Dedication
For everyone who tries to live in the space between.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
An Excerpt from The Soldier’s Scoundrel Chapter One
An Excerpt from The Lawrence Browne Affair Chapter One
About the Author
Also by Cat Sebastian
A Letter from the Editor
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
London, 1817
Julian pursed his lips as he gazed at the symmetrical brick façade of his sister’s house. It was every bit as bad as he had feared. He could hear the racket from the street, for God’s sake. He pulled the brim of his hat lower on his forehead, as if concealing his face would go any distance toward mitigating the damage done by his sister having turned her house into a veritable brothel. Right in the middle of Mayfair, and at eleven in the morning, when the entire ton was on hand to bear witness to her degradation, no less. Say what one wanted about Eleanor—and at this moment Julian could only imagine what was being said—but she did not do things by halves.
As he climbed the steps to her door, the low rumble of masculine voices drifted from an open second story window. Somebody was playing a pianoforte—badly—and a lady was singing out of key.
No, not a lady. Julian suppressed a sigh. Whoever these women were in his sister’s house, they were not ladies. No lady in her right mind would consort with the sort of men Eleanor had been entertaining lately. Every young buck with a taste for vice had made his way to her house over these last weeks, along with their mistresses or courtesans or whatever one was meant to call them. And the worst of them, the blackguard who had started Eleanor on her path to becoming a byword for scandal, was Lord Courtenay.
A shiver trickled down Julian’s spine at the thought of encountering the man, and he could not decide whether it was from simple, honest loathing or something much, much worse.
The door swung open before Julian had raised his hand to the knocker.
“Mr. Medlock, thank goodness.” The look of abject relief on the face of Eleanor’s butler might have struck Julian as vaguely inappropriate under any other circumstance. But considering the tableau that presented itself in Eleanor’s vestibule, the butler’s informality hardly registered.
Propped against the elegantly papered wall, a man in full evening dress snored peacefully, a bottle of brandy cradled in his arms and a swath of bright crimson silk draped across his leg. A lady’s gown, Julian gathered. The original wearer of the garment was, mercifully, not present.
“I came as soon as I received your message.” Julian had not been best pleased to receive a letter from his sister’s butler, of all people, begging that he return to London ahead of schedule. Having secured a coveted invitation to a very promising house party, he was loath to leave early in order to evict a set of bohemians and reprobates from his sister’s house.
“The cook is threatening to quit, sir,” said the butler. Tilbury, a man of over fifty who had been with Eleanor since she and Julian had arrived in England, had gray circles under his eyes. No doubt the revels had interrupted his sleep. “And I’ve already sent all but the—ah—hardiest of the housemaids to the country. It wouldn’t do for them to be imposed upon. I’d never forgive myself.”
Julian nodded. “You were quite right to send for me. Where is my sister?” Several unmatched slippers were scattered along the stairs that led toward the drawing room and bedchambers. He gritted his teeth.
“Lady Standish is in her study, sir.”
Julian’s eyebrows shot up. “Her study,” he repeated. Eleanor was hosting an orgy—really, there was no use in pretending it was anything else—but ducked out to conduct an experiment. Truly, the experiments were bad enough, but Julian had always managed to conceal their existence. But to combine scientific pursuits with actual orgies struck Julian as excessive in all directions.
“You,” he said, nudging the sleeping man with the toe of his boot. He was not climbing over drunken bodies, not today, not any day. “Wake up.” The man opened his eyes with what seemed a great deal of effort. “Who are you? No, never mind, I can’t be bothered to care.” The man wasn’t any older than Julian himself, certainly not yet five and twenty, but Julian felt as old as time and as irritable as a school mistress compared to this specimen of self-indulgence. “Get up, restore that gown to its owner, and be gone before I decide to let your father know what you’ve been up to.” As so often happened when Julian ordered people about, this fellow complied.
Julian made his way to Eleanor’s study, and found her furiously scribbling at her writing table, a mass of wires and tubes arranged before her. She didn’t look up at the sound of the door opening, nor when he pointedly closed it behind him. Eleanor, once she was busy working, was utterly unreachable. She had been like this since they were children. He felt a rush of affection for her despite how much trouble she was causing him.
“Eleanor?” Nothing. He stooped to gather an empty wine bottle and a few abandoned goblets, letting them clink noisily together as he deposited them onto a table. Still no response. “Nora?” It almost physically hurt to say his childhood name for her when things felt so awkward and strained between them.
“It won’t work,” came a low drawl. “I’ve been sitting here these past two hours and I haven’t gotten a response.”
Banishing any evidence of surprise from his countenance, Julian turned to see Lord Courtenay himself sprawled in a low chair in a shadowy corner. There oughtn’t to have been any shadows in the middle of the day in a bright room, but trust Lord Courtenay to find one to lurk in.
Julian quickly schooled his face into some semblance of indifference. No, that was a reach; his face was simply not going to let him pretend indifference to Courtenay. He doubted whether anyone had ever shared space with Lord Courtenay without being very much aware of that fact. And it wasn’t only his preposterous good looks that made him so . . . noticeable. The man served as a sort of magnet for other people’s attention, and Julian hated himself for being one of those people. As far as he could tell, the man’s entire problem was that people paid a good deal too much attention to him. But one could hardly help it, not when he looked like that.
Even in the improbable shadows of Eleanor’s south-facing study, Julian could properly appreciate Courtenay’s famous profile, from the aquiline perfection of his nose to the tousled waves of his overlong coal black hair. Portraitists had fallen over themselves to capture the strong lines of his features in ink and charcoal and oil paints. Rumor had it that the artist of the most famous portrait, the one that had hung in Mrs. Olmstead’s drawing room for years after their affair, had actually paid Courtenay for the privilege of painting him, as if he were a common artist’s model and not a peer of the realm.
Sta
nding a few scant yards from him, breathing in the scent of the noxious cigarillo Courtenay held in one languid hand, Julian had to scramble to think of anything suitable to say. An insult would do the trick. He was rummaging through his brain to come up with a cutting remark, when a moan sounded from one of the bedchambers upstairs. Julian winced in embarrassment.
“Somebody knows how to start the day,” Courtenay murmured, his voice somehow even more obscene than the sound overhead.
“It is nearly midday,” Julian snapped, as if the time were what mattered. “The day is not starting here, nor anywhere else in England. Some of us have been up and about for hours.”
Courtenay held his gaze for a moment, his green eyes heavy with boredom. “My apologies,” he drawled. “I stand corrected. I ought to have said that somebody likes having his cock sucked.” He paused and glanced upwards, as if meditating on the soft sounds coming from upstairs. “At least it sounds like cocksucking. No sign of the pounding”—here he rhythmically slapped his hand against the arm of his chair—“that you’d expect to hear with any actual f—”
“Enough!” Julian felt warmth spread through his body—anger and lust all tangled together the way they so often were where Courtenay was concerned, damn it. One of his first memories of London was seeing one of Courtenay’s portraits hanging on the wall of a salon to which he had somehow managed to get invited. There it had hung, as if daring Julian to look, to stare, to throw away his tenuous claim to respectability and give himself over to pleasures the portrait seemed to hint at. He had assured himself that in person, the man’s eyes couldn’t be quite so striking, that surely the passage of time would have done something to soften the perfection of his features. But when Julian finally met Courtenay this winter, he found the man every bit as appallingly attractive as that portrait. It had taken a heroic effort to behave with some semblance of decorum. And for all that, Courtenay hadn’t even seemed to notice him, had scarcely so much as looked Julian’s way. Not that Julian wanted to be noticed, or anything so vulgar as that. It was simply that after six years spent trying not to lust after a man, it was a bit levelling to have not so much as a glance thrown in one’s general direction.
Perhaps it was the coarseness of Courtenay’s language and not Julian’s angry outburst that finally got Eleanor’s attention, but she finally looked up from her writing with an expression of consternation.
“What are you doing here, Julian?” She had the nerve to sound put out by her brother’s presence. “I wasn’t expecting you back until after Easter.”
There was a time when she would have been glad to see him. Only last year she had pleadingly renewed her offer that he make his home with her instead of keeping his own lodgings. He desperately tried not to think of that now. “That much is evident, my dear. This isn’t the sort of entertainment to which I’m accustomed.”
Oh, he sounded so peevish, so priggish, but he reassured himself that he had the moral high ground. “I came because I had word that your servants were all about to give notice. If they had aspired to work in a brothel, they likely would have arranged their lives somewhat differently.”
Eleanor rose to her feet. Julian didn’t know whether to be amused or gratified that she was wearing utterly correct morning attire. It was the striped muslin ensemble they had picked out together—which was to say Julian chose it for her when she showed no interest in refreshing her wardrobe for the season. He noted that at some point in the past several weeks she had stopped wearing a cap. Courtenay’s doing, Julian supposed. A lock of her sand-colored hair, identical to Julian’s own, tumbled onto her shoulder, and he resisted the urge to reach out and pin it back up.
“You’ll not come into my house and talk like that.” Eleanor’s fists were balled at her sides, dots of pink on her pale cheeks. Julian would never get used to how pale his sister was in England, after a childhood spent under the tropical sun. Nevertheless, she looked extremely well, and the most tiresome part of Julian’s nature bitterly wondered if that was what taking a lover had done for his sister.
“Perhaps we could have this conversation elsewhere,” he suggested through gritted teeth.
Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
Julian was aware of Courtenay looking back and forth between them like a spectator at a tennis match, when the light shifted and Julian could make out the title of the book Courtenay had open on one long leg.
The Brigand Prince of Salerno.
Left alone in the parlor, Courtenay eyed his empty glass. He very much wanted to fill it with some of that Bordeaux Eleanor had lying about, drain it, then repeat the process several times over in rapid succession. But he knew with a certainty born of vast experience that drunkenness wasn’t going to make anything better. He’d only have a rotten headache and still be no closer to fixing his shambles of a life.
It was abundantly clear that he ought not to have come back to England. There was nothing for him here—only sneering prigs like Eleanor’s brother. And the usual debt, ostracism, and the sort of scandal that had seemed thrilling at twenty but now, at a few years past thirty, was tedious. He was no longer amused by scandalizing society. But that ship had sailed long ago: London society had made up its mind to be scandalized by him, and he could hardly blame them. He seemed to drift into infamy without the slightest effort, and rumors of his extravagance and his exploits had traveled back to England long before he did.
The sodding Brigand Prince was the final straw. It had been published weeks after his return to England, and whoever had written it had drawn a perfect portrait of him. He knew this because he had been told so by several gleeful acquaintances. Every detail was precisely correct, from the length of his hair to the drawling manner of his speech to the way he tied his cravat—sloppily, he had always thought—but the villain of The Brigand Prince spent hours berating his valet before the looking glass, so that was what Courtenay was believed to do. All the rest of Don Lorenzo’s misdeeds were attributed to Courtenay as well. He didn’t bother correcting anyone. The novel had only proven what everybody had believed all along.
Courtenay was effectively stranded in London, a city populated by people who thought him a monster. He had spent the last of his money getting here, and his affairs were in too much confusion for him to figure out when, if ever, he could expect his coffers to be replenished. He had no family to speak of; his sister was dead and his nephew far away, and it was nobody’s fault but his own.
Instead of refilling his glass, he tossed his cigarillo into the fire and rose to his feet. The cook would need to be attended to first. He didn’t consider himself a man of many talents, but years living abroad with a tight income and a spendthrift sister had given him a background in household diplomacy. No matter what, one maintained peace with the cook and trusted her to negotiate treaties with the rest of the staff. But before reaching the kitchen stairs, he heard footsteps in the foyer. He turned to find a girl struggling into her cloak, while the footman stood awkwardly by, his hands hovering midair.
“Good God, man, she’s a tart, not a leper,” he hissed into the footman’s ear. “Not to mention she’s her ladyship’s guest.” That last bit was something of an overstatement. She was one of the girls Norton had produced midway through last night’s revelries. Norton and the rest of his assembled merry makers were nowhere to be seen; the house had fallen silent upon Medlock’s arrival and had resumed its usual air of serene, chilly silence. This girl was likely the last to leave. Courtenay took the cloak from the footman and held it out for her to step into.
“Thank you, m’lord,” the girl said, flashing a crooked smile over her shoulder. Christ, but when had tarts gotten so young? Courtenay suddenly felt like a lecherous old roué. “Pleasant change of pace not to get pawed at, if you know what I mean,” she added.
Courtenay raised an eyebrow. “I trust young Norton knew how to behave himself.”
“If you’re asking whether he and his friend paid me, then ay
e, they did.”
That wasn’t what Courtenay was asking, but he hardly knew how to ask what he really needed to know. English was a terrible language for this sort of nuance. Add that to the running tally of grievances against the motherland. He reached a hand into his coat pocket, and was almost surprised to feel his fingertips brush against the cool solidity of a coin. A crown. Far too much if Norton had already paid, but unspeakably paltry if they had mistreated her. Either way, he could ill afford it. He handed it over to the girl anyway. At another time, another place, Courtenay would have tossed it to her with a wink and a smile and an open invitation, but now he pressed it into her palm.
She closed her ungloved fingers around his own. “I’m at the opera if you want to call on me after a show. Ask for Nan.” Her fingers were warm and contained the promise of hours spent not alone.
He pulled his hand away.
Courtenay leaned against the door frame, watching the girl descend to the street. He felt nothing more than a kindly, avuncular interest in her. How demoralizing.
After a decade of debauching himself most comprehensively, he found that he couldn’t quite muster up the appropriate enthusiasm for any of his old pleasures. London seemed haunted—by ghosts of dead friends, of bad decisions, of good times that now were tainted by the knowledge of what came later. He couldn’t enjoy himself properly with the ghosts whispering in his ear, reminding him of the price of pleasure. It was a sin and a shame to let a talent go to waste, and Courtenay had once had a genius for depravity.
Courtenay pushed himself off the doorframe and headed back into Eleanor’s house, patting the pocket where he kept the miniature portrait of his nephew.
Chapter Two
Julian glanced around the disused parlor Eleanor had led him to. “We haven’t disrupted any fornication, have we?” he asked dryly.
“Enough, Julian. Enough. Things got out of hand with some of my guests last night, but that’s none of your business,” she said primly. She tilted her chin up, just the way he had taught her. She looked like a duchess, but her eyes were furious. Julian was about to respond that it was far more than one night, but Eleanor cut him off. “No, don’t you dare argue with me. I’m a grown woman—a married woman—and if I choose to behave abominably it’s no concern of yours.”
The Ruin of a Rake Page 1
