“You owe me three pins.”
He removed his cravat pin and handed it across the table. “Two. For now.”
As their play continued, he unknotted the green neckcloth slowly, tracking her eyes following his hands. When he unwound the silk from his neck and untied his collar, she swallowed hard and turned her head. The emerald stickpin dropped into her lap when he caught and held her eyes. She took up the two hairpins left on the table to secure her limp locks firmly back to her head. The frown on her pretty mouth put an end to any thought he had of distracting her with kisses, and a beleaguered sigh forced its way past his lips.
“Were it not for the benevolence of his Majesty,” she said waspishly, “we would all be much happier adjourning to the countryside, not inviting scandal and notoriety in London.”
“You would be happier,” he commented, rolling the dice, turning up double threes, which allowed him to bring all of his exiled pips into her home board without risking them further. His lip turned up in amusement, and he tapped his foot against hers. “The rest of us don’t mind London.”
She huffed out her indignation and, in her usual fashion, avoided giving him an inch by dropping her dice cup and turning the topic. “I’m not at all certain involving the king is a sound decision.” The clock chimed half-past nine. It had been months since they had retired to their bedchamber so late.
Nick unbuttoned his green wool waistcoat and the four buttons holding his white linen shirt closed, then went to work on the emerald studs at his cuffs.
“It was impulsive, I admit, but insulting to rescind. One does not insult sovereigns, I expect you recall.”
They were silent for a time, only the sounds of dice tossed across felt, ivory tiles clacking, the tapping of his fingertips on the Queen Anne card table, the scrape of hairpins passed back and forth between them, and the snap of the fire as it consumed a cherry wood log.
As he began bringing tiles into his home board, signaling the beginning of the endgame, she turned her head away and poked her nose into the air. “His Majesty is no example of moral decency, and consider the poor child, the expectations it will place—”
Shrugging off his waistcoat and tugging his shirt from his waistband, he raised one eyebrow and said the same thing he had already repeated dozens of times, “The expectations that arise from having the King of England as godfather are the kind I wish my son to uphold. You may complain at your leisure, sweeting, but Sunday afternoon, the new Marquess of Abersham will be baptized David George Northope under the protection of the king.”
“I hope Davey spits up on him.”
“With a bit of luck,” Nick concurred, “Prinny will reek of soured milk all day.”
He shifted to the side in his chair so he could remove his boots, dropping them with a thump next to the table. His stockings were next, tucked into the boots. She eyed his large feet, so he wiggled his toes.
“Blakeley will be none too pleased to find your wardrobe strewn about the study.”
“Thanks to you, he has discovered my stockings in stranger places.”
The sweet pink of her blushes reminded him of the young girl he night have married instead of travelling, had they met. Knowing her as he now did, he imagined meeting her as a debutante and stealing her right out from under Myron Holsworthy, taking her away to sea, sharing their adventures in truth, not just conversation. He would have stopped her wasting so much of her life on mere affection. She would have stopped him wasting his on emotionless harlots.
When he slid his big toe up under her dress, following the same path as hers before he had annoyed her so thoroughly, her breath caught.
“I believe I would like to change the stakes,” he said, deliberately lowering his voice, allowing it to take on a husky rasp.
She stopped his foot with one hand, but permitted him to set it on the edge of her chair, letting her fingertips drift along his ankle through her skirts. “You only wish to change the stakes because you are winning.”
“Why else?” He offered, “If I win, I will hear no more argument about London or the king until we reach Wellstone. Once there, you may be as shrewish as you like.”
She snorted, “Once there, you have hundreds of thousands of hiding places you have known since you were a boy.”
“True. But you will have my sister’s help to ferret me out, and I’m certain she has a map.”
She nodded absently and tapped her finger on the tabletop. “What will you offer when you lose?”
“If I lose, I shall divest myself of the rest of my clothing, then remove yours, and worship at your feet until morning.”
“You will do that in any case,” she laughed, pinching his toe. “While a delightful prospect, hardly comparable to unquestioned deference in everything unpleasant for the next eight days. I shall accept your wager, and when I win, you will rescind your invitation to His Majesty, and we will leave for Bristol in the morning and Venezia as soon as our families can be graciously removed from the estate.”
“I cannot—will not—withdraw my request to the king, as you know, but we’ll leave for the West Country directly from Windsor Castle on Sunday and set sail in six weeks’ time. And you may complain about everything as much as you like, as long as you refrain in company or in front of the king.”
She pretended to consider, tapping her finger against her cheek. “I believe that will provide sufficient incentive.” She picked up the dice cup. “Shall we say best three of five games?”
“It is far too late in the evening for that, my lady.” He pulled his shirt over his head, leaving it to hang off the arm of his chair, watching her eyes grow glassy, as they always did when faced with his half-clothed form and the surety of his passionate attention. Now, Nick had seen the pretty pink blush all over her body, so when it appeared on her face, he imagined it underneath her clothes. He was feeling a bit more glassy than usual himself.
He loosed two buttons on the fall of his trousers, squinting at the game board, counting tiles, and opined, “I am winning, but haven’t won yet.”
She quirked a coy brow, licking her bottom lip. “So it seems.”
Rubbing one of his fingers between hers, burrowing chilly toes into his thigh, she tossed the dice.
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Acknowledgements
While writing is a solitary occupation, finished novels are a communal effort. In the case of Royal Regard, Liana Abarca-Smith and Barbara Lund acted as beta readers, providing comments on early drafts. Heather King was the last reader, who wielded the reddest of pens. Rhoda Miller provided confirmation of French language use. The Beau Monde chapter of the Romance Writers of America answered innumerable questions about the Regency era, and several Facebook groups of fellow Regency authors also provided both research and moral support. Tameca L. Coleman proofread the final manuscript, subject to my extensive style sheet, and David Cutler provided financial backing and support to the project. Fran Allison and Brena Adams put up with my distraction and tempers throughout, and celebrated the small successes.
About the Author
Mariana Gabrielle is the pseudonym of Mari Christie, a professional writer, editor, and designer in Denver, Colorado, with more than 20 years’ experience in business, technical, academic, and marketing writing. She has been published in dozens of nonfiction and poetry periodicals since 1989, and now writes mainstream historical fiction, Regency romance, and poetry.
Coming in 2015 from Mariana Gabrielle:
La Déesse Noire: The Black Goddess
Kali Matai, La Déesse Noire, London’s most famed Indian dancer and courtesan, holds tightly to
a lifetime of secrets. Her father a British peer, her mother one of India’s legendary tawaifs: dancers, singers, poets, and paramours who, throughout history, enthralled the subcontinent’s most powerful kings and noblemen. Under the iron control of malicious and influential men, securing Kali’s freedom, her family, and the man she loves, will require her protectors stop at nothing to fulfill her desires.
Continue on to the first chapter.
La Déesse Noire: The Black Goddess
Chapter One
London, England – 1805
The first time Kali met her father, he was screaming.
“I am shocked you would call me here!” the Earl of Thornfield shouted at the target of his ire, as Kali stood a few steps outside the door. “Bad enough to be summoned to a brothel, but one like this?!”
The Masala Rajah Gentleman’s Retreat, Kali’s home for the past two years, was known to a select, very wealthy, few as a bordello catering to the most exotic sex practices—floggings and canings and buggery, sapphists and dwarves and men who dressed like women, choking and piercing and pissing on clients who paid handsomely for the privilege. The madam, Kali’s mother’s oldest friend, barred only acts with children.
“A note!” he barked. “You sent a note?! What if it had been intercepted?!”
A different, larger, class of guests, of which the earl could loosely be considered one, also knew the Masala Rajah to be the training ground for the most accomplished Indian courtesans to be had outside Punjab; women so extraordinary, it was less expensive to take a wife than make a mistress of a Masala Rajah girl.
“You have no discretion!”
To the uninitiated—most of London—it appeared a traditional Indian kotha. Here, the aristocratic gentleman could find the same privacy and indulgence he found at White’s or Brooks’s, with the addition of beautiful women in revealing saris to serve his drinks, admire his wit, dance and sing for his entertainment, and decorate his immediate landscape.
“It is unthinkable I might be associated with your… your… depravity!” the earl bellowed.
In all fairness, such association was a disservice to Thornfield, since the earl never left the confines of the kotha. When he visited, infrequently, he rarely spoke, never encouraged flirtation, and always paid his bill in gold sovereigns. He had never partaken of the offerings in the back rooms, never suggested even an hour with a concubine. He only smoked his pipe and watched the dancers and drank coconut feni, a spirit he had learned to enjoy during his military years in India.
Today, however, his presence was rather more disruptive. Mayuri Falodiya, the owner and procuress, had been taking the brunt of the earl’s ire for the exactly twelve minutes she trained all of her girls to keep any man waiting. Mayuri’s scarred, leathery cheek was turned against his harangue, allowing his anger to wash over her without reacting at all, another skill she passed on to all of her pupils.
“You have no business calling me here! Anyone might have—” His railing stopped the moment Kali entered the room.
“My God!” he gasped, falling back three steps. “You look just like—”
“Rohana Shaheen,” Mayuri finished, putting paid to his tirade.
Thornfield’s head snapped back when he saw Kali, and his rattled composure flew back and forth between the two women as she curtsied deeply.
The Earl of Thornfield, or as Kali knew him, the Vikanta, looked nothing like her imaginings. Her mother had described hair like cinnamon, skin smooth as river clay, chest broad as a water buffalo, arms like a baobab tree, thighs strong as a bullock.
This man was tired and bent as a mangrove, hair white as a Brahmin’s shawl, face furrowed like an elephant’s hide, limbs spindly as a rattan palm. The only part that recalled Rohana’s musings were his eyes: the deepest blue of a peacock’s breast, fierce as a tiger stalking a gazelle.
Mayuri said nothing, just allowed the earl and his daughter come to their own conclusions, and Kali followed her instruction not to speak unless addressed directly. Kali chanced glances from the depth of her bow, seeking some sign this was the man her mother had loved to her last breath.
He motioned for her to rise, and Kali watched his hard eyes soften as he looked at her, his frowning mouth turning up into an even, narrowed line. He straightened his back, recalling another of her mother’s descriptions: the manner and bearing of a maharajah.
Kali had heard Rohana tell, ten thousand times, how his heart had ached to leave them, and when her cherished mother told her daughters stories of the love they had shared, Kali and Kamala held their tongues, thinking Rohana foolishly besotted with an Angreezi who had never cared for her. It was more likely, the girls agreed outside Rohana’s hearing, that he had been taken by the talents of an exceptional tawaif and would have said or done anything to convince her to lie with him as often as she would allow it.
It was not a story difficult to believe. For a tawaif was not a streetwalker who would futter for pennies, but rather, a skilled dancer, musician, poet, and practitioner of the erotic arts, trained from birth to meet a man’s every desire. Before she met Thornfield, Kali’s mother had been one of the most sought-after in Punjab, as her mother and grandmother had been before her, and her daughters would be after.
“You look just like… you’re like a vision… I never thought…”
Unlike most Englishmen of his ilk, the Vikanta had not treated Rohana like a disposable rag on which to wipe his spent cock, but rather, had forged a relationship if not based on love, at least mutual passion and esteem. Love was not an emotion granted a woman of her caste, nor embraced with a courtesan by a man of his. But while the Vikanta could have turned Rohana out when she became pregnant, he instead allowed her the child, then a second, honoring her request to keep some part of him once he was forced to return to England to inherit.
Their illicit romance had lasted almost five years, but eventually, The Vicious Viscount of Visnagar had ordered more than fifteen hundred people slaughtered, from elders to babes at the breast, reprisal for ten British soldiers killed with a katar blade in the dark of night. When the mobs came for the blood of the Vikanta Khotaa, Sutcliff Birchbright, the future Earl of Thornfield, boarded a brigantine to England—alone.
“I never thought I would see her face again. I can’t… It’s like she… It’s uncanny…”
If the Vikanta had remained in India, Rohana always said, she and her daughters would never have fallen so far, but Kali knew that was a lie. If he had stayed, he would have fallen along with them. Her mother had been shunned by tawaifs for her inexplicable love for the Vicious Viscount, shunned by the English like every person of dark skin. The papers the Vikanta had left to endure their protection had been worthless as his words of devotion. If not for the enormous sum of money he had given Rohana for the care of his children, they would easily have starved.
Twelve years after their parting, when Kali was fifteen, Kamala two years younger, Rohana’s broken heart had stopped beating, so her daughters had come to England to seek out their mother’s oldest friend. The stigma of being half-black daughters of a nameless tawaif in London infinitely preferable to being half-white daughters of the Vicious Viscount in Visnagar.
Once Thornfield accepted that the apparition in front of him was not Rohana, silence reigned until, after gulping several large breaths and closing his eyes against any memories that might be filling them, he said, “So, this is…” His eyes opened but looked past her. “Which one are you?”
Kali’s voice was nearly imperceptible, shaking and unusually squeaky. “Kali, my lord. Kali Shaheen.”
His face softened momentarily. “And your mother? Is your mother…”
Mayuri answered, “Rohana died three years ago. To be clear, my lord, should you choose to leave, there will be no mention of this to anyone. You need not involve yourself. It is only I believed you should know.”
They all knew there was no limit to the punishment Thornfield could rain down on an Indian abbess trying for blackmail or
coercion. At best, the closing of the Masala Rajah, and at worst, execution or transportation to a penal colony. Kali had been trained from childhood to never speak her father’s name, only to call him the Vikanta, a misnomer since just after he had returned to England, when he traded a courtesy viscount’s title for his father’s earldom.
Thornfield’s eyes became suspiciously bright, and he turned away, eventually speaking to fill the silence, “I thank you for the consideration, Mayuri. I have often wondered what…” He trailed off before turning to his daughter. “I cared about your mother a great deal, Kali… I… I wish you to know that. She was… well, she was important to me.” He straightened his spine and asked, “Your sister?” He choked, “Is Kamala…?”
“Kali and Kamala are under my protection, my lord. Kamala is attending her lessons presently, as I hoped not to overwhelm Your Lordship. I can call her in, should you choose.”
“In a moment. I wish to better understand the situation first, if you please.”
Mayuri’s hands twisted in her lap, the first time Kali had ever seen her the least bit nervous, but she could not possibly be as anxious as Kali. Only years of training in grace, poise, and self-possession kept her from wrinkling her skirt in her fists. Her mother had taught her when she was six, about to play the three-stringed sarangi for a woman who might take her on as a student: grasshoppers in the belly need only make you tremble on the inside. She remained perfectly motionless as she waited for Mayuri to speak.
“The girls have been in London almost two years, my lord, finishing their education with me, but it is time for Kali to… to make her own way. Kamala is just fifteen, so will not be ready to take her place among the tawaif for some time.”
Royal Regard Page 40
