Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  The colonel chose to be loud and hearty tonight and said he’d missed seeing her sweet face lately and why didn’t Robin bring her to dinner anymore? It would have embarrassed her when she was fifteen and capable of being embarrassed by fools. She extricated herself, took two steps to the left, and faced Robin.

  She’d thought Robin would look different after his incomprehensible betrayal. More like a weasel. More shifty-eyed and unwholesome. But he was exactly the same.

  He smiled warmly and held his hand out toward her as if nothing had ever happened between them.

  Without expression she ignored his outstretched hand and made the smallest possible inclination of her head, exactly in the manner of an heiress possessing the bluest blood of France being approached by an encroaching mushroom of an Englishman. It was a complex and restrained slight enacted before many eyes that would recognize and appreciate it. Maman would have been proud of her.

  She went immediately to the next Carlington in line. This was an elderly cousin, wearing a steel-gray gown and tight steel-gray curls, who did not approve of her. Two more minor Carlington relatives and she was free.

  She didn’t look back to see how Papa dealt with Robin, but she heard no shriek of agony and no breaking of small bones. Papa played a long game.

  The gold-and-green ballroom opened before her. She set her shoulders straight, held her head high, took her pretty sandalwood-and-blond lace fan into a loose hold, and went to do her work. She would not concern herself with Robin Carlington and his coterie. The Carlingtons, root and branch, could be ignored.

  She wandered across the room, pretending not to notice the people who caught her eye and beckoned. Friends mostly, but some were simply gossips she would not encourage.

  At first glance, this was not a promising setting for assassination. The ballroom was as well lighted as any stage. Lamps glowed along the sides of the room. In the chandeliers, every candle was lit. A few alcoves were half concealed behind draped, pulled-back yellow brocade curtains, but no one in his right mind would lurk there. The marble pillars were narrow and the Carlingtons had refrained from dealing out a forest of potted greenery, convenient for launching an ambush.

  O’Grady could hide in the crowd, one sheep among many. These harmless people were his defense, his camouflage, and his hostages. Part of her job tonight was protecting them.

  The orchestra plucked strings and piped flutes in an experimental way. Ladislaus held a long note on his violin. An expectant pause from the musicians. They began a Haydn quartet, layering the music underneath conversations so the voices wouldn’t fall into silence, but making it clear nobody was supposed to dance just yet.

  For herself, she chose a spot to the side with a column behind her. She could keep an eye on the top of the stairs, the receiving line, and the faces of new guests as they arrived.

  Papa finished his first sweep through the ballroom and came to join her.

  “There’s one clear shot from the balcony to the far end of the room,” she told him, though he’d have seen that for himself.

  “Felicity went up earlier and nailed the door shut.”

  “One less thing to worry about. But then he’s in the crosshairs again when he walks along there.” She slid one finger in the air, left to right. “From there to there.”

  “Hawk’s bringing the man around the side, past the library.”

  Neither of them said Wellington’s name. Harmless comments got lost in the general mutter. The one word you wanted to keep close fell into a lull in the noise and rolled out like trumpets and bells.

  Guests entered in threes and fours, a flock of brilliant dresses and skillfully cut jackets. All of them easy faces for her to collect. In the ballroom, men crossed the floor to seek out partners, knowing the opening dance would begin soon. Comfortable little groups staked out the few chairs and settled in to talk.

  That was another way she’d spot O’Grady. An outsider, he’d neither dance nor attach himself to any of those groups.

  While she held this post of observation, she was, in her turn, meticulously watched. The ton rather hoped Robin would wander by and enact an interesting scene. Their boredom wanted tears and accusations, or at least raised voices and sarcasm. She was encircled by a languid spite waiting to feed. Even her friends wondered what she was thinking.

  Eventually Papa would go away and she’d be on her own. If she had to stop O’Grady, violently, in front of so many eyes, she’d become notorious, not merely eccentric.

  There are easier, less complicated battlefields than the ballrooms of the ton. Still, she’d weathered scandal before. She could do it again.

  She silenced the clamor in her head. Pax had taught her to do that when he’d taught her precision with a rifle. She’d learned the lesson in full at Somosierra, in the mountains, waiting for the French, the butt of her rifle to her cheek.

  Defensible terrain came in many forms. She estimated distances up and down the room and said, “Twenty feet.”

  What would have been obscure to most people, Papa understood at once. “Even with a pistol, he has to get closer than that. There’ll be people going back and forth.”

  “Draw a line between the second columns. It’ll happen inside that box. He takes his shot and scuttles out that far door, past the library, down the stairs.”

  “Where MacAllister catches him at the outside door.”

  “He goes through the card room and jumps out a window. Or the library window.”

  “Those Bow Street Runners.”

  “Always a problem. He shouldn’t stage this here at all.” She frowned and slapped her fan across her palm. “This house is complicated and unpredictable. People milling around. Footmen, maids, grooms, illicit lovers in the corners, men in the alley pissing against a wall. Bad escape routes. This is a stupid place to kill somebody. If it were me, I’d wait on the street and shoot him in his carriage. Anybody can be in a crowd. I have my errand boy and MacDonald outside right now.”

  “I’m glad the man doesn’t have you to advise him,” Papa said.

  “I’d poison the lobster patties, if I were truly evil. It’d kill off a dozen guests, of course, which is excessive. And a dog.” The Countess of Maybrey had brought an armful of fluffy yapmonger with her and was carrying it around, feeding it fancy tidbits from the platters.

  “The old soldier’s not going to eat or drink anything.” Papa felt around inside his jacket, searching for the pipe he wasn’t carrying, remembered where he was, and sighed. “I told him he might be in somebody’s sights tonight. He wasn’t impressed. Who’s the brown-haired man, plump, about thirty, next to Faversham?”

  She glanced that way, moving only her eyes. “That’s one of the Norfolk Fortneys. Works at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Knowledgeable about the position of planets, if you ever want to know.”

  “I’ll remember that, if the occasion arises.”

  At a moment when she should be wholly concerned with Wellington and bullets, other annoyances and worries bobbed to the surface of her mind, like bubbles in a boiling pot. “As long as we’ve got a minute, let me tell you what happened in my office early this morning. I didn’t want to bring it up in front of everybody, but I’ve had a succession of visitors lately. My office was . . . rearranged. I’m annoyed.”

  “That was somebody’s mistake,” Papa said. “Tell me about it.”

  • • •

  WITH the skill of long practice, Raoul Deverney made himself inconspicuous among the fashionable. He’d come to the ballroom not up the grand staircase and through the receiving line, but by ambiguous side paths, along the servants’ corridors. Now he stood in the mouth of a hall leading to the ballroom, a plump attaché from the French delegation between himself and Séverine.

  She hadn’t noticed him yet. Her attention was elsewhere. Without being obvious about it she looked into every face that came upstairs
into the ballroom. Even from this distance, he saw her as a sentry on guard, back straight, her whole being intent and vigilant.

  Séverine’s father lingered at her side, pretending to exchange pleasantries, looking harmless. Maybe he was giving last-minute orders. Maybe he was protecting her from the chitter-chatter infesting the room.

  She wore a gown of deep ruby color that stood out even in the brilliance around her. Ten generations of de Cabrillac pride faced the slander of venomous tongues and did not hide. No slinking in corners for Séverine. Let the world chatter and be damned to them. She was magnificent.

  The rubies at her throat were another declaration, one that spoke of her impressive fortune. That was power proclaimed insouciantly with very old, very famous rubies. She was well armored with every weapon the ton respected. She’d be armed in more brutal, straightforward ways as well.

  Rumor in the small elite world in which he traveled said Séverine de Cabrillac held herself aloof from the British Service. But she was working for them now. Three Service agents he knew by sight were in the ballroom. There’d be others he didn’t know. Something important was going on. Plots crossed and crisscrossed this room tonight. Everybody waited for something—the guests, the British Service, William Doyle, the small tribe of Carlingtons, Robin Carlington, and a cool-eyed Séverine de Cabrillac.

  He should leave. The British Service, studded through the crowd, was a complication to burglary. Their business for the evening seemed unrelated to Sanchia’s death. Nothing to do with Pilar. And yet . . .

  He’d survived the last decade, lived and flourished and pursued his particular avocation, because he turned a cynical eye on life. Other men might fool themselves about who they were and what they wanted. He never did. Séverine glowed like a fire on the other side of the room and he couldn’t look away. The sight of her, armored in her fine clothes and impressive calm, captured him utterly.

  Ten years ago, he’d met her face-to-face in an army camp in Spain. He hadn’t known her name. For a minute she’d held the Deverney Amulet in her hand, in the dark and shouting, in the confusion of his arrest. She’d casually passed it to one of the soldiers to give to the authorities, along with the other jewels he’d carried. He’d been dragged off to an appointment with the hangman. She’d ridden away, not looking back, obviously already thinking of other things.

  Years later she was involved with the amulet again, with Sanchia’s murder, and with Pilar’s disappearance. One single clue, left in Pilar’s bedroom, linked everything. But instead of studying her to see what villainy she might reveal, he ran his eyes around the room, looking for threats to her. That dangerous father of hers was doing the same, so unobtrusively. Tonight he made common cause with his natural enemy, William Doyle. Life was an infinite jest.

  Something was going to happen here tonight. He tasted it in the air. Felt it in the blood. Instead of turning his back and walking out like a prudent man, he was foolishly, idiotically picking a good spot to wait, prepared to protect Séverine if the need arose.

  He examined his feelings carefully and didn’t like what he saw inside himself.

  Nine

  SÉVIE saw the reaction to Wellington’s arrival before she spotted the man himself. A stir spread through the whole room. He was Carlington’s great catch of the Season, a true hero, a public man of genuine stature. The war had been over for three years, but Wellington hadn’t shrunk to one more general, one more duke, one more important man in a room glittering with power.

  He was about to be appointed to the King’s Cabinet as Master-General of Ordnance. An ordinary-sounding title, but basically it meant he’d run the army. He’d be formidable in that position. She’d seen him chase Napoleon’s Grande Armée out of Spain, all brilliant strategy and tightly directed energy. The British Army had best prepare. A new broom had arrived to set right old mistakes and put order in place. He’d end up Prime Minister if the Tories stayed in power.

  “That’s a fine figure of a man.” Lucy looked Wellington over. The military genius and steel-hard integrity were lost on Lucy, but she did appreciate fine tailoring and a healthy body.

  “Old for you,” was the best answer to that. “And married.”

  “I want to paint him, not go to bed with him.”

  Lucinda Preston, sandy-haired and freckled, whippet thin, devastatingly frank, was an artist, which was why she thought that way. She was the daughter of a duke and said anything she wanted to. A loyal friend. Witness her here tonight, sticking like glue when Séverine was an object of spiteful gossip in some corners of the room.

  Lucy said, “He has interesting bone structure.”

  “Look at a man and see a skeleton. Who would be an artist?”

  Lucy grinned and called a waiter over to exchange an empty glass for a full one.

  The elite who ruled England danced, flirted, and got drunk. Respectable, solid men collected in small groups under the colonnades to discuss horses, the health of the pheasant population, and, as an afterthought, the politics of empire. There was more than a scattering of men she knew from Spain, ensigns and lieutenants who’d been in the field tents while she delivered intelligence to their captain. Boys not much older than she’d been, who rode with her sometimes from camp to listen to what she had to say about the countryside they were about to march their men through. Solid army men, all grown up now.

  As far as she could tell, nobody skulked about the perimeter of the ballroom, bent on assassination. But the night was young.

  She’d expected an uncomfortable and lonely vigil waiting for O’Grady. Instead, a succession of socially powerful protectors came to hover over her and smile upon her and shape public opinion in her favor—a dowager countess, a general in the army, diplomats, grandes dames of the ton. Maman’s friends and Papa’s. Her own. People she’d helped with little problems, one time or another. You’d think they were taking turns so she’d never be left alone, naked to the spite of Robin’s clique.

  Friendship was unaccountable. She hadn’t expected this.

  Robin, freed from the receiving line, went about the room being charming. Sometimes he stared piercingly in her direction and looked worried. That shouldn’t have been a distraction, but it was.

  “We were saying—Gretchen and Emily and I—that we should lure the Carlington pimple into the park and drown him in the Serpentine. Between us we have enough quarterings on the escutcheon to get away with it in plain daylight.”

  “I’m touched.”

  Gretchen, Gräfin von Gutzkow, danced, rather daringly, with her husband. Emily flirted like mad with an indolent dandy, both of them enjoying the game. And Hildebrand Garth, “Brandy,” one of Robin’s cronies, headed purposefully toward her.

  She’d been waiting for a direct approach from Robin’s set. They’d sent Brandy to deliver it. She preferred this, frankly, to slippery whispers in corners.

  He brayed, “Evening, Sévie sweet. Evening, Lady Lucinda.” When enough heads had turned in their direction, he added loudly, “Lovely dress, Sévie. Quite the scarlet woman, aren’t you?”

  Maman had taught her how to deal with presumption before she was seven. A de Cabrillac, one who had been a spy for years, who bore the marks of torture by Spanish guerrilleros and the scar of a French bullet, is not put out of countenance by a jumped-up fop strutting about in a ballroom.

  She turned her back on him without reply. Beside her, Lucy said coolly, “We have not been introduced,” and did the same. A duke’s daughter can turn her back with a clang of disapproval heard from Soho to Suffolk.

  Lucy linked arms with her and they strolled in the direction of the dancing. “Have you seen the Lawrence portrait of Wellington? Lovely brushwork. The real man looks surprisingly like his portrait.”

  Brandy was left gape-mouthed behind them. No cut was ever more direct.

  “That happens sometimes.” She drew Lucy to another spot with a good v
iew of the room. She did not lose sight of Brandy Garth. One does not lose sight of an enemy.

  Brandy should thank her for teaching him the rudiments of ambush. Next time, he’d bring a pack of his friends with him to surround his prey and snigger at the right moments. Next time, he’d know to approach her when she was alone.

  Lucy gave him a sidelong glance. “Nasty little slug.”

  “Have you really never been introduced to him?”

  “Who knows? Nobody’s going to contradict a duke’s daughter. I’m spoiled from the cradle. I’d be quite dreadful if I hadn’t met you.”

  “My civilizing influence.”

  Lucy grinned. “You pushed me into the ornamental lily pond at Sommerworth. We were five. I’ve been terrified of you ever since.”

  “I have no memory of that encounter.”

  Twenty feet away, Brandy Garth fiddled with his watch fob and visibly decided he wouldn’t be put in his place by a pair of uppity females. He started forward, composing his next brilliant comment.

  Rescue came in an odd guise. Colonel Belford Carlington, bright in his red uniform, stamped toward them, harrumphing as he came. As he passed Brandy he muttered, “Go away, you jackanapes, before somebody puts a sword through you.”

  “What?” Brandy looked around. “Who? What?”

  “You have the manners of a pig.”

  The colonel took a spot in front of her in exactly the place to block her view of everything she needed to keep an eye on. “Harrumph.” The colonel was one of the few people she’d met who actually harrumphed. “In my day we didn’t insult guests in our host’s ballroom.” He pursed his lips, considered the old days, and found them admirable. “We did it in the card room and then we fought duels. Insulting ladies got you killed in those days. Probably still does when it’s a woman with relatives like yours.”

  As if Papa and Hawker would waste murder on a Brandy Garth. “Dueling is sadly out of fashion. I believe the Serpentine is available, though.”

  “Serpentine?” The colonel twitched his eyebrows together.