The Bride Wore Scarlet

by Liz Carlyle

  “Aye, because if she knows no one, then she has no one to whom she can turn for help,” Geoff added. “So we must manage to look as useless and benign as possible.”

  “Perhaps we should be poor?” Anaïs remarked.

  “Aye, let’s suggest to Madame Moreau that we live on a strict allowance from my father,” he proposed. “That he pays all our bills, and watches our every sou.”

  Anaïs snorted. “Suggest it when?” she muttered. “She isn’t even permitted to come across the street for tea.”

  “No, but she goes to the park every day at one.” Geoff snatched his coat from the back of the chair, and threw it on. “And there she meets with Lezennes.”

  “And so?”

  “So get your cloak,” he ordered. “I’ll fetch my easel. Perhaps it’s time we met Lezennes, and showed him what harmless flibbertigibbets we are.”

  Located in the London heart of Her Majesty’s Government, Four Whitehall Place was an unassuming house that backed onto a far more infamous courtyard, a yard that legend held had once belonged to the ancient Kings of Scotland. And while a lady might—on very rare occasions—venture through the portals of Number Four, she would on no account be seen round back, for Scotland Yard had fast become the most notorious of London’s police stations, and a common point of ingress and egress for much of what constituted Westminster’s relentlessly revolving rabble.

  And so it was that on a lovely spring afternoon, the Earl of Lazonby escorted Lady Anisha Stafford up the steps to the slightly more proper administrative entrance, held open the door, and bowed.

  Lady Anisha swept past him, nose held faintly in the air, still not entirely pleased with the bargain she’d struck. Just inside the door, there was a sort of porter’s post, but it was vacant. She looked about, uncertain what to do.

  “Come on,” said Lazonby a little gruffly. “We’ll just go up.”

  Lady Anisha set a hand to her chest. “What, unannounced?”

  “It’s Number Four, not Buckingham Palace,” he grumbled, steering her toward the stairs. “Besides, you promised.”

  “And you promised to go with me to the theatre,” she countered.

  “Which I—”

  “—did, yes,” she interjected, “only to snore your way through Donizetti’s last aria.”

  “That song dragged, Nish, like a crooked plow behind a lame horse,” he said. “You’re lucky it ended before I expired of boredom and rigor mortis set in. How would you have got my stiffened corpse back down those narrow stairs?”

  “It was ‘Una Furtiva Lagrima’!” she cried. “It was heart-wrenching! And quite possibly the world’s greatest tenor aria.”

  “I confess, I’m a Philistine,” Lazonby grumbled. “Sorry if I spoiled your evening with your future in-laws. But it was your choice, Nish, to take me. You know what I am.”

  Lady Anisha continue to sputter and complain as Lazonby hauled her up the steps, but in a low undertone, informing him in no uncertain language that the place was a little dingy, and smelled of boiled vegetables and stale sweat. Lazonby responded by explaining—in his usual blunt fashion—that the sort of people who came to Number Four generally had good cause to sweat.

  At the top of the second flight of stairs, they turned into a long, narrow chamber divided by a low, gated bar such as one might see in a magistrate’s court—not that Lady Anisha had ever laid eyes on one of those, either, but she had seen Mr. Cruickshank’s courtroom caricatures in the print shops round town, which was almost the same thing.

  Behind the little wall sat a pair of matched clerks—or at least she supposed that they were matched, for much like a brace of footmen, the black-coated fellows were of similar height and weight—which was to say very long and thin—and perched upon stools at either side of a tall desk, which made them look rather like a set of black andirons, forever welded as one.

  On Lady Anisha’s side of the wall, there were a few chairs—very straight-backed chairs, with no upholstery, not even so much as a pillow.

  “They don’t want you to get comfortable here, Nish,” said Lord Lazonby when she remarked upon the discomfort. “This is a place of suffering and inconvenience.”

  “Well, I seem to be suffering a vast deal of inconvenience on your behalf.” Lady Anisha waved an elegant hand to forestall the frightful mélange of ink, coal smoke, and cooked turnips wafting up from the bowels of somewhere. “How long must we sit here?”

  Lazonby gestured at a rather grand slab of a door at the far end of the room. “Until that door opens, and I manage to wedge my foot in it.”

  Being far more obliging than Lord Lazonby, the door chose that moment to swing wide. Two men came out, one portly and pretentious-looking, with a thick gold watch chain stretched taut across his belly, and a score of long black hairs wrapped resolutely round his bald head, then pomaded into a sort of greasy tonsure.

  Towering over him, the second man was far more interesting. The assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was a svelte, broad-shouldered fellow with a nose that resembled a meat cleaver and a thick head of dark hair trimmed to precision. His cheeks were lean and scraped unfashionably clean of whiskers, and with his hard, dark eyes, he put Lady Anisha very much in mind of a bird of prey.

  She recognized him at once and came to her feet, sweeping past Lazonby. “Assistant Commissioner Napier,” she said brightly, offering a bejeweled hand. “How lovely to see you again. Might we have a moment?”

  The portly man having vanished, Royden Napier’s gaze was now shifting suspiciously back and forth between his new callers. “Lady Anisha, a pleasure,” he said stiffly. “And by we, you would mean . . . ?”

  “Lord Lazonby and me,” she said, smiling.

  Napier wanted to refuse; that could not have been more apparent.

  But much to his discomfort, Napier was now indebted to Lady Anisha’s brother, if only a little. And he was curious—very curious—about her.

  Despite her protestations to Lord Lazonby, Lady Anisha had not failed to notice Napier at her brother’s wedding. Both before and after their fleeting introduction, the assistant commissioner had watched her almost incessantly from one corner of his eye. And when at last he’d approached her, he had been stiffly formal. But those eyes! Oh, they had never let up.

  Perhaps she reminded him of someone from the criminal underworld. Or perhaps, like much of society, he was merely suspicious of her honey-colored skin and dark hair.

  Whatever it was—as Lazonby had predicted—it was enough to preclude him from telling them both to go to hell. Instead, he invited them into his office—which, to those unlucky few forced to come here, might have been the very same as hell for all Lady Anisha knew.

  Certainly Royden Napier looked like the sort of man who might have been on speaking terms with the devil.

  “Well,” he said tightly when they were seated before his massive oak desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “We want you to reopen a case,” said Lord Lazonby, forgoing any niceties. “The murder of Lord Percy Peveril.”

  “But we have already had a conviction in that case,” said Napier, looking pointedly at Lazonby. “You.”

  Lazonby jerked to his feet. “And it was overturned,” he said, planting a hand in the middle of the assistant commissioner’s desk. “But I shall never be free of it, Napier, until Peveril’s real killer is found and convicted. You know that.”

  “I trust you’ll pardon me, my lord, when I say that I find deathbed recantations a trifle suspect,” said Napier coldly. “Especially when the grieving widow seems to come into a rather vast sum of money afterward.”

  “I was in jail when that happened, you fool,” Lazonby growled into his face.

  “Indeed, you were,” said Napier, “though it took me many long years to get you out of North Africa and back behind bars. But your father, the previous earl, was not in jail. He was free to—”

  “Do not you dare drag my father’s good name into this, Napier.” Lazonby’s
face had gone dangerously colorless, his hands fisted around the chair arms. “He did nothing to deserve having this vile business brought down upon his head.”

  “Nothing save having a hot-tempered, cardsharping wastrel for a son,” Napier countered. “Lie down with dogs, Lazonby, get up with fleas.”

  “You damned fool,” said Lazonby hotly. “I was set up to take the blame for someone else. Am I the only one who wants to know why? Does the Crown not care that a killer walks free?”

  “As I recall, your case was pretty cut and dried.”

  “Yes, and your late father was the very chap who cut it and dried it, Napier, and he did it with about as much forethought as another man might mow down a hayfield—with no regard for what might have been concealed within the grass. Instead, he just hacked it all to bits.”

  “Your point, my lord?” asked Napier. Both men were standing now, Lady Anisha observed—and leaning over the desk, almost nose to nose.

  “Have you even had a look in those files of his?” Lazonby demanded. “Have you? Or did you just take his word as gospel when you inherited this desk?”

  It was at this point that Lady Anisha rose, too, clearing her throat sharply. “Gentlemen, there is a lady present,” she said quietly.

  Both men drew back a few inches, and Napier’s face, at least, colored with embarrassment. “I beg your pardon,” he said.

  Lady Anisha turned a sweet gaze on Lazonby. “Rance?”

  “My apologies,” he said tightly, “but you knew what this was apt to come to.”

  “What, fisticuffs?” she asked sarcastically. “Rance, kindly leave us.”

  He turned on her, eyes wide. “Do what?”

  “Get out,” she said. “Go back downstairs. You are overwrought. I wish to speak to Mr. Napier alone. You may come back up when I am done if it pleases you.”

  Lazonby half turned, then cut her a nasty glance.

  Lady Anisha drew herself up to her full height—which was all of about five feet. “Go,” she said sharply. “I mean it. You have pushed your luck with me, Rance, for the last time.”

  Surprisingly, he went, slamming the door behind.

  Napier had paced across the room, his back now half turned to her, one hand set at the nape of his neck as he stared blindly out the window at Whitehall Place below. She waited for him to speak. She could feel the strong emotion surging through the room. She only wished she knew what it was.

  “Well, is this how it begins, Lady Anisha?” Napier finally asked, his voice pitched low, and obviously angry.

  “I beg your pardon?” She crossed the room toward him. “Is this how what begins?”

  He turned from the window, his expression one of disgust. “Do you now threaten me with your brother’s wrath?” he asked. “Or drop Her Majesty’s name by way of warning?”

  “Oh, my,” said Lady Anisha softly. “Lofty circles indeed.”

  His lip curled like a snarling dog’s. “Oh, I know all about Ruthveyn’s ‘special relationship’ with the Queen,” he said. “I know a good deal more than that, actually, about Lazonby and Bessett and their little coven in St. James—though I cannot quite prove all of it yet.”

  “I really have no idea what you are talking about,” she said. “I hardly need my brother to do my dirty work, if that’s what you think. I’m perfectly capable of it. As to Ruthveyn’s relationship with the Queen, any loyalty he earned there, he earned the hard way—with his toil and his sweat and yes, even his blood, all given because he loves his country. And if our sainted Queen is grateful for that, then I say she bloody well ought to be.”

  If her unladylike curse shocked him, Napier gave no sign of it. Instead, he stood for a time by the window, backlit by the midday sun like one of Michelangelo’s more wrathful angels descending from heaven. One hand was set stubbornly at his narrow waist, pushing back the front of his dark coat. Beneath, his waistcoat had shifted to reveal what looked like the butt end of a knife cleverly tucked inside the waist of his trousers.

  An avenging angel, perhaps.

  “Well, what do you want, then, Lady Anisha?” he asked coldly.

  She lifted one shoulder with studied casualness. “I want to know,” she said quietly, “why it is that you never stop looking at me when we’re in the same room together.”

  Chapter 11

  Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.

  Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  By half-past noon, Anaïs was propped against a tree in the Parc de Brussels with Mr. Reynolds’s latest penny dreadful open on her lap. Perched upon a folding stool, Geoff sat at his sketch pad a few feet away, his broad back half turned to her, his bronze hair shifting lightly in the breeze.

  Already a fine drawing of the Royal Palace was appearing beneath his hand, the strokes bold and black and unerring. It was a view of the structure as glimpsed through the massive park gates, and Anaïs found herself fascinated by the swiftness of his movements. To look at the sketch, one might imagine he’d been at work for hours rather than a mere fifteen minutes.

  “You really do have a knack for that,” she murmured.

  He turned and smiled—truly smiled—and Anaïs felt her breath catch dangerously.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve always had a passion for beautiful buildings. It was, so far as I could see, the only saving grace of a childhood spent abroad.”

  “Can you draw people?”

  His smile fading, Geoff turned back and removed his sketchbook from the easel. After flipping the page, he laid it across his lap, his long hair falling forward to shadow his face as he bent over it.

  Dashing his hand back and forth across the paper for a few minutes, he flicked the occasional sidelong glance in her direction. Eventually, he straightened and held it a little away as if to study it.

  Apparently satisfied, he ripped the paper free and handed it to her.

  Anaïs took the sketch, and almost gasped.

  It was the simplest of drawings, really. Just a few swift lines and a dash or two of shadow, but he had drawn her with incredible realism.

  Anaïs let her gaze take in every detail. She still possessed her father’s strong nose, but on the drawing it looked somehow right, and perfectly proportioned to her face. And although he had sketched her seated against a tree, one knee drawn up—just as she was—in the drawing Anaïs’s hair was shown spilling round her shoulders, nearly to her waist.

  But it was her eyes that were most arresting. They were large, but not overly so, and it felt as if they stared squarely, almost boldly, at the viewer. And yet they gave up nothing, appearing instead as almost enigmatic pools of ebony.

  It was, on the whole, perfectly breathtaking.

  “Geoff, it’s lovely,” she managed, still holding it. “But I fear you overly flatter me.”

  “Oh?” She could feel his curiosity burning into her. “In what way?”

  She lifted her gaze to his, but saw no hint of equivocation there. “I’m not sure that’s quite how I look.”

  He tilted his head and studied her. “That’s how you look to me.”

  There was an earnestness in his face Anaïs had not expected—and a sort of gentleness, too, though he was the sort of man with whom one would not ordinarily associate such a word. And to her extreme discomfort she felt, quite suddenly and inexplicably, as if she might burst into tears. As if the thing she had waited the whole of her life for was somehow wrong; as if she were not quite the person she’d always believed herself to be. Certainly she was not this beautiful, mysterious woman.

  Abruptly, she thrust it back at him.

  “You don’t want it?”

  “No.” The word came out far too husky. “I mean—yes, I do want it. Very much. I just want you to sign it for me. And date it.”

  With a muted smile, he did so, scratching a bold, angular signature in the lower right corner, and the date beneath.

  “There,” he said, handing it back. “I daresay that’s the first portrait I’ve sketched in a decade or
better.”

  “Then I’m honored. Thank you.”

  But he had signed it Geoffrey MacLachlan—a precaution, she supposed, to preserve their ruse.

  Just then, something caught her gaze. Anaïs laid the drawing aside. This strange and pleasant interlude was officially at an end.

  “I suppose we’d best get our flibbertigibbet faces fixed,” she went on, “for I see Madame Moreau turning in from the Place des Palais.”

  Geoff stiffened, but did not turn back around to look. “With whom?”

  “A gentleman and a little girl.”

  Geoff nodded, and returned to his drawing. Anaïs stood as if to dust off her skirts, then looked up and brightened her expression.

  “Madame Moreau!” she called out. “Oh, my! What good fortune!”

  Charlotte Moreau smiled, but her eyes shied uneasily toward the thin, elegant man whose arm she held. “Good morning, Mrs. MacLachlan,” she said when Anaïs hastened toward them. “How do you do?”

  “Oh, ants!” said Anaïs, stepping onto the path. “I think I sat on a nest! Can you imagine anyone so witless? I seem to be imagining them all over me now, and it’s utterly distracting.” She twitched a bit for good measure.

  Madame Moreau’s smile thinned. “Mrs. MacLachlan, may I present my—er, my uncle, the Vicomte de Lezennes? And this is Giselle, my daughter.”

  When the full introductions had been made, Anaïs curtsied with almost comical depth to Lezennes. He was a slender, elegant man of middle age, with close-cropped hair nearly as dark as her own; a fine, thin nose, and a sharp beard that looked decidedly satanic. The child was a coltish thing who said nothing, and refused Anaïs’s gaze—understandably, perhaps.

  “Oh, Your Lordship, it is such an honor,” Anaïs gushed. “A French nobleman—right here in Brussels. And a diplomat, too!”

  Lezennes flashed an almost patronizing smile. “My dear lady, Brussels is awash in French noblemen, I do assure you,” he said in flawless English. “And diplomats. What brings you here?”

  Anaïs widened her eyes. “Oh, we are on our wedding trip,” she said, tumbling over her words. “Pardon my manners. Geoffrey! Oh, Geoff, do come here. You will remember Madame Moreau, I think?”