Beguiling the Beauty ft-1

by Sherry Thomas

  One should never speak to a servant while there were guests present—it would give the impression that household staff didn’t know their tasks. But Helena had counted on secreting Andrew’s letters in a more secure place before someone else handled her belongings.

  “Yes, miss,” said Susie.

  Her instruction did not escape Fitz and Millie. They exchanged a glance.

  “Would you mind taking a turn with me in the garden, Miss Fitzhugh?” asked Hastings.

  This was the opening she needed. “Of course. Let me change into more comfortable shoes.”

  If Hastings had the run of the house due to his long friendship with Fitz, then Helena need not stand on ceremony, either. She rushed upstairs to her room, sent Susie out to buy something irrelevant, unlocked her trunk, and gathered Andrew’s letters. Tomorrow she would take them to her office at her publishing firm; now she locked them in her bedside drawer.

  Hastings was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs when she came down again.

  “Love letters,” he murmured. “So gratifying to receive, so troublesome for the remainder of their natural lives.”

  She pretended not to hear. “Glad you could find time in your busy schedule of wenching and general wastreling to call on us, Hastings.”

  He offered his arm; she ignored it and walked ahead.

  The Fitzhugh house backed onto a private garden shared by the adjoining houses. In a few weeks the plane trees, fully sprouted, would provide green, dappled shade. But now the leaves were tiny green nubs too shy to unfurl. Finches hopped from bare branch to bare branch, pecking at last year’s seed balls. A three-tiered Italianate fountain sparkled in the sun.

  “Hullo, Penny,” Hastings called cheerfully.

  “Hastings, old fellow,” answered Lord Vere, one of their neighbors, from his perch at the edge of the fountain. “Marvelous day for October, is it not?”

  “It’s April, Penny.”

  “Is it?” Lord Vere looked befuddled. “This year’s or last year’s?”

  “This year’s, of course.”

  “Well,” huffed Lord Vere, “I don’t know what I’m doing out here in April. Everybody knows it is always raining in April. Good day, Hastings. Good day, Miss Fitzhugh.”

  Hastings watched Lord Vere return to his own house. “You should have said yes when he proposed last year. Were you Lady Vere, it would have been nobody’s business but your own where and with whom you spend your nights.”

  Of course it was just like Hastings to approach the subject so baldly. “I do not marry men who do not know what month it is.”

  “Yet you’d gladly lie with a man who dallies with virgins?”

  She ignored that jab. It was hypocrisy of the highest order for a man who slept with everything that moved to criticize one who took risks for love. “Are you happy now that you have my family in a state?”

  “What would you have done in my place? If it were your best friend’s sister teetering on the edge of ruin?”

  “Save your hyperboles. I’ve never been anywhere near the edge of ruin. And if it were my best friend’s sister, I certainly wouldn’t engage in double-dealing.”

  Hastings raised a brow. “Allow me to refresh your memory, Miss Fitzhugh. For a kiss, I promised not to reveal the identity of your illicit lover. I did not promise that I would keep your family in the dark altogether concerning your furtive activities.”

  “All the same,” she said, giving him her falsest smile, “you duplicitous pig.”

  “Admit it—you enjoyed the kiss.”

  “I would rather eat a live snail than endure anything of the sort again.”

  “Ooh,” he murmured, his eyes alight with speculation. “With or without its shell?”

  She flicked a dismissive finger. “Save what you think of as your wit for a more gullible woman. What do you want from me, Hastings?”

  “I’ve never wanted anything from you, Miss Fitzhugh—I’ve only wished to be of service.”

  She snorted, this from the little snot who used to try to maneuver her into cupboards and steal kisses.

  “Seeing as it was I who introduced Andrew Martin to you,” he continued, “I feel a deep sense of responsibility toward your welfare. At the risk of damaging my health, I have decided to offer to see to your needs.”

  She’d been refraining from the moment he arrived, but she could no longer: Her eyes rolled of their own accord. “Your altruism astounds, Hastings. I am shocked you haven’t been canonized yet.”

  “I quite share your opinion, my dear Miss Fitzhugh.” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “An unmarried woman passionate enough to flout all rules and jump into a man’s bed? Your needs just might cripple me.”

  A flush of heat rose along the column of her throat. She walked faster and made her voice frigid. “I’m touched by your willingness to sacrifice. Nevertheless I must turn down your lavish and magnanimous offer.”

  He kept pace. “That is unfortunate, Miss Fitzhugh. For I am a far better choice in this matter, not already being another woman’s husband.”

  “Too bad you’ve nothing else to recommend you, my lord.”

  “As I thought, you are still completely insensible. Very well then, if you won’t think of yourself, think of your beloved. His mother is not a forgiving woman and he always cringes to be thought ill by her. Imagine her reaction should she find out that he’d compromised a virgin.”

  Andrew was in awe and mortal dread of his mother; there was no disputing that.

  “Don’t fool yourself into thinking that because his mother doesn’t find you objectionable, she would condone such action on his part. She wouldn’t. She would crush him with her disdain.”

  Helena worried the inside of her cheek. “We don’t plan to give ourselves away.”

  “I’m sure you don’t, but have you taken into full consideration Mrs. Monteth’s ratlike tendencies to sniff out all wrongdoing?”

  Mrs. Monteth was Andrew’s wife’s sister, a self-righteous woman who lived to expose the faults and weaknesses of those around her.

  “If you love him, leave him be.” Hastings’s drawl had turned steely—it still amazed her that his tone could shift so, from velvety indulgence to cold implacability. “Or, mark my word, you will make him live in misery for the rest of his life.”

  He bowed. “And now I’m quite finished. I bid you a good day, Miss Fitzhugh.”

  At the steps back into the house he turned around, an ironic smile on his lips, once again the roué. “And in case you are curious, my offer still stands.”

  My dear boy,” said the Dowager Duchess of Lexington, who had come up to London with Christian.

  “I recognize that tone, Stepmama,” he answered from before the window. “You have become privy to a particularly succulent piece of gossip.”

  Children frolicked in the small park across the street, flying kites, feeding ducks, playing hide-and-seek. One boy managed to slip away from his governess long enough to feed an apple to the horse harnessed to a hansom cab parked by the curb.

  “And a rumor of the very rarest sort, too: one concerning you.”

  “I see.” It had been too much to hope that word wouldn’t spread until he’d first had time to secure his beloved’s hand.

  The boy’s governess scolded him and removed his hand from the horse’s coat, no doubt warning him of fleas and other undesirables that were sure to be associated with such a common animal. Did the curtain covering the hansom’s window flutter? The cabbie, having finished his paper, now pulled something that resembled a crumpled penny dreadful out of his coat.

  “Since we arrived in London this morning, I have received not one, not two, but three separate notes concerning a torrid affair you conducted during your crossing. In plain view, no less.”

  At least now he could speak of her. “Yes, it’s true. All of it.”

  Did gloved fingers grip the edges of the curtain on the hansom cab?

  “Surely not all of it. Some of the rumors declare t
hat you have married her.”

  He turned around. “That, no. But not for lack of trying.”

  The dowager duchess, who had been in the middle of rearranging a bouquet of tulips on a console table, stilled. She, too, turned around—a pretty woman in her early forties, only thirteen years older than Christian. But instead of immediately blurting out a response, she sat down on one of his Louis XIV chairs and arranged her skirts with a deliberate thoroughness. “You proposed?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have not said a word.”

  “The situation is somewhat complicated. I did not want you to worry.”

  “And I’d worry less when I learned it this way?”

  He bowed his head to let her know that he’d heard her reproach. “My apologies, madam.”

  “And what, pray tell, is so complicated about the situation? When the Duke of Lexington proposes, the lucky lady accepts. That’s the end of it.”

  If only it were that simple. “She was traveling under an assumed name.”

  The moment he stepped onto English soil, he’d arranged to see someone familiar with German aristocracy. The Seidlitzs were a notable Prussian clan. The Hardenbergs were Silesian nobility. But there was no Baron von Seidlitz-Hardenberg on record—and therefore not a single Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg.

  So much for the always minuscule chance that she had been using her real name—and could therefore be found without the whole Continent being torn apart.

  The dowager duchess sucked in a sharp breath. “An assumed name?”

  “I have also never seen her face.”

  She blinked, stunned.

  “As I said, it’s quite complicated.”

  “Really, Christian.” She tapped her fingers once against the armrest of the chair. “Hundreds of properly credentialed young ladies at home and you offer your hand to someone whom you wouldn’t even be able to recognize if you passed her on the street?”

  “She is the one I love.” That should be justification enough, but somehow it did not sound quite adequate, in the face of all the unknowns. “You will adore her—she puts me in my place.”

  Her Grace was unconvinced. “I’d like to meet her and judge for myself.”

  “I will arrange it as soon as I can convince her to accept my hand.”

  “And how soon can you manage that?”

  “On my birthday, I hope—she has agreed to meet me for dinner at the Savoy.”

  The duchess rose. “You know I trust your judgment, Christian. I have trusted your judgment since we first met. But I will be remiss if I do not point out the extraordinary irregularity of the circumstances. You have put yourself at a great deal of risk here—and I do not mean your prestige or your coffer.”

  He deserved the warning. “I’m afraid my heart is wholly taken. I shall be miserable if I do not marry her.”

  “You can be just as miserable in a marriage—by then it will be too late.”

  “It is already too late. If I cannot have her I will have no one.”

  She sighed. “You are sure about this?”

  “Yes.”

  An echo of something—fear, perhaps—rattled inside him as he gave that unequivocal answer. He’d been just as certain, upon seeing Mrs. Easterbrook for the first time, that she held the key to his happiness.

  “Be careful, my love,” said the dowager duchess. “Renew the offer of your hand only if she proves to be worthy of it.”

  He tried to lighten the conversation. “So says the woman who would have been happy to have me marry any female with a pulse.”

  “Only because this one has the power to injure you, my love. Only because of that.”

  With all the hansom cab’s flaps down to hide Venetia from view, the air inside, already heavy with the odors of tobacco and gin, grew staler with each passing minute.

  She couldn’t care less.

  The sight of her lover had turned her delirious. She couldn’t reason. She couldn’t think. The only thing that mattered was that she should see him again. She had no idea what she hoped to accomplish by that, but the forces driving her toward him were greater than any she could muster to keep herself away.

  She’d set out from Fitz’s house walking. Somewhere along the way she realized that it would take her far too long to walk to the Savoy Hotel, so she stopped and hailed a hansom cab.

  Her cab reached the Savoy Hotel just as the duke climbed back into his own carriage and drove away. She followed him to his home, a very fine neoclassical structure that she despised. Perhaps if its walls were made of glass she wouldn’t mind it as much. Then she might see him moving about inside, doing whatever it was that he did when he was not making her fall head over heels in love.

  But she saw nothing. The governesses in the park were becoming very suspicious about the hansom cab. And it wouldn’t be long now before a bobby came around and asked the cabbie what he thought he was doing loitering about outside the homes of dukes and earls.

  She could not sit here indefinitely.

  One more glimpse. She just wanted one more glimpse of him.

  The gods were listening. A carriage emblazoned with the Lexington coat of arms drew up at the curb. A minute later, he walked out of the front door and entered the carriage.

  She had her “one more glimpse.” But it was like receiving a single grain of rice when she’d starved for a week.

  “Follow that carriage,” she instructed her cabbie. “And don’t lose sight of it.”

  One more glimpse. Just one more when he alighted at his destination.

  “Mum, you’d ’ave ’im sooner if you’d let ’im ’ave a good look at you,” said the cabbie.

  How she wished that were the case. “Hurry.”

  His carriage turned west. She thought he was headed for his club on St. James’s Street, but the carriage didn’t stop until it had reached Cromwell Road, right before that magnificent cathedral to the animal kingdom, the British Museum of Natural History.

  Where her dinosaur was housed!

  She threw a handful of coins at the cabbie, leaped off the hansom, and cursed her dress with its narrow skirts, which made it impossible to attempt anything remotely athletic.

  He ascended the front steps and passed under the beautiful Romanesque arches into the museum. The main display in the central hall was the nearly complete skeleton—missing only three vertebrae—of a fifty-foot sperm whale. She’d never before visited the museum without stopping to admire the skeleton, but now she only looked about wildly for him.

  Let him go to the west wing to amble among the birds and the fish. Or let him go upstairs. But no, presently he peeled away from the cluster of visitors gathered before the whale skeleton and headed to the east wing, where the paleontological collection was housed.

  Thankfully, the gallery that greeted visitors upon first entering the east wing dealt with mammals: the great American mastodon, the perfectly preserved mammoth unearthed in Essex, the rhinoceros-like Uintatherium, the northern manatee, hunted to extinction toward the end of the previous century. Perhaps they were all he intended to inspect this afternoon. Or the human and primate fossils in exhibit cases that lined the southern wall. Or the extinct birds in the pavilion toward the end of the gallery—the moas were very interesting, as were the eggs of the aepyornis, a bird said to have weighed half a ton.

  But he paid only cursory attention to these wonders collected from all over the world for his enjoyment and edification and made for the gallery that ran parallel to the mammalian saloon, where the reptilian remains were kept.

  She still hadn’t lost all hope. Several perpendicular galleries, full of marine curiosities, branched out from the Reptilia gallery. Perhaps—perhaps—

  Perhaps not. He slowed, stopped before the Pareiasaurus skeleton from the Karoo formation of South Africa, and then leaned in to read the small plaque that gave the names of the discoverers and the donors.

  Her heart thudded. Her name was on a plaque barely fifty feet away from where he stood. Alt
hough he wouldn’t immediately be able to make the connection, should he find out, subsequently, that she had crossed the Atlantic at approximately the same time as he, then the coincidence would strike even him as too great, no matter how unwilling he was to think of Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg and Mrs. Easterbrook as the same person.

  He turned from the Pareiasaurus. Along the south wall of the gallery were the great sea lizards: the Plesiosaurus and the ichthyosaurs. Against the north wall were the cases that held the land monsters.

  As if pulled by a compass, he strode toward the north wall.

  Why he was puttering about the premier British natural history museum Christian had no idea—there wasn’t even a Swabian dragon on display, as far as he could recall. If anything he ought to be checking the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin or the Institute of Paleontology and Historical Geology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

  Yet something had propelled him here. It was possible she had already arrived in London. And if she had, wouldn’t she wish to avail herself of the best collection of Dinosauria in all of England?

  It was a sunny, crisp day out, and the gallery was not crowded: half a dozen young men who looked to be university students; a middle-aged couple, plump and expensively dressed; and a governess with two charges whom she hushed from time to time when their voices grew too excited.

  Out of an utterly irrational hope, he looked several times toward the governess. It had occurred to him that the baroness was perhaps the commonest of commoners, and therefore did not consider herself worthy of an alliance with a duke. But that was the least of his worries. What was the point of being a duke with a lineage going back eight hundred years if he couldn’t marry as he wished?

  The governess, a severe-looking woman in her thirties, was not amused by his attention. She gave him a hard glare and pointedly turned her attention back to her charges, pronouncing that they had better head for the fossil fish if they wanted to look at everything before it was time to go home for tea.

  Her head held so high her nose pointed almost directly at the ceiling, she ushered the children out. As she did so, another woman entered the gallery from its far end. She stopped to study the flying lizards fossils on display against the wall.