Tarnished Amongst the Ton

by Louise Allen

  ‘You all right, Miss Phyllida?’ Anna asked, peering closely at her as she took her valise. ‘You look as if you’ve been awake half the night crying.’

  ‘Nonsense, of course not.’ Just all night, alternating between tears and frozen indecision. What to do? Where to run? ‘I have got a cold coming or something, that is all.’

  ‘I’ll make you up my remedy,’ the maid said. ‘Oh, and there’s a letter for you. I was just about to get Perkin’s boy to take it over to you.’

  Phyllida picked it up. Not a hand she recognised, ordinary paper, thick, clumsy writing. She trailed into the drawing room and sat down, opened it with no curiosity. A bill, she supposed.

  A large engraved card fluttered out and she picked it up from the floor.

  Mr Harry Buck’s House of Pleasures for the Discerning Gentleman.

  Below that was printed in the heavy black handwriting. Three o’clock this afternoon. Come back to work. Don’t be late. I’ll need a little sweetener to keep this secret all to myself.

  Phyllida dropped the card as though it had moved in her hand. It lay at her feet, as dangerous as an adder. Overcome by nausea, she staggered to a bowl on a side table and was violently sick.

  ‘Lord love us! What’s the matter now?’ It was Anna, fussing and anxious.

  Phyllida closed her eyes and dragged her hand across her mouth. ‘Don’t know, something I ate perhaps. I’m sorry, I’ll wash the bowl, you shouldn’t have to.’ In a minute, when she could think, when she had stopped shaking.

  ‘Nonsense. You come up to bed now, my lamb, and I’ll send for the doctor and his lordship.’

  ‘No! Not Lord Clere!’

  ‘Your brother, I meant. Now come along, you lean on me.’

  ‘All right. Thank you, Anna. Don’t send for the doctor, I will be all right presently. And don’t worry Gregory, Miss Millington needs him. But I will lie down for a while, then I have to go out this afternoon.’

  ‘In this state? You’ll do no such thing, Miss Phyllida. It’s bed for you.’

  Ashe ate his breakfast wearing his best diplomatic face while his family pretended valiantly that nothing was wrong, that they’d never had a houseguest and that they were not desperate to know just how affected he was by Phyllida’s defection.

  He then strode off to Brooks’s club, mentally kicking himself when he realised he was averting his eyes from the turning off St James’s Street into Jermyn Street.

  He already knew enough members to make negotiating the entrance hall and finding a quiet corner to bury himself behind a newspaper a trial, but the club was used to gentlemen seeking peace and quiet after a hard night and no one seemed offended by his curt nods of greeting.

  The newsprint swam in front of his eyes, the words meant nothing. Damn the woman. He had lost a night’s sleep alternating between anger and aching arousal.

  Phyllida didn’t want him, she thought marriage to him would be a life sentence to unhappiness and she didn’t even desire him. Their lovemaking had simply been an exercise in getting over a traumatic incident in her past.

  It was only hurt pride, of course, this sick ache inside. That and unsatisfied lust. He had been used. Used to get her out of a scandal, used to conquer her fears, and now she no longer needed him so she simply walked away. It seemed that her disinclination to marry him overcame his title, his wealth and his prospects.

  Ashe folded the newspaper with savage precision and slapped it down on the table beside him. He needed to hit someone. He didn’t care if they hit him back, he just needed the outlet of violence.

  A waiter came at the crook of his finger. ‘Are there any boxing salons near here?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. Quite a few. Gentleman Jackson’s is the prime one, of course. I’ll give you the direction, shall I, my lord? Or any cabby will take you there.’

  ‘I’ll walk.’ Ashe took the slip of paper and gave the man a coin. ‘Thank you.’

  He spent an hour pounding hell out of a punch bag, then sparred with one of Jackson’s assistants, the great man being booked for the day. It was some help, the ache of the bruises where punches had landed were a distraction from the internal ache. He ate a hot pie and drank porter in the Red Lion down an alleyway off Pall Mall, making himself focus on the taste and texture of the food as he had on the mechanics of the bout he had fought.

  When he had finished he walked north with no fixed idea of where to go, just needing to move.

  ‘My lord!’

  He stopped dead and turned. A woman in a plain gown and cloak was hailing him. A maid by the look of her. Then he saw it was Anna, Phyllida’s woman.

  ‘Oh, my lord, I was coming to find you.’ She panted to a halt beside him. ‘Then I saw you cross St James’s Square…’

  Ashe looked around him and found he was almost in Haymarket. ‘What do you want?’ he asked curtly.

  ‘It’s Miss Phyllida. She came home this morning looking as if she’d been crying her eyes out, but she said it was just a cold coming on. Then she’d no sooner opened her post than she was casting up her accounts and shaking like a leaf.

  ‘I got her to bed, but she said she had to go out later and off she went, wearing those awful clothes she puts on to go down east. And she’d said she wasn’t doing that any more.’ Anna took a deep breath and looked him in the face with something very like accusation in her eyes. ‘Something’s wrong, my lord, and I’m betting it’s to do with you because she told me you wouldn’t be round any more and bit my head off when I asked why. So what have you done to her?’

  ‘Nothing. Your mistress has decided she wants nothing more to do with me.’ He turned on his heel and walked away. He’d be damned if he was going to be interrogated by some maidservant in the public street.

  Two yards. Phyllida crying her eyes out. Well, she rejected me, not the other way round. Five yards. Sick, shaking. She deserves it. I feel sick. Ten yards. Going east. Into the slums, into the dangerous world of Harry Buck and his ilk.

  Ashe looked back. Anna was standing where he had left her, but when she saw him stop she ran to him. ‘My lord?’

  ‘What post?’

  ‘Just one letter. She didn’t say who from.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  Anna screwed up her face in concentrated thought. ‘Don’t know. She didn’t have it when I took her upstairs. I’ll be guessing she dropped it in the drawing room when she took ill.’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘Please, my lord, do you think there was something in the letter?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it is the only clue we have. Come on.’

  Anna found the card under the sofa. Ashe read it, once in stunned disbelief, the second time in cold anger. Come back to work. She hadn’t been raped, she’d been a whore. Phyllida had lied to him, she had hidden this disgraceful secret and only the danger of exposure had forced her to break off their relationship. He could have ended up married to her—and then what would have happened when one of her former clients turned up?

  To hell with her, she deserves everything she gets. Ashe ripped the card in half, then made himself look at it again, made himself start thinking with his head and his heart about the real woman, the woman he knew and not the one who had wounded his pride.

  Phyllida had been genuinely inexperienced and nervous when he had made love to her. This creature Buck had most likely used her only once. And now he was blackmailing her to get her back to his brothel, into his power.

  It would not just be money he’d be after. Phyllida might not realise it, but Ashe could read between the lines and the danger she was in made him cold with fear for her. How she had ended up in this mire could wait for later.

  ‘Have you heard of Harry Buck?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes.’ The maid went pale. ‘He’s a dangerous thatch-gallows, is that one.’

  ‘Where’s his brothel?’

  She gawped at him, then seemed to realise he was serious. ‘He’s got half a dozen of them, so I’ve heard, but I don’t know where they are.’

&
nbsp; How long would it take him to scour the slums of the East End of London without help, without local knowledge? Even if he found her brother and explained all this, there was no guarantee Gregory would know where to go. He seemed to have visited the gaming houses, but there was no hint he habituated brothels in such a rough area.

  Then he recalled Phyllida asking about his name and whether Ashe was the same as Ashok. She knew an Indian trader in the docks by that name and he, she’d said, was a rogue, but a good-hearted one.

  ‘I’ll find her, Anna,’ he promised. ‘You stay here in case she makes it back without me.’ Then he ran.

  There was no-one at the Town house as he pushed through the front door, up the stairs to find his pistols and his knives. He went down again three at a time and out into the square to find a cab. ‘The docks,’ he snapped at the toughest, biggest driver he could see. ‘Double your fare if you get me there fast.’ He wedged himself in a corner and began to load the firearms. If Phyllida was harmed, someone was going to suffer.

  She knew roughly where to go, somewhere in the maze of alleys and courts wedged between Butchers Row, Pillory Lane and New Street where the noise and smells of Smithfield Market did battle with the stench of human waste, overstuffed graveyards and tanneries. She had stumbled though this area once before, shaking and sore, horrified at what had happened, her fingers cramped around the coins Harry Buck had given her.

  It was only later that Phyllida realised that she had been lucky, that Buck had kept his word and used her for that one occasion only and had not simply turned the key in the door and kept her captive to use again and again.

  A plump girl with a red shawl, her breasts uncovered almost to the point of indecency, looked a likely person to ask. ‘Can you tell me the way to Harry Buck’s house?’

  ‘What, looking for a job, are you?’ The girl ran a scornful eye over Phyllida’s drab gown and brown cloak. ‘Prime bit of crack you are, I don’t think.’

  ‘Heard ‘e needs a cook.’ She flattened her vowels, dropped her aitches. ‘I’m a good cook.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, his cunny warren’s just up there.’ The whore jerked her head in the direction of Smithfield. ‘The best house, that is.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Phyllida made her reluctant feet move. She had no idea how she was going to get out of this, but she had to do something before Buck told the world that the Earl of Fransham’s sister was a common whore.

  The nausea came back when she saw the house, three storeys of respectable-looking brick turned black by years of soot and grime. The front door was clean, though. Red, glossy and flanked by torchère holders that would blazon its presence to all those seeking it.

  Phyllida climbed the steps and banged on the knocker. A panel slid back, a broken-nosed face scrutinised her. She stared back, recognising one of Buck’s regular bodyguards. ‘Mr Buck asked me to meet him here,’ she said.

  ‘’E did, did ‘e? You must ‘ave some interesting tricks if he wants you.’ The panel slammed shut and then, with the sound of bolts being drawn, the door opened. ‘Come on in then, the boss is along ‘ere.’

  He peered at her as he opened a door on the first floor. ‘You’re that dealing woman, ain’t yer?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed as she hesitated on the threshold, summoning enough courage to step into Harry Buck’s lair. ‘I’m a dealer.’ Not a whore.

  ‘What’s that?’ Buck demanded sharply as she walked in. ‘What you say, Jem?’

  ‘It’s that dealer woman from the warehouse, guv’nor. You know, bought the Chinese stuff when that Indian geezer got lippy with you.’

  ‘Nah, this is a bit of laced mutton, this is.’

  Phyllida looked up from the swirling patterns of the Turkey carpet and saw Buck lounging in a chair beside a wide desk.

  ‘What you doing all got up like a dowd, darlin’? You wasn’t looking quite so drab last night, off to dinner with your smart friends.’

  The bruiser closed the door behind her. Phyllida straightened her spine and looked Buck in the eye. She was not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing just how he made her feel. But the memories kept swirling back like thick, putrid fog to cloud her brain.

  You’re a pretty one. Think I’ll break you in meself. Don’t see why I can’t have a treat now and again. Thick fingers, unwashed body. Pain and shame.

  ‘I am here. What do you want to close your mouth?’

  ‘Money, darlin’, like I said.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Hundred.’

  She could find that easily enough. But it wouldn’t end there, she knew. ‘And that will be that? You will keep your mouth shut?’

  ‘Don’t be a silly girl. I’ll want that every month. If you ain’t got it, you can come ‘ere and work for it on yer back. You pay or you work and I stay quiet.’ He leered at her. ‘You was a scrawny little thing back then, but I remember those eyes, all big and round, just like when you looked at me in the warehouse. That mark like a heart on your tit. I’ve a good memory, I ‘ave. So I had you followed and thought about it ‘til I remembered who you was.’

  ‘Blackmail is a serious crime.’ And blackmailers were never satisfied—she knew that. Buck would never go away.

  ‘Send me to the nubbing cleat, it would,’ Buck agreed, baring his teeth in a grin. ‘But who’re you going to tell?’

  No one, was the answer to that. She needed time to think now she knew what he was demanding, time to find some kind of lever that would counteract his threats. Could she find out something to threaten him with, blackmail him in return? But Harry Buck had probably committed every crime and sin in the book and he was still out on the streets. No one seemed able to touch him.

  ‘I can’t find that kind of money all at once. You’ll have to give me time to get it together.’

  Buck studied her, her gaze sliding like a greasy finger over her face and down over her body. ‘Nah. I know that’s a lie. So we’ll start tonight, shall we? I’ll get me hundred out of your body. There’s one of me little parties here this evening. They’ll like you, my gentlemen will.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Phyllida reached for the door handle, jerked at it and found herself facing Jem’s broad chest.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Buck said. ‘The lady’s staying, Jem. Put her in one of the rooms upstairs and lock the door—don’t want ‘er straying and ‘aving an accident, do we?’

  She tried to push past him, knowing even as she shoved at the sweat-stained frieze coat that it was hopeless. Jem picked her up and slung her over his shoulder as easily as he might a child.

  The room he dumped her in was quite obviously one used to entertain clients. She wondered, as she stared around at the tawdry red velvet, the huge bed and the mirrors, if this was the one she had been taken to before. It was all a blur, the only real thing in her memory Buck’s face above her, his weight, the pain and the sheer helpless terror.

  Well, she was not a helpless girl now and she was desperate enough for just about anything. Phyllida pushed up the window and leaned out, hands braced on the filthy sill. She was three storeys up, overlooking a back alleyway. There were no ledges, no drainpipes within reach. This window and the locked door were the only ways out of the room.

  She took off her cloak and one half-boot, held the thick fabric in front of the mirror and hit it hard with the heel. The glass shattered into a radiating pattern of long, knife-like shards. Phyllida picked one out at the cost of a cut finger, dragged back the cover from the bed and began to cut the sheet into strips.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘You’ll do it?’ Ashe asked in Hindi.

  The tall Indian smiled. ‘Of course, my brother. You are the enemy of Buck, he is my enemy. We are allies, are we not? And I do not like that man’s dealings with women.’ He used a foul word and spat. ‘Come, let us hear what my men have discovered.’

  Ashe suspected that Ashok—he admitted to no other name—was as much a criminal as Buck. He might not deal in women, but Ashe could smell raw opium, and the heav
y locks and the glint of weapons everywhere he looked argued precious contraband hidden in the warehouse that was Ashok’s headquarters.

  He had been remarkably easy for a man who spoke Hindi to find. The first group of Indian seamen that Ashe saw had been startled to be addressed in their own language by a man dressed in the height of fashion, but Ashe’s colloquial speech seemed to win them over and they led the way to Ashok without any further persuasion.

  Ashe had explained what he wanted, had swallowed liquid opium from the other man’s own cupped palm, exchanged a number of highly coloured items of gossip about Calcutta and was now sitting cross-legged on a heap of silk rugs, drinking sherbet while using all his diplomatic training not to take Ashok by the throat and shake him into urgent action. But this was the Indian’s world, his men and, Ashe was acutely aware, his own best and only chance of getting into Buck’s headquarters and removing Phyllida.

  ‘Oh yes, my brother, she is still in there. I have the place watched, always, as is prudent with an enemy. Your lady went in—pale, in a dull brown cloak—and has not come out. Now we wait until evening.’

  ‘No. She is in danger. Even as we sit here talking they could be—’

  ‘Wait until evening, then customers come. That’s who they want her for. You are just another English gentleman and so the door will be opened to you. My men attack at the back door and others follow you in through the front.’ The Indian reached for a sweetmeat. ‘When you find Buck, you will have a duel with him?’

  ‘That is for gentlemen.’ Ashe slid the knife from his sleeve and delicately trimmed a rough edge on his nail. ‘He is not a gentleman.’

  ‘Ah.’ Ashok smiled. ‘No, he is not. And we do not want the magistrates getting their hands on him, he knows too much about me. Perhaps he will have an accident. While we wait, your lady admired some pearls I have, the last time we did business, but she said they were too expensive for her. Perhaps you would like to look at them?’

  My lady. Is she? Ashe pushed aside the thought. The future consisted of whatever time it took to get Phyllida out of there. After that he would try to work out just what she meant to him and discover what he meant to her.