Flicke blinked at His Grace before replying with genuine warmth, “Quite well, thank you.”
Ainsworth slipped off his coat with Flicke’s help and returned other greetings as he made his way upstairs to the rear of the club where one might claim a private salon. He ordered tea and relaxed with the afternoon paper. In such soothing surroundings, he soon drifted to sleep. As often the case, hellish visions punctuated his dreams:
The fire grew hot. A demon stood with his back turned, his long black queue swinging hypnotically. The Oriental ghoul only came into focus as he knelt between the duke’s bare legs, a straight razor in hand. Now would be the time to panic, or better yet, to bellow and fight. But lassitude weighed down his limbs. He could only sigh and resign himself to suffer whatever torments awaited.
This dark, hot place, with its distorted, leering faces and infernal shadows leaping across the walls, had to be his eternal destination. He was where his censorious father insisted he would finish. Fortunately, oblivion overtook him as the fiend set to work.
Through the enveloping darkness, he next felt soft hands on his skin. Her hands were cool yet his skin burned wherever she touched him. He struggled to open his eyes and found her looking back at him with extraordinary, turbulent eyes. She caressed his cheek and whispered, “Please forgive me” before dissolving back into the black void.
The duke awoke disoriented. Scrubbing a hand slowly over his face, he straightened up in the overstuffed club chair. Day had dimmed to dusk. It was past time to return home. He had no idea how he ended up ‘illustrated,’ but he would never forget that young woman’s eyes.
Damn her eyes.
Chapter 2
In which our heroine learns revenge is a dish best served cold. And to the right party.
The Night Before
“This is not the Duke of Ainsworth!” Miss Prudence Haversham hissed to her housekeeper, Mrs. Mason, in the dim room.
When Prudence finally took a good look at the man drugged senseless, abducted and tattooed at her instigation, she panicked. She paced back and forth, glaring at the slumped man, willing him to become the one she intended to see. He remained stubbornly himself and no other.
Prudence made no effort to see the ribald tattoo meant to repay the Duke of Ainsworth for ruining her life. She stood behind him, transfixed.
This was not the duke. Far from it.
Her gaze raked across the expanse of the unconscious man’s broad shoulders, over his bandages and up to his tousled brown hair. Brown hair. She shuddered.
Too late, much too late, nothing to be done now.
Turning to her assistant and abductor-in-chief Murphy, she whispered, “The duke is a blonde man, fair skinned and…fleshier…Look! This man didn’t suffer an injury like that riding to hounds or shooting game birds! It’s as if he’s been mauled!”
“Gnawed by a badger, more like,” added Mrs. Mason. “Though I wasn’t paying much attention up there, I’ll admit.”
Murphy rumbled, “Were you studying the man elsewhere then, wife?”
“I’d a little peek,” she said with a giggle, “Not that he were little!”
Murphy spanked his saucy wife’s ample bottom.
While Mrs. Mason tittered and Murphy fussed, Miss Haversham tried to slow her thundering heart and collect her thoughts.
Who was he?
His scars preyed upon her conscience. He was a soldier certainly. She recognized the pale tracery of old saber slashes and the puckered flesh of a recently healed gunshot wound. This was not the tipsy, soft peer who nine years ago groped her, lied about it and disgraced her in her family’s eyes.
Worse was the unresolved wound. The linen bandages wrapping his shoulder had darkened with bloody ooze and come loose. She gently lifted them to find a suppurating wound covered much of his left shoulder. Rough handling during the abduction disturbed his badly mangled flesh.
A generous dollop of guilt garnished the heaping portion of mortification she struggled to digest.
Mrs. Mason herded Prudence from the room so Murphy could dress him. She paced up and down the hall for hours, or so it seemed, until she finally bullied her way back inside. Her captive slouched on the chaise wearing only his breeches. She stood in the middle of the room not knowing what to do or where to go. Like a witless fool, she asked Murphy repeatedly what they were going to do with him.
“We’ll pop him ‘round to Grosvenor Square ‘fore he wakes up,” Murphy answered patiently. “Just sneak through the mews. Settle him nice and cozy in his garden.”
“He’ll be right as roast when he wakes up, Miss H., don’t you worry,” Mrs. Mason reassured. “But let’s finish quick before the poppy syrup wears off. Don’t want him waking up while we still got him, do we!”
Prudence Haversham, apothecary, could not leave well enough alone. She bade Murphy fetch her healing salve.
“But Miss H., we don’t have time for it. Best we move along,” Murphy urged.
“He’s drifting in and out,” Mrs. Mason agreed. “If he wakes, he’ll be a handful.”
Despite her name, Prudence insisted.
She removed the soiled bandages and cleaned the wound gently with fresh water. Carefully, she dabbed salve on the man’s inflamed flesh and applied a poultice where it was raw. As Prudence re-covered his wound with fresh bandages, she succumbed to temptation and peeked over his shoulder. She surveyed the breadth and solid contours of his chest and the dark hair covering it. From that dense northern forest, her eyes skittered south following the thin dark trail of hair on his taut stomach, past his navel to where it disappeared into his breeches. Her cheeks burned.
It frightened her to do it but despite her fear she moved to face him. She knelt and brushed a lock of hair off his brow. Touching him, she felt a visceral shock, a jolt as one does dreaming of losing one’s balance. It was so elemental that Prudence’s rational mind reflexively dismissed it. The gooseflesh on her skin was harder to ignore so she chafed her upper arms to erase the sensation. She studied him, fascinated.
This man was more than handsome. Even unconscious, he still smiled faintly, making his angular features almost boyish. Disheveled brown hair fell across a high, unlined forehead, though he was 30 years of age at least. His face was tanned except at the corners of his deep-set eyes. Pale creases showed, either from laughing or squinting at the enemy in the sun. (She prayed he had a well-developed sense of humor.) Strong cheekbones balanced his sculpted jaw. His nose ran straight and fine with an aquiline profile.
In the heat of battle, she imagined his features would look honed from tempered steel with no soft flesh to spare — except his lips. His upper lip curved slightly like a bow over a generous lower lip. She couldn’t help but wonder how they might feel in a kiss. She gawked until she recalled herself to their awkward circumstances. He shifted slightly and Prudence smelled soap and something more than his clean skin. It was as if the man’s warmth had a scent, which was as disconcerting as it was stimulating. She breathed it in while her two helpers bustled about the room.
Then he opened his eyes.
The shock knocked Prudence off balance and down she plopped to the floor on her bottom. “Oof!”
He chuckled low and smiled, bleary eyed. It was as if his fingertips, not merely his heavy-lidded gaze, brushed up her ankles and over her knees to linger on her face. If his lascivious survey was any indication, he was a jaded rake. Although she had to admit, he had a lovely smile.
His gaze held her rapt. While her rational faculties screamed in unison to scramble on hands and knees into the shadows, her body responded with more instinctive wisdom. Gathering her legs beneath her, she leaned against his knees to reach out and stroke his face again. Though improper, soothing him didn’t feel the least bit wrong. No, touching him felt entirely right. Rather than run and hide, she met his gaze and whispered, “Please forgive me.”
She waited for his response.
Slowly, his eyes drooped and he drifted back into a drowse. With a whoosh,
Prudence exhaled the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
The duke stood several inches above six feet with a well-muscled physique. Manipulating such a large man into the rest of his clothes while limp as a rag doll proved harder than removing them. Even so, Murphy replaced everything, including his close-fitting coat. At Prudence’s insistence, Murphy hoisted him over his shoulder with a great deal of care so the duke’s return would be less traumatic to his injuries.
They loaded His Grace as gently as they could into the cart, covered him with blankets and made their way through the empty, densely fogged, early morning streets of Mayfair to Ainsworth House. The ducal residence was a handsome, four-storey building of red brick with cream Coade stone quoins outlining the corners. It stood within a spacious city garden made private by a tall, brick wall.
From the mews behind the main house, they entered a wrought iron gate in the rear wall. A cacophony of barks and howls erupted somewhere in the bowels of the great mansion as Murphy carried the duke into the gardens. They scrambled to situate their victim then hid in the bushes and watched anxiously for lights. Windows below stairs stayed dark and the dogs quieted.
Though they rushed to leave, Miss Haversham made sure the duke lay on his sound, right side. Last, she picked the paper label from a jar of her rose arnica salve and slipped it into his coat pocket. She hoped it would help.
• • •
Two days later, Prudence Haversham still ruminated over the nightmarish moment her life careened into a ditch.
They drove the horse cart into Bath. They were a quarter-hour or so from Bathwick just across the Avon River from the famous spa town.
“That wasn’t him,” she repeated to Mrs. Mason.
“All will be well, Miss H., you’ll see,” Murphy reassured her.
Prudence reproached herself throughout the journey home. How could she have made such a blunder? Of course, she knew the answer. On this misguided trip, after nine years of stewing and fuming, she finally fulfilled her vengeful fantasies as well as her autumn orders for essential oils, salves and poultices. And if Shakespeare’s tragedies were any indication, her thirst for revenge would certainly prove her downfall. Or so she fretted every waking hour.
For years, Prudence joked with Mrs. Mason and Murphy about branding the Duke of Ainsworth or having him tattooed for his knavery. (She had not meant it…Well, maybe a little…All right, perhaps more than a little.) She indulged in daydreams of revenge whenever she suffered low spirits. Plotting her reprisal proved an uplifting way to pass a quiet evening while living in spinsterish ignominy. The three of them would imagine ridiculous tattoos for the duke. The more outrageous the suggestion, the harder they laughed until they made themselves hysterical with giggle fits.
For years, Prudence gamely lived life as Sir Oswald Dabney’s discreetly disgraced sister and unmarriageable female apothecary. But the injustice of it gnawed at her. After all, it was the duke’s incorrigible behavior for which she, not he, paid the price.
Prudence, however, was not one to pout in a corner about the unfairness of life. Almost immediately after Sir Oswald sent her back to Bathwick in disgrace, she turned her social exile to advantage, apprenticing at the Trim Street Apothecary. In time, she managed it and when the apothecary retired, she assumed his duties. Her clientele came from the lower orders of society, those who could not afford a doctor’s fee and were desperate enough to accept a female apothecary’s treatment. Her competence and mixtures made her a great favorite among soldiers and sailors wounded in war. Thanks to Napoleon’s intransigence, her practice thrived. Unfortunately, as years passed and her self-confidence grew, so did her righteous indignation.
In addition to contemplating what to tattoo on the duke, and where, she also raised the subject of how to tattoo him with Hsieh Ta Long, a Chinese herb merchant from whom Prudence purchased ginger root and other exotic medicinal herbs on her trips to London.
Mr. Hsieh had a magnificent tattoo. Whenever he gestured with his hands, his loose silk jacket sleeve revealed the meticulously scaled tail of a dragon that wound round his wrist and twined sinuously upward. When she finally found the nerve to express her admiration, he pushed up his sleeve to show her the monster in full. At his shoulder flying among blue shaded clouds leered a green dragon with a lolling red tongue and plumes of orange from its nostrils. His brother had done this, Mr. Hsieh told her, but he too had a little skill. (Modest Mr. Hsieh was a master in the art.)
Thanks to Mrs. Mason’s habitual indiscretion, Mr. Hsieh knew of Prudence’s unfortunate history and offered to help punish the guilty party should the opportunity ever arise. He didn’t find it a scandalous notion in the least. In his country, tattooing criminals on their foreheads was common practice.
For several years more, Prudence continued to deliver supplies to apothecaries in fashionable London twice a year and only daydreamed of vengeance.
In August of 1815, the ‘dye’ was cast.
The knocker had been taken down from Sir Oswald’s Russell Square townhouse when the baronet and his family left in early August. (Lady Dabney was expecting yet another blessed event and would spend her confinement at Treadwater.) None of Sir Oswald’s staff remained but Miss Haversham nevertheless found it a convenient place from which to conduct her usual week of business.
By day, Murphy took the horse cart to deliver larger orders, while she carried small quantities to the pocket-sized apothecary shops more easily reached on foot.
At night, in the echoing townhouse, Prudence read with growing disgust the scandalous newspaper accounts of the Duke of Ainsworth, who was suddenly ‘at large’ and flouting convention in London. With the rakish duke swaggering through the broadsheets, her vengeful fantasies became more detailed, with specific ‘hypothetical’ plans for abducting him, tattooing him and returning him undetected to Ainsworth House.
Prudence even joked that Murphy and Mrs. Mason might someday use a free evening to follow him and note his habits. She hadn’t anticipated they would take the initiative so decisively the very next night.
Their last day in Town began unremarkably enough.
Prudence had one last piece of business that day so she allowed herself all morning and the better part of the afternoon to wander the streets of Mayfair, her small basket of essentials in hand. She peered into the windows of drapers, hardly taking in the bounty of sumptuous silks, brocades, Indian printed calicos and laces. In a modiste’s window, she studied the latest Ackermann’s fashion plates.
Finally, she turned her steps toward her favorite client, Mr. Floris at 89 Jermyn Street in St. James. She loved his elegant, wood-paneled shop. It smelled perfectly masculine, like his colognes and gentlemen’s toiletries. Her late father favored Floris’ citrus-scented soap. It was there Beau Brummell himself once praised her essential oil of rose, the critical component in his secret, custom-blended scent, or so he said.
Once they concluded their business, Mr. Floris invited Prudence to take tea with him and his wife in the first floor parlor. To this, she readily agreed. They discussed botany and Society with great enthusiasm. The afternoon reminded Prudence of happier days in Bathwick when her parents were still alive. Time flew by. When Prudence insisted she must be on her way, the sun had set. The city fog obscured a great deal, but night had certainly fallen. Mr. Floris insisted she take a hackney cab back to her brother’s townhouse. This she did, glowing from her wonderful day.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Mason and Murphy spent the evening trailing the Duke of Ainsworth. They shadowed him as he toddled unsteadily from White’s across Piccadilly into the night’s sea fog drifting dense in the side streets of Mayfair. They followed him past the alley where by chance they left the cart and horse. Never ones to disdain a God-given opportunity, they snatched him. He was two, if not all three, sheets to the wind so the two drugged and bundled him into the cart quite handily despite his imposing size.
Murphy sent a hackney cab to London’s Limehouse district to fetch Mr. Hsieh.
Considering it was done impulsively, the acts of the tragedy preceded like clockwork. Murphy and Mrs. Mason appeared with the duke, muffled head to toe in a rough blanket, slung over Murphy’s shoulder. Prudence had no time to think much less reconsider. She was too giddy with triumph to exercise caution or put a stop to it.
The night careened away with its own momentum thereafter. Mr. Hsieh arrived, his face wreathed in smiles. Mrs. Mason and Murphy barred Prudence from the room while they stripped the man and Mr. Hsieh shaved his lower belly bare and plied it with needles and ink. By dawn, the Chinaman had tattooed Prudence’s most hilarious suggestion under the duke’s skin and left with a paternal pat on her cheek.
It happened so quickly, and in such dim light, she hadn’t noticed anything amiss at first.
Days later, in the kitchen of her little stone cottage, Prudence Haversham paced, her slight frame tense, her slim hands in constant motion. Reflexively, she tucked in stray tendrils of sable brown hair escaping from her bun’s thick braid and smoothed creases from the smock and faded dress she wore while she tended the distiller. Nothing she did to dissipate her nervous energy settled her nerves.
Well-meaning people often described her as girlish, much to her irritation. In truth, she was lithe and quick in her movements, as a girl child is before propriety and ‘uplifting’ stays make her self-conscious. But Prudence’s gaze was that of a woman in full, sobered by painful disappointments. Her eyes shifted color like a stormy sea from blue to gray to a blue-green, revealing emotions she usually concealed with unflappable competence.
Although worried about the consequences of their recent misadventure, Prudence never once blamed her overzealous staff. She realized her preoccupation with revenge made the disaster inevitable.
“I should’ve made certain he was the duke,” she reproached herself.
“He rode in the duke’s crested carriage, Miss H.,” Murphy said. “We made sure to check the coat of arms.”
The Duke's Tattoo: A Regency Romance of Love and Revenge, Though Not in That Order Page 2
