“We are still young,” said Freddie.
Messieurs Conrad and Wessex played a game of vingt-et-un; Kingsley sat on his luggage, reading a copy of The Illustrated London News; Vere and Freddie strolled slowly along the drive.
“I’m almost thirty. And I’m not having any successes.”
It was easy to fail when one proposed exclusively to the most sought-after debutantes of the Season, especially easy when the proposals were accompanied by copious spills of punch upon said debutantes’ bodices. Vere felt strongly that he should be perceived as a man eager to settle down: the effort lent his role greater authenticity—the poor, sweet idiot too dumb to see that he ought to set his sights lower.
“Let a girl know you better before you propose to her,” said Freddie. “I don’t see how any woman can fail to love you, if you would but give her a little time.”
Thirteen years, and Freddie still spoke to Vere as if nothing had changed, and Vere had remained the same brother who had protected Freddie from their father. Vere had expected the usual stab of guilt; what he had not expected was that he had to turn his face away to hide the tears that were suddenly in his eyes. He’d best take a long sabbatical after the Douglas case—this life was taking its toll on him.
But Freddie’s answer did give Vere the opening he’d sought. “Do you think I should propose to Mrs. Canaletto then? She’s known me all her life.”
“No!” Freddie cried, then immediately flushed. “I mean, of course she does love you, but only as a brother.”
“Dash it. What about you? Do you think she also only loves you as a brother?”
“I…ah…um…”
The talent for lies and pretenses that Vere possessed in such abundance had bypassed Freddie altogether. He was no good at prevarications of any sort.
“I don’t know for certain,” Freddie finally said.
“Why don’t you ask her and find out?” Vere said blithely. “I know; we can both ask her at the same time. How could I be sure, otherwise, that she hasn’t harbored some great, big, secret tendresse for me all these years?”
Kingsley, bored with his newspaper, came up to ask Vere for a cigarette, and Freddie was spared from having to reply to Vere’s question.
But Vere already had answers enough.
* * *
The amiability of her guests overwhelmed Elissande. They were so happy to meet her, so grateful that she had opened her home to them, and so delighted to be put up, on such short notice, in the style and comfort to which they were accustomed.
L’affaire des rats had indeed been traumatic, to a one they confirmed to Elissande. But they were younger and of shorter memory than Lady Kingsley. Already they thought it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Miss Kingsley made fun of herself, of how she’d screamed so unstoppably that if Lord Vere hadn’t told her later, she never would have known that he’d had to slap her to interrupt her hysteria. Miss Beauchamp likewise recounted how she had half fainted by the time Lord Vere had come to her rescue and had to be carried out in his arms, clutching at his lapel all the while.
Their gleeful laughter astounded Elissande. They did not seem quite real to her, these rosy, robust young women, so entirely free of dread and fear, as if the thought had never crossed their minds that enjoyment carried consequences and should therefore remain as hidden as misery.
She hardly knew what to do in their cheerful company. So she fell back on the familiar and smiled. They, on the other hand, made a to-do over her. Her teeth, exposed by her smiles, were admired. The pallor of her skin, unsullied by the cumulative effects of riding, boating, and lawn tennis playing, quite envied. As was her tea gown, which Miss Kingsley declared she’d seen on a dummy in Madame Elise’s shop on Regent Street, but which her mother had refused to buy for her. Elissande wondered how long Miss Kingsley’s interest in fashion would persist if she had to wear the latest styles to daily tea and dinner with Elissande’s uncle.
“It’s a shame you couldn’t have been in London this past Season,” said Miss Beauchamp. “Oh, all the jubilee fêtes.”
“Too many,” said Miss Duvall. “My feet were worn out dancing.”
“And I must have gained a stone,” said Miss Melbourne, who was as slender as a sapling.
“Miss Edgerton, don’t listen to Miss Melbourne,” said Miss Kingsley. “Every time she takes a sip of water, she vows buttons pop off her bodice.”
“My goodness,” said Elissande. “Gentlemen must form long queues to fetch Miss Melbourne her beverages then.”
The young ladies regarded Elissande in astonishment, then burst out laughing, Miss Melbourne most of all, doubled over with the force of her mirth.
Elissande almost joined them. She didn’t, in the end, because laughing herself was even more alien than hearing others do so.
Miss Beauchamp suddenly held up her hands. “Shhh. I think the gentlemen are here.”
With that, all the young ladies rushed to the windows, Miss Kingsley pulling Elissande along.
The open barouche had not yet reached the house, but already Elissande’s eyes were drawn to one passenger in particular—an outrageously good-looking man, with features of perfect strength, masculinity, and symmetry. His head was tilted back slightly, to better take in the house. And then he turned to the gentleman next to him and smiled with evident affection.
For a moment, she forgot the impossible task that lay ahead of her. A bright pleasure such as she’d never known lit within her, a pleasure that derived from something as inconsequential as the way the afternoon sun fell across the brim of his hat, or the way his hands rested atop the walking stick balanced insouciantly between his knees.
“Come away now,” said Miss Kingsley, again pulling at Elissande’s sleeve. “We don’t want them to see us just standing here like a gaggle of silly schoolgirls.”
Elissande allowed Miss Kingsley to guide her to a seat. She had no doubt of his identity—the handsomest one of them all. Her heart raced with a burst of nerve-wracking happiness. He rescued young women from plagues of rats; he had lovely friends; he looked like a hero of classical antiquity. And he was a marquess, an important man who could shield her aunt and herself.
She felt it. The shift in the tide, the reversal of fortune, the inexplicable thrust of destiny gathering momentum.
This was it. He was it. Her three days began this minute.
* * *
The carriage drew up before a three-story stone edifice built in the Gothic Revival style that had been still popular two decades ago. Ivy spread luxuriantly over the front of the house, lending it a greater air of authenticity and age. The windows were true lancets, rather than mere rectangular windows with a façade of pointed arches above. There were even grouted gargoyles to lead water off the steeply pitched roof.
The manor was more than respectable: It was grand. Yet despite its fine, geometric garden, there was something barren in its aspects.
An older country estate, such as the one Vere grew up in, was a hotbed of horticulture and animal husbandry. There was a walled garden that supplied fruits and vegetables for seventy people, a vinery that contributed hundreds of pounds of grapes, and half a dozen specialized hothouses that produced, among other luxuries, strawberries at Christmas and pineapples in January. And while the game park provided pleasure shooting, the duck pond, the henhouse, and the dovecote were entirely utilitarian.
Whereas Highgate Court was but a house and a severely manicured garden in the middle of nowhere. Truly nowhere: Shropshire was a rural and sparsely populated region and Highgate Court occupied one of the emptiest stretches within it.
He had a glimpse of the young ladies crowded around one large window before they quickly dispersed, like birds taking flight.
“I need to get myself a diamond mine,” said Wessex, who was always short on funds, in exasperated admiration as they walked into the manor.
“Diamonds are mined?” exclaimed Vere. “I thought they grew in oysters.”
“You are thinking of
pearls, Penny,” said Freddie, patient as always.
“I was?” Vere scratched his head. “Anyway, nice place.”
“Everything is Louis the Fourteenth,” said Kingsley of the furniture in the spacious and elegant entry hall. And Kingsley knew about such things.
The walls and fixtures of the interior had yet to acquire the patina—indeed, the sensation—of age. But beyond that, one could not fault the sensitive taste of the master of the house, who had succumbed to none of the blatant displays of wealth and glitter Vere had expected of a man of such recent fortunes.
He quickly recalled the scant known facts of Edmund Douglas’s life. His father had been either a publican or a dockworker in Liverpool. He’d had two or three sisters, the birth of the last of whom had killed his mother. He had run away from home when he was fourteen, very fortunate timing, for influenza killed everyone else in the household soon thereafter. Eventually he had made his way to South Africa, established a reputation as a brawler, and profited handsomely from the discovery of diamonds.
Nothing Vere knew of Douglas suggested subtlety or restraint. In Kimberley, South Africa, people still remembered the wild, almost orgiastic festivities he’d mounted after becoming a very rich man overnight. Of course—Vere realized for the first time—nothing he knew of Douglas suggested that the latter would become a recluse either.
He glanced once more at the entry hall, noting the passages that branched from it, and then followed the other gentlemen into the drawing room. Once Freddie moved out of his line of sight, he had a direct view of Miss Edgerton, in an eye-catching, buttercup yellow tea gown.
Lady Kingsley had said that she was pretty, with a tremendous smile. She was indeed very pretty, shining strawberry blond hair, light brown eyes—an unusual combination—and the soft, fine, almost melancholy features of a Bouguereau Madonna.
She seemed slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of men piling into her drawing room, her eyes darting from one gentleman to the next. Then her gaze came to rest on him—and did not move again. After a moment, her lips, very soft, pliant lips, parted and curved, showing off a row of even and notably white teeth. Dimples next appeared, deep, round, charming. And finally, a blaze of giddy, impossible pleasure in her wide, wide eyes.
There were so many things to do when entering a drawing room for the first time. He had to estimate where he might take a spill that wouldn’t damage his knees, which curios he could “accidentally” knock over without breaking, and always, when he visited a house in a professional capacity, to mark a way out of any given room, just in case.
This time he forgot everything. He only stood and stared.
That smile. Christ, that smile. He recognized it by the wave of ecstatic joy that all but knocked him flat on his back.
Had he thought himself incapable of happiness on a sustained basis? He was wrong—and how. He could never have enough of this sweet elation. He wanted to splash in it, swim in it, drink it by the gallons, until nothing but bliss pulsed in his veins.
The girl of his dreams. He had met her at last.
* * *
Lady Kingsley came forward. “Miss Edgerton, may I present the Marquess of Vere. Lord Vere, Miss Edgerton.”
“I’m so pleased to meet you, my lord,” said the girl of his dreams, still smiling.
He could barely speak for his gladness. “The pleasure is all mine, Miss Edgerton.”
The pleasure, privilege, and stunning good fortune. All his.
He broke his long-standing policy that required him to establish his moronic bona fides immediately, and instead stood some ten feet from her and basked in her presence, saying little as tea and sandwiches were passed around.
But she noticed him even in his silence. Several times she glanced up at him and smiled. And every time she smiled, he felt it, the peace that had long eluded him no matter how many wrongs he’d helped unearth and punish.
All too soon it was time for the ladies to go up to their rooms to change for dinner.
“You are welcome to wander about the house as you wish,” Miss Edgerton said to the gentlemen as she rose. “But I would ask that you please do not enter my uncle’s study. It is his private sanctuary and he does not wish for it to be disturbed, even in his absence.”
Little registered on Vere but the smile she bestowed upon him—she was at the door and actually turned around halfway and smiled directly at him. He drifted from one end of the drawing room to the other, fluffing curtains, rearranging bric-a-brac, and brushing his fingers absentmindedly along mantels and tops of chairs.
Lady Kingsley had to personally come and escort him to Edmund Douglas’s study for him to perform a preliminary search. He went through the motions and discovered two hidden compartments in the desk: One of them held a revolver, the other hundreds of pounds in wrinkled, stained banknotes, both of which a man was perfectly at liberty to possess.
Documents crowded the study’s copious cabinets. One cabinet contained ledgers relating to the running of the estate. All the other cabinets were devoted to the filing of letters, telegrams, and reports from the managers of the diamond mine, a quarter century of records of the origin and continuance of Douglas’s wealth.
Lady Kingsley was waiting for him outside the study—she’d been standing guard. “Anything?”
“Excellent record keeping and completely above-board,” he said. “And have I mentioned that it is a pleasure to work with you, madam?”
She frowned. “Are you quite all right?”
“I’ve never been better,” he said, and sailed on past.
Chapter Four
“Is it true that diamonds come from mines rather than oysters?” Vere asked his reflection above the washstand.
Bloody hell.
“Or is it that if you split open a pearl, you find a diamond inside?”
Bugger.
Everything was backward. This was the woman with whom he’d roved the coast of the West Country for more than a decade, the woman who understood his every mood and desire—his haven, his refuge. He didn’t care that her uncle was most likely a criminal. He didn’t mind that he must now conform his conduct to the limits Society found acceptable. But why, for God’s sake, must he meet her on a case, when he could not compromise his role?
As the highest ranking man present, he would be seated next to her at dinner. So they must converse. Possibly at length. And he must play the part of the idiot, no matter how he wished otherwise.
He pushed his fingers through his hair, the jubilation of the past hour now a jumble of frayed nerves. There was no helping it: He was bound to disappoint her at first. He could only hope that it would be a mild disappointment, and that in her kindness she would overlook it and choose to appreciate his sweetness instead—he portrayed sweetness beautifully, copying it, as he did, from Freddie’s character.
When he’d finished dressing, he sat down and tried to compose a better line of inquiry: subtle stupidity, if such a thing were possible. But his mind kept drifting away, back to the cliffs, back to the moors, back to the stunning coasts of the West Country.
The sun was setting, the sky ablaze. The wind whipped her coat and the ribbons on her hat. As he placed his arm about her shoulder, she turned toward him. And how lovely she was, eyes the color of delicately brewed tea, a long, straight nose, lips as soft as a whisper.
Meeting her in person was, he realized with a renewed pang of anxiety, perhaps not quite the unmitigated good fortune he had first believed. She had a face now, a name, a history and identity of her own.
They’d been one for so long. Now they were separate entities, so separate she barely knew him. And it was up to him to return them to that seamless unity he’d loved so well.
In his idiot guise, no less.
* * *
“You look well, Penny,” Freddie said, as they crossed the entry hall toward the drawing room.
Vere had never liked the way he looked—he bore an uncanny resemblance to his late, unlamented father. But ton
ight he hoped his looks would do him some good. Tonight he needed every arrow in his quiver.
Lady Kingsley pulled him aside almost as soon as he entered the drawing room. She spoke to him in a low voice and he heard not a single word she said as the crowd parted and revealed Miss Edgerton.
She stood with her back to him, in a dinner gown of pale blue beaded tulle. The skirt was narrowly fitted through her hips and thighs, then flared out in ruffles studded with seed pearls, as if she were Venus, freshly born of the waves, with a froth of sea foam still clinging to her calves.
And then, as if she felt the force of his gaze, she turned around, her gown sparkling with her motion. The bodice of the gown was cut modestly. But even the almost prim décolletage could not disguise the magnificence of her bosom, or the deep cleavage that came as a complete surprise to him, since he’d never before looked below her chin.
His heart thumped. Of course he’d made love to her before, but always gently, and more as a prelude to sleeping in her arms than for its own sake. He’d never imagined she’d inspire an animal lust in him.
Well, on that account he did not mind being wrong.
She smiled. And it was a wonder he did not knock his head on the ribbed vault ceiling—surely he levitated high above the floor.
Someone said something to her. She turned her face toward the speaker. A sharp pain on his forearm made him hiss—Lady Kingsley had rapped him, hard, with her fan.
“Lord Vere!” she whispered, her voice ominous with disapproval. “Did you not hear a word I said?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Look at me when I talk to you.”
Reluctantly, he wrenched his gaze from Miss Edgerton. “Sorry?”
Lady Kingsley sighed. “She thinks you are intelligent.”
“She does?” A lightninglike thrill zipped through him.
“She is not meant to, remember? We have work to do, sir.”
* * *
His imagination was showing itself to be quite second-rate. How many times had he walked arm in arm with her? Over how many sustained miles? And yet he’d never known that she smelled of honey and roses, nor that her skin gleamed like Vermeer’s pearls.
His At Night Page 3
