House of Cads (Ladies of Scandal Book 2)

by Elizabeth Kingston

  “I like that you make him ridiculous,” she said. “But I like it more if you also give him this reputation, in every drawing, so that he is known to be ridiculous and degenerate.”

  “You want to go after Ravenclyffe?” He had no idea how Freddy would feel about that. “I know we made a libertine out of almost nothing in St. James’ case, but I’m not sure how easy it’ll be to do the same to a duke.”

  “It is not out of nothing,” she objected. “And I would not want to make him seem so romantic as a libertine.”

  “More of a cad, then?”

  She gave an indignant huff that had no small amount of disgust in it. “This word is too kind, cad. It is the genteel way to say a man is not honorable, but he is more than dishonorable. The pig. And I do not ask you to invent, it is all truth.”

  He considered this. “So your point is to give a general impression that mothers should keep their daughters out of his reach, something like that?”

  “Oh yes, I would very much like that. He is a duke, you know? You cannot destroy a duke, you can only hope all his acquaintance will laugh at him. Already you are drawing pictures to do this. I only suggest there is this other thing to ridicule.”

  Freddy was the final decision on what the story was, but Mason didn’t say that. She could answer all the challenging questions about why it would or would not work when she met Freddy.

  “I’ll draw it,” he said. “I’ll put together a few more drawings and take them to Freddy when I meet him tomorrow. Will you come to my room tonight to look at the sketches?”

  She laughed. “Ah, the ancient invitation! You say this to all the women?”

  “Only the ones who are serious about their pleasure,” he assured her, and had the very great satisfaction of watching her blush.

  “I think it is perfectly understandable he would remind you of a farmer,” explained Phyllida as she spooned jam onto her bread. “He lives in nature, and so is possessed of the wisdom one can only acquire when one is liberated from the bonds of civilization. A life devoted to the contemplation of the soul among the creatures of the forest is not so different to a life spent in service to the soil.”

  Mason decided that if Marie-Anne could keep herself from laughing at this statement, which was one of the most ludicrous things he’d ever heard, then he could do it, too. Never mind that this wise hermit had said barely more than two sentences before accepting the offered sandwich, tugging respectfully at his cap, and leaving. Never mind that the sole reason for the existence of an ornamental hermit was to entertain within the dreaded “bonds of civilization.” And never mind that seventeen-year-old Phyllida Shipley was about as familiar with wisdom as she was with the definition of a forest: she was determined to be fascinated.

  Now the three of them sat before the picturesque little cottage – which would be more rightly described as an artfully designed hut – and shared the contents of the hamper while Mason stared dreamily at Marie-Anne’s mouth and Phyllida compared the rigors of being a hermit to farming.

  “I think your typical farmer spends more time contemplating his crops than his soul,” Mason offered. Phyllida scowled, so he added as seriously as he could manage: “And he’s the poorer for it, I’m sure.”

  “Indeed he is not, Mr. Mason!” Phyllida was brimming full of hope that she could make him understand. “An ideal life is one spent out of the corrupting influence of society. Our souls are born in a state of perfection, do you see, and wander far from it through the influence of civilization. Education interferes with our natural state. Do you see, then, how a simple farmer is necessarily closer to the divine than the learned man?”

  He considered telling her that learned men tended to be wealthy men, and that most farmers would gladly sell their alleged proximity to the divine for a fraction of that wealth. It would fall on deaf ears, though. She was patently uninterested in common sense, and it was more expedient to agree with her.

  “I do see it now,” he said in a tone of dawning enlightenment. “You’re much better at explaining these ideas than the poems St. James composes. He gets himself tangled up in the mechanics. What was he trying to rhyme the other day? ‘A countenance noble’ with ‘morality immobile’?”

  “I preferred ‘savage beauty’ and ‘ravaged esprit’,” said Marie-Anne, who thankfully did not look at him or both would have burst out laughing. “Such persistence in creativity! It is to be admired.”

  Phyllida grew unusually quiet as she unwrapped cheese and sliced more bread. Normally, she would take this opportunity to praise St. James’ poetic sensibilities. She finally mumbled something about how he had been working on that poem for months and still wasn’t finished. “I fear he may be in want of inspiration.”

  “You are inspiration enough for ten poets, Phyllie,” Marie-Anne insisted loyally. “If he needs more than you, then he is a very poor poet.”

  “I wouldn’t say that’s the only thing that makes him a poor poet,” Mason muttered. But he did it quietly, so that only Marie-Anne heard him.

  Immediately after dinner that evening, he excused himself so he could prepare the new drawings alone in his room. He briefly sketched out three ideas, and then began calculating how long he could reasonably wait for Marie-Anne to come through the door and help him decide which one held the most promise. It would only take a minute, and then maybe she’d kiss him. Maybe she’d pull his trousers open again in that deliciously impatient way.

  Or maybe he’d spend all night fantasizing in an empty room. She might not come at all. Over dinner, he had made mention of his intention to go to the village tomorrow. A few of the other guests invited themselves to come along, including Marie-Anne, and he could only assume she had some plan to get free of the party so that they could meet up with Freddy. She was clever enough, he had no doubt. But a part of him still hoped she would want to discuss it with him tonight.

  Just when he had decided to give up, and pulled his favorite of the sketches toward him so that he could add more detail, her soft tap came at the panel. She wore a friendly smile of greeting as she entered, and also all of her clothes. He exerted a mighty effort to hold back his sigh of disappointment.

  “You have been drawing?”

  She came forward and he slid the pages across to her. She smelled wonderful. He had brought another chair to the desk in the hope that she would stay long enough to sit, and now she drifted down to it as she looked at the sketches.

  “I liked that one best,” he told her. She held the drawing of Ravenclyffe seated in the salon, surrounded by empty chairs as he leered at Miss Ainslie who stood at the piano, singing. A cluster of young ladies peered fearfully at him from afar while two housemaids in the corner discussed his lewdness. Marie-Anne smiled a little as she examined it. Then, as he watched, she gave a delicate shudder of disgust.

  “It is very vivid, how you make him drool at the singer.” Her finger hovered over the group of young ladies at the side of the drawing. “But this will not do. You have drawn Phyllida, and here is the youngest Huntingdon niece, it is obvious. And these chairs here – everyone will see it is this estate, and this party of guests. It is too exact.”

  He was so distracted by the idea that the Huntingdon estate was identifiable by its chairs that it took a moment for him to register the rest of her concerns.

  “I can change their faces if you like.”

  “And the room,” she insisted. “And the singer too. You cannot draw a scene from this house, do you not see?”

  “I can’t say that I do. Is it a secret that Ravenclyffe is here?”

  She was scowling at him again like it was perfectly obvious and he was a thickheaded dolt. He felt a horrified flush beginning to creep up his neck, as it always did when he suspected he was making an ass of himself. But her exasperation was fading a little now, and his mortification ebbed with it.

  “Lady Huntingdon is my dear friend,” she explained patiently. “Very dear, and very loyal when others abandoned me. She has invited you her
e because of the lies you told, and now you gather stories from her guests like…like fruit on the ground, hm? To be welcomed into a private home, it is a privilege. To share it with strangers, to make the private public – this is a betrayal of her trust and her hospitality.”

  Well, that was damned inconvenient. He could say that the Huntingdon servants were so famously indiscreet that it scarcely mattered – the doings of this household were hardly a secret. But right now all he wanted was to wipe the serious look from her face.

  “Let’s change the scene, then.” He pulled up a fresh sheet of paper. “And the ladies’ faces. You can describe new dresses for them, too.”

  This didn’t lighten her mood as he’d hoped. She put the drawing down and squeezed her hands together. He’d never seen her less than perfectly self-assured, and her uncertainty alarmed him enough that he put the pencil down and reached across to put a hand on hers. This amused her a little.

  “I worry you so much, do I?” She quirked a brow at him and pulled her hand away. “It is not so grave. I am wondering if I should tell Lady Huntingdon about you. It is very bad of me, to decide for her that you are harmless.”

  “That seems pretty grave to me,” he said carefully. “How about if I just promise you that I won’t draw a single thing you don’t approve of? I won’t use anything I learn here unless you say I can.”

  “Ha,” she scoffed. “You do as you please without asking approval, as I do.” Her obvious skepticism made perfect sense, but he was still a little insulted by it. There was no chance for him to defend himself, though, because now she was tapping the empty page, eager. “But it is for me to think, and it is for you to make a new drawing now. Come, I want to watch you!”

  So he picked up the pencil and worked. The same idea but different in the particulars, with her making suggestions all the while. She was a little exasperating, hanging over his shoulder and dictating the most trivial elements when he wasn’t ready to add that level of detail yet. He finally pulled away and put a hand over the paper to shield it from her commentary.

  “For God’s sake, Marie-Anne, just give me another half hour and I’ll be ready to bother with the pattern on their stockings. Until then, sit. Over there. I’ll tell you when I need your help.”

  She blinked at him out of startled blue eyes. “Eh bien! Truly you are an artist.” Then she swiftly returned to her chair, pointedly looking away from him with a smile playing at the corner of her lips.

  He couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or not, and he really didn’t care. Among these people in their fine clothes and enormous homes, he doubted himself with every breath, holding on through sheer luck and guts in the face of his colossal ignorance. But this page before him was something he knew with absolute certainty. He knew how to hold the pencil and let his hand move without thinking too much, how to form the shape of the empty spaces and how to recognize when it was good. It was the only thing he was certain of, and he didn’t need her hanging over him and making him nervous about it.

  She looked through the folder full of drawings he had left on the corner of the desk, and he worked. Some part of him could sense her watching him intently from time to time. She was hell on his concentration, so he exerted a mighty effort to block her out. He was determined to do this and do it well, like it would prove something vital if he could draw it as she wanted.

  Most of the sketch was done, just a few more details to add, when she spoke softly from her chair.

  “It is beautiful, Mason.”

  She was looking at one of the drawings from the folder, rapt, and he hesitated to see which it was. Her face was mesmerizing. He wanted to draw her like this, too – full of soft wonder, her eyes shining. She looked up at him and he felt a kind of vague panic beginning to build in his chest to see she was entirely serious, even a little bit reverent.

  “It’s just a drawing,” he said sharply, as though he had not carefully chosen this selection of his work, hoping she might look at them and have exactly this reaction. He leaned over to see which one she held.

  It was the drawing of Lady Summerdale – or really, just a piece of her torso. Shoulder to hip, it showed the beaded bodice, the delicately puffed sleeve of her ball gown, and the length of one bare arm next to her curving waist. As he watched, Marie-Anne’s hand floated over the paper as if she wanted to touch, but was afraid of damaging it in some way.

  “It is Hélène,” she said, and gave a little sniff. “Oh, you make me miss my friend. Almost I can believe she is here, it is so real. Well, it is not quite right how you placed the seam, and she wore gloves with this gown – but this is not important.”

  He cleared his throat of the thousand things caught in it. “How did you know it was her?”

  She gave him a scornful look. “She is my friend! Who else has this body, so perfect like a goddess? No one. Even if you wrap it in a horse blanket, I would know it. This.” She touched a finger lightly to the inside of the elbow on the page. “She is so alive, I almost expect it to be warm to the touch. It is exquisite.”

  It was painful – actually, physically painful, the hot tangle of joy and fear that suffocated him. Part of him wanted to rip the drawing out of her hands like a jealous child, and part of him wanted to point out every flaw in it, tell her how wrong she was. An even bigger part of him wanted to laugh and turn it into a joke that made it small and unimportant, something that didn’t matter.

  Instead, what finally emerged from the mess of feelings strangling him was a faint, “You mean it?”

  “Of course. It is enormous, your talent. I...” She shifted through the pages. “And this one of the old man. And here, the cat. This one, it is Dahlia’s curls, no? How do you make the light shine when it is only pencil on paper? You are extraordinary.”

  She pulled them out one by one and detailed everything she loved, admiring so many of the little things that he had worked at for hours, things he never thought anyone but himself would notice. When she reached the drawing of the lascivious plum, she pressed her lips together and passed over it without comment. It was only then that he remembered there was anything he enjoyed doing with her more than this. And he didn’t even miss that so much, if this was to be the consolation.

  Chapter Twelve

  Marie-Anne was forced to admit to herself that, despite how terrible it was to make money by lying to people and publicly humiliating them, she was far more in sympathy with Mason than she was with any of the Huntingdon guests. As she watched one of Joyce’s many nieces struggle and fail to hide a look of disgust at a villager who had dared a cordial greeting, she reflected that most of the people mocked in Mason’s pamphlets deserved far worse.

  It was ungenerous to judge them so harshly. After all, they could not help how they were raised. She vividly remembered Helen’s stories of how hard it had been when she, the daughter of an earl, had first come to Bartle, determined to live as simply as any villager. When she had described cleaning out her own chamber pot for the first time in her life, it had made Marie-Anne laugh until tears rolled down her cheeks – not least because she couldn’t imagine growing fully into adulthood without ever once having to clean up after oneself.

  As she and Mason walked with the handful of other guests through the village, two of the ladies – the tiresome singer and The Poetess – seemed to be engaged in some kind of battle. They were boasting about their various travels, and who was better acquainted with a certain Hungarian musician, and all manner of experiences that would apparently prove one of them more worldly and sophisticated than the other. Presumably they were hoping to impress the villagers, being unaware that the villagers were far more excited at the prospect of two fine ladies fighting in the street than which of them could name more canals in Venice.

  Moving on to deciding who had the more discerning palate, the ladies eased into a debate over whether the preserves served this morning had been quince or fig. Marie-Anne was standing a little away from the rest of the party with Mason, who was watching the arg
uing ladies closely.

  “Will you put this scene in your papers?” she asked him, careful to keep her voice low.

  “Not unless it comes to blows.” Despite his grin, he seemed perfectly serious. “I wouldn’t put it past Miss Wolcott, either, she might say she’s a simple poetess but I’d lay odds she’s tough as a hedge apple.”

  “Apples do not grow in hedges.”

  “No,” he said, distracted as he watched the ladies snap at each other. “And the preserves weren’t fig or quince. Should we tell them it was elderberry, or wait to see what happens? It really would make a great print, and both of them would love the publicity.”

  “You mean it, don’t you? Already you are planning how to draw it, I can see.”

  He pulled his attention away from the scene to look at her. “What? No, I was joking. I promised you I wouldn’t use anything from these people unless you said I could.”

  His anxious frown gave her an unexpected sense of satisfaction. Good. He should be concerned. There was a kernel of resentment in her still, even though she had spent the last two days assuring herself that he was not malicious or spiteful. She couldn’t quite understand the lingering anger until this moment when, suddenly, she realized it was not his lying that had so offended her. It was that he had used her in the hopes of getting close to her friends. Charmed her and used her and planned to run away the instant he was discovered.

  That was only part of her appeal to him, of course, and a small part. She could see very plainly that he liked her for herself, and it was more than probable that they would have become lovers no matter what her social connections were. It was very real, their attraction, and so she did not fault him for acting on it. She could not help but be angry, though, with the part of him that had hoped to use her.