He shook himself, trying to look surprised as he read on. “What a coincidence. This is a legitimate invitation to the masquerade at Castle Eaton. We won’t have to pose as chambermaids after all. Fancy that.”
“You cheat,” she said slowly. “You underhanded, beguiling rat. You planned this—you listened to me babble on about Loveridge’s damned stupid—”
He laughed helplessly. “It was Heath. He told me he could wangle an invitation. I had no idea how fast.”
“Conniving clearly runs in your family.”
“Then our children will be doomed.” He traced his thumb across her tender lower lip. “It’s not such a bad plan, is it, for us to masquerade as man and wife?”
“No,” she agreed after a deep silence. “Who knows? We might just start a fashion in society for devotion in marriage again.”
“I hope so.” He leaned over her, his gaze intent. “I have never looked forward to a winter as much as this one.”
“I shall need a new wardrobe,” she said thoughtfully.
“One without trousers, I hope.”
“Actually I had this costume designed—”
“Elle,” he interrupted firmly. “It is a good time for us to go. I don’t want to share you with all of London.”
She lifted the letters from his hand and dropped them one by one on the desk. “You do know how to get your way, don’t you?”
He lifted her into his arms and carried her to the bed, undressing her in fervent need. Their clothing fell willy-nilly to the floor. She pulled the bed curtains closed and wrapped her arms around his naked body. He kissed every inch of her bare skin. She made threats. He made vows. She groaned. He whispered her name between kisses so bittersweet that she quivered, and though the past might still matter, it wasn’t enough to keep them from each other.
He broke before her, and her body drank, overflowed, following him into bliss moments after. Heated pleasure expanded her veins. She floated. He soothed the taut skin of her ribs with his fingers and listened to the slowing of his heart and breath until he drifted off.
When the church bells woke him hours later, he realized he and Eleanor still lay entangled. A floorboard creaked somewhere in the house. He eased out from her arms and half-sat, pushing the bed curtains apart.
Not a blade of light penetrated the curtained windows. Something other than the bells had awakened him. He stared at the door. Had he seen candlelight?
She stirred. “It’s early. Is anything wrong?”
He shook his head. “Have you ever read any of the letters that you’ve recovered for the duchess?”
“Of course not.” She snuggled deeper into the covers. “They’re private. If they contained secrets that would embarrass her or the duke, I should not wish to know.”
A cart rumbled over the cobbles below the window.
“Why did you ask?”
“Just curious.”
“I thought you were above our petty affairs.”
He laughed.
She rose on her elbow, studying her silent husband, the masculine angles of his body, his shoulders, his narrow hips. His hard features lent his profile a forbidding look.
When would he tell her the truth? Should she confront him, or let him play his hand? If he didn’t work for the duke, could he be working for someone else? A double agent? Impossible. What would a spy want with love letters?
He glanced around suddenly, his gaze so penetrating that she shivered. In the dark he looked a little fierce, harder than the man she had married.
Overwhelming, to want someone this desperately.
The cart in the street slowed. A back door in the house creaked open.
“What is that?” he asked, rising to stare out the window.
“The coal man, I imagine.”
“I thought he came earlier this week.”
“Pray don’t say they’re coming for me,” she whispered in alarm. “I haven’t even got my new wardrobe. And you—You aren’t wearing a stitch.”
He laughed, a warm sound in the shadows that dispelled her fears. “Nobody will take you away when I’m here.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
After a subdued breakfast, the topic of the Masquer not discussed, Sebastien dropped off Eleanor and her long-ignored friend Lady Phoebe Haywood at the shopping district of Bond Street.
He cautioned Burton, the footman, to keep the two ladies in view and said he would return after a quick coffee in St. Giles with some old friends.
Eleanor muttered that she wished she could send the footman to watch over her husband. St. Giles and its overcrowded rookeries bore a nasty reputation, she reminded him.
“And furthermore,” she added. “I know why you’re going. This is part of your agreement to put your ear to the ground.”
“Well, let us tell the world,” he replied, glancing at her clueless-looking companion.
Dutifully he waited in his carriage until she and Phoebe entered the glovemaker’s shop. Aside from a poster or two blowing in the gutter, he saw no evidence of last night’s impassioned mob.
A lady ought to be safe enough buying a pair of gloves, he reasoned as he rapped on the carriage roof to alert his driver, Tilden.
The ladies stood at the counter for over an hour. Not because they were selecting pretty gloves. Eleanor might have enjoyed that. What she did not enjoy was Phoebe chatting her head off to every customer and assistant about how terrified she was of the Masquer while moved to tears at the same time, and what would happen should the mob find him before the police?
Would he be torn to bits or be given sanctuary by an aging prostitute?
Eleanor could have gagged her friend with the expensive onyx-buttoned gloves she’d finally purchased. She suspected that even then Phoebe would not remain silent. She had been a chatterbox in school who’d fainted at least once a week.
“You haven’t bought a thing,” Phoebe exclaimed as she followed Eleanor outside. “I don’t know why you didn’t take those pink leather gloves with the pearl buttons. They’d look ever so nice on you.”
Eleanor breathed a sigh of relief. She had most of her gowns, and a few Masquer costumes, made by a French modiste who lived on the outskirts of Town and did not care for Society in general. Efficient, discreet, selective about her clients, she served Eleanor only because Eleanor had once saved her cat from choking on a fish bone. Perhaps Eleanor could persuade her to come to the country to make her a few heavy dresses and a woolen mantle or two for walking.
She and Sebastien had not walked together since Spain. She sighed happily at the thought.
She glanced down as Phoebe laid her hand gently upon hers. “May I make an honest remark between friends?”
Eleanor doubted that she could stop her.
“It’s that you’re so different,” Phoebe blurted out indelicately. “You’re not anything like the girl I remember from boarding school.”
“One grows.”
Phoebe pursed her small mouth. “Yes, but does one have to grow so dull?”
Eleanor noticed a group of well-heeled gentlewomen spill from a carriage across the street. They were a rather determined-looking lot, presumably intent on a day of shopping. In fact, they seemed to be marching her way in a military formation. She decided that she had developed an aversion to daylight activity.
“I’m dull?” she asked, suddenly realizing the insult she had just been dealt.
Phoebe gave her a sheepish grin. “Well, you used to be enormously fun. Climbing out of windows, putting leeches down Mrs. Paulton’s dress—”
“Did I do that? What a waste of leeches. And what a horrible person I was.”
“But you were Eleanor, she who entertained us and dared to act out all the wicked deeds we lacked the courage to commit.”
“I don’t know that it was courage,” Eleanor admitted. “I could not hold still. And—”
“Dear heavens!” Phoebe said, staring past the shop they had just exited.
Three more carriages had discharged passengers
onto the pavement. This group appeared to be predominantly male, the relatives, Eleanor assumed, of the ladies marching forth with placards hoisted high.
For the first time in her life she actually gawked. Well, maybe she’d gawked once before. She seemed to recall that seeing Sebastien completely undressed on their wedding night had been an eye-opener, too. But a nice one. In fact, she still loved to look at him. He was a magnificently built man.
“They’re coming for the Masquer,” Phoebe breathed. “I wonder if they know where he is.”
Eleanor glanced around in chagrin.
The placards waving in the air pleaded for her to turn herself in. Instead, she turned in the opposite direction. A grandfatherly gent doffed his hat and held it beneath her bosom.
The mob had found her.
“Penny to save the Masquer, my lovely young lady? You shall be my prettiest contributor of the day.”
“I—”
Phoebe stuffed several bank notes into his hat, then yelped as the grandfather’s heavy-set wife trod on her foot and demanded he keep moving.
“I don’t like large crowds,” Phoebe said in a quavery voice. Her face whitened. She made a little fish mouth. “I feel as though I’m going to be stampeded by elephants.”
Eleanor grasped her by the waist. “Oh, no. Not now. Didn’t you outgrow the vapors?”
Phoebe’s eyes rolled back in her head.
“Where is the footman?” Eleanor asked in panic. “Burton—”
He motioned wildly from the doorway of the linen-draper’s across the crowded street, indicating he couldn’t reach her. Muttering under her breath, she half-carried Phoebe back toward the glove-maker’s shop.
A poster begging for Masquer mercy stared down at her from the plate glass window. There was no escaping herself.
The shop owner and his assistants poured out onto the sidewalk to witness the excitement.
Phoebe wasn’t the only person fainting. It was like a contagion that spread through the crowd.
Only one establishment appeared to offer asylum from the hysterical excitement of the gathering throng. Not until Eleanor had shoved and elbowed her way there, dragging Phoebe along like a doll, did she realize that there were footmen standing guard outside this shop.
And they weren’t friendly by the look of them, either.
“Ooh,” Phoebe said, suddenly not a fainting-bone in her body. “This is Madame Devine’s shop. I’ve been dying all my life to come here. How brave of you, Eleanor. I take back everything I said—you aren’t dull at all. You’re still a giggle.”
Eleanor approached the Georgian-design brick building with trepidation.
She’d never visited the shop, but she remembered Sebastien explaining that Madame Devine catered to fashionable wives, mistresses, and courtesans alike. He might have been hinting that she make an appointment. The price for a private fitting was exorbitant. She spotted a young buck with two ladies on either arm, the footmen efficiently ushering them inside. Under other circumstances she wouldn’t have been seen entering such premises.
Now she a felt certain prurient curiosity. After all, she’d been inside a brothel. She had made love on a floating one, too. She might as well make a full descent into moral decline.
What would Sebastien think if she surprised him with some provocative attire?
“Let’s go inside,” she said in resolve, although Phoebe had already forged ahead as if to charge the door.
The footmen stepped forward in practiced grace like a pair of crossed swords. “Your names, mesdames?” one inquired with a critical appraisal of Eleanor’s comfortable shawl and bonnet.
“Lady Phoebe Haywood,” her friend said before Eleanor could reply.
The footmen glanced at each other, unimpressed.
Eleanor could have smacked the pair of them stupid with her unfashionable bonnet. “Lady Boscastle,” she said offhandedly. “And I do not wish to shop here, anyway. I—”
“Lady Boscastle, of course.”
“An honor.”
“A privilege.”
“Please forgive us. Your name must have been omitted from our list of today’s customers.”
Eleanor felt a peculiar rush of power. She liked it. The holy name of Boscastle. Why hadn’t Sebastien taken advantage of it before? Did he resent his relatives that much? And what sort of women in his family held influence over an exclusive shopping district? Perhaps she wouldn’t like them. Then again, perhaps she would.
“That clerk should be dismissed,” the first footman said.
The other looked down at his list and said, “Ah. Here it is. You have an appointment right now. So sorry for the delay. We’ll—”
A crowd of half-hysterical women knocked Eleanor into Phoebe like a wave.
“You shall have a divine appointment with my foot if you do not let us inside,” she said, straightening her bonnet.
Within moments they met Madame’s personal assistant, who rushed them through an unimpressive candlelit interior and up a flight of stairs.
Another assistant joined them in the upper hallway. Admiring the color of Eleanor’s hair, her family connections, her unique eye color, she led them into a small chamber where only one other customer sat sipping Madeira and discussing her winter attire with Madame Devine.
The woman, dressed as modestly as a vicar’s wife, glanced up. She caught Eleanor’s gaze for less than a second, smiled politely enough, then resumed her conversation.
Phoebe drew what sounded like a dying breath.
Eleanor thought she herself might faint.
She nodded to Mrs. Watson. The courtesan nodded back without looking up again.
And that was that.
“Would Lady Boscastle care for some libation?” another assistant inquired, a black silk corset slung over her arm.
“Bring the entire bottle,” Mrs. Watson said with a low, inviting laugh. “We shall have to wait for this atrocious mob to go away. We may as well shop to prove to our protectors that we aren’t wasting their precious time.”
“What a clever notion,” Phoebe said, divesting herself of her cloak and gloves. “My husband will go into shock if I come home with a scandalous costume.”
“As will mine,” Eleanor said in resignation. Although she guessed it would be for a completely different reason.
Sebastien stared out the rocking carriage at the sea of gentlewomen who filled the streets, morning dresses swirling to the march of delicate slippers. He’d witnessed quite a few disturbances in the past. He had initiated frays in the public squares and on the docks of France. He had blown up ships. He had disguised himself as a farmer and protested taxes.
But he had never encountered such an intimidating mob in his life. Being comprised primarily of sympathetic, well-mannered women, they parted when his coachman Tilden asked them to move, and allowed his carriage to pass.
Even then, Tilden had to park a mile away from the shop where Sebastien had promised to collect Eleanor and her friend. He could not pick the ladies out in the crush. His beleaguered footman Burton explained that they had disappeared into Madame Devine’s premises. Burton had been instructed to wait outside.
Sebastien’s brows shot up in speculation.
Eleanor shopping at this Cyprian’s modiste? As talk went in his club, the dresses and undergarments designed by Devine could arouse the carnal proclivities of a stone statue.
He wasn’t made of stone.
He studied the poster in the window. He thought of Eleanor wearing risqué corsets that laced up front, undressing slowly for his private entertainment. Given a choice of his wife bedecked in trousers or tantalizing underclothing, well, there really wasn’t much of a decision.
“My lord,” Burton said, hovering behind him while glaring bravely at the other footmen. “Shall I clear the way for the carriage while you fetch the ladies from this place?”
Sebastien pulled out his pocket watch and pretended to reflect upon the time. At least he knew she was safe inside that shop. �
��There’s no hurry. I wouldn’t mind walking down to the bookseller’s for a few minutes. I’ll need something to read in the country.”
Although if her ladyship enjoyed the fruits of an afternoon in adventurous shopping, Sebastien would not read a single page all winter long.
Chapter Twenty-nine
At the last minute, neither Sebastien nor Eleanor wanted to leave for Castle Eaton. Teg had run away the night before and gotten into a brawl with three gutter dogs. He returned home in such pathetic condition that Eleanor had to stitch up his ears and scold the gardeners for leaving the back gate open.
One of the housemaid’s aunts died of mysterious causes the morning of their departure. She left her niece all her worldly possessions, which didn’t amount to enough for an early retirement from service, but the girl was so inconsolable that a crowd of strangers—law clerks and hot-chestnut sellers—gathered at the curb to offer sympathy, roasted nuts, and legal advice.
“At least,” Sebastien confided to his wife, “it isn’t a mob of do-gooders searching for a certain fabled mischief-maker.”
She pivoted on her heel and left him standing alone on the pavement.
She could not find her traveling cloak. Nor her costume for the masquerade at the castle. She and Mrs. Bindy, the house keeper, searched high and low before they located the large portmanteau that contained both items sitting beside the bed. It had obviously been there all along, Sebastien said. A bag could not move by itself.
Then his traveling trunk came unstrapped when the coachmen leaned down to lift it.
All of Sebastien’s clothes, his smalls, silk cravats, nightshirt, and books, tumbled into the gutter for London to behold.
“I refuse to believe in omens,” Eleanor said, and wondered why she felt so sick to her stomach that she couldn’t even finish her usual pot of tea.
“But you believe in fortune-tellers,” he reminded her, when he knew he shouldn’t have said anything at all.
“That’s different,” she said. “I only believe in the good things he predicted.”
“There were the bad ones?”
“I knew you were superstitious.”
A Wicked Lord at the Wedding Page 20
