Her father turned his glare on her.
“You know nothing of it, girl.”
Catherine bit her lip. She knew plenty. She knew men like Ben Hawksmoor lived on a knife’s edge because for all their popularity they could fall from favor at any moment. She knew Clarencieux had died because he had no money and no connections to save him. Society was harsh. It had rules you broke at your peril. Catherine’s best friend and fellow debutante, Lily St. Clare, had been married off at seventeen. Four years later she had run away from her husband to be with her lover, but he had spurned her. Lily had ended up living in a brothel, and Catherine was expected never to see or speak to her again, and forget the friendship that had bound them since they were at school, as though Lily had become someone completely different, a bad person whom no one would acknowledge. Society spoke of Lily very much as they did of her.
Bad blood always tells in the end, you know….
The injustice of it all made Catherine furious.
She knew that a debutante’s role was to marry to advantage and she knew her never-loving father was going to sell her off to Lord Withers like a side of beef.
She also knew that Molly, one of the housemaids, slept with a silhouette of Ben Hawksmoor beneath her pillow. The maid had been laying the fire in Catherine’s chamber one day and some cuttings from the scandal sheets had fallen from the box in which she kept the coal and wood shavings for the fire. Catherine had picked them up and handed them back to Molly, but not before she had seen that each of them referred to the outrageous activities of Lord Hawksmoor and his inamorata, Lady Paris de Moine. Molly had blushed and thanked her, and admitted that she thought Ben Hawksmoor a hero because he was so handsome and so dashing, and he had once served in the army and they told tales of his courage and daring. Molly had sat back on her heels before the blackened grate and said that she wanted to be Lady Paris de Moine if only for one night. To have all the excitement and the attention and Ben Hawksmoor for a lover…She had sighed before going back to rubbing her hands red raw with polish.
Later, when Catherine had been out in Burlington Arcade and seen silhouettes of society figures for sale for a few pennies, she had not been able to resist buying one of Ben Hawksmoor for Molly, who had later confessed that she took it to bed with her every night.
Ben Hawksmoor, the hero. Catherine shivered. The fantasy spun around him was very seductive. How impossible to be so drawn to a man who was everything that a debutante should deplore. How impossible to forget the sweet pleasure of his hands against her back and his heart beating beneath her cheek and his mouth pressed against her hair…How easy to see now just what the chaperones were squawking about when they warned of decadence and pleasure beyond imagining. Catherine discovered that her imagination was now remarkably vivid as she tried to picture what it might have been like to let Ben Hawksmoor take his pleasure with her.
Catherine trembled a little as her wayward thoughts took flight, and this time she managed to knock over her wineglass. The ruby liquid spread across the table toward Maggie Fenton, who stared at it as though transfixed.
This time none of the footmen moved.
“Someone bring a cloth!” Sir Alfred ordered, but then Maggie stumbled to her feet, her hand pressed to her mouth. Behind her the dining chair clattered to the ground. With a stifled sob, she turned and ran from the room. John, sensing at last the malevolence in the air, started to wail. Sir Alfred swore. Catherine leaned forward and mopped at the spilled wine with her linen napkin.
“Leave it!” Sir Alfred shouted. John’s screams redoubled in volume and he scrambled down from his chair and shot out of the room. Catherine stood up.
“Sit down!” her father barked. “We will finish our meal.”
Catherine paused. Maggie had shown her much kindness in the past and now the paper-thin structure of Catherine’s family life was under terrible strain. She could not simply watch her stepmother suffering and leave her to do it alone.
“I am sorry, Papa,” she said. “Please excuse me. I must go and see how Maggie does.”
Sir Alfred waved his fork. A piece of beef wilted on the prongs. “Her maid will attend to her. Sit down, girl.” He went back to his food, certain of her compliance.
From upstairs came the sound of John’s wailing and above it the descant of the baby crying. The whole house seemed to vibrate to the noise. Catherine hesitated a moment longer, then hurried to the door, ignoring her father’s incensed bellows that she return to the table at once.
She found her stepmother lying facedown on her huge tester bed. The room smelled of lavender perfume and was an opulent riot of frills and flounces in pink and green, just as Maggie had been, the opulent trophy debutante, when she had married Sir Alfred. Now she was pale and so thin that her body barely made an impression on the covers.
Catherine placed one tentative hand on her shoulder. “Maggie—”
Maggie jumped as though Catherine had branded her. She rolled over. She had not been crying but her expression was so desolate that Catherine felt chilled. She sat down next to her stepmother on the bed and felt the springs give under her own rather more considerable weight.
“Maggie,” she said again, “what on earth is going on?”
Maggie clutched Catherine’s hands. Her own were so frozen that Catherine gave a little exclamation.
“I am in a lot of trouble, Catherine,” she said.
Catherine raised her brows. The sort of trouble that normally afflicted Maggie involved bills from the milliner and the couturier. Sir Alfred would bluster but he did not really mind. Catherine knew it was more important to him for his wife and his daughter to be creditably turned out than whether they spent beyond their allowance.
“I have a little money left this quarter—” she began, but Maggie shook her head. She pushed herself upright and slid from the bed, crossing the thick carpet to throw open the door of the cupboard opposite and to rummage inside. Catherine waited. Eventually Maggie emerged, pushed the straggles of auburn hair away from her face and came back to kneel at Catherine’s feet. Her left hand was clasped tightly about something.
“I stole it,” she said. “There was a party and I saw it on the shelf and I thought to have it for myself. A little piece of him…”
Catherine frowned. “A piece of whom? Maggie, you are frightening me—”
Maggie took Catherine’s wrist and placed the package in her outstretched hand. It was wrapped in a red velvet cloth. Maggie sat back on her heels while Catherine unfolded the material.
She was holding a miniature of Edward Clarencieux. It was in a silver frame, studded with diamonds. Catherine looked from the handsome, painted face to her stepmother’s ravaged one that was now dissolving into silent tears.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
Maggie’s tears fell faster. “I told you. There was a masked ball at Lord Hawksmoor’s rooms. I went there—with Ned.”
Catherine’s heart skipped a beat. “Lord Hawksmoor?”
Maggie ignored the interruption. “Such pretty things were exhibited there. Ned’s picture—”
There was a heavy step outside the door, Sir Alfred’s voice raised in irritable inquiry.
Maggie gave a gasp. She closed her fingers about Catherine’s hand, locking the miniature into her grip.
“I loved him,” she whispered. “I loved Ned Clarencieux.” A tear slid down her nose and dropped, desolately, onto the green silk bedcovers. Maggie looked up and the expression in her eyes made Catherine’s heart turn over with pity.
“You have to take it back for me,” she whispered. “Your father must never know, for all our sakes. You have to take it back to Ben Hawksmoor but he cannot know where you got it. You must keep my secret, Catherine.”
“YOU LET HER GO?” Sam Hawksmoor said blankly. “You met the most beautiful girl in England and you let her go?”
“She wasn’t beautiful,” Ben said. “She was pretty.” He stopped. He was beginning to wish he had not mentioned
the encounter with Catherine to his cousin at all. He was hardly the type to confide and unless he spilled his soul in a way he had never done before, he could not begin to explain why he had been so drawn to the girl he had met at Clarencieux’s hanging. He could still remember the way that she had trembled in his arms. He could still feel it. He was accustomed to passion, to desire, but what he had felt for Catherine in that moment had been an entirely different experience and one that had shaken him to the core.
Ben shook his head slightly to dispel the memories. It would be best to let Sam think this was just a casual lust. Best to persuade himself that it was. That moment of affinity between himself and Catherine had been born of nothing more than the anger and guilt he felt over Clarencieux’s death. It had meant nothing.
He threw himself down into one of the battered wing chairs in the inn parlor. The whores had been sent packing, Sam’s other ramshackle friends had gone to find more congenial company in the clubs, which left Ben and his cousin alone, a fact for which he was profoundly grateful. He did not feel like carousing on this of all nights.
“Pretty, beautiful…” Sam shrugged. “You still let her go. You could have offered her carte blanche, snapped her up from under Withers’s nose!”
Ben loosened his neck cloth. “I did try. She turned me down.”
Sam’s mouth hung open. “You must be losing your touch. Or you weren’t trying hard enough.”
Ben laughed. “Sometimes, Sam,” he said, draining his glass of brandy, “I think you believe all the things they write about my reputation. This has nothing to do with love and everything to do with—”
“Money,” Sam said succinctly.
“Precisely.” Ben swung the empty brandy glass gently from his fingers. “Withers has plenty of it. I have none. A courtesan has to calculate such things.”
Sam screwed his face up with disapproval. “It sounds very mercenary.”
“Life is. Had you not noticed?”
Sam shook his head like a horse troubled by a persistent fly. “I do not have so cynical a view as you do, Ben. Sometimes I think I’d just like to settle down with a nice young lady.”
Ben sighed. “I hate to prove my cynicism,” he drawled, “but no nice young lady would have you, Sam. You have no fortune.”
“I know,” Sam said. “But I would like to meet someone to whom that did not matter. Someone I could love.”
Ben’s lips twisted into a parody of a smile. “Get a dog. They are cheaper than a wife and generally more affectionate.”
Sam’s good-natured face was disapproving now. “It has always puzzled me why you do not marry for money since you are so concerned about it,” he said. “I know no one would marry me, but they would have you.”
It was true. While Ben knew that none of the Ton chaperones would countenance him as a husband for one of their charges, there were other women—widows, rich merchants’ daughters—who would have been only too happy to present him with their fortunes in return for marriage. Notoriety was an advantage and gave him plenty of offers.
“I have thought about it,” he admitted, “but I have never met even one woman who does not want something in return, Sam.” Cynicism deepened the lines about his mouth. “They would all demand a piece of me in return for their money and that…” He shook his head. “That I cannot grant. I am too selfish a soul.”
“You do not like women,” Sam said. “I have often observed it.”
The brandy glass stilled between Ben’s fingers. “You mistake,” he said, putting it down carefully. “I do like women. I admire some of them very much. I simply do not love them.”
“You must love someone,” Sam argued.
“I do.” Ben reached for the brandy bottle. “Me.”
Sam ran his hand through his disheveled fair hair. “No, I mean someone else. Someone you want to care for and protect?”
Ben grinned. “Definitely me.”
Sam’s lips twitched but he did not allow himself to be distracted.
“There must be someone who matters to you.” He brightened. “I know—what about Lady Paris?”
Ben laughed. Paris de Moine, his reputed mistress, was a courtesan with the face of an angel and a heart of flint. Falling in love, Ben thought, was almost the worst, most foolish and self-destructive thing that he could ever do and he had never been close to loving Paris.
“Paris does not need my protection,” he said. “She can look after herself better than anyone I know.”
“Well, at the very least, you must have loved your mother.”
Sam was blundering on like a dray horse out of harness and Ben suddenly felt cold. His expression hardened. He never, ever talked about his mother.
“Let us not speak of that,” he said.
“But—”
“Sam, I said no.” He saw his cousin’s look of confusion and rubbed an impatient hand across his brow, trying to find the tolerance and the words. “You cannot make me be like you, Sam,” he said, a little roughly, “so pray do not try. I know it grieves you that I am mercenary and cynical and shallow but that is simply the way I am.”
Sam’s face was flushed. “You went down into the crowd to save that girl,” he said stubbornly, “so do not pretend you did not care.”
There was a silence. Ben knew that what his cousin had said was true. In that moment, he had cared desperately what happened to the pretty girl in her yellow dress. It was inexplicable. It was unwelcome. And now—happily—it was an aberration that was in the past.
Ben had no time for love, or innocence, or any other quality commonly accounted a virtue. They were not commodities that he valued. He had no use for them. Love led others to take advantage; it saw you fleeced, cheated, discarded…. Once, when he had been a boy, Ben had believed in the goodness of others. But that had been a long time ago. The same boyhood had later seen him stealing clothes from washing lines so that his mother could sell them in the streets to earn enough for them to eat. It had seen him pick pockets, beg and lie to survive. His father had disowned both him and his mother years before, claiming the marriage illegal, calling him a bastard, condemning them both to a life of poverty and degradation. By the time Ben’s Hawksmoor uncles had come looking for him to send him to school, Ben’s soul was old.
“Acquit me of any chivalrous motives,” he said lightly. “I saw her and thought her pretty. And when I knew she was Withers’s mistress, I had a fancy to take her away from him. You know I detest the man.”
“I see,” Sam said. “Worthy motives, all.”
Ben laughed. “Worthy of me, certainly.”
The thought of seducing Catherine away from Algernon Withers appealed greatly to him. Normally he never wasted his energies dangling after a woman he could not have. Life was too short—and too expensive—to waste time. But Catherine…There he could make an exception. It would be worth it, even for just one night of bliss.
Sam was looking pensive. “Don’t think much of her taste if she’s with Withers,” he said. “The man’s a loose fish. No one in the Ton gives him countenance. He’s…” Sam shuddered. “Deeply unsavory.”
“True,” Ben said, “but a harlot must make her bed where it benefits her the most.” His gaze dwelt thoughtfully on the two empty brandy bottles at Sam’s elbow. “And you are scarce as pure as a dewdrop to criticize others, are you, Samuel?”
Sam’s good-natured face blushed red. “Unlike Algy Withers, I am not insensible with laudanum every night by nine of the clock.”
“No,” Ben agreed. “Only with drink.”
“Helps pass the time,” Sam mumbled. He rallied slightly. “If it comes to that, I am not the black sheep of our family, cuz.”
Ben laughed. He could never argue with Sam. His cousin was far too easygoing. And he did not really want to lose Sam’s regard, anyway. He was the only member of the Hawksmoor family with whom Ben was on speaking terms. In one of his weaker moments Ben might even admit to a slight affection for his cousin. And on a more practical note, to lose him w
ould reduce his family connections from one to none.
“Perhaps, then, I should visit Withers’s mistress after nine,” he said. “She will have time to spare once her lover is unconscious with laudanum.”
“What is her name?” Sam asked.
Ben frowned. “Catherine.”
“Catherine what?”
“I do not know. We did not get that far.”
His cousin grinned. “Well, I don’t suppose it is necessary to get even that far with a whore—” He took a look at Ben’s face and added with spurious innocence, “Why do I have the impression that you wish to hit me, Benjamin?”
Ben drove his hands into his pockets. He felt shaken. He could not deny that he had felt a powerful rush of fury to hear Sam refer to Catherine so disparagingly. And yet why should it concern him? He knew she was a courtesan. He had said as much himself. He simply did not like the thought of people calling her a whore.
He moved his shoulders uncomfortably beneath the fine linen of his shirt. He was not himself tonight. Evidently Clarencieux’s death had unmanned him. He was turning soft, sentimental. Soon he would be penning sonnets.
“No wonder you weren’t interested in Flora and Jane if you were lusting after Withers’s mistress,” Sam was saying. “You hurt their feelings. And you bored them. That’s unforgivable in a gentleman. They were expecting you to be so much more exciting.”
Ben had almost forgotten the harlots that Sam had procured earlier in the day. Now the thought of them raised no more than a flicker of irritation in him. His cousin should have known that he would not be interested. He had never been interested in cheap strumpets.
“I am no gentleman,” he said, “so they will have to acquit me.”
Sam grinned. “True, you are not. But you need not worry. They will not wish to admit that they failed to interest you, so they will tell everyone that you are a marvelous lover anyway.”
Ben pulled a face. “I know,” he said. The demireps had far more to lose than he had. They would want to boast of an afternoon in his bed rather than confess to the embarrassing truth that he was more interested in the contents of the brandy bottle than in their amatory skills.
Lord of Scandal Page 4
