Devil's Bargain

by Marlene Suson

  His mouth hardened into a narrow, determined line. He would never permit himself to love any woman, not even his delightful wife.

  Three days later Marc took Tia to court for her presentation at the Queen’s drawing room. Afterward, as they rode home from St. James’s Palace, he looked forward to hearing her impressions.

  “What did you think of the Queen?” he asked.

  “She was most gracious, but I own I was surprised that after all these years in England, she should still speak with such a heavy accent.”

  Tia had also been disappointed that Princess Charlotte, the Prince Regent’s daughter and second in line for the throne after him, had not been at the drawing room. Rumor had it that the prince, jealous of his offspring’s popularity, had forbidden her attendance.

  Marc did not need to ask his wife that she had thought of the Regent. It had been written all too clearly on her shocked face when she learned that the disgustingly fat, dissipated gentleman in the creaking corset who had waddled up to her was her country’s ruler. Fortunately for the prince’s exquisitely tender sensibilities, his attention had been focused at that moment on the renowned beauty, Lady Margaret White, who was standing next to Tia, and he had not noticed the new duchess’s expression.

  Marc, knowing the prince would regard Tia’s look as an intolerable insult, whispered urgently to her to curtsy to the prince. As she obeyed, he ruthlessly sacrificed her elaborate court gown by planting his foot on her train of green velvet ornamented with gold so that when she rose it was to the sound of ripping cloth. That had immediately distracted everyone’s attention, and Marc had the excuse he wanted to hastily spirit his wife away.

  After that incident, he was more than a little thankful that Lord and Lady Cargon’s squeeze tonight would be a masquerade ball where Tia’s wonderfully expressive face would be safely concealed behind a mask. They were to go as King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, and he remarked, “I think you will make a charming queen.”

  “If my husband does not destroy my gown,” she teased, “I have never known you to be so clumsy before.”

  “Nor I,” he said wryly.

  Their carriage stopped in front of Castleton House and two footmen, resplendent in the duke’s crimson and gold livery, jumped down from their perch to assist their master and mistress from the equipage.

  After the grandeur of Rosedale, Tia had been disappointed when she had first seen Castleton’s London home. Although it was nine bays wide and overlooked Green Park, its undistinguished brick front stood in mundane contrast to the more impressive stone mansions on either side of it. It had been built very close to the street, and a fence of high iron palings had been installed in front of it. No pediments or fanlights adorned its long windows. The dreary plainness of its facade was relieved only by a one-story portico, resting on four fluted Ionic columns, that extended out beyond the palings.

  This unprepossessing exterior gave no clue to the opulence that greeted Tia’s eyes as she stepped through its heavy oak doors. The entry hall’s columns and wide winding staircase were of Kent marble, and it was lighted by a crystal chandelier hanging from a plaster rosette.

  Marc had been as attentive to her and Freddie in London as he had in the country. Only one small detail cast a shadow on Tia’s happiness, and that was Marc’s refusal to buy her Lady Todd’s chestnut for forty pounds.

  Marc’s secretary, George Stanley, a shy, bran-faced young man, came into the hall, a troubled look upon his face, and requested a private moment with his employer.

  The two men went into George’s small office off the duke’s library Tia headed for the marble staircase to go up to her apartment.

  George neglected to shut the door tightly behind him and his employer. As Tia ascended the stairs, his agitated voice drifted through the opening to her.

  “Your Grace, Jennie Martin has seen a mare that she has fallen in love with and insists she must have.”

  “Then see that she gets it,” Marc said curtly. “You need not consult me about such a minor expenditure.”

  Tia stopped abruptly halfway up the stairs.

  “I fear, Your Grace, that it is not as minor a cost as you think,” George said apologetically. “The animal is an inferior piece of horseflesh, and the price is outrageous—three hundred guineas. She’s not worth half that, but Jennie has taken such a fancy to her.”

  “Then see that she gets her,” Marc said. “You know my orders. Jennie is to have anything she wants.”

  “But Your Grace…” George began.

  Marc cut him off. “I repeat, Jennie is to have anything that she wants—no matter the cost.”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” his secretary said in a chastened tone.

  Tia’s happiness dried up like an artesian spring that had suddenly had its source sealed. She recalled how her husband’s voice had softened when he had proclaimed Jennie the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Tia had suspected then that he cared deeply for the woman, and now her suspicion had been confirmed. He would pay without a quibble three hundred guineas for an inferior horse for Jennie when he had refused to spend a fraction of that for an excellent animal that his wife had wanted.

  This told Tia all too clearly where she stood in her husband’s affections compared to Jennie, a cherished convenient who could have whatever she wanted from Marc no matter how expensive.

  Deeply wounded, Tia hastily resumed her ascent of the stairs. When she reached the privacy of her bedchamber, she longed to throw herself across the coverlet of her bed and have a good cry, but Marie was waiting to help her dress for the masquerade. Tia never suffered from the headache, but now her temples began to throb.

  She tried to hide her unhappiness from her maid, but a glance in the mirror at her woebegone face told her that she had failed miserably.

  Marie, however, did not notice. Her pretty face was incandescent with happiness. When her mistress inquired as to the cause of her obvious joy, Marie confided that she had fallen in love with Robert, a handsome young footman in the duke’s employ.

  “And he loves me as much as I love him. He’s told me so. Oh, ma’am, I’m the happiest gel alive.”

  Watching Marie’s glowing face as she arranged her hair, Tia wondered a little sadly what it would be like to be as certain as her maid was that the man she loved also loved her in return.

  * * *

  After an hour at the Cargons’ noisy, overcrowded masquerade, Tia’s head ached so intensely that she sought solitude.

  Escaping from the din of the ballroom jammed with masked and costumed revelers, she found refuge in a deserted sitting room. In her disguise as Queen Guinevere, she wore a velvet gown of royal purple embroidered about the neck and sleeves. On her head rested a heavy gold crown with a long veil attached. She tried to blame the crown’s weight for her worsening discomfort, but she suspected that the real cause was a beauty named Jennie Martin.

  Closing the door so that she would not be disturbed, Tia removed the crown and veil from her head and sank wearily onto a Chippendale sofa covered in cream damask. Alone at last, she took off her mask and laid it atop her headdress, then rubbed her throbbing temples.

  She was still bothered by how readily Marc had agreed to a vastly overpriced mount for the lovely Jennie after rejecting a bargain for one she herself had wanted. Her realization of how little her husband cared for her stung her more than she would have thought possible six weeks ago.

  But since their marriage, the passionate dislike that she had felt for him had given way to passion of another kind. Worse, under the spell of his charming companionship and accomplished lovemaking, she had deluded herself into thinking that he was coming to like her as much as she liked him. What a fool she was!

  He had bluntly warned her that love would have no part in their marriage and that he would have other women. She had agreed to this, and now she must keep the devil’s bargain she had made.

  The door to the sitting room that she had so carefully closed now suddenly opened. A man dr
essed as an angel in a billowing white gown with wings attached to his back and a halo suspended over his head strode purposefully in, clearly in quest of someone.

  Tia, anxious to be rid of his unwanted company, told him sharply, “You will not find whom you are looking for here, sir. I am alone.”

  The angelic intruder’s white satin mask was wider than any she had seen that night, and it covered most of his face from his upper forehead to his chin. A space had been cut for his mouth as well as his eyes.

  “I regret to contradict you, my dear Duchess of Castleton, but you are the very person I am seeking.”

  He must have followed her from the ballroom, but how could he have recognized her when she had been wearing her mask? “How do you know that I am she?” Tia inquired uneasily.

  His thin lips smiled enigmatically at her. His eyes were so light through the slits in the mask that they seemed almost colorless.

  “Do you not know that you are the talk of the ton? All eyes are upon the woman who has at last caught the elusive duke in a parson’s mousetrap.” The stranger spoke in a soft, coaxing voice that invited confidences. “Everyone knows that he had vowed never to take a leg shackle. Yet somehow you managed to change his mind.” His tone grew softer, more intimate. The pale eyes behind the mask were studying her closely. “How did you manage to capture his heart?”

  If only she had! She swallowed hard, on the verge of tears as she thought of her husband’s clear preference for the beautiful Jennie.

  The man was watching Tia closely, and suddenly his pale eyes glittered with comprehension. “He does not love you, does he?” he exclaimed, much excited by this discovery. “Your face tells me he does not.”

  Tia cringed with humiliation at what her telltale face had revealed to this disturbing stranger. The certainty she read in his eyes told her it would do no good to try to deny it. Her head throbbed as though it would explode.

  His thin mouth, visible through the slit in his mask, twisted in a mocking smirk. “So what they say about Castleton marrying you for an heir is true.”

  Tia said nothing, but apparently her wretched face betrayed her again, for his cruel smile broadened. His gaze moved meaningfully to her belly. “Are you increasing?”

  “No!” Tia was startled into answering this impertinently personal question and instantly regretted doing so. The man was making her increasingly nervous. “Who are you?”

  “I never disclose my identity at masquerades, my dear duchess. It is part of my pleasure to let others try to guess it.”

  Tia was beginning to feel a little frightened. “I have a tolerably good memory for voices, and I am certain I have never heard yours.”

  “You are correct. We have not met before, my dear duchess. By the way, you make a lovely Queen Guinevere.”

  “And you, I collect, are the angel Raphael.”

  “You disappoint me. I should never pose as such an insipid creature.” His tone was suddenly so unangelic that it sent a shiver down her spine. “No, my dear duchess, I am Lucifer before the fall.”

  Tia gaped at him. The man was clearly touched in the upper works.

  He bowed to her. “I must take my leave. Do not pine too much for your husband’s affection, my dear duchess. Better to lead a long and unloved life rather than a short and loved one.”

  She gasped. “What?”

  But he disappeared into the hall without amplifying on his cryptic remark.

  When Tia went back into the ballroom, she saw no sign of the fallen angel. The man was clearly unhinged but undoubtedly harmless, and she dismissed him from her mind.

  Chapter 10

  Coles informed Marc that a Mr. Keller was awaiting His Grace’s pleasure in the anteroom off the entry The butler’s disdainful sniff left no doubt that he found this caller beneath his exalted master’s touch. In a voice dripping with skepticism, Coles informed Marc that this personage had dared to insist that he was here at the duke’s request.

  “So he is,” Marc said.

  The butler looked as though he suspected his master had suddenly gone queer in the attic.

  At the duke’s entrance, Mr. Keller rose from the humpbacked Chippendale sofa on which he had been sitting. Marc could understand his butler’s suspicion of Mr. Keller. He did not look at all like the sort of man one would expect to find in a duke’s home. He was, in fact, a brilliant detective, a former Bow Street Runner whom Marc had hired to identify and track down the mysterious enemy responsible for his brother’s death.

  An ugly, jagged scar ran diagonally from Mr. Keller’s nose to the left side of his chin, a memento from a murderer he had once brought to justice. His clothes were old and even in their youth had not been fashionable. His eyes, hard as granite, had clearly seen too much of the dark side of human nature.

  The duke, anxious to hear what progress the detective had made, asked without preamble, “What news have you for me?”

  “None of any import, Your Grace,” the detective replied bluntly. “Not to wrap it in clean linen, we are stymied unless we can come up with some clue to Major Hetton’s real identity. Without it, we cannot trace his background. Nor can we question his relatives and friends about who might have hired him to kill your brother. We have found no one who knows anything of Hetton before he appeared at the Earl of Leasingham’s.”

  “Surely the Leasinghams gave you some clue,” Marc said impatiently. “He lived beneath their roof for weeks.”

  “We have interviewed them, their son, and their servants at length, Your Grace, and we have checked everything Hetton told them.”

  “And?” Marc prompted.

  “It was, all of it, Banbury tales. He claimed he was the son of a country squire with a handsome property named Linshaw near Meldon, a remote village in Northumberland. When I sent a man there, he discovered that there is indeed such a property but that the squire who owns it is named Canfield and that all three of his sons are presently alive and accounted for. Nor did anyone matching the major’s description grow up in that vicinity.”

  Marc uttered an expletive.

  “It was the same with everything else Hetton said. Whoever he was, he covered his tracks carefully.”

  Marc said scornfully, “And I understood you were the best detective to be had.”

  “I am, but you are welcome to try another if you think he can do better,” Mr. Keller said quietly.

  His answer mollified Marc. “That was unfair of me, and I apologize. What have you learned of Lynnock and Thiers?”

  After much thought, Marc had concluded that of his various enemies Sir Gregory Lynnock and Lord Thiers were the most likely suspects, and he had given their names to Mr. Keller.

  “Nothing yet that would connect either of them to Hetton.” From what Mr. Keller had learned about Lynnock, he would bet his blunt on his being their quarry, but until he had hard facts to back up this opinion, he would keep it to himself.

  The clock on the fireplace mantel sounded the hour, and the duke rose. “You must excuse me. I have promised my brother-in-law a visit to Week’s Mechanical Museum.”

  Mr. Keller, unaware of the brother-in-law’s age, was dubious that two sophisticated gentlemen of the ton would be much impressed by the mechanical fauna there, but he said politely, “It’s worth a look once.”

  He thought the duke sounded a trifle odd, as though he were gritting his teeth, when he replied, “Unfortunately, this is our fourth visit.”

  Freddie had his own special list of London attractions that he wanted to see. So Marc had gamely taken the boy and his sister to see the Tower of London and the wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s. Although clearly bored, Castleton suffered through not one, but three, performances of acrobats, clowns, and equestrians at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre.

  The boy’s very favorite spot was Week’s in Haymarket, and Marc was repeatedly prevailed upon to take him there so that he could watch the mechanical birds, mice, and tarantulas, in rapt fascination.

  After Napoleon’s abdication, it wa
s Marc who gave in to the boy’s pleas and allowed him to remain up long past his bedtime so that he could see the elaborate illuminations celebrating peace. The duke drove Freddie and Tia out in his curricle that night to view what everyone agreed was the most impressive display of lights and transparencies that London had yet contrived.

  Carlton House offered the most ornate production. Its entablature and Corinthian columns were studded with lights. A pedestal of fire supported two large stars and in the center the words “Vive les Bourbons” were formed by silver lamps. Six large stars with the arms of France supported by a figure of fame decorated the parapet.

  Tia, however, preferred the simpler display that the Duchess of Oldenburg, the sister of Czar Alexander I of Russia, had erected at the Pulteney Hotel where she was staying. The duchess, who had become a friend of Tia’s, had used variegated lamps to spell out “Thanks Be to God.”

  Freddie favored three transparencies of Napoleon at Ackermann’s in the Strand. In one, he was blowing bubbles that burst as fast as he made them. In another he was building houses of cards that kept tumbling down, and in the large central one Death stood with his foot upon the fallen emperor’s breast.

  As they rode home, Tia reflected that she had never seen her little brother as happy as he had been since her husband had entered his life. Marc was proving to be a better father to Freddie than the boy’s own had ever been, treating the child with just the right combination of firmness and indulgence.

  When they returned home, Freddie scampered ahead of them toward the house.

  As Tia and Marc followed at a more sedate pace, she tried to thank him for his kindness and patience with Freddie.

  “I confess, to my own amazement, I am beginning to look forward to the children we shall have.” He glanced slyly toward her waist. “Or perhaps are already having.”

  “If we are not, it is not for lack of your trying,” she retorted, referring to his nightly visits to her bedchamber.

  An electric look passed between them, and he put his arm around her, momentarily checking her progress. His head dipped down just as the door to Castleton House opened, and he kissed her before the startled eyes of the porter and Robert, the handsome young footman whom Marie loved.