A House East of Regent Street

by Pam Rosenthal

  A House East of Regent Street

  Pam Rosenthal

  P&M Editorial Services

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004, 2020 by Pam Rosenthal

  Excerpt from The Edge of Impropriety copyright © Pam Rosenthal 2008

  Excerpt from The Slightest Provocation copyright © Pam Rosenthal 2006

  EPUB Edition

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by P&M Editorial Services

  Cover Design by Jessica T. Cohen

  About A House East of Regent Street

  The future looks bright for former sailor Jack Merion. His wartime heroics have won him influential contacts, and his good looks and flair for business are definite assets. With funds to invest, he’s on the brink of financial success in the high-stakes world of Regency London.

  And buying the house in Soho Square is a can’t-miss opportunity. Once a fashionable brothel, the property will yield a good income in commercial rents and a clear path to the respectable life Jack has never known.

  There’s only one problem – another prospective buyer. With a dark past, a desperate future, and some unmistakable assets of her own, Miss Cléo Myles is a formidable obstacle, one that Jack would be wise to steer clear of.

  But instead, he proposes a bargain that’s as scandalous as it is irresistible.

  Five afternoons. Five rooms. Uncountable pleasures…

  …In a neighborhood that’s seen better days. And a house that’s seen everything except love.

  “Pam Rosenthal is a master at her craft and A House East of Regent Street is a gem, the kind of gem that is not only beautiful to behold but radiates warmth and unforgettable emotional clarity. She combines the sexiest of moments with the most touching character development and you will be doing yourself a great favor to fall into this story and let it transport you!”

  – Sherry Thomas

  For my husband, who hectored and cajoled this edition into existence. With love and gratitude.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Monday

  Tuesday: The Front Parlor

  Wednesday: The Kitchen

  Thursday: The Yellow Bedroom

  Friday: The Red Punishment Room

  Saturday, and the Days Following…

  The Housemaid’s Room in the Garret

  Also by Pam Rosenthal

  Excerpt from The Edge of Impropriety

  Excerpt from The Slightest Provocation

  About the Author

  Afterword and Acknowledgments

  Monday

  London, 1816

  “Pompeiian Red.

  “Turner’s Yellow.

  “Zoffany Blue.”

  The rooms glowed. Rich afternoon September sunlight poured in through tall, graceful windows; the air shimmered as though suffused with the earths, stones, and metals that lent their hues to the walls.

  “And the green?” Jack Merion waved his cane at the walls of the front parlor. The room was nearly empty; his voice echoed as he wandered among a few chairs and a settee, discreetly swathed in holland covers.

  “What’s the green called?” he asked the property agent.

  “Sorry, Mr. Merion. I’ve forgotten what they call the green paint. But it’s got verdigris crushed up in it. Lapis lazuli in the blue paint, verdigris in the green.” Mr. Wilson’s boyish face had caught a slanted ray of sunlight; his cheek was mottled with faint splotches of color from the walls. He shrugged, as though to slough off any personal identification with all that rowdy brilliance.

  “One doesn’t usually see such expensive paint, but the tenant” – he allowed himself a bit of a snigger here – “evidently considered it worth the investment.”

  No need to be patronizing, Jack thought. Whatever the tenant’s taste or motivation, the investment had paid off handsomely. Situated just off Soho Square, the house had been a popular and highly profitable brothel, maintaining its luster even as the neighborhood grew shabbier and less fashionable, and while more elaborate houses farther west attracted a richer custom. The lease having finally expired, however, the tenant had chosen not to renew.

  One could easily imagine this parlor in its heyday: glowing green walls, delicate furniture, bronze brocade at the windows. You’d come here first, to choose a girl for the evening. It must have been… inspiring.

  In any case, the woodwork was solid, and the price was likely to be reasonable. Better grab it up quickly, Jack told himself. In a fortnight, he could have a good crew of laborers chopping it up into offices and modest flats, walls painted over in appropriately sober hues. Some proprietors, he supposed, might still try to keep it intact, thinking to revive the house’s – even the neighborhood’s – past glory. But if you had a sharp eye for property values and social distinction, you’d know there were bigger changes on the horizon.

  Because the Prince Regent, like an eager puppy, had lately begun to mark his territory, his architects laying plans for parks and crescents, canals and arcades, and a boulevard to rival the great shopping thoroughfares of Paris. Some of these designs were still merely marks on paper and proposals before commissions, but in some neighborhoods ground had already been broken and populations displaced, to make way for the coming glories of Regent’s Park, Regent’s Crescent, Regent’s Canal.

  And most notably, the new commercial thoroughfare. People were already calling it Regent Street. Call it what you liked, Jack thought; what mattered was that the street would constitute a sort of rampart, a bastion of social exclusivity neatly dissociating the city’s ton from the remainder of its populace. Lesser sorts of people would still go about their business eastward of Regent Street – in flats, shops, and offices rented from “paper-money men” sharp enough to develop those properties – while the Polite World concentrated its pursuit of pleasure in opulent town houses in Mayfair and St. James. Even the paper-money men, like Jack himself, would endeavor to locate themselves in the West End, establishing families (quite as Jack was hoping to do) in those trim little stuccoed crescents going up in Marylebone. This property, splendid as it was, could only be an investment, one that Jack was considering quite seriously, for the rents he could charge.

  It was gratifying, he thought, that an ex-sailor could afford to buy such a building. For, contrary to the proverbial way of sailors, Jack had saved what he’d gotten over the years, be it from wages, prize money, or some early smuggling ventures that were now safely buried in his past. And more importantly, he’d invested what he’d saved, choosing those investments carefully, and becoming respected for his judgment. With the result that these days, he could almost always depend upon being treated as a man of means – though he might still encounter the occasional uncertain moment, usually with minor functionaries. It was usually the flunkies, he’d observed – like petty property agents or obsequious butlers – who were most eager to show their contempt for low origins and new money.

  Wilson, however, had been most decent, murmuring the obligatory catchphrases like a benediction. Viscount Crowden’s letter of introduction… family well known to our firm… his father the earl in your deepest debt… A grateful nati
on recognizes its heroes.

  To which Jack had turned his best public smile: modest, dashing, and high-minded all at once. Leaning on his cane in the entrance hall, he’d paused for a moment under the skylight: War Hero, Justly Rewarded, Entering his Sober Middle Years as a Man of Commerce. It helped, as he’d learned these past months, that he so perfectly looked the part. The grateful nation found it easier to recognize a handsome hero.

  And so he and Wilson had managed a cordial acquaintance, the pale, plump younger man expatiating upon the house’s fine design and good construction, while the broad-shouldered, sun-darkened older one contributed an ex-sailor’s working knowledge of the inside of a brothel. By now, Jack had quite won the young property agent’s affections.

  “Someone else is interested in this property,” Wilson confided, “to use for its original purposes. A Frenchman. I’ve been expecting him this afternoon as well. But as he’s quite late already, I doubt we need worry about him.”

  Jack shrugged, not worried at all.

  “Well then,” the young man continued, “we’ve seen the kitchen downstairs and the dining room at the back of the house – nice, eh, to imagine the girls taking their meals there? So I think we’ll want to go upstairs now.” A broad wink. Silly youth, Jack thought.

  Having mounted the stairs to the second storey, they found a lovely little bedroom, painted in that rich Zoffany blue. Good, springy Elastic Bed, well covered against dust. Elaborate plasterwork on the ceiling – cherubs, it looked like.

  Beautiful house. Had he ever been here? Possibly, quite some years back, during the smuggling days. Occasionally, after a venture had gone particularly well, he and a few of his mates had treated themselves to places like this, rather than their accustomed cheap haunts in Wapping. They’d clean and smarten themselves up, contain their rowdiness, give the girls a break (as they liked to joke) from the softer sort of gentlemen who made up the house’s usual custom.

  There were additional small bedrooms on this second storey, and other, more interesting spaces as well, like a large room that held various bulky and oddly shaped items, ghostly in their cloth covers.

  “They’d do their more public entertaining in a room like this,” Jack said. “Pageants and such, they’d be half dressed, singing and playing musical instruments – that’s a harp, I suppose, and that thing looks like a barrel organ.”

  The room would have provided a graceful setting for it.

  Though in fact he’d never had a lot of patience for such entertainments; to him the point had always been the fucking.

  Whereas for Wilson… The younger man gazed dreamily at the harp until Jack cleared his throat.

  “And on the next storey…” he suggested.

  “Quite,” murmured his guide, leading the way up the stairs. Upon peering into the first room on the house’s third storey, however, Wilson’s cheeks flushed a sudden dark red. Perhaps a reflection of the paint on the walls again, Jack thought, but not likely.

  “Yes, well, and here we h-have a… a…”

  “Chamber of torments.” Abruptly, Jack finished the young man’s sentence for him, in a sharp tone that precluded any impression of discomfiture on his own part.

  The walls were done in dark Mediterranean red. No windows: the light entered from skylights in the roof. Curious dark panels were mounted high on the walls; wooden gargoyles appeared to be perched atop iron contrivances bolted into the panels’ carvings. And hanging down from the bolts? Chains, with wrist cuffs attached. Cranks and pulleys to adjust them, and some odd hinged mechanisms whose workings he didn’t quite understand. The gargoyles grinned and grimaced in a mute frenzy of anticipation.

  He pulled the holland cover from a large, square object. The tooled ebony cabinet hadn’t been shut correctly. Its door swung open, revealing the whips and floggers, the switches, straps, and scourges, neatly ranged in order of size and formidability.

  Wilson let out a sort of squeak that might have been a scandalized giggle, while Jack stood silent as the gargoyles, his face circumspect and just mildly ironic, trying to deal with whatever complex of emotion the room had churned up in him.

  Not shock or surprise exactly. And certainly not disgust – live and let live; if you paid your money you were entitled to whatever entertainment was available. No, what he was feeling was more complicated, a sort of unwilling envy of anyone so confident of his place in the world that he’d pay for a taste of helplessness and humiliation. Where Jack came from, you got your ration of helplessness and humiliation for free.

  The gentlemen who’d used this room had probably pretended to be little boys at Eton again – Lord Crowden had once explained a little of what that had been like. Jack had noticed a bundle of slender willow canes in the ebony cabinet. Also a cat o’ nine tails: perhaps the gentlemen had also played at being seamen, spread-eagled and stripped to the waist, waiting for the hideous bite of knotted rope at their naked backs. They probably fantasized a whole ship’s crew assembled on deck to watch. And very arousing it might be too, Jack supposed, as a fantasy.

  Rather less so, as a memory.

  “The room is sealed,” Wilson announced solemnly. “When the door is closed, no sound can escape.”

  Jack nodded. Enough of the red room. The two men took a slow, meditative stroll through an elegant bedchamber, all done in bright yellow.

  Well, he had to admit that the house had stirred his imagination. And more than that – no point trying to ignore the physical facts of the matter; it wasn’t only envy and resentment that had taken hold of him. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, as he’d learned to do these past few years, in preparation for a battle at sea.

  Mercifully, the stirring began to subside. Some advantage anyway, to approaching one’s fortieth birthday.

  “Yes, well, I think I’ve seen what I needed to see, Mr. Wilson. I think we both have.” They could skip the servants’ rooms at the very top. He’d quite gotten the idea of the place by now. “Yes, Mr. Wilson, I’ll be considering the investment.”

  Soothing to begin thinking in money terms again. And it was also time to begin discussing his other (actually more exigent) needs in the way of houses and property.

  Mr. Wilson? he repeated softly, for the younger man was clearly having his own difficulties in the matter of self-management. Jack cleared his throat.

  “Perhaps it’s time, Mr. Wilson,” he announced, “to move on now. I’d like to hear about some properties more appropriate to the establishment of a household. Properties the young lady I’m presently paying court to might find to her liking.”

  He laid mild, didactic stress on the word lady, his gentle, almost avuncular smile meant to turn the property agent from the dangerous currents of his imaginings and steer him toward the shores of decency, propriety, commerce. The young man gulped, his eyes slowly regaining their focus.

  “Of… of course, quite so. I left the list of properties downstairs. And may I congratulate you, sir, in advance…”

  “Hah! A bit early for that, Wilson, but you can wish me luck…”

  The self-consciously jaunty exchange faded into the clatter of their boots on the stairway. The smooth, beautifully bleached pine boards were uncarpeted at the house’s upper levels; bathed in warm rays of sun streaming from a skylight, the wood felt sturdy, springy, and slightly yielding. They descended another floor, walking on good thick carpet now, and gaining the entry hall on the first level.

  His knee ached a bit. Always did, walking down stairs.

  A mirror hung in the hallway. He straightened his cravat and ran his fingers through his thick hair to order it a bit – or to make it stand up as it was supposed to do. He missed the feel of a sailor’s queue at his nape, but Lord Crowden had insisted he get it cut in one of those poetical new styles that suggested a soul buffeted by winds of passion.

  His brow was a bit sweaty. The house was stuffy; all the windows were closed. Or perhaps he felt taxed by the pain at his knee.

  “Enjoy the knee,” Crowde
n had counseled him. “Exploit it. The ladies love a war wound.” He’d been right, in the case of a wound as little disfiguring as this one, anyway – at least when hidden under well-tailored narrow buff pantaloons. Draped in good clothing, his wound was, in truth, rather an adornment. Ladies liked to fuss over an attractive hero; Jack would never have stood a chance with his young lady, were it not for the fortuitous combination of his good looks and bad knee.

  Her parents had wanted someone better born. But in the patriotic haze of these postwar days they were willing to indulge her – even, finally, to welcome Jack’s daily presence at their house on Cavendish Square.

  With his sharp nose for turbulent weather, however, Jack was in a hurry to seal the bargain, before Miss Oakshutt (Evelina, as she’d lately allowed him to call her) conceived a fancy for some other suitor and whatever novelties he might offer.

  A loud clacking noise interrupted his thoughts: an unexpected rap at the front door’s big brass knocker. Wilson shrugged and hurried to answer it, while Jack nodded absentmindedly – perhaps the phantom Frenchman had materialized after all.

  Evelina was a good deal younger than he was, pretty enough, blonde and well-shaped. With her dowry and her merchant father’s connections in the City, she was as satisfactory in her way as Andrewes, the tailor Crowden had recommended, was in his.

  Not that Jack wouldn’t keep his end of the bargain. He’d provide well for her and the children they’d have; act the sober, faithful husband. And of course he’d do his duty in bed – after all, as Nelson had famously expressed it, England expects that every man will do his duty.

  In any case, he’d had enough of whores and whorehouses. He’d steal a kiss from Miss… from Evelina, this very evening.

  But what had Wilson been doing all this time?

  There were voices at the front door. Jack turned from his reflection, to join Wilson and the new arrivals.