one. Now he picked through the glittering mess of familiar diamond bracelets and pendant sapphires, the rings and brooches, until he found the false bottom and lifted the tray upward to reveal the object that lay beneath.
He lifted it up into the light.
The miniature was a fair likeness, he acknowledged, though it failed to capture the mischievous glint in Penhallow’s hazel eyes, the charming, idiotic flop of golden brown hair that invariably made its way onto his brow. Moreover, you couldn’t see those muscular shoulders that had powered Oxford to victory in the 1882 Boat Race, nor the negligent posture he assumed as he leaned against some fluted Grecian column in a London ballroom, expecting worship the way other men expected breakfast.
Still, the beauty was all there, the perfect features, the damned happy smile. Why shouldn’t he smile? He’d been sitting at the bottom of the jewel box of the most beautiful woman in London, the wife of one of its most powerful aristocrats. Why the devil shouldn’t he be as happy as a clam, as the cat who stole the cream.
Damn you, Markham. He mouthed the words rather than said them.
Markham didn’t answer. Markham had simply deposited this box and left the room, so that Somerton might examine its contents alone.
Perhaps that was for the best, after all.
And yet. He felt the strangest surge of yearning in his belly for the secretary’s straightforward, thin shoulders, his quiet posture, his guiltless face and patient brown eyes. The warmth and promise of his clean young limbs.
He picked up the jewel box and flung it against the wall. It struck with a thud rather than a crash, and rolled unharmed into the Oriental rug, surrounded by its sparkling contents. For a moment he stood, not breathing, and then he walked over and picked up each piece, one by one, and put them all back where they belonged.
• • •
A warm, wet tongue lapped Luisa’s nose and cheeks, drawing her upward out of a deep and dream-clogged sleep.
“Quincy!” She flung her arm around the dog. “What the devil? Is it morning?”
The room was dark; not the slightest hint of light emerged from the cracks of the heavy velvet drapes. Quincy went on licking her ear with businesslike strokes, until she was gasping with unwilling laughter.
“Stop it. Stop it, I say!” She struggled to her elbows and blinked to recall herself. For a moment, she was surprised to see the room around her. She had been dreaming of home, of the colorful autumn Schweinwald set against the violet mountains, except that the man galloping at her side was built on a different scale than lanky Peter, and his hair was velvet black . . .
She bowed her head into the sheets. She wasn’t Princess Luisa; she was Markham. This wasn’t her light-filled chamber facing the grand panorama of Holstein province; this was a dark and stately room in a London town house, and she was wearing blue-striped flannel pajamas and a thick linen bandage around her breasts, because the Earl of Somerton slept on the other side of the wall, in all his masculine majesty.
Quincy licked her hand. She looked down, where his furry shape made a dark smudge against the bedspread. She reached out and felt for her pocket watch on the bedside table, but it was too dark to see the face.
Quincy yipped urgently, bumping her hand with his head.
“What’s the matter, love?” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
The dog turned and leapt off the bed and ran to the hallway door. She couldn’t see him in the blackness, but she could hear his paws click on the wooden floorboards as he turned in impatient circles below the knob.
Luisa smothered a yawn. “Quincy, for God’s sake. Can’t you wait until morning?”
Clickety-clickety-click. Quincy landed back on the bed in an explosion of furry urgency. He butted his head against her chest, he raised himself up and smothered her face with sweeping licks of his long tongue.
“All right, all right!” she whispered fiercely. She set him aside and swung her legs off the bed. Her robe lay on the armchair next to the wardrobe; she shrugged herself into it, shoved her feet into her slippers, and trudged to the door, where Quincy was lifting himself into the air in ecstatic pirouettes. She turned the knob, and Quincy squeezed out the crack and shot down the hallway toward the stairs like a greyhound.
The lights had been put out long ago, but enough glow remained from the streets outside to guide her down the grand staircase to the entrance hall. Quincy stood waiting at attention on the marble tiles, head tilted to one side, wondering at the vastness of her lethargy.
“I shall have to find the key to the garden door,” Luisa began, but Quincy was already darting off, not in the direction of the garden, but down the hall to the earl’s private study. “Quincy! What on earth?”
He turned around, whined, and scampered the rest of the way to the study door, from which, Luisa could now see, a dim bar of light glowed at the bottom.
“Oh, Quincy,” she whispered.
He danced and whined, staring back at her plaintively.
Luisa’s heart tripped. She hurried after the dog, inhaling the cold air of the hallway in anxious gasps. He would have found the jewel box by now. What had he done?
“Is something wrong, Quincy? Is he all right? Has he hurt himself?”
Oh, please God. Not that.
She grasped the handle, and in her haste and panic, it was not until she had actually begun the motion of flinging open the door that she heard the delicate strains of the cello within.
For a moment, she didn’t see him. He wasn’t sitting at the desk, his usual posture. The fire was nearly out, the room chilly, filled only with a music of gaping loneliness, of abandonment. A pungent spiciness note saturated the air, the scent of Scotch whiskey.
The notes were coming from the corner near the window. She turned slowly. Quincy settled at her feet with a relieved sigh.
He played with his eyes closed and his jaw set, at an angle away from her. He must have known she was in the room, but he showed no sign of it: not a flinch, not the slightest curious movement in her direction. His arm plied the bow, and the sensitive wood called out in sorrow.
Luisa could not have said how long she stood there. When the last low note dissolved into the whiskey-scented air, she hardly dared to breathe. Somerton sat without moving, head lowered, resting the tip of his bow on the edge of the red-patterned Oriental rug, as if listening to the dying echoes of the music, and then he picked up the glass on a nearby shelf and drained it.
“What were you playing?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer. He lifted his bow and loosened the hair, and then he plucked a cloth from the open case beside him and wiped first the bow and then the strings of the cello itself. He propped the instrument against the chair and walked, with a kind of studied steadiness, to the tray of drinks, where he refilled his glass.
“Something to drink, Markham?”
“No, thank you.” She tightened the belt of her robe and slid her hands into the pockets.
He made his way to the desk and sat down in his accustomed place, from which he controlled his immense wealth, his vast networks of spies, his intricate schemes, his web of power. He set down the drink and put his head in his hands and stared at the jewel box before him.
“My lord,” Luisa said, in a low voice.
“She never loved me,” he said.
Luisa bowed her head.
“Her heart is closed to me. It always was.” He picked up the drink and swirled the liquid in a gentle circle about the sides. “I remember the day we married, the way she looked at my damned beak of a nose, my plain face, as if she were looking at a corpse. As if she were attending her own funeral.”
“Sir . . .”
“I was madly in love with her. I saw her at a garden party, and I knew I had to have her. I had to make her mine. And do you know what she did?”
“No, sir.”
“She went off with Penhallow. Before I could secure an introduction, he had taken her off in the shrubbery. I never stood a chance, did I? A handsome chap like him, a smooth-skinned, lyric-tongued Adonis.” He took a drink. “But I got him out of the way, didn’t I? I gave her parents a hundred thousand pounds for her. An offer no one could refuse.”
“Oh my God.” Luisa’s throat closed; she had to swallow, twice, to allow herself to breathe.
“I did my best. I swear I did. I was never any good at wooing women, but I know how to give them pleasure in bed, and by God I gave her pleasure. And even that didn’t work. It made her hate me more. She thought, you see, that if she endured me like the martyr she was, if she felt nothing, she could still be true to him. But I made her want me, and she hated me for it.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” Luisa whispered.
He looked up at that, and the bleakness of his smile made her ribs ache. “My dear Markham. I assure you, she does. When she got with child, I retired from her bed. I couldn’t stand the way she looked at me afterward, as if I’d betrayed her by making her spend. She never said no to me. That was a point of pride with her. Oh no, she never said no; what a good, obedient wife. So I was the one who walked away. I never visited her bed again, from that day to this.”
He rose from the desk in a lithe movement. How extraordinary, that a man built on such burly lines could move with such animal grace. Luisa watched him cross the room, tossing down the rest of his whiskey as he went, and when he couldn’t go any farther he hurled the glass into the fireplace and pounded his two hands against the mantel.
“She never loved me. She never loved me at all.”
Luisa stood near the door, brimming over. Quincy’s wet nose nudged her ankle. In her mind, she heard the cello vibrate with agony, that searing phrase at the end, over and over.
She took one hesitant step, and another. Her feet were cold in her slippers, as if all the blood had gathered near her heart. When he did not object, or bark at her to go away and leave him in peace, she came closer, and closer, until she could feel his warmth tingle the tiny hairs on her skin.
She laid her palm against his white linen shirt.
A sound came from his chest, like the low howl of an animal, but she kept her hand in place on his back, counting the strikes of his magnificent heart, the slight contractions of muscle that told her he was sobbing.
“My son,” he said. “I don’t even know my son.”
“Oh, my lord.”
Somerton drew in a long breath and straightened. The glass case of the mantel clock reflected a portion of his face, his cheekbone and a single bleak eye.
“Go to bed, Markham. We will both endeavor to forget this hour.”
“Sir, I can’t . . .”
“Go to bed.”
Luisa let her hand slide away, down the granite curve of muscle. She curled her fingers into a fist and stuck them back in her pocket, and then she walked slowly to the door, Quincy trotting at her heels.
At the last instant, with her hand on the knob, she stopped and turned her head. “You should sleep, sir.”
He hadn’t moved from his position at the fireplace, braced in place against the mantel. His dry and humorless laugh hurt her ears.
“Ah, Markham. I shall sleep in my grave.”
TEN
The newspaper headline was thick and crisp: LOST PRINCESS FINDS LOVE IN ENGLAND; SET TO WED DUKE OF ASHLAND IN STORYBOOK ROMANCE; ROYAL BALL TONIGHT IN PARK LANE TO CELEBRATE ENGAGEMENT; PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF WALES EXPECTED TO ATTEND.
Below it, her sister Emilie’s blurry face peeked out, empty of her usual spectacles, from between the heavy charcoal-clad shoulders of two giant men. One was the Duke of Olympia, gray hair wisping from beneath the brim of his black top hat, and the other was in the act of lifting his hat to reveal . . .
The paper flashed away from her hands.
“It’s that thrilling,” sighed out Annabelle, the new housemaid, holding the folded sheets above her porridge. “The most romantic thing I ever heard. Imagine, a princess like that, walking about London. Imagine if we was to bump shoulders on the pavement, her and me.”
“Imagine,” said Luisa. She fought back the anxious jump of her pulse and returned her attention to her breakfast, which she now took below stairs, since that was where one discovered anything of interest about the household. Besides, the flow of chatter, the companionable clink of chinaware and cutlery gave her the comforting sensation of fellowship. Of belonging to a place and a set of people: not quite a family, but a well-meaning substitute for it.
