Hope Tarr - [Men of the Roxbury House 02]

by Enslaved

  But not as cruel as being made to endure yet another lame joke from the pinstripe-suited comic currently strutting about the stage. Turning away from the platform, he looked about the sea of cloth-covered tables and saw the real show wasn’t taking place on the stage but in the audience—the pugilist with the bulging biceps and shaved pate flanked by two buxom blondes wearing heavy paint and plunging necklines whom he presented to the waiter as his “nieces;” the trio of factory girls gawking at Gavin and then blushing and giggling at turns once they caught his eye, their elaborate bonnets stacked with silken flowers, feathers, and in one case, a faux canary with black button eyes; the dour-faced dockman putting down his third pitcher of stout and barking to the music hall chairman to get a move on and bring out Delilah du Lac straightaway.

  Gavin was in full sympathy with him on the latter. He’d already suffered through a bad burlesque featuring a gadabout husband who received his comeuppance at the hands of his clever wife, an Italian performing fantasias by hitting his hammer upon a grisly instrument constructed of bones; and a middle-aged man dressed in drag affecting the persona of the pantomime dame, Widow Twankey. The striking of the chairman’s gong and the shuffling of scenery taking place behind the drawn velvet curtain announced each new act, which was invariably billed as the “most amazing,” “stupendous,” and “splendiferous” mankind had ever beheld.

  Another hour crawled by, measured not by clock hands turning but rather by the consumption of yet another pint of beer. Their pitcher dry, there was still no sign of the mysterious Mademoiselle du Lac. The music hall chairman must be a cagey fellow for it was becoming clear he meant to hold back his top-lining performer until the very end of the night, building his audience’s anticipation while milking them of the maximum coin. Pulling out his pocket watch, Gavin confirmed it was coming on midnight. Delilah du Lac would have to make due with one fewer admirer this night.

  He pushed back his chair and stood. Suddenly the room seemed to be seesawing. Damn, he’d drunk too much. Tomorrow he could look forward to a splitting head and cottony mouth, his just desserts for imbibing too much, staying out too late, and generally pretending to be someone other than who he was.

  He gripped the table’s edge, hoping no one would notice he was holding on to steady himself. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve an early morning briefing to deliver, and I’ll do my client no great service if I arrive still asleep.” He congratulated himself he’d gotten the words out without slurring too terribly.

  Scowling, Hadrian reached for his sleeve. “You can’t leave now after we’ve waited all night. Delilah du Lac is the very reason we’re here. She’ll be coming on any time now.”

  “Aye, for once Harry has the right of it,” Rourke spoke up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “We’ve bided this long for a look at the lass and so have a hundred-odd others. To pack the house like this, she must be worth the wait.”

  Gavin had his doubts. Another tarted-up dance hall girl with dyed hair, heavy paint, and scanty clothing—he’d seen a chorus of them so far that night and there was no reason to believe Delilah du Lac would constitute any measurable improvement on the common, very common, theme.

  He shook his head, already imagining how good his bed’s new mattress would feel beneath his back. “I’ll find my own way home. You lads stay on. I’ll expect a full accounting of the lady’s charms tomorrow. For now, goodnight and—”

  “Ladies and gentleman, I give you the Nightingale of Paris, the Muse of Montmartre, the Chanteuse of Calais, the lovely, the sublime, the splendiferous Miss Delilah du Lac.” The music hall chairman’s voice chimed in as Gavin took his first less than steady step toward the exit doors.

  Gavin bit back a groan, hearing the death knell of his early escape in each pompous, overblown syllable. Damn, if he’d only found his resolve a moment sooner. His present choices were reduced to two: be stuck there for the duration of her performance or be abominably rude and walk out in the midst of it. As eager as he was to be on his way, it wasn’t in him to be discourteous to a woman even if the woman in question wasn’t precisely a lady.

  He pulled out his chair and sat back down just as the velvet stage curtain jerked up. The spotlight illuminated a baby-faced pianist seated at a grand piano wearing bright green suspenders and a very tall hat. The light shifted slightly to the left, focusing on the tall, slender young woman standing in silhouette, her one slipper-shod foot propped upon the bench to show off the arc of a perfectly shaped leg. Feathers dressed her cinnamon-colored curls, a bustier hugged her high-sloped bosom, and a flounced striped-skirt rode above her knees. She sent her gloved hand on a slow, salacious slide from ankle to thigh, carrying the skirt hem with her.

  “Good evening, gents. Or as we say in Paris, bonsoir.“ She fingered the black garter banding one milk white thigh, and Gavin joined the other male members of the audience in sucking in a collective breath.

  Delilah du Lac dropped her slender foot from the bench to the stage floor and turned about to face the audience, and Gavin suddenly understood what all the fuss was about. Unlike the chorus girls he’d seen earlier that night, her face looked porcelain smooth, the features delicate as Dresden china except for her lush lips, her body lithe and long-limbed, her breasts generous without being bovine.

  “My, my, what fine looking gents we have with us tonight,” she remarked, addressing the pianist. “Shall we give ‘em a taste of what they came for? Some sugar and spice?” Looking out onto the sea of tables, she raised her voice and asked, “What shall it be first, mates, the sugar—or the spice?”

  She punctuated the word spice with a shimmy of her hips, and seconds later the audience exploded with calls for, “Spice, spice!”

  Smiling, she slid a hand over the pianist’s shoulder and said, “You heard ‘em, Ralphie. Spice it is.”

  The pianist answered with an eager nod and laid into the ivories, stroking out the score to popular music hall tune, a saucy number Gavin recognized as “Oh! Mr. Porter.” Delilah swept a scarlet boa from the seat, draped it about her slender white throat, and sauntered forward, the cone of limelight following her to the front of the stage. She stopped at the edge, and Gavin caught a whiff of her scent, some spicy mixture of jasmine and mint and musk that somehow managed to rise above the cigar smoke.

  Wetting her lips, she sang:

  “Oh! Mr. Porter, what shall I do,

  I wanted to go to Birmingham, and they’ve taken me to Crewe,

  Take me back to London as quickly as you can

  Oh, Mr. Porter what a silly girl am I.”

  The lyrics were mildly suggestive but not terribly risqué. Any bourgeois matron or young maid might have sung the same song from the bench of her parlor piano without drawing so much as a raised brow among her guests. It was the bold sensuality of Delilah’s delivery that made the song seem so overtly sexual—the steamy look in her slanted eyes, the perfect pucker of those moist red lips, the perfectly timed pauses and suggestive winks that made the most innocent-sounding of words seem fraught with innuendo.

  The music shifted to the mellower tune of a number from The Beggars Opera and Delilah opened her scarlet slash of mouth to sing, “Can love be controlled by advice? Will Cupid our mothers obey? Though my heart were as frozen as ice, at his flame ‘twould have melted away.”

  Delilah du Lac was obviously well-practiced at playing to her audience. At “heart,” she laid her folded hands over her left breast, lifting it so even more of the creamy cleavage slid out of her gown’s top. At “flame” she lifted her slender arms above her head and quivered her torso and hips, giving the impression of liquid mercury or dancing fire, her swaying more hypnotic than any hypnotist’s pendulum.

  Watching her, Gavin was mesmerized. She was obviously a pro at working it—the stage, the crowd, him. She was working it—and she was very good. So good, in point, he could almost believe she was staring at him particularly, her gaze fixing on his face, her half moon brows lifting, and her stage smile slip
ping. He stared back, not at her breasts or her legs but directly in her eyes. For a frenzied few seconds, he felt the intensity of her regard like a physical touch, felt the answering hammering of his heart and the unmistakable stirrings of arousal. All at once it was as if he and Delilah du Lac were the only two people in the crowded club, as if the smile returning to her ruby lips was meant for him alone.

  Gavin honed his gaze on her mouth, too wide for fashion and yet so sensuously shaped he could well imagine nibbling and licking and tasting the ripe fruit of those full lips for hours on end. Noting how her top lip was a near mirror image of the bottom, he felt something more powerful than lust slam into him.

  Recognition.

  The last time he’d seen that upside-down mouth it had been smeared with red, too, not with stage paint but with peppermint from the broken off bit of candy stick he’d given her. The sweet had been meant to take away the bitterness of their goodbye.

  Daisy? Gavin blinked, half-wondering if the surfeit of drink, cigar smoke, and wishful thinking hadn’t conspired to cloud his vision and muddle his memory. The alcohol must be pouring into his bloodstream at a powerful pace because he would swear the woman who was the object of every slack-jawed stare in the place was the grownup incarnation of his childhood friend.

  Perspiring profusely, he sat back in his seat and reached up to tug loose his tie. Delilah du Lac. Daisy Lake. Lac was the French word for lake, after all. He’d been searching the four corners of England and all this time Daisy must have been in France. What an idiot he was not to have considered the possibility before. As for his detective, he made a mental note to fire the fool on the morrow.

  “All right, lads,” Delilah—Daisy—called out. “I’ve given you a taste of spice. Now it’s time for a nibble of sweet.”

  Taking his cue, the pianist slowed the music to a soulful ballad Gavin recognized as “After the Ball.” Delilah stood in the center of the cone of limelight singing of love lost due to misplaced pride, and the wistful expression on her face and the familiar crystalline purity of her voice chased away the last of Gavin’s doubts. Hers was a woman’s voice, not a child’s, and one which obviously bore the benefit of years of practice and professional coaching, but even so the similarity was too striking for him to be mistaken.

  Delilah and Daisy were two facets of the same woman. The years had transformed her coltish girl’s body into that of a woman, but beneath the mask of greasepaint, her heart-shaped face was familiar still, the childish promise of great beauty ripened to full bloom.

  He dropped his gaze to her long legs sheathed in black fishnet stockings and was reminded of the rumors his friends had repeated earlier. Legion of lovers. The Prince of Wales invited her to a very private supper when he was in Paris last. Talent onstage said to come as second to her talent between the sheets. At the time he’d listened with only half an ear, but now each salacious snippet was a drumbeat echoing in his ears, a razor slashing at his heart.

  He glanced between Hadrian and Rourke. What the devil was the matter with them? Didn’t they recognize her? Didn’t they know?

  The ballad ended and apparently it was time for “spice” again. The music picked up pace, a raunchy burlesque number Gavin couldn’t begin to name. Delilah strutted up and down the stage in time to the tune, interspersing high, thigh-baring kicks with slow, suggestive bump-and-grinds. Watching her, mouth dry, Gavin felt the sharp poke of an elbow in his side.

  He turned to a grinning Rourke. “If she moves even half that well in bed, her reputation will have been well-deserved, aye?”

  Steeling his voice to steadiness, he answered, “It’s all part of her act, for the benefit of the audience. Offstage I’m certain she’s a different person entirely.”

  The effects of drink were fading, replaced by the headier intoxication of raw, animal lust. He felt as if his every sense vibrated with a previously unknown awareness, a steady-striking pulse point of need, stirrings that Daisy in her present incarnation as Delilah was ridiculously adept at arousing.

  Rourke cast him a skeptical look but was wise enough not to argue the point. “I’ve set my sights on a certain wee heiress. Pocket-size though she is, I suspect once she warms to me Lady Kat will prove far too lusty in bed to leave me time for show girls, even ones who move like … that.”

  Show girl. Gavin winced at the word and yet that was exactly what Delilah—Daisy—was.

  Hadrian yawned behind the back of his hand. “You’ll get no competition from me, either. She’s a tasty morsel, but I’m very much missing my bed and my bride.”

  Rourke snorted. “What he means is Callie would turn him into a castrato if she caught him ogling another woman.”

  Hadrian didn’t deny it. “I’m married and to hear him talk, Rourke is as good as engaged, but there’s nothing to keep you from following your fancy.”

  Rourke nodded his agreement. “Aye, if a fling with a show girl is what it takes to melt your melancholy, go to, man. Go to.”

  “I’ve no interest in a fling,” Gavin said. Watching a glowing Daisy stroll back over to the piano, he was already busy calculating how he would go about getting her alone.

  He didn’t mean to keep his friends in the dark indefinitely—she’d been their friend, too—but after a year of combing England looking for her, he felt a private reunion was more than deserved. As soon as the performance was over, he would slip backstage and find his way to her dressing room. Or perhaps he should send their waiter with a note inviting her to join him at his table for a glass of champagne. Yes, yes, that’s likely how these things were done. He’d gladly choke down another whole bottle of the dreadful stuff if it meant seeing her alone.

  Rourke interrupted his thoughts with a clap on the back. “So, Gav, after all your fashing, aren’t you glad we wouldn’t take no for an answer and dragged you out anyway?”

  Gavin didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Patrick. I can honestly say there’s no place I’d rather be.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “The boy I love is up in the gallery,

  The boy I love is looking down at me,

  There he is, can’t you see,

  waving with his handkerchief,

  As merry as a robin that sings in a tree.”

  —The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery,

  Music hall song made famous by Marie Lloyd

  The song spiraled to a close, and Daisy parked herself by the piano to catch her breath. Draping an arm about the pianist, she called out, “Maestro, for my final number give us a cross between spicy and sweet, if you please.”

  Each night, her act concluded with her selecting one man from the audience to bring up onstage for her most seductive number. This night’s selection would be “A Little of What You Fancy,” made popular by music hall legend, Marie Lloyd. Like any song, it was the delivery more than the lyrics that set the tone of the piece. A suggestive smile, a shimmy of shoulders or hips, a subtle inflection of voice could transform the most demure of drawing room melodies into the bawdiest of ballads. It was all in good fun, and the audience ate it up as evidenced by the hefty tips that came her way afterward.

  The handsome dark-haired man sitting at one of the front row tables with his friends had caught her eye from the very first. A real gentleman, she’d thought, but beyond that he had the look of someone she’d once cherished and lost, Gavin Carmichael, the orphan boy she idolized as a child. For a split second, she actually thought he was Gavin before dismissing the notion as fancy fed by wishful thinking and more than a passing resemblance. Taking in his confident carriage, the apparent ease with which he chatted with his tablemates, and the habit he had of looking everyone, including her, squarely in the eye, she told herself he couldn’t possibly be the sweet, stammering, slope-shouldered boy of her memory.

  Like Gavin, this solemn-eyed man struck her as the serious sort, not one to appreciate being singled out and subjected to a feather boa looped lasso-like about his immaculate shirt collar—which made the prospect of tweaking that aristoc
ratic nose and coaxing a flush into those high-boned cheeks all the more irresistible.

  From the orchestra pit, a drum roll sounded, her cue to sashay down the stage stairs and choose her night’s “victim.” Summoning her most sultry smile, she announced, “I’ll need a volunteer from the audience. Whichever of you fine, strapping gents shall it be, hmm?”

  Predictably, hands shot up to the sky along with calls of “Over ‘ere, sweet’eart,” and “Pick me. Me!”

  Playing to the crowd, she pursed her painted lips into the pout she knew from experience would turn every man within eyeshot into a randy, raving lunatic. “Oh, my, so many gallants to choose from, my poor head is spinning.”

  Tapping a finger to the beauty patch beside her mouth, she made a show of scanning the audience, pausing every now and again to hesitate over a pair of pleading eyes or to smile into a flushed face, all the while knowing exactly who she would pick—the dark-haired archangel with the sad, solemn eyes and the beautiful lips. For the span of a single song, she simply had to have him.

  “I think it will be … you!” She stabbed her finger at him and then crooked it, beckoning him onstage.

  Looking like a startled stag confronted with a hunter’s rifle, for a handful of seconds he stared at her unmoving. One of his grinning friends jabbed him in the side. Coming to, he looked back over his shoulder as if the object of her pointing must be sitting at a table behind him. Daisy hid a smile and silently counted off to five. By “four” he’d turned back to her, expression horrified. Staying in his seat, he jerked his head back and forth and mouthed “no.”