House of Cads (Ladies of Scandal Book 2)

by Elizabeth Kingston

  Instead, he altered the cartoonish figure next to her so that it leaned a little closer and leered more broadly. That was really all it ever took, anyway – show a man leering at it and the most innocent female figure was instantly interpreted as more sexual. It was the power of suggestion. Still, he added her hand, tickling the man under the chin in a gesture that was affectionate and flirting.

  “There’s an idea,” said Freddy thoughtfully. He was looking over Mason’s shoulder, one of his more annoying habits. “Don’t want to get too political, but play on Lady Summerdale’s scandalous past like that and we balance the two stories.”

  “One story,” corrected Mason, as he added a sash across the leering man’s chest that read NORWAY. “Or one true story, at any rate. Her scandal was real, but this is entirely invented.”

  “Believable, though. What are they doing in Norway, anyway?” Freddie took a bite of whatever he was eating, probably dropping crumbs on the floor behind Mason’s back. “Ought to holiday in Italy or Switzerland, like the rest of them.”

  Mason ignored him in favor of perfecting the expressions of satisfaction on the other figures who were waiting eagerly in a large bed behind Lady Summerdale’s enticing form. There were three of them, labeled America, France, and Haiti. Maybe Haiti didn’t belong – he wasn’t sure how much the British public cared about that revolution. And he wasn’t sure where to place her husband in the scene. What would an English lord do while his radical wife kept company with revolutionaries? And should he include something to remind readers that Norway had abolished their aristocracy last year?

  “It would need to be more personal than this. Bring in the Irish,” Freddy suggested. “That was the scandal, how she played the whore to an Irish peer. Maybe if they’d gotten their republic, she’d have wanted to be more than just his mistress. Either way, it’s easy to make the case she has a taste for revolutionaries.”

  “Except for how she’s married to the most upstanding member of the British nobility, who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body, and they are famously in love.” Mason moved his pencil lightly over her eyebrow. Her body was easy to capture on the page, but her face was elusive.

  “Well leave that out, but I tell you it needs more of the personal. Maybe add her French friend? That’s more scandal and more revolutionaries.”

  “Freddy, that will not happen.” Mason dropped his pencil and rubbed his eyes. It was late, and he had other things he’d rather be drawing now. “That French friend is going to get me out of this engagement. And she’s going to manage it so I still have some kind of respectability with these people when it’s done, which I’ll remind you is necessary if you want to keep this game going.”

  He had no compunction about leaving Dahlia at the altar, if it came to that. She and all her acquaintance might consider it an irreparably damaging humiliation, but Mason didn’t even come close to caring. If he dropped her, she’d still have her good name. She could even marry some decent man in the end, if she would ever lower herself to accept someone without a large fortune or an impressive title. Even more importantly, no matter what he did Dahlia would still have a roof over her head, clothes on her back, and food in her mouth. The idea of “ruin” among these people was blown considerably out of proportion.

  The plan had always been to disappear and, like always, the people left behind would feel betrayed and bereft. The trick was to make sure they didn’t feel that way until he was gone, and he needed a few more months until he had enough funds to take him very far away. Now that he was completely trusted among the Shipleys and all their circle – which now included Marie-Anne de Vauteuil and her invaluable high society friends – he and Freddy might get enough material to sell more papers than they’d imagined.

  “Anyway, forget this,” said Freddy. “It’s suicide, going after Summerdale like that. Save it for when we’re in need of desperate measures and ready to burn every bridge. We’ll both hope it never gets that desperate. Besides, politics don’t sell as well as the gossip. Did you finish the one with the marquess?”

  Mason pulled the drawing of the marquess forward and handed it to Freddy. He slipped the Summerdale sketch into a folder behind a dozen other half-drawn and abandoned ideas. It really would ruin their whole scheme to publish anything like that. He’d only put his pencil to it because he wanted an excuse to draw Lady Summerdale, and when left to his own devices he always tended toward the political. Back in New York, the political work was the only kind that paid, and it was where all his experience came from. Freddy rightly insisted that others already did political satire in London, and the appetite for social satire was never satisfied. So that was where they had focused their attention.

  “Oh, this is brilliant,” said Freddy, beginning to laugh as he looked at the sketch of the marquess.

  “You like it? I wasn’t sure if I should make his wife look more sympathetic. You know – scoundrel husband, pitiful weeping wife.”

  “No, it’s perfect. Let someone else play up the tragedy. This,” he said with a gleeful jab at the drawing where the wife brandished a poker, “is comedy. No one has to choose sides to enjoy this version. The Marquess cries Divorce at the wife who dared to witness his infidelity – that’s what we’ll call the print.”

  Mason refrained from rolling his eyes. Nothing like re-stating exactly what was depicted, in case there was any doubt about a picture of a man in bed with a woman and shouting DIVORCE at his angry wife. But Freddy was in charge of words, so he left it alone.

  “If we can get the mistress’s name by next week, you can do another drawing on it then. If not, we’ll have to think of something else. The divorce won’t happen, so this story will be played out soon enough. It’s not too soon to do another on Aloysius St. James, if you’re ready to put that Shipley girl in the line of fire?”

  Mason shrugged. “If we have nothing else, but it’s awfully boring. She just sighs over him like all the others, while he writes bad poetry and looks pretty. Nothing new there.”

  “It’s a new conquest, anyway, and we wouldn’t want the public to miss out.”

  It might put Amy’s future with her priggish vicar into jeopardy, but Mason didn’t consider that worth his time or concern. Amy was sensible and he liked her well enough, but he didn’t feel remotely responsible for her antiseptic romance. That was Marie-Anne’s concern.

  Except, damn it all, Marie-Anne was only helping him out of his own engagement for Amy’s sake.

  “God, it’s like dominoes. We have to knock ’em down in the right order.” He put aside the thought and reached for a fresh sheet of paper. “Let’s not put her name on it. At least not until my engagement is safely ended.”

  “That can work. Build a bit of mystery, who’s the new girl – that sort of thing. One day, Mason, you and I will write our memoirs and explain to the world how we created a libertine out of someone as dull as St. James. I’ll lay odds he gets his wretched poems published on the strength of a reputation we invented, and he doesn’t even know it. All the work, none of the credit, though the money’s better than credit–”

  “Freddy, are you going to leave anytime tonight? Or did you forget the tantrum you threw over having to pay for two rooms? If you don’t actually use yours, I promise my own tantrum will be even louder.”

  When Freddy left, Mason retrieved the larger folder from where he’d kept it hidden away atop the wardrobe. He flipped past the sketches of Dahlia’s hands, her father’s artfully tied cravat, her mother burning her mouth on the soup at dinner last week. He’d used half a page sketching the flowers that were in Summerdale House, and now he used the other half to draw Lady Summerdale’s waist. There was the beading on her gown from the night at the ball, and the curve of her forearm which he had to imagine because she’d worn long gloves.

  He worked on it until it seemed alive to him, like he could touch the crook of her elbow and feel a pulse. Then he moved on to a new page, intending to try his hand at drawing a kangaroo but finding tha
t his pencil had other ideas. It was Marie-Anne’s smile that made it to the page. He drew her mouth again and again – her full smile and her little mischievous grin, her polite smile and her smirk, her moue of distaste and her lips pursed in disapproval. There was a natural upward curve to her lips, as though she were perpetually amused.

  It was easy to think she was perpetually amused, but he had seen her face when Sir Gordon and Lady Shipley pretended they had never treated her horribly. For that matter, he had seen she was not amused when she declared him a cad and rebuked him for flirting with her at the ball.

  She truly cared about the Shipley girls, and was serious about keeping them safe from hurt. What’s more, he was fairly certain it was not obligation to a dead lover that motivated her. It was just her nature to look out for them, no matter how exasperating they were. She cared, and as long as she thought he cared too, she would want him around.

  How long ago had he learned to notice and use that sort of thing? Probably before he’d even learned to walk. Like what they like or hate what they hate, and they think you’re on their side without you even trying. That’s how his cousin had always put it. Don’t lay it on too thick, though.

  Mason looked at the page full of her smile. He didn’t care what happened to the Shipley girls, but he wanted to kiss Marie-Anne de Vauteuil. He wanted it so much that even if he were to get free of this engagement tomorrow, he’d still help Marie-Anne with her plans. He’d do it because he wanted her to like him. Not to achieve some end – not to help him with Dahlia or get him closer to high society, and not even just because he rarely went an hour without thinking of kissing every inch of her. He just wanted her to like him as much as he liked her. And if he could get her to look at him half as soppily as she looked at that stupid poet, he thought he could die happy.

  “Won’t you please consider coming to the opera?” Dahlia pleaded with him the next day. “I know you’ve said you don’t like it, but Mrs. Heckerling has offered us her box and it’s really so very important to be seen there.”

  “We’re being seen here,” he said to her with a sweeping gesture at the park. “And we’ll be seen tonight at that card party, and on Saturday at the dinner you say is so important. I don’t mind the park, Dahlia, and I like playing cards and eating dinner, but I’ll be damned if I spend hours at something I don’t like only so people can look at me.”

  “You are very disagreeable today, Mason.” She said it fretfully, which was why he always found it hard to be unkind to her. Unless it was her parents or sisters, Dahlia was so anxious for approval that just faintly criticizing her felt like kicking a puppy. “Marie-Anne said I should ask you even though I was sure you’d say no. I think she worries you will not make a good husband for me.”

  “Did she say so?”

  “Oh no, she would never say it.” She paused to wave at a passing carriage, but did not ask him to stop so that she could greet whoever it was. “I remember her saying years ago that the world could always do with more love in it, and so one should never say anything to discourage a romance. Isn’t that the noblest sentiment?”

  Mason carefully considered how he wanted to respond to this before settling on, “If you value sentiment over truth, I suppose.”

  Her cheeks were growing pink, but he couldn’t tell if that was a trick of the late afternoon light or real feeling. She was very subdued as she said, “She would never be untruthful. It is very ungracious of you to suggest it. I don’t care what her past is or what my parents have said about her. Richard thought very highly of her and loved her passionately, and he could never love a liar.”

  She seemed so wounded that he almost pulled the carriage to a halt so that he could soothe her. But he remembered in time that he was supposed to be nurturing a rift between them. “Then it’s a good thing I never said she was a liar,” he said coolly. “You’re the one who thinks she doesn’t like me.”

  “Oh no, that’s not what I meant! I think she likes you very much!” she protested, looking disheartened. “We seem to misunderstand each other rather often, don’t we? I suppose with time we’ll grow more accustomed to one another. Though I won’t expect you to grow accustomed to the opera, at least not this week.”

  He guided the carriage out of the park and towards her home. There was no denying that an evening at the opera could easily provide fodder for next week’s paper. This was the whole reason he’d ever bothered to flirt with Dahlia in the first place – to attend these sorts of things with someone who continuously and enthusiastically pointed out who mattered and who didn’t, and why. He’d never thought it could backfire so spectacularly. Now everything seemed to be a choice between keeping his money-making scheme afloat and disentangling himself from her plans to marry him.

  But if Dahlia was so desperate to be seen on the arm of her wealthy new beau at the opera tomorrow night, it was probably because Lord Releford would be there. And there was no reason not to take advantage and kill two birds with one stone.

  “Why not ask St. James to join you? He loves opera.”

  He’d also make any man jealous, with that hair and that chin and the way even Marie-Anne fluttered when she looked directly at him. It only helped that St. James had been linked to an actress a few months ago, a possibly harmless acquaintance that Mason and Freddy had turned into a torrid affair with a few strokes of the pen. Now they could speculate in print if the would-be poet’s new conquest was another actress, or one of the Shipley sisters, or some other notable citizen in the over-perfumed crowd.

  “Oh yes, that’s an excellent idea!” said Dahlia breathlessly, clearly seeing the superiority of the plan.

  That settled the matter, thankfully, and Mason was so relieved to have an evening free of socializing that he didn’t even mind when Dahlia’s father, upon learning Mason would not be attending the opera, said, “Of course, it’s only natural that you can’t appreciate the more elevated entertainments to be found in London. But I think you’ll find that if you apply yourself with diligence to studying the pursuits of those with more refined tastes, your own sensibilities will improve.”

  This was delivered in his natural voice: pompous, condescending, and at a normal speed and volume. Since Sir Gordon usually employed a slightly slow and loud voice when magnanimously explaining anything to the uncultured colonial in his drawing room, Mason thought their relationship must be improving. Which would not do at all. To counter it, he looked blankly at Sir Gordon for a while and eventually asked him where a man was supposed to spit in this city, as there was never a spittoon when you needed one.

  He really couldn’t wait to tell Marie-Anne about the look of horror this produced. Unfortunately, he saw her sparingly over the next few days and always in the presence of the Shipleys. At last she came to dinner one evening, her opportunity to meet Amy’s almost-vicar.

  “I am so glad to finally meet you, Mr. Harner!” she said when they were introduced, her enthusiasm firmly in place as she held out her hands to him and gave a radiant smile that made Mason’s heart lurch. “It is a very special man, I think, who can capture our sweet Amy.”

  But Mr. Harner was deeply uncomfortable with this warm familiarity and, as he avoided her outstretched hands, Marie-Anne’s enthusiasm began to die out. Her smile dimmed down to a pleasant expression that grew increasingly strained throughout the evening as she tried, and failed, to find anything interesting about Mr. Harner. The man was so dull his mere presence tarnished the silver.

  “Does he take pleasure in anything at all?” She whispered it to Mason as he sat next to her after dinner at the card table.

  “Reading to us from his favorite book of sermons.” He answered her in an undertone as he reached for the cards. “But Sir Gordon threatened never to invite him to another dinner if he pulled out that damned book again. That made Amy threaten to kick St. James in the shins if he read any more of his poetry for the evening entertainment, which led to a squabble between her and Phyllida that made me very happy I never had sisters.” />
  “So we must amuse ourselves with cards, I see,” she said, and looked at him shuffling the deck. “You are very good at that! Do you gamble so much?”

  He’d let his hands move without thinking, handling the cards as deftly as an expert. He stopped. “I was a bored child who played with cards, that’s all. Dahlia,” he said as she approached them. “We were just talking about entertainment. Will you play for us?”

  “If you like,” she agreed, “but Amy is so much better, and I was hoping Marie-Anne would show us her lace-making.”

  “Oh yes!” Phyllida came rushing across the room. “Won’t you please, Marie-Anne? You can’t imagine how often we’ve talked of it over the years.”

  Marie-Anne seemed amazed they remembered it at all, and protested she didn’t have the materials necessary. When Sir Gordon began to frown and mumble something about his daughters engaging in a trade best left to common shop girls, Mason overrode him by asking how she had come to learn it.

  “It was the business of my family for many generations,” Marie-Anne explained. “It is why I learned English, you know, because my father’s uncle came to England to open a business here. I was to come when I was old enough and help to teach the patterns.”

  “But then there was the war and Napoleon,” said Phyllida eagerly, as though it was an old favorite story. “And no one wanted to buy lace from a Frenchman in England, isn’t it too bad? But then Richard found you in Paris because you spoke English–”

  “And loved cakes!” interjected Dahlia.

  “Yes, and you talked about pastries and England and he fell in love with you the very afternoon you met. He told us so. When did you fall in love with him, Marie-Anne?”