Lady Killer

by Michele Jaffe

  As if on her command, the crowds passing in front of Mariana to pay their respects drifted to the sides, and Miles appeared before her. Corin had been promised twenty pounds by the Arboretti if he produced his master in good condition, and he had earned his money in hard labor. Miles was resplendent, radiating wealth, power, elegance, and good odor in equal measure.

  But there was nothing Corin could do about his mood. Miles’s face had grown blacker and blacker as the hour of the ball approached. The vitality had drained from his movements, his eyes had slipped back down into slits, and his face was once again a mask of bitterness. There had been a time, Corin was aware, when all of that was merely affect, but as the day of his marriage approached, it had begun to sit naturally. Even the drinking, which had been a cover to allow him to gather information in taverns, had assumed a more real aspect, as Corin knew from the ever larger pile of empty decanters he collected from his master’s bedside each morning.

  But as much as he would have liked to be, Miles was not drunk as he entered the ball. Unable to bring himself to really examine the woman he would be spending the rest of his life with, he instead focused on her companions, bowing to each as the introductions were made. One of them looked familiar to him, but it took Miles a moment to recognize the young man called Saunders, the son of a country squire he had met years ago, beneath the patina of a tall, gangly gentleman that he now wore and the cloud of absurd cologne that circled him. Next to him, his arm through Mariana’s, was some sort of bearded foreign professor of indeterminate origin with an accent that hurt Miles’s head. On the other side of the bride stood Lady Alecia, her grandmother, whose quivering coiffure made Miles a bit nauseous, and behind them, whistling to himself in a corner, stood Mariana’s father, Sir Edwin Nonesuch. Of all of them, Miles decided he liked Sir Edwin best, mostly because nothing about him made Miles queasy.

  But he did feel queasy, right through Lady Alecia asking him how he did and him saying fine, right through Sir Edwin giving him a menacing scowl before fading back into the wainscoting, and especially through Mariana curtseying to him with an “Oh!” and a sigh and asking if he could not hear the baby rabbits raising their little voices to sing in doleful—“dulcet” the foreign professor put in helpfully—tones at their union. It took Miles a moment to recover from the shock of this question. He was still mouthing the words “baby rabbits” to himself, soundlessly, when Mariana went on.

  “This, darling Viscount, is Saunders Cotton, my grandmother’s secretary,” Mariana explained, gesturing to the man Miles had recognized, who promptly blushed. “And this—” she pushed forward the bearded fellow, “—is Doctor LaForge, the famous scholar and my tutor. Of course you have heard of him.”

  “It is a pleasure to make the acquaintance of a being of such greatness as you possess, monsieur le viscount,” La Forge said, bowing low and averting his gaze from Miles’s like one who dare not look upon a great idol.

  Miles gave the man a smile with an amazing resemblance to a sneer and muttered something under his breath that sounded to his cousins like “simpering puppies.”

  Mariana heard it too and clapped with delight. “Oh! I knew as soon as you set eyes on me our spirits would frolic together like baby clouds at the start of a new day. I have always wanted a puppy! Oh! Do have your man bring one to me, darling Viscount. One with large, soft eyes that speak of his sweet baby soul. Like mine.”

  Much to the horror of the Arboretti, Miles smiled. It was not a real smile but one of the ghastly new expressions he used when he was about to flay someone alive verbally. But before he could begin, a bell was rung at the other end of the hall and the crowd grew silent.

  A middle-aged man, with his hair slicked to the side and very red lips, cleared his throat, and all eyes turned to him. He looked down at a piece of parchment he was holding, then up at the crowd. “It was the wish of his late Lordship, the current viscount’s father, that this letter be read on the opening day of the celebration of his son’s marriage,” the man began without introduction. “He left it in the care of my father, his business agent, but my father being infirm, he asked me to read it in his place.”

  The man licked his lips and began to read.

  “ ‘On this, the first day of July in the year fifteen hundred and sixty-five, in gratitude for Sir Edwin’s saving my life, I do hereby betroth my son to the first-born daughter of my dear friend Sir Edwin Nonesuch. Twenty-five years from today, her hand shall be joined with his in marriage, and her fortunes likewise. From the day of her twenty-fifth birthday forward, Sir Edwin’s daughter will be sole heir to my son’s estate. Only if the Deity sees fit to take one of them to himself before that day, will this betrothal be voided. Otherwise, it is my firmest wish that it proceed. To that end, I pledge my son’s complete obedience. If my son should prove to be craven or unworthy of his blood and my title, if he should behave with dishonor and break this contract, then I disown him, and order that he shall forfeit his entire fortune to Sir Edwin Nonesuch.’ ”

  Craven or unworthy. The words that bound Miles to the damn contract. They were like an incantation, guaranteeing his obedience. If his father had not included them, had not yoked his son’s honor and character to the betrothal, Miles would have extricated himself long ago, willingly giving up his fortune in exchange for his freedom. Miles had always thought that those last words were designed to goad him, to be a challenge to him, a thorn in his side. He could still hear his father’s predictions about him—that any son who was more interested in what made a gun work than how to fire it, any son who would not back his father in a fight when someone called him a thick-headed beast, but would happily jump into a fray to stop some leprous tramp from being robbed, that any son who kept his father from disciplining his mother with the cat-o-nine-tails when the bitch deserved it, was unworthy and cowardly and a failure and would bring dishonor to the Dearbourn title. Miles would be damned before he fulfilled those predictions by backing out of the betrothal.

  “Unfortunately for Sir Edwin, it does not look as though anyone is thinking of breaking this contract,” the man who had been reading joked with an artificial smile.

  The assembled company laughed politely at the remark, and raised their glasses in a toast to the bride and bridegroom. Beaming at the adoration she felt communicated to her in waves from every corner, Mariana gave a low curtsey, exposing an expanse of alabaster bosom that at least one man in the room would have killed to call his own.

  That man was not Miles. His attention no longer held by the reader, he turned it to the glass of sparkling wine someone had given him, and, having gulped that, to Tristan’s glass, which he pried from his cousin’s fingers. Slowly, he began to feel better. He was just about to reach for Sebastian’s when he saw Mariana shudder.

  He wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “Now that my fortune is yours, you might spend it on getting a proper dress made,” he told her with an unflattering glance at her bodice. “There is no reason for you to go about half-exposed and freezing like that.”

  “Oh! Listen to his divine similitude for me,” Mariana trilled to her companions, ignoring the doctor’s whispered correction “solicitude” as she leaned toward Miles to confide, “A heart such as mine, darling Viscount, needs no covering, but must remain unexhibited so it may rise to the heavens.”

  “Uninhibited,” the doctor whispered.

  Miles stared at her dumbfounded.

  “I knew you would understand, darling,” she went on, awash in smiles. “I knew you would see that only jewels might come near it without fear of damage. I have already reserved an emerald pendant on a pearl choker at Beaumond’s, Viscount,” she explained, naming one of London’s most expensive and most garish jewelers. “You need only send your man to buy them. Darling Beaumond said he would await your bill of credit until the baby birds cease to fly and all upon the earth perish.”

  S’teeth I hope that happens soon, Miles thought to himself, utterly undone at the prospect of having to spend the re
st of the evening, not to mention his life, with this woman. He felt like a seasick sailor in the middle of a storm whose arms were broken and whose boat had sprung a bad leak. Then, suddenly, he saw a life raft. “Of course you shall have the jewels. In fact, I shall see to them, and the puppy, right this moment if you can spare me your company.”

  The word “jewels” had a marvelous effect and Mariana could not dismiss him fast enough. Just the instant before, he had been prepared to rid himself of the viscount title forever so that he would never need to hear it on her lips again, particularly coupled with the words “darling” or “baby,” but he was now glad to have it, if only because the rents from the lands associated with it might bring in enough income to purchase him a lifetime of jewel-induced liberation. “This first meeting has surpassed my fondest imaginings. You are an even more incredible woman than I ever dared dream,” Miles said as he bowed in departure, and meant it acutely.

  While Mariana rejoiced at her conquest of the darling viscount, so like a lonely baby horse until she came—“Oh! He is utterly smitten, isn’t he Saunders?”—Miles barreled past his guests in search of wine. Or liquor. Or poison. Anything to dispatch him from his misery for at least a moment. He finally located a long table covered with savory delicacies, and spotted a carafe of sparkling golden wine at its far end. His fingers had almost closed around its neck in a fair approximation of what he wished someone might do to Mariana, when he felt a hand on his arm and a smooth voice whispered in his ear, “You are looking marvelous, my lord. Even better than I remember.”

  Lady Starrat Peters gave Miles a wide smile as he turned to face her. “Of course,” she said, appraising him, “it might only be the clothes. I would have to see you out of them to know for certain if you have changed. Are you busy right now?”

  Miles had known the beautiful Lady Starrat for many years and had been fond of her, both because of her wit and because she had been one of Beatrice’s only friends from childhood. There had been a time when a proposition like the one she had just made would have amused and intrigued him. But now the idea of such intimacy with another person left him more than cold. The only company he was interested in at that moment was the company of the wine decanter in his hand.

  “Don’t look so shocked, Miles,” Lady Starrat laughed. “I was only going to ask you to dance.”

  Miles gave what was supposed to be a smile. “It would be a pleasure, Lady Starrat, but not tonight. I have some important business to attend to.” She did not need to know that it consisted of downing as much wine as he could absorb.

  Gripping a full decanter—his “business partner”—tightly in one hand, Miles had just begun threading his way to the door of the Great Hall when there was a chorus of screeches behind him followed by a thud, a clatter, and the feel of an object sailing into his back.

  The Arboretti, who had been following close on Miles’s heels to ensure that he did not leave the party, stopped dead in their tracks.

  “Isn’t that—” Sophie whispered.

  “Do you see—” Bianca asked.

  “What the devil—” Tristan and Sebastian said simultaneously.

  “A monkey,” Crispin pronounced with enormous surprise.

  “And a woman,” Ian added

  “With dark brown hair—” Crispin went on.

  “—Brown eyes—” Ian put in.

  “—And a smudge of dirt on her cheek,” they whispered in unison.

  Miles, who had swung around ready to give his cousins hell for their overblown attempts to keep him from his own damn wine, found himself speechless for the second time that day.

  Clio was not much better, but she had a better excuse. Miles at least knew where he was. Only minutes before she had been alone in her library, reading at her desk by the flame of a single candle, and now she found herself standing in a great hall blazing with light and filled with the cream of English society.

  She had spent the early part of the afternoon having the girl’s body removed to a cool-house. Afterward, she had gone to ask questions of the dead girl’s employer, Mr. Wattles the doll maker, but instead had spent an hour listening as his wife explained that he only did the dolls to make ends meet because really, you see, he was an artist and had several important patrons, very important, who valued his skill at being able to take off a face from a drawing and make it come to life in the round, just as sure as if it were looking at you. The only useful piece of information she had been able to extract from the Wattles was that the boy’s name was Inigo.

  He had followed her everywhere, and it was only once she had convinced him she was taking the investigation seriously that she had been able to persuade him to eat something. Although he was dropping from exhaustion, he had refused to stay in the bed Clio had made up for him in the big room with the angel heads carved in the ceiling unless she stayed with him, so she had sat next to him, humming him the song her ancient nurse used to hum for her and holding his hand, until he had fallen into a fitful sleep. She had then retired to the library, putting Toast on the gold cord that doubled as his leash and looping it around her chair to keep him from waking Inigo. When she had procrastinated as much as she possibly could, she gave up and opened her household ledger.

  It was the most depressing book ever written, Clio had thought to herself as she again tried squinting. For a moment she could almost pretend that what she was looking at was a sea scene, with a wave caressing the prow of a sailboat over which the sun shone, but as soon as she stopped squinting the traitorous wave once again became a six, the boat showed itself to be a four, and the sun was revealed as a zero.

  640. Six hundred and forty. Not an offensive number in itself, Clio knew, but very, very bad when written on the debit side of a ledger as it was on hers. Six hundred and forty was the number of pounds she needed to keep her household—and her creditors, who were not even really her creditors but were now her responsibility—content for the next six months. And six hundred and forty was about five hundred and forty pounds more than she currently had.

  She knew the money Baroness Von Sturman still owed her for having recovered her prized black tigers would take care of ten pounds, and the job she had done clearing the famous pugilist Thomas “Lay-Ye-Down-To-Rest” Barlow of the charge of killing his mistress would bring in another thirty, but even with the addition of her quarterly allowance there would still be over three hundred pounds unaccounted for. As if to underscore the deficiency, a booming voice wafted down the stairs from the floor above announcing the end of the Roman Empire. Such an announcement could only mean that the Triumvirate—Masters Pearl, Williams, and Hakesly—had almost finished their newest theatrical masterwork, about the end of the Roman Empire, which meant that the time for disappointing her friends by telling them that she could not fund its debut would soon be upon her.

  Clio had just begun to think that the six looked more like a noose with which the four—which looked like her—was about to be hung, when her attention was drawn to Toast’s growing agitation. Assuming that it was designed to show sympathy for her and the growling her stomach was doing—she had begun to limit herself to one meal a day, and today she had sacrificed that to be sure the hungry boy had enough—she patted him on the head, put the ledger aside, and reached for her copy of A Compendium of Vampires and Other Fiends. But she had not gotten past the half title when Toast gave an enormous jerk, pulled the leg off her chair, and sent her somersaulting onto the ground.

  She had recovered quickly enough to grab the end of the gold cord, but not fast enough to keep him from leaping out the open window into the street outside. Her protests only made him pull harder, and he led her on a strange chase through the narrow backways of the city. She had a vague notion that they were headed toward the queen’s palace, but the warren of alleys and byways that ran between the larger houses of London was unfamiliar to her, and it had been all she could do to keep up with the dashing monkey. They were rushing down what appeared to be a dead-end passage when Toast stopped abru
ptly, turned his head, cocked it to one side, and then jumped through an open ground-floor window. Clio tried to pull him back, but the expression on his face when he turned it to her—urgent, without a hint of mischief—was one she had never seen, and she had resolved to follow, guessing this had something to do with finding the vampire. With Toast leading the way they wound through a maze of dark and empty corridors and up an unadorned flight of service stairs that ended at a closed door. Toast did not pause but threw himself with all his might against the door until it burst open, and then dragged her into the middle of the glittering room in which she now stood, depositing her squarely in front of a man.

  He looked like a version of the man she had met that afternoon, the man in the tavern, but not the same version, because instead of a stubbly slovenly wreck, this man was a picture of aristocratic elegance. A picture she recognized. She was so astonished that she dropped Toast’s leash, allowing him to make directly for the refreshment table, while she gaped at the familiar man, who was now making a low bow. She only had time to think, No, not him, when he began to speak.

  “I am delighted to see you,” he said, his voice a deliciously rich rumble, his teeth even lovelier than she remembered. “I had been hoping for an opportunity to apologize for my conduct this afternoon, but I had no idea you were on the guest list.”

  There was a rustle in the crowd and then a piercing voice announced, “She most assuredly was not,” from the other side of the room. “You just could not stay away, could you?” the voice asked, addressing Clio.

  Clio did not need to turn around to identify the speaker, but she forced herself to do it anyway, tearing her eyes from the man in front of her. Giving a low curtsey, rendered somewhat more difficult by the fact that she discovered she was still clutching A Compendium of Vampires in her hand, she looked Lady Alecia Nonesuch in the eye and said, “Good evening, grandmother.”